Wow, I often have 20-30 Chrome tabs, plus two or three instances of Visual Studio, and big sets of log file open in Notepad++, and I've never gotten anywhere near that kind of memory usage on my Win10 desktop with 16 GB of RAM.

I don't know what huge projects Promit has, and what kind of insanely heavy webpages he visits, but I don't get anywhere near that memory usage on my MBP either, with similar load as you (20+ tabs, some news site, mostly documentation and dev consoles, a couple of instances of XCode, and source control)

I'm really surprised you've had that many issues with OS X dev. In my experience (I was a Windows user for a considerable portion of my life and I am currently using it for work related stuff) OS X suffers from way fewer issues than the Windows OS's do. I haven't seen the same memory consumption issues or kernel issues you mention. Of course no machine/OS is perfect. Xcode is really a matter of opinion, plus many other IDEs are available for people not interested in Xcode.

Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but I know a novice Mac user the moment they tell me it's stable. I restarted my rMBP today, a few hours ago, because the keyboard stopped responding. The wifi dies randomly coming out of sleep. I upgraded to this machine from my last MBP because 8 GB was not sufficient to run XCode with no other programs running. This machine is floating at 14/16 GB used, though a large part of that is that Chrome at around 20 tabs. I only really have just enough memory on this machine to run Chrome, XCode, and source control, and the machine will go berserk and unresponsive if I exceed total system memory. If it weren't for iOS dev, I'd buy a $2,000 XPS 15 instead of this. Same core specs, same build quality, much more usable dev machine.

Ok, so I run an rMBP with flash storage and 16 GB RAM and haven't had frequent issues. Every once in a while I've had to restart because something froze, but not really frequently. I run about 9 desktops with various Safari, Terminal, Unity3d, Sublime, Unity MonoDevelop, Maya, and other software. Again, imo this runs a lot better than most Windows machines I've used. Sure I concede it's possible that I've been using some fairly crappy Windows machines, but I personally have not had issues with Macs.

Windows. I've used Macs and they are fine but it's really laughable when i visit people with Macs and they show me games. I think of how those same games perform on my PC at home. Well. Ok, that's a cultural thing, and probably an expense thing but it's a reality. As for Linux. Well, it's just not as good as Windows, the desktop experience, IDE and language support on Windows kicks Linux out the door. I am honestly embarrassed for all the universities here in Australia that still prefer Linux / Java in the labs. I'm looking at you ANU.

95% of gamers say Windows.

IDE and language support on Windows kicks Linux out the door. I am honestly embarrassed for all the universities here in Australia that still prefer Linux / Java in the labs. I'm looking at you ANU.

Yeah because they dont want to pay 500 USD per dev machine for Resharper to make Visual Studio usable. And then being able to deploy to like, the two latest Windows Server versions available only.

Seriously, no fucking outline (beyond the retardedly alphabetically ordered dropdown list), no fucking decent doc popups (you have to export them with an external tool ffs!!!), very few syntax coloring options, I've had projects just fuck up and VS silently crashing on load for no reason (.suo corruption? Who knows!). You have to pay for a decent C# profiler (unless VS2015 changed things). You have to pay for decent auto complete. You have to pay for better refactoring options. And fucking stepping through the standard .NET library is near impossible, and if you can step through the .NET, half the time it cant tell you the value of any variable. You cant open the same Razor file in two windows! WHY!?

Instead of having like a reasonable option, go to a site and download the debugging symbols then link them in the IDE, they have this fucked "symbol server" for reasons beyond my comprehension, that work 10% of the time because you depend on them publishing the symbols of the particular .NET version you're using, which they often don't (for also reasons beyond my comprehension). Oh and VS whitelists the project files instead of blacklisting them. So **any** fucking structural change needs a commit of the .csproj.

When you get slightly outside of the tiny box of "latest .NET release with latest VS edition with latest Windows with latest Windows Server" it goes right up your butt.

So much for "kicking it out of the door". I'll reaffirm, the whole Windows dev environment pisses me off in subtle ways all the fucking time.

(deploying to IIS from the IDE itself is really nice and easy, the debugging experience when it works is quite good, and VS2015 probably improved a few of these things, I'll give you that)

Seriously, ....

No really, can you tell us how you feel? Don't hold back.

When it comes to software development I prefer Linux, although I'm quite comfortable with Mac as well. I haven't used Windows since version 7, but so far I see no reason to go back to it.

I guess that the main reason I prefer Linux (and Mac) is the Unix shell. I'm mostly useless without it and putty is simply not the same when you need to ssh to remote servers running Linux.

Also, I work better with multiple desktops, and last time I checked, Windows didn't have them.

Also, I work better with multiple desktops, and last time I checked, Windows didn't have them.

10 has them; check again.

This is actually a major fault that one sometimes sees in Linux-land; people don't keep up to date with the capabilities of Windows and as a result make statements about it that might not have been true for some time. I recall another example from elsewhere where somebody claimed that Windows, in 2002/2003, still used co-operative multitasking.

On that reply ^^ Win10 also lets you run an Ubuntu command line environment for all those devs addicted to a nix command line workflow :)

http://www.zdnet.com/article/ubuntu-and-bash-arrive-on-windows-10/

And no, it's not emulation like Wine, but natively running linux programs via a fake kernel.

Thanks to this post, I decided to turn back to Windows 8.1 as there is nothing too enticing for me in Windows 10 and not happy of spending time to make an OS barely tolerable.

Thanks to this post, I decided to turn back to Windows 8.1 as there is nothing too enticing for me in Windows 10 and not happy of spending time to make an OS barely tolerable.

Windows 10 is more tolerable even in it's default install than Windows 8.1, and any OS will have you spend an hour or two configuring it to your liking (called "customizing") post-installation.

If your choice is Win8.1 or Win10, then Win10 is superior, by almost every metric. The vague licensing confusion and the telemetry is the only bad spots, and a little work makes those problems much reduced in consequence.

Discussion about Win10 vs OSX vs Plan9 vs Linux makes sense though, because they all have pros and cons.