[mechanicker]

Well, those OS differences taught us to write (or strive to) portable code. It also taught me to better appreciate strengths in different operating systems over the years.

[ethbr1]

Absolutely! But in a learning format, the student probably needs to be focusing on the task at hand.

Learning to paper over OS errata isn't as generally useful as, say, groking multithreaded coding models.

Yes, there are environment quirks. Yes, you'll have to deal with them. Yes, you can look up documentation when you run into those situations.