Having switched from Windows to Mac a couple months ago, I was interested to see the long series of comments on this post by Peter Cooper on the Ruby Inside blog—Is Windows a First-Class Platform for Ruby. The predominant answer, from many developers with substantial experience, seems to be “no, but it should be.”

My take-aways from this (and from my own experience):

• If you’re a serious Ruby developer today, life is easier if you can avoid Windows
• It’s hard for the Ruby community to keep everything working smoothly on Windows, because most of the senior developers don’t use it
• Like it or not, the majority of the world is on Windows, and for Ruby to achieve the degree of adoption it deserves will require more work on the Windows side