Noms – A versioned, forkable, syncable database

The survey covered a whole ~40,000 people out of the ~11 million pro developers in the world. That's nothing.

The numbers also don't jive at all with the empirical evidence. Walk into any small, medium or large business IT shop that employs programmers and you'll find Windows more than any other OS. If they're running Linux it's in a VM on Windows.

Macs are still extremely rare for anyone outside of Mobile developers.

What do you think Enterprise devs use? Not Macs...

Yes, that's true.

> "Better support and easier install of a vast array of developer tools and languages (just one example: git)."

This falls under Unix command line tools for me, but okay.

> "Much more automatable (eg not every install on windows can be automated. Many require GUI interaction)."

This is really just the same point as the package management one you already mentioned.

> "Containerizable."

Windows Server now has native support for Docker.

> "More powerful filesystems like layered filesystems or content addresses filesystems like ZFS."

Linux's support for ZFS isn't exactly a strong point. Perhaps you had OS X in mind? In any case NTFS is a fairly decent file system, I don't really see it as a weak point for Windows.

> "Cloud orchestration tools work better (puppet, chef, ansible)."

Automating Windows configuration is easily done through PowerShell. I know that Chef and Ansible both use PowerShell to get their Windows support. I'd suggest taking a look at Desired State Configuration if you're unfamiliar with how these tools utilise the existing infrastructure on Windows.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/dsc/overview

> "Tiling window managers to streamline screen work."

In my experience, tiling window managers are nice if you've got a keyboard-heavy workflow, but not that much more efficient when you switching around GUI apps. Windows has some basic tiling windows shortcuts built in, plus it now has virtual desktops built in and shortcuts to switch between them, so I don't feel like I'm missing out on much.

> "Much wider choice of code editing environments and code manipulation tools (Windows is much more centric around the offerings of Microsoft)."

Which code editing environments are you thinking of that you like that aren't also available on Windows? As for the MS tools, if you can show me a better IDE than VS on any platform then I'll be impressed.

> "Better interoperation with other tools and filesystems (Linux plays much nicer with windows than windows plays with linux)."

The upcoming Linux subsystem for Windows 10 should go a long way in addressing that.

> "Less bugs in the APIs and development systems themselves (a result of open source enabling bugfixing independent of a vendor)."

Hmm, I don't think you can back that up. Let's put it like this, I've tried Linux multiple times, but I always come back to Windows, and generally speaking that's because of bugs I've found in Linux or Linux software. I have far fewer problems with Windows. Can you share some of the problems you've had with Windows?

> "Better system debug and development tools (eg. strace/dtrace/ktrace)."

Sure, I'll admit these tools are probably better than the Windows equivalents.

> "Almost every dev tool included in the distributions (no need to go download some dodgy .exe of tucows or where ever)."

You don't need to get dodgy dev tools, there are plenty of useful dev tools from Microsoft and other well known software companies.

> "More example open source code to reference and work with makes coding similar ideas less error prone."

Are you familiar with MSDN? If you knew how easy Microsoft makes it to become a proficient Windows coder, you wouldn't be saying that.

To be fair to you, there's one advantage of Unix OSes I think you missed, and that better networking tools (such as firewall software).