It does have some rough edges that may cause you to dismiss it as unusable, but it offers tab completion, colored text output, and a real scripting environment (not DOS batch scripting). Every serious Windows developer I've talked to nowadays uses it exclusively.
No, and I have zero reason to do so. I don't deploy on windows, I have no reason to ever deploy on windows, so why would I bother learning another syntax just to develop on windows? It really doesn't make any sense. Powershell only makes sense for IT admins whom have to manage windows networks, it makes no sense at all for developers deploying on *nix.
Can't speak to the seamless suspend/resume support, etc on your choice of hardware, and I acknowledge that if that kind of stuff doesn't work, it'd be a dealbreaker.
Just saying, Gnome3/Shell is at least worth checking out if you like the OSX workflow and use just a few apps day to day for development.
Thanks for the writeup of your experience!
Yup, still no xrandr support which makes any on-the-fly monitor config changes very difficult or impossible.
Sometimes, if you use twinview and nvidia-settings from the start and if the moon is aligned just right, you can dynamically configure monitors / video ports. Sometimes.
I used linux as my only OS sans VMs from roughly 2008 till 2011. I finally gave up because it handled monitor switching, multiple monitors so poorly (using Nvidia GPU). I begrudgingly switched to windows because I owned the hardware already, and it was the only option. Windows sucks, the lack of a usable shell kills it, full stop, nothing else windows does matters. And no, cygwin doesn't cut it.
Fast forward to now, the only computer I manually interact with is a macbook air. The old desktop hardware became my file server(running FreeNAS) despite being many times faster than the air.
Through this experience I realized what I actually cared about...I run four 'apps' 99% of the time: chrome, sublime text(everything non java), iTerm and IntelliJ(java). That is really all I care about, anything that prevents interacting with these applications as quickly as possible fails. The support stuff, git, a database, a message queue, etc. Runs anywhere. I _rarely_ interact with the 'OS' in ui terms. I rarely use finder, I only use the dock to empty the trash (launch everything through Quicksilver). At the end of the day I love OS X not because it has 'awesome' UI paradigms, but because of all the options I see it the least, it may as well not be there.
OS X is the only OS i've ever used that I just don't think or care about. It sleeps, it wakes up, it deals with new screens, it does all the OS shit so I can just use the apps i want to. Thats why I am hooked using it as a dev machine.