I would guess that for every hacker, there are 10 JEE developers that just use their Windows machine for developing applications that never see the outside of the corporation they work at.

HN and /r/programming are great resources, but they're not by any means representative of developers or the programming world in general. Indeed, I think it's quite safe to say the vast majority of developers have never heard of HN (or even Github) and while they might know of Reddit most of them probably don't visit. This might be a lamentable thing, depending on your views, but it is what it is.

It's really easy to get caught up in the SV culture, but it's by no means the rule. There's millions of developers out there whose code is never made public, writing Java, .NET, C, C++, Ada, Fortran, and other languages that HN would regard as obscure, niche, or dead. They're consulting or working for small businesses, medium size businesses, enterprises, local, state, federal governments.

I don't know if most of them use Windows, but it's definitely a hugely substantial fraction. It's not a small minority.

I really dislike Windows, and use OS X and Linux entirely (and have for the past... hell, nearly 8 years now!) -- but Visual Studio is an amazing IDE. Like, really really good. VS.Php[0], Resharper... tonnes of amazing plugins so even other languages other than .Net are amazing in it.

Where I work, it's a 50/40/10% split between Windows, OS X and Linux as our DE's, though most of us run a Linux VM for the development server to run on. Makes life easier that way, and with Vagrant we're all running the exact same environment, despite differing opinions on how to do things!

[0] http://www.vsphp.com/

Something I've noticed in some large cross-platform (Windows, Linux) C++ projects I've been involved in is that the developers, given the choice, will just as often choose to work in Windows. Visual Studio is an incredibly powerful IDE.

This is something I'd agree on, Visual Studio is amazing, but not good enough for me to switch to windows over. IMO all of the stuff jetbrains makes is almost as good as VS anyway.

Except for my years at CERN and a small startup on my early career days, all the companies I worked for used Windows systems.

If we had to target UNIX systems, the development was done via XWindows or telnet/ssh to common build servers.

Assuming you are developing in PHP, it can be surprisingly quick to just download the WampServer bundle and begin working on your PHP projects.