I've never bought the whole "Linux is better for development spele" that everyone tries to spin just to make them look / feel better.
There was a time when the interpreters and compilers for various languages literally weren't available for Windows, or if they were, usage was like swimming upstream. Python didn't have Windows support at all until a full decade after its first release. PHP was the same (regardless of what you think about PHP, it was the king of mid/late-2000s dynamic web development). Then, there's the GNU Utils and tools like git itself, which were downright painful to run, even under Cygwin. Powershell didn't exist until 2006, so there was a solid decade or so between the original MS-DOS and the release of Powershell where the command line in Windows was severely hamstrung.
All of these added up to a painful developer experience for anything other than Windows (and later, .Net) development.
Now, the development ecosystem for VB6 and .Net were (and are) fantastic. I mean that sincerely. I actually love Visual Studio, proper, for what it can do. But development on just about any other language family? Not so great until the past decade or so. Even now, some of the tooling for certain things lags behind on Windows.
The combination of things like Github Desktop for Windows (which came with a decent transparent installation of the GNU Utils, if nothing else), Microsoft's shift to start embracing open source, instead of totally fighting it (and they did, even into the mid-2000s; they even had a FUD campaign as late as 2005/2006 against Linux), and Apple's resurgence as a viable end-user ecosystem in the late 2000s (prompting a need for Microsoft to take action to remain competitive and not sit on their laurels) converged to help make Windows more hospitable to development as a whole.
every time I've tried a switchover to Linux I've always found it unproductive, lacking adequate tooling and generally just a mess.
The inverse of this is basically the tl;dr of my response, above -- until the past decade, going from Linux to Windows, for developers, the main complaint was exactly that - lack of adequate tooling, unproductive, and generally a mess.
Ironically, your reasons for not switching to Linux still echo my reasons for not switching to Windows for my primary systems. Not only am I just not really productive on Windows, but the tooling (that I need) isn't there whenever I do consider switching.
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There was a time when the interpreters and compilers for various languages literally weren't available for Windows, or if they were, usage was like swimming upstream. Python didn't have Windows support at all until a full decade after its first release. PHP was the same (regardless of what you think about PHP, it was the king of mid/late-2000s dynamic web development). Then, there's the GNU Utils and tools like git itself, which were downright painful to run, even under Cygwin. Powershell didn't exist until 2006, so there was a solid decade or so between the original MS-DOS and the release of Powershell where the command line in Windows was severely hamstrung.
All of these added up to a painful developer experience for anything other than Windows (and later, .Net) development.
Now, the development ecosystem for VB6 and .Net were (and are) fantastic. I mean that sincerely. I actually love Visual Studio, proper, for what it can do. But development on just about any other language family? Not so great until the past decade or so. Even now, some of the tooling for certain things lags behind on Windows.
The combination of things like Github Desktop for Windows (which came with a decent transparent installation of the GNU Utils, if nothing else), Microsoft's shift to start embracing open source, instead of totally fighting it (and they did, even into the mid-2000s; they even had a FUD campaign as late as 2005/2006 against Linux), and Apple's resurgence as a viable end-user ecosystem in the late 2000s (prompting a need for Microsoft to take action to remain competitive and not sit on their laurels) converged to help make Windows more hospitable to development as a whole.
The inverse of this is basically the tl;dr of my response, above -- until the past decade, going from Linux to Windows, for developers, the main complaint was exactly that - lack of adequate tooling, unproductive, and generally a mess.
Ironically, your reasons for not switching to Linux still echo my reasons for not switching to Windows for my primary systems. Not only am I just not really productive on Windows, but the tooling (that I need) isn't there whenever I do consider switching.