From my experience of doing software development professionally in several flavors of UNIX and Windows systems, I would say Linux is no better as there is seldom a way that works flawlessly across distributions.
I can't remember the last time I struggled building something on a random distribution that worked on another. What are you doing that you run into incompatibilities across modern Linux distributions?
It's certainly better than: "use VS" or "suffer through any other sort of Windows dev" in my opinion.
I'm constantly running into incompatibilities with my own code, all of them due to Debian. The one that's still causing me trouble is being able to invoke a pyuic4 that has access to both pykde and pyqwt; as far as I can tell that's impossible on Debian.
