I am preparing to switch back to Windows as my dev environment for the haxe,cpp,c workflow because:

2. Do you Win devs use cygwin for system interaction in your builds?

I have used many build systems and tools based on cygwin in my career and it has always been an unpleasant experience. I'd rather cobble together an arcane cmd batch script than enter the world of cygwin.

However, with the Win10 anniversary update, MS has added bash on Windows (turn in on in "Optional Features") which seems to work great and almost seamlessly, despite being a beta version. It basically gives you a familiar debian/ubuntu based CLI and has managed to run everything I have thrown at it so far, with the exception of "screen".

Another caveat is, that integrating "bash.exe" with other script is made a lot harder by the fact that "bash.exe"'s stdout and stderr can't be redirected. This can be worked around, but it is an annoyance and will hopefully be fixed.

… and has managed to run everything I have thrown at it so far, with the exception of "screen".

I code for X-Plane in C++ because it simply works on all os. If you code on Windows or Mac, you suddenly remark that you have to rewrite stuff to compile on other os.

I'm also faster with Linux tools than on Windows. Grep, bash etc. save me time.

I code for X-Plane in C++ because it simply works on all os. If you code on Windows or Mac, you suddenly remark that you have to rewrite stuff to compile on other os.

I'm also faster with Linux tools than on Windows. Grep, bash etc. save me time.

This. Unless I'm targeting my code for windows (the need for which is becoming less and less as time flows on) using a Linux shell is pure joy. Even in powershell I'll forget what I'm on and try to write a quick perl line and *bam* pw doesn't know what I'm talking about. Remember: Linux was written by coders for coders (arguably), where as Windows was written by a corporation for people to consume, NOT MODIFY, at least to the extent that Microsoft wants.

Windows works, and well enough for what its meant to do, but its obvious that some things are an afterthought next to Linux. Powershell being an example. Every Linux has shipped with shells and the ability to automate simple tasks easily from waay back, with grep, wget, telnet, perl, awk, etc. Powershell came after Windows developers more and more discovered Linux shells...