[knightni]

An extremely large number of programmers use Mac and Linux machines. Linux on the desktop is sustained to a substantial extent by a programmer audience - and you only have to look at the availability of software for it to see that it's popular among that group.

Personally, when I'm not using a unix-y environment, it's because I've been forced. Using windows as a programmer feels like having one of my hands chopped off.

[jheriko]

sure it is a large number, but large != most.

every programmer i know works in a windows dominated environment. this is a small sample though.

i believe that in back-end only environments linux has some serious popularity but i can't comment on how many studios use it as their development platform because i have no great experience there (actually i work in office where they develop such things, but they use windows exclusively).

for desktop software, games and web front-end development windows is king. its the platform that all of your target audience are using to an excellent approximation. for AAA games there is an extra restriction that its the only practical choice (there are zero tools for working on any other platform). sure for iOS/OS X there is the same restriction to a mac and iOS development has become extremely popular - even so there is quite some resistance to using OS X and XCode as anything more than a test configuration on cross platform projects - I've seen a lot of macs dual booting to windows in this context. For android Linux can give you a small edge, but its not much...

Linux is obviously meant for programmers, but that doesn't mean they use it either - until quite recently even the best flavours were horrible user experiences. I think ubuntu is great and really takes steps to get away from the 'you download source and build your app with archaic and buggy tools at the command line' approach which has always dominated... in terms of doing your job though - unless you work on the backend of some web service you can't do any useful builds under Linux, unless you are targetting Linux desktop which is exceptionally rare.

[knightni]

I don't dispute that windows developers are in the majority - I dispute that other choices are as vanishingly rare as your initial comment suggested.

Anecdotally (I work at a large corp), slightly under half our devs use Linux. You only need to look at the array of software-for-programmers that's available under Linux to see that it's an extremely popular choice - the availability of programming software and libraries is generally better under Linux than it is under Windows.

While linux is certainly a bit more hassle to maintain than windows (I use a mac when given the choice, which i find gives me the best of both worlds), it's still a clearly superior environment for highly technical users. It's only recently with the introduction of Powershell that Windows has stopped being a substantial handicap for developers, imo.

[cs02rm0]

every programmer i know works in a windows dominated environment. this is a small sample though.

Indeed, every programmer I know works in a Linux or Mac dominated environment!

[djur]

Every web frontend dev I've ever worked with used a Mac.