I own a Surface device, an iPad Pro, and a Macbook Pro. While I write code on all of them, macOS is still the king of development environments.

On macOS, you can just work. That's what the end goal should be in other platforms. I doubt iOS will ever get there. I mean, how are you supposed to copy and paste code from Vim running in tmux inside of Blink? With your finger? Hell's bells!

Windows is just too weird. If you compare them strictly from the perspective of using Vim, Windows is better than iOS. You can use Vim from WSL or a VM in a nice Linux terminal like Tilix running on a Windows-native X server. Boom, Vim is running right alongside your Python interpreter, $GOPATH, etc., and copy and paste works. (Let's set aside the fact that WSL is crawling with problems.) But if you use Windows, you'd kind of expect to be able to use more than Vim, right?

That ends up being a pit of snakes... multiple Windows-native X servers I've tried have problems rendering Intellij, and I've tried to get native Windows editors like VS Code to work smoothly with interpreters hosted in WSL or VMs. Only Intellij can really do it properly, and even then it depends on the language. It ends up being just another distraction.

Then there's running Linux desktop on a VM in Windows 10. I don't know how other people do this. Even with a beefy machine with two GPUs, no modern Linux window manager is performant enough to use. If you can find one like xfce that is fast enough, you end up having to manage the scaling on individual programs when you switch between high DPI and lower DPI displays. It's bananas!

So purely from the perspective of access to any tool you want to use and limiting distractions, macOS is still the best. I'm rooting for Windows, but only because I have a 2017 MBP and the new keyboards are painful to type on.

I don’t find OS X any easier than windows or linux. It all just works. And never had any issue running linux in a vm on windows.

I think at the end of the day it’s all personal preference. I prefer windows. But have no problems in linux or OS X. Granted I won’t be buying another MacBook anytime soon. Just switched to Lenovo.

For python and go why use WSL or a VM or an Xserver at all? Install the mingw tools and use native builds of everything with the native window manager. You can use a VM to test cross OS compatibility at the end.

When you run whatever OS inside a VM, chances are that they are not using any GPU you have available in the host (unless you spent your time with making vfio work). Instead, they are using emulated graphics, which isn't exactly high performance with any guest os.

Anyway, the important thing to achieve performance inside VM is storage, not graphics. If your VM is stored inside a file on the host filesystem, it is going to be way slower compared to VM using dedicated partition, lv or physical disk passed through. The effect is the same, as using classic HDD vs SSD in your host.

Surface supports Ubuntu 18 out of the box pretty well for regular use. The caveats are the touch screen doesn't work, I had to make a one line fix to get WiFi to stop failing randomly, and setting up luks at install time can't be done without an external keyboard because the type cover isn't recognized at boot until a one line fix is made, but that's it! I've used it as my daily setup for several months without issue. As a backup I have a Windows to go instance on an external SSD that I can fire up.

You should be able to get touch working - https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface

I haven't tried personally but I've looked into it before.

on a surface book touch and pen work but battery doesnt, and theres no auto rotate

I find that the Surface (Book) has a good creative workflow as well since it has the Adobe Suite and Krita (and all Windows programs of course).

I agree. Xcode for iOS is exactly what is needed to make the iPad a serious tool.