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Windows NT, 2000, and 9x all have separate categories in this
poll. And development is certainly different. But how about
poor saps like me who have to develop one code base for all
of them? Since the customers want our programs to behave
consistently, it usually means we have to take a least
common denominator approach. While NT/2000 don't have any
of the 16 bit limitations, they still creep up in Windows 9x
from time to time. Take a look at the edit common control,
for instance. MFC's CEditView, which is based on that,
works great in Windows NT. But in 9x, it won't hold more
than 64K of text. (How annoying is that?? We had to start
using the rich edit, which is far more complicated than
we need.)
So I wonder how different the poll would be if Windows NT, 9x,
and 2000 were all grouped together?
Sure, there are inconsistencies among the Linux distros
as well, but they tend to be relatively minor, and fixable
with proper upgrades/patches. And it's a lot easier
to tell your customer to upgrade a free OS than it is to
tell them to switch from Windows 95 to Windows 2000. 
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Perhaps the next question should be "Which OS do you have to develop for?" My answer, antiquated as it may be is MS-DOS 6.22
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We all feel your pain Larry
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Obviously W2K and NT are great to develop for becuase (a) they are extremely user friendly, and (b) they are far more stable than win9X. But is that the only reason?
I personally enjoy CE. Writing an app for NT is fun, but there is just something so gadget-man about writing an app for you PPC and then having the thing actually work for you while sitting on a train, or under a tree in a park.
My days of unix development involved vi and gcc. I remember wondering what all the fuss was about with GUI based integrated environments :
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I wouldn't use "user friendly" to describe the networking and security (e.g. file permissioning) APIs in W2k/NT. 
FWIW (very little!), my cop-out answer to the poll is "none of the above, they all suck in their own special ways". hehe
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I guess I'm using "user friendly" in its broadest and most generous form.
What I mean is that win9x can be extremely frustrating due to crashes, and other systems such as CE and Palm have their own little quirks. gcc on Unix is great if you like command lines and makefiles - but working in the Visual Studio IDE with intellisense and a great debugger has really spoiled me.
I'll admit I've been out of the unix world for a few years - anyone have any comments on the programming environments for Linux, solaris etc
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Palm devices are limiting in the fact that one must constantly "synchronize" with a desktop or portable. As soon as a direct ethernet connection is possible, I'll change my vote to Windows CE.
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