First, before anything else, if you want to try a Unix operating system on your windows computer, here's cygwin: http://www.cygwin.com/
It'll install with setup.exe and run like any other program on your computeer.
There's too many linux operating systems out these days to give the Linux question a fair answer.
But, Unix operating systems usually have a lot of development tools for free, and many Unix programs are open source, which is great for developers because not only do they get the tools they need for free, but they can improve them whenever they need to.
Development tools for windows have always cost ten times as much as hardware does; even simple HTML editors like Dreamweaver used to cost around ten thousand dollars.
Unix operating systems are usually based around three concepts
- A standardized file system, that can work regardless of things like how you have your drives partitioned, and
-A c compiler and a scripting engine, for building programs, and
-User access to everything, usually in english or near-english
The biggest and most noticeable difference between the operating systems, is the install process. While programs such as Debian's apt-get and Redhat's Package Manager have attempted to ease these problems, at some point on a Unix computer you're going to install something from source.
Here's what I'm talking about, in English:
Installing a program on Windows:
1.)Open setup.exe
1.5) Tell it where you want to install stuff (usually most people just go with defaults)
2.)Click "next" a lot
3.)Tell it you don't want to register or try any special offers at this time, understand that this is trial software, put in a fake name and e-mail address, etc.
4.)Click finish
Install process on a Unix machine:
1.)Grab a source tarball (like a zip file) from the internet
2.)Extract it
3.)Read through the installation instructions
4.)Find out you don't have all the dependencies, and repeat all these steps (including this one roughly half the time) until you have everything you need
5.)type in ./configure, wait one minute
6.)type in make, wait five minutes
7.)get an error, look through diffs and help files online, edit C files, grab dependencies that weren't mentioned before, perform voodoo rituals, cry, write major parts of the program yourself, use dirty sed tricks, grab virtual machines and attempt to install on those, and then marvel when, one day, for no apparent reason, the program works the way it's supposed to
You can skip step 7 if you have slackware
8.)type in sudo make install