Yeah, my preferences for tech stack are less "I must have X, Y, Z" and more "I refuse to work with X, Y, Z"

I'm kinda the same, except one further: I don't think I ever want to use Visual Studio again.

I cut my teeth on Emacs and find VSCode a decent compromise but Visual Studio is just such a clunky editor. Extremely limited UI customization and code highlighting options and such. I don't like it at all

VSCode is fine IMO. I'm a vim guy and I'd take vim without plugins in PowerShell before I even go through the install process for VisualStudio again.

> Language doesn't matter, but platform can/does to some

Very much this. I can put up even with FORTRAN - hell one of the most interesting challenges I had recently was figuring out how to call C++ from FORTRAN.

But I've been living in Emacs for almost two decades, and longer than that in Linux. I have to insist that my personal development seat is Emacs on Linux. Yes, I can target Windows and probably anything else from Linux (iOS is a challenge, but I'm looking into it), so I don't see the "need" to develop natively.

Yeah, after developing on linux for the last 17 years or so I would never go back.

I also prefer non-Win environments but generally my higher concern is whether the hardware specs and configurations are sufficient for the loads that are placed on them.