It's not that bad. It runs node well and I can ssh out of it and do the things you describe. Powershell is an improvement from command prompt but it's still not as nice as terminal / iterm / gnome terminal.

And it's ubuntu, so you can apt-get install build-essential & whatever else you need. It doesn't do upstart or /etc/init.d services (like if you wanted to run mongo as a service) but it runs mongo instances fine for me while I develop locally.

I spent my first full day developing on a win10 box this weekend & it went fine. But since I've switched to webstorm for most of my development what o/s I'm running hardly matters outside of keyboard shortcuts.

For anyone considering switching, I'd recommend buying the "pro" version as you can use the services feature to turn off things like cortana or the automatically-restarting windows defender. It would like to do a whole lot of spying by default, more than I'm surprised people are comfortable with.

But as many in this discussion have said, please give linux (and especially gnome 3 a shot). It's a pleasure to work with, and if I could stream legal tv services and run photoshop there's no question it's what I'd run.