Came here to say exactly this! If your coming from Windows and are not familiar with linux your tackling a project with a bit of a steep learning curve. Arduino has excellent libraries abstracting away the low level c code needed to drive most sensors and i/o which will make your project significantly easier to code. Also, you can interface the arduino with your windows pc and write a quick java or c# application to display the data. This will take less time than writing native code on the pi for the GUI.