> Personally I don't like treating Windows users like how I treated Linux/macOS users. You chose Windows, you chose the hard way, you have to figure it out on you own.

I dunno if you're trolling here (and if so, well done), but this attitude really gets under my skin. Excuse me for ranting at you, but I need to get this off my chest.

I think that this attitude is harmful to open source projects, and to projects of all kinds. In my experience, the people who use Windows usually haven't 'chosen' Windows; that decision was made for them by bureaucracy or money or time.

I go to a state university in a metro area, and roughly 90% of the people in my CS program use Windows. These kids have part-time jobs and families who need them. They commute over an hour each way to get to school, because they can't afford rent in the city. They don't have the cash to drop on a Mac. A lot of them are still on their first laptop, which they got back in high school, chosen for them by well-meaning parents with no clue about arcana like driver compatibility. It's probably got a smallish HDD, or a tiny SSD, barely enough space for a VM and Visual Studio (which, by the way, a mandatory class requires). This laptop is their primary and only computer, and it runs Windows. Maybe it'd run Linux too, if you didn't mess up the install. You wanna toss those dice with your only tool for getting your homework done on time?

And the intrepid few who do slap Linux on their computer pay for it, with their time. Every single Linux User Group meeting we have someone who comes in asking how to set up their laptop with the school wifi. These are smart people, often with graduate degrees, who struggle with wpa-supplicant et al; and we aren't even talking Arch here, just as many issues come up with Ubuntu. Windows Just Works (TM), in a way that Linux doesn't, and probably never will (and even really probably shouldn't). Linux may be free as in freedom, but it's not free as in beer, not if time is money.

So this is just one subset of the people you're targeting when you support the 82% [0] of computer users who use Windows. And I understand completely that Windows is a deeply unfun system to support. But supporting Windows is going to open up all kinds of contributors from nontraditional backgrounds to your project. Studies show that diverse teams are more creative [1] and, in a business context, more profitable [2]. (Side note: looking at that Wikipedia page, maybe it's time to support a first-class IDE for Android?)

These are the users you most desperately want to attract to your project, the ones who think differently than you do, who come from different backgrounds and whose ideas are shaped by different experiences than you. There are all kinds of initiatives going on right now (LLVM, for example [3]) to attract a more diverse open source developer base, and I think that's great. Supporting Windows is one more way to achieve that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

[1] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work-group-p...

[2] https://www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/media/news/articl...

[3] http://blog.llvm.org/2018/03/international-womens-day-celebr...