Well the thing with Vagrant is that it (in theory) runs your application code inside the VM, but you typically run all your development tooling in the host OS.

I suspect that it was on the local tooling side that things fell apart for this Windows developer, if he was grabbing a project mostly built on Mac or Linux.

A lot of popular dev tooling built around web technologies (node, Ruby, PHP, etc) isn't as mature on Windows as it is on MacOS or Linux.

My source on this is me. I have a Mac and a Windows box at home, and I've had projects fail to set up and build on the Windows machine for these reasons.

I’ve had problems even getting anaconda (scientific python distro) to work in a VM on windows (because the file system of the host OS lacks certain UNIXy features).

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. If no one is testing the build on platform X, no one should be surprised if it doesn't "just work" on platform X.

You would think that right? Except then you actually want to run a simple python script on Windows and observe things like: os.rename not being able to replace opened files, the default encoding not being UTF-8 (wtf), not being able to just `pip install scipy` because of some weird BLAS/MKL dependency...