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

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.

It's not just the bash shell, it's an entire stock Ubuntu Server image.

And WINE (a recursive acronym for WINE Is Not an Emulator) is not an emulator. It's natively running Windows programs via facimile system DLLs.

My take on both of those is just use the real thing.

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.

Couldn't disagree more, Windows 10 needs many steps to become barely tolerable and I am ok with customizing ofc but not big fan of dealing with Group Policy ( not big deal but what I don't like is pointless restrictions ) even for basic things.

And now performance is far better in Windows 8.1 (using a Skylake Xeon E3)

When comparing with 8.1 for Windows 10's superiority,

- W10 Start Menu is not bad but not crucial for me as well. In time I used W8 , noticed that I don't use Start Screen much and I like it as I am used to from Windows Phone.

- I couldn't care less about Cortana and Notifications

- Windowed apps are big plus for W10 but I don't use apps at all as I prefer offline account, was just using Edge which had an annoying experience

- Automatic updates are problematic in W10 and there is no easy way of hiding updates.

- Multiple desktop isn't like what I dreamed of ( I was expecting different desktops you can put different icons/folders to each one so I could separate workspaces for each project )

- Anniversary Update doesn't look like bringing something noticeable, so there is no hope W10 will be better in short time for me.

I use Windows + Ubuntu + MAC

Windows whenever I can, because I'm used to it, and because our IT likes it.

Ubuntu, because I do a lot of cloud programming, and windows is not that good for the cloud. (Unless you use Azure, but I use Openstack/AWS/Google )

Have a MAC gathering dust whenever I need to deploy an iPhone app. (I'm such an MS junky, that I always get lost in MAC the whole experience is strangely disorientating to me).

As much as I love MS, it seems they've been making one mistake after another. So I'm trying to ween myself from my MS addiction, before they go extinct. I am trying to switch to Ubuntu. however I've found Ubuntu desktop to be extremely unstable. Had a lot of "fun" cleaning up mistakes made by apt-get. On a virtual server this is not a problem for me, as I just reinstall all my software from a script/recipe, but on a desktop it's intolerable. I really don't like how the programs for Linux seem to be dependent on eachother and then on certain versions of certain other programs. I understand the problem of packaging binaries in the opensource world, but the inability of programs to ship with their own dependencies sometimes causes a big pain. On complex dev desktop machines this can lead to alot of conflicts. Also alot of stuff breaks when upgrading. As risky as upgrading can be, upgrading an ubuntu desktop can be much trickier. One colleague has solved this by using docker to isolate his dev machine. He uses different containers for different build environments. That might be my next step. For god's sake, ubuntu does not even have a good graphical GIT client. I find myslef installing Jetbrain's stuff just to get decent source control.

I truthfully prefer mac OS, but due to the high cost of Macs and the tricky nature of booting OSX86, I can't use it very often (my old iMac has kind of become a paperweight at this point as it's nearly five years old).

My second choice is Windows, third Linux, mostly because I like to develop my games for as many OS's as possible.

Well i have used microsoft operating systems since the very beginning (dos 5), but had always the urge to checkout other systems.
I have tons of years of experience with bsd-systems and linux-distros but i always had weird hardware or software issues all the time - graphics not working properly, input device not working, sound not working, second monitor not working, packages is depends on X but X cannot work cause... etc.
Of course i got it fixed someway, but it took me a lof of time to get it running and sometimes money where i had to buy older hardware to get it working... O_o
So i pretty much have given up to using a *nix system for private productive environment at all.

Nowadays i use windows 10, upgraded all my pcs and i dont regret it.
Windows 10 runs much better than 7. It is more responsive, works better with modern hardware and boots almost in 5-7 secs to the login screen (Win 8.1 was much faster with active fast boot ~3 secs to the login screen).

The only system i use linux as main os is my media game couch pc connected to the tv - but even this has windows 10 with steam installed of course.

Pros:

- Has much much better games support than linux (only native games in linux runs better sometimes than in windows)
- Visual studio 2015 is unbeaten for creating rich large gui applications (WinForms, WPF)
- Visual studio 2015 c++ coding is getting better (refactoring is finally possible, c++/11 support)
- VMWare/Virtualbox VM GPU support (OpenGL 2+, Direct3D 9) support is much better on windows
- Delphi IDE was really fun to code with until it was sold to codegears/embarcadero
- There is no linux version available of UE4 / Unity
- Much better hardware support
- Multi-monitor support was always working (*nix world took ages to get it properly working -> xorg.conf NOOO!!!!)

Cons:

- Since visual studio > 2008 the performance gets slower and slower, even with much better hardware...
- Web-development is very annyoing under windows: Installing required packages is so much easier in linux (nodejs, geo-tools, php, apache, tomcat)
- Java RE runs much better on linux than on windows (Exceptions are awt/swing - those runs worse on linux than on windows O_o)
- Multi desktop support is much better in *nix window managers
- Sometimes you must throw-out/replace your working scanner/driver when you upgrade to a higher windows version, because there is no driver anymore... (opposite of *nix)

- Connecting to linux shells is a pita (Cygwin, X-Window system etc...)