I think WSL should also be listed among awesome new developer amenities from Microsoft. I know a lot of people view it as a capitulation considering its Microsoft, but WSL is such a great tool.
I purchased a Macbook about 2 years ago out of curiosity, as it seems a lot of developers prefer them. I'll admit the screen is beautiful, but so much of the developer niceties are simply the Mac taking advantage of POSIX interoperability. As WSL continues to grow, I could definitely see going back to a Windows machine.
POSIX interoperability isn't to be taken lightly. WSL is currently still pretty far imo from the native experience you get in Linux and Mac. Mac is also the only system that allows easy development of any platform, though of course that's primarily because of locking down development for their stuff.
Macs are popular dev machines because they couple the above with a very polished and stable widely compatible OS. The broad market appeal with the advantages of Unix like terminal and file system and a package manager. The screen isn't even that great, I'd take the XPS screen over the Macbook's.
I think WSL will get there eventually but in its current state it's just more tedious to use for permissions/networking/compatability issues.
Mostly things you can work around but just a bit more tinkering
(disclosure I work for Microsoft but not on this stuff)
Biggest benefit for me has been how simple it has made ssh on Windows. I got a nicer spec'd Surface Laptop 3 during my last hardware refresh and haven't missed Macbook at all.
Confusing. Do you mean as an ssh server? Because there is no functional difference between Cygwin ssh client running in mintty vs WSL (1 or 2, doesn't matter) ssh running in wsltty. I think if I sat you down in front of them and switched them out you wouldn't notice a thing.
I purchased a Macbook about 2 years ago out of curiosity, as it seems a lot of developers prefer them. I'll admit the screen is beautiful, but so much of the developer niceties are simply the Mac taking advantage of POSIX interoperability. As WSL continues to grow, I could definitely see going back to a Windows machine.