Thank you. I do use bash/dash and other shells regularly both on Linux and OS X. If I need my Windows desktop apps to work on the same files as I'm working on with my shell, then I just share the directory one way or another.
Flexibility is certainly debatable depending on your point of view. Personally, I only want flexibility within the realm of stability and speed. For instance - Windows does not let you switch window managers the way you can in Linux. But that's not the kind I'm interested in. I am more concerned with things like:
- Will it run on most hardware without much hassle?
- How easily can I customize the file browser to do things like adding new context menu actions (based on node type or other state) via third party modules?
- How stable are my customizations?
- Can I generally put things where I want them easily, without fighting against some overarching design opinion?
All of the Linux software that I use regularly runs in a terminal and Linux runs absolutely great in a guest VM on any type of host. If I run Windows in a guest VM, it's slower and GPU intensive apps suffer. If I really, really needed to work on an iOS or OS X app while traveling and I could only bring one device with me for some reason, I would certainly bring only my Macbook Pro. Luckily, I don't have that problem!
Looking forward, Windows will soon have Ubuntu running on the Windows kernel. If that works out, I can have the best of both worlds without keeping any VMs running. The closest I can get to this in Linux is with Wine, but that sucks worse than Cygwin does on Windows IMO.