I've had it up to here (I'm pointing to my neck) with getting stuff to work in Windows. I can do my usual C learning in Windows, but all the more advanced stuff I'm dabbling in is taking too much time to get functional.
For example: I'm playing around with GTK+ and Glade (a GUI building tool) just to get familiar with it so that one day when I'm more comfortable it won't be such a shock. Getting those to work in Windows has been a chore - at least four or five hours of free time, which is about as much free time I have during a normal week. On my Linux netbook the package manager handled everything and it all worked the first time. This is partially due to the Windows installer for Glade was an afterthought and has many known problems.
Months ago I tried hooking the VGA output of my netbook to my monitor and got disappointing results. I realized that I had not tried it recently (with the new OS version install) and gave it a shot yesterday. My tiny little netbook can now push a full 1920x1080 monitor and is reasonably fast.
Conclusion: I'm going to do the rest of my learning on the netbook attached to my big monitor (and keyboard and mouse). The compile times are a bit slower - that is to say they are on the order of 1-2 seconds instead of nearly instantly, but that's ok.
I'm not adept enough to make a blanket statement that learning programming in a Windows environment is a hindrance, but I'd rather be struggling with data structures and flow control - not .dll files and shoddy ports (not Windows' fault).
Fortunately the netbook is decent enough to do web based stuff like email through my browser and even remote desktop into my work machine. That should help not need to be constantly switching back and forth - I don't have a KVM so it's a chore to keep swapping USB cables around. My only concern is heat. The netbook gets super hot.
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