Heck, as a primary Windows user I've been contemplating switching to OSX for development.
P.S. While Cygwin is nice, I've always felt like it was a clunky alternative that was shoe-horned into Windows.
For tools, the stuff from the GnuWin project fits into a cmd shell better than Cygwin (in my experience anyway):
OS X is great for development. Besides gaming, I really don't see a point to using Windows ever again really. The UI is so much nicer, gestures save me a lot of time (quickly launch an application, view desktop, switch between spaces), combined without having to do any workarounds (working remotely on a Linux server) to get things running. Love having a native terminal as well.
I actually prefer a Cygwin terminal on Windows to a Rxvt or similar lightweight terminal in X Window. The biggest pain in Linux is the selection buffer. With Console2 on Windows, selecting text puts it in the clipboard buffer, and you can then select a bunch of text in your IDE and overwrite it with a paste. The same workflow doesn't work at all well in Linux; first you must delete the text in the IDE, then select the text in the console, then very carefully aim where you want the text inserted and fire with the middle mouse button.
Even worse, IDEs like RubyMine clobber the selection buffer for common operations like Ctrl+Shift+N (Navigate | File); not only does it clobber the buffer, but it hides the window if it loses focus, so it's actually impossible to copy text from an rxvt terminal into its search box!
As a practical web development environment, I think Linux is the way to go to minimize the distance to production. But my preferred means of interacting with Linux is ssh, either to a VM or over the network, from a nicer desktop OS. Which for me is Windows.
Could you explain that a little more? For instance - say you want to browse the web or read email - you're doing it in a Cygwin terminal?
Do you use it as your launcher to launch Windows apps or do you only run text interface applications? Or, do you just do most of your dev/sysadmin work in Cygwin and use normal Windows apps for the rest?
When I write new utilities, they are usually command-line based. If I can get away with it, I'll put together a bash script built out of pipelines of Unix utilities and various others I've written over the years. I'm reluctant to write for-purpose apps; I try to make them fit into a Unix-style paradigm of streams combined with some command-line options.
For example, I recently wrote a simple video editor to select clips from my motorbike commuting videos. The only platform-specific bit is the video player, and all it does is respond to keyboard commands to navigate backwards and forwards and mark positions, in response to which it writes out text to standard out. I have other scripts which drive ffmpeg or other utilities as necessary to do the heavy lifting of cutting and composing. And to port it to another OS, all I need write anew is a video-playing component. And things like parallelization for efficiency, process isolation for resilience, and job control to temporarily reduce CPU usage (perhaps to avoid overheating on reencode!) are trivial.
For work, all my testing is done from the command-line, much of the code tweaks, all source control, merge resolution, grep / sed / etc. Debugging is usually done with repls like pry for Ruby. Browser at work is primarily used for distraction while having a coffee and waiting for tests to run, or to interact with company web apps.
Things like web browsers (Firefox in my case, because of tree-style tabs more than anything else) are invariant across platforms. If you live entirely in the browser, you don't need to deal with, or even know anything about, the machine's OS. So I don't really consider that use case an interaction.
The problem comes when you want the *nix tooling to interact with the Windows environment. Personally I like the clear separation between the host and guest environments, but YMMV. At the very least you can mount some share the Windows host provides inside the guest OS.
I think it would be great to have a tightly integrated VM. There are some that allow you to open Linux X apps in a Windows desktop rather than confined to a VM Window.
Perhaps we could get a Wayland/Mir port for Windows. Run the VM in the background but have a full Linux desktop environment. Might need a shim layer or some remote desktop extensions.
The way I see it is that if you're working with code, especially open languages and platforms, Linux is a great fit and you should make the leap :).
1. There are probably customization tools out there that would let you get close to this but I don't believe it's truly possible just given desktop Windows' architecture.