I want to get some input on some of the advantages of why developers should and need to use Linux as their primary development desktop on a daily basic as opposed to using Windows. This is particulary helpful when your Dev, QA, and Production environments are Linux.

The current analogy that I keep coming back to is. If I build my demo car as a Ford Escort, but my project car is a Ford Mustang, it doesn't make sense at all.

I'm currently at an IT department that allows dual boot with Windows and Linux, but some run Linux while the vast majority use Windows.

Here's several advantages that I've came up with since using Linux as a primary desktop.

• Same Exact operating system as Dev, QA, and Production
• Same Scripts (.sh) instead of maintaining (.bat and *.sh). Somewhat mitigated by using cygwin, but still a bit different.
• Team learns simple commands such as: cd, ls, cat, top
• Team learns Advanced commands like: pkill, pgrep, chmod, su, sudo, ssh, scp
• Full access to installs typically for Linux, such as RPM, DEB installs just like the target environments.

The list could go on and on, but I want to get some feedback of anything that I may have missed, or even any disadvantages (of course there are some). To me it makes sense to migrate an entire team over to using Linux, and using Virtual Box, running Windows XP VM's to test functional items that 95% of most of the world uses.

This is similar but a little different thread going on here as well. link text