Frankly speaking, I'd prefer to use macOS to do software development generally these days and since I don't really need to do alot of configuring my environment thanks to its consistent user interface and it fits my development mental model. Windows + WSL2 might suffice but only for Windows development but I rarely needed to boot-up and directly use a Linux desktop these days; just only for specific open-source needs or reproducibility scenarios via SSH.

As much as setting up a dev environment on a Linux desktop sounds "superior" in the authors opinion which to some extent I agree with in some use-cases, I'm afraid, I'd pretty much side with consistency over customization as I find it very difficult to reproduce bugs found in Linux distros / environments that are heavily customized, especially GUI applications. I'd simply just want to get on with the work I have to do rather than messing around with sane defaults and then having to end up reseting or googling issues over my setup.

> Whenever I read about new features for the Windows Subsystem for Linux, I wonder why people settle for anything less than the real thing.

Perhaps Windows developers enjoy having a consistent Unix-like environment without having to install + configure everything. Plus they can enjoy running all those Windows apps anyway without doing a full blown migration to another OS.