[spacenick88]

Windows has abysmal performance in its equivalent of the VFS layer i.e. path handling, directory listings and so on.

Funnily enough the main reason is probably that compiling the Linux kernel is one of the most filesystem taxing workloads and also one of those kernel developers care most about.

[pzone]

And it is worth mentioning if you've never used git on Linux, the difference versus Windows really is night and day.