What about "I'm really a UNIX kind of guy and a Windows shop probably isn't the best fit for me" is dishonest or devoid of information?
This makes it clear that he prefers UNIX and that was a factor in declining the position. It stops short of passing sweeping judgements on people who do not prefer UNIX, which is very likely to annoy somebody who prefers Windows.
I guess I mostly disagree with the "very likely to annoy somebody who prefers Windows" statement. I love Windows as a desktop OS, and am typing this on it right now. Nonetheless, my love for it is really irrelevant when I'm developing for Ubuntu Lucid. I guess I feel strongly about this because I've actually been the sole guy in a small shop sticking to Windows while all my colleagues were on Ubuntu (which was the target OS.) I tried to justify it to myself for as long as I could, and frankly at the end of it there was simply no good reason to be on a different platform than the target. It caused me no end of headaches and wasted dev time - although part of this was because I was pulling from a repo shared with ubuntu devs, it was mostly that the target was ubuntu.
TL;DR: If an interviewee two years ago had seen that I was on Windows, turned us down, and cited my Windows development as the reason for their refusal, I would probably have switched to ubuntu six months sooner and saved myself (and the company) upwards of 100 hours of dev troubleshooting. So it's hard to view the raw "You're on Windows developing for UNIX. Just what?" as worse than "I'm not a Windows developer, sorry."
Which "sweeping judgements" did I pass on people who do not prefer Unix? All I've said in this article is that, given the choice between Windows and Unix, I prefer Unix. I went on to add points on why I like Unix, which admittedly is a little extraneous, but I never voiced any negative judgement on Windows. Many seem to infer that themselves.
Let's be honest, you were basically singing UNIX's praises for a little bit. While I agree with them, you have to admit that saying that "Unix encapsulates, and indeed was built on, many core principles of good software design" is a sidelong criticism of Windows which you imply is not built upon core principles of good software design. I imagine this could easily be construed as an insult.
Consider if a Windows user said he didn't want to work at a Unix shop because Windows is a better-designed operating system. Would you not consider this a judgement of Unix?
Good points. I agree that it's reasonable to construe what I was saying as a swipe at Windows.
What I really meant, and I guess I didn't do a sufficient job at getting this across, was that I know Unix is rock-solid; I don't know the same about Windows. Truth be told, I know very little about Windows since I haven't used it for 4 years. I was going for a positive point about Unix, not a negative one about Windows.
But you have a pretty good point about my praise of Unix being a vacuous swipe at Windows.
I only use Windows because I am always in too much of a rush to pass through the pain of adopting a new operating system on my desktop machine. We do deploy onto Linux.
I don't have any local Linux / Unix help.
Perhaps if you joined the team, many of the other developers would also have switched. I might have if I was from this company.
Consider if a Windows user said he didn't want to work at a Unix shop because Windows is a better-designed operating system. Would you not consider this a judgement of Unix?
Judgment of a platform and judgment of its users are separate issues.
This makes it clear that he prefers UNIX and that was a factor in declining the position. It stops short of passing sweeping judgements on people who do not prefer UNIX, which is very likely to annoy somebody who prefers Windows.