It's interesting that you describe a Unix/Linux development environment as web development friendly. Historically, the only relationship between the two was that a portion of the server/hosting market ran on Solaris and Linux boxes (and now, Linux servers and VMs). But that's not really why it became popular for web development.

Since web development doesn't require a proprietary dev toolkit, it gravitated towards the platform that most naturally supports software development in general. And that happened to be Unix/Linux.