I'm mainly developing PHP applications (Magento, Symfony) And I found Linux much easier. Back in 2000 (ish), when I switched to Linux the biggest confusion was the different format of configuration files and scripts. In Windows, I get used to .ini files and .bat batch scripts. When I switched to Linux (well, it was more like a slow process) I was confused about this. Fetchmail config format, the apt sources tree format (which seemed to be an .ini) and all the config files in /etc was all different. I finally managed to get my emails fetched and sorted to different folders based on topic and sender, using Fetchmail, then I was happy to read them in Mutt. The UI looked terrible (well, it was text after all) so I tried Balsa and used it for years, then Sylpheed, Claws Mail, still backed with Fetchmail. I can imagine that the different GUI libraries would confusing others, but I always managed to sort my installation to use only one. If I had KDE, I installed only KDE or at least Qt programs. If I had GNOME, then so that it. Nowadays, I use AwesomeWM mainly with 3 or 4 software only, on 3 screens: the first screen is the terminal with tmux, the second (middle) is the browser, Thunderbird, the third is Sublime, so I don't get nervous about installing different libraries.
With all of these, Linux felt better than Windows and it's openness and community support encouraged me to discover more and more. Back in those days I really tried every programming language I could: Java, Ruby, C, C++ and I had no confusion learning and using these on Linux. I was only confused when sometimes I had to switch back to Windows. The lack of documentation, missing libraries, unpredictable crashes on software upgrades (which came from different sources, absolutely without automation, manually running setup.exe's) and different UX, unsought taskbar icons really annoyed me. Now if I sit in front of a Windows PC, I feel it's just an useless gadget.
Linux was the cause I became a software developer.
I have only experience with one IDE, which was Netbeans. I used it mostly for developing Rails applications and I found this was the only IDE which does not get in my way. I just can't get used to PHPStorm today and I found Eclipse too slow, so I'm using Sublime as my primary editor now. Before it was Geany, gEdit or just Vim. I was never able to learn Emacs, but probably it's my fault :)