[jamespcole2]

Having been a dev for 10 years, 5 of which were almost exclusively using .net and the other half using open source web tech I feel like I can add something to the discussion. I've recently got back into .net for a couple of recent projects after a few years away from it. First off c# is awesome, it's a great language.

The main problem I have have with it is the clunkiness of the tools. Windows itself is pretty poor as a server OS and dev environment(IMHO), it's unnecessarily heavy, has too many useless features, is difficult to automate, and more. Powershell is ok but not really as simple/powerful/portable as bash. SQL server I guess is ok as a db engine but using it is clunky(again feature bloat really hobbles it). I find getting an environment set up with vagrant, capistrano etc. with windows much more complex than it needs to be.

Also one of the really noticeable differences is the overall quality of the community. It's much harder to find good answers to problems when using .net/Windows than with other environments and platforms in my experience. In general I find .net devs more interested in maintaining the status quo than exploring new ideas and tech(massive generalisation but I'm sure I can't be the only one to notice this). Also nearly every tutorial about modern web tech is written for *nix environments as the general community support and interest in .net/Windows seems to be non-existent.

An observation that I've noticed lately when attending tech events and conferences is that Windows just isn't even on the radar. It's not that people actively dislike it or openly criticise it, it's just not even considered or discussed, it's old tech, it's boring, it's clunky.