http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3602.htm- Many Windows-only concepts (registry) hold key configuration data.
- Lack of a proper command line environment (somewhat covered by Cygwin, but not ideal). PowerShell is interesting, but, again, is very alien to non-Windows tools.
- No select-middle-click copy/paste (it's an incredible time-saver).
- Limited number of available languages and tools and the difficulty of integrating them (you have to add every install directory to PATH - unless you are running Cygwin).
- Case-insensitive filesystem (and some subtle bugs that it allows).
- It's almost impossible to open a tempfile and delete it while you still have the file handle.
- No package management (you can't just "yum install" what you need)
- No package management (you have to bundle every dependency with your installer)
It's not bullshit. Unless you are developing for Windows only, developing under Windows is quite painful.
If you didn't make Windows apps at the time, it probably seemed really complicated. It really wasn't. Most of the issues were with C/C++, and the complexity that brings. VB and Delphi were decent alternatives -- there were some 4G languages that worked ok as well.
Making viaweb a web-app instead is obvious in retrospect. But not because making Windows apps is so hard -- it's the deployment that the web brings, not the ease of development. In 1995, there was no super-easy way to make web-apps -- PG and RTM had to invent that too.
Uh, what Linux? No, pg worked on Lisp Machines before, and that's why Windows were hurting him so much.
Really?
Clearly the whole point was to get away from developing desktop applications, and realizing the single-source, rapid development nature of web apps.
Please don't tell me that developing client apps on Windows was so much worse then doing it on Linux. Its bullshit. Overfocusing on this aspect of the story feels like platform fanboyism, misses the real point, and just overall kind of cheapens PG's stellar image.