But everything new they release and everything I use from them makes me thankful I mostly use Apple products. I don't have to worry about the new version of Windows destroying my computer or forcing itself upon me, and I especially love knowing that my computer will not reboot itself unexpectedly at night due to security updates. I'm glad I have products made by a company that knows what it is and what it does, that focuses on stability and polish. A company that doesn't flap back and forth between consumer and enterprise computing, discontinuing devices and services as fast as they can create them. Maybe I'm still sore from the loss of my Zune, or my Windows Phone, or my TechNet subscription.
I didn't start using Macs with the Lisa, or System 7, or even when OS X was released; I'm fairly new. This is only my second Mac. But I used Windows for years, and every time I hear someone say "I'm leaving Apple for Microsoft because Apple has lost their way", what I actually hear is "I'm making a symbolic statement and I don't actually care what the repercussions are." Because if anyone thinks Windows is more stable, more polished, more developer friendly, or has machines with a better build quality, I have to say... you're gonna be surprised.
Maybe Apple isn't what it used to be. But it still seems a damn sight better than Windows, in almost every regard.
I really wonder why people seem to like Finder over Windows Explorer.
I mean, I run linux on all but one of my machines, but if a company made me choose, I'd choose Windows over OSX.
Apple doesn't make things dev-friendly, the mountain of volunteers who make homebrew and packages make it dev-friendly. They didn't switch OSX to be nix-based because they wanted to entice developers, they did it because it allowed them to move faster.
Meanwhile, MS is releasing their nix subsystem, open-sourcing lots of crap, and generally going out of their way to pull devs back into the fold.
I wouldn't switch today, but the last year of releases makes it clear that this has been under way for quite a while... and will continue for many more. If the nix subsystem works as well as they say, I could see myself switching at some point in the future. (because I would really like some decent power management)
But literally my biggest pet peeve with Windows is, it seems every few days I sit down in the morning and log in only to realize it had rebooted itself overnight. Or it's begging me to schedule a reboot. Or I installed a program and immediately afterwards it needs to reboot to finish installing. My Windows machine spends more time shutting down or starting up than it does actually running.
How about working on getting me updates-without-restarts like ksplice instead of changing the colour of the buttons.
What I like is a Unix command line. I also like virtual desktops that I can spawn by full-screening an application. I have a Red Hat laptop that work gave me, but I prefer my BYOD Macbook. I have three Linux certifications, but it's still so fiddly and good lord do I hate the package management tools. All of them. Why is it "yum install httpd" but "apt-get install apache2"? Why doesn't my OS run "apt-get update" in the background every so often so I don't have to do it manually when I want to install something?
It's nice to have Unix but backed by a company who knows how to design a user-friendly experience.
Probably because you disabled it at install time. There's a box to check in the software update settings on Ubuntu; I see a similar cronjob on Debian.
In any case, you don't have to do it. You'll simply get the version of the package that was current at the time you last did the update.
> Why is it "yum install httpd" but "apt-get install apache2"
Because these are different tools.
In my opinion, that's not a valid answer. httpd and apache2 are exactly the same software package, running on the same OS at the same version, performing the same function. The only reason yum, apt, pacman, etc exist independently of each other is because the maintainers of each package manager are too stubborn and prideful to see the value in combining their efforts. It's obvious that apt is no better than yum. If it was, Red Hat would switch to it, and vice versa.
To reiterate something I said in another reply, these are things that seem perfectly natural to a Linux admin but are unacceptable to anyone else. I've seen 10+ year experienced Linux admins log into a new box and run apt-get install and see the response "command not found". Whoops, forgot it was a CentOS box.
I love bash and the Unix core utilities, but I dislike the way Linux is developed. I know Linux because I use it every day for my job, but that doesn't mean I have to like it and all of its idiosyncrasies.
> The only reason yum, apt, pacman, etc exist independently of each other is because the maintainers of each package manager are too stubborn and prideful to see the value in combining their efforts.
To me this seems a bit like complaining that Chrome, Safari, IE, and Firefox have different keyboard shortcuts, and saying it'd be better if everyone just joined forces and worked on one browser. There is a huge amount of value in diversity and competition. If that means I occasionally have to google "pacman apache package," so be it.
There's value in diversity and competition, but does yum's new features make apt better? Does yum have any new features? Or is it literally just duplicating the exact same thing just for the sake of NIH? Browsers get updated constantly, it's a quickly changing market. Package managers are pretty much done. If apt or yum have implemented a new feature in the last 5 years that made the other maintainer say "oh my god we need that, how did we not think of that?" I will eat my hat (I don't actually own a hat).
You know what's really nice? Interoperability. Predictable behavior. It's the same damn OS. EXEs that run on Windows 10 Pro run on Windows 10 Home Premium, too, you don't have to switch to MSI just because you changed the distribution.
I work on both daily as well. I can give some commentary on that. Coming from Windows, I initially hated Finder, but I prefer it now. The controls scheme is more consistent to me, and things I liked about the Windows setup was purely because I used Windows first.
* Navigating the folder structure: OSX: Cmd+down to drill down. Cmd+up to move up a directory. Cmd+down to open a file. Windows: Enter to move down. Alt+up to move up a directory. Enter to open the file.
* Renaming a folder or file OSX: Enter. Hands can remain on the home key for immediate typing of new name. Windows: F2. F2? Why? Hand has to fly off home position. And it's such a random key. I'm sure there's a historical reason, but from an end user's perspective, why that F key vs any other F key?
* Open file dialog (I believe each OS uses their file manager to power it) OSX: Not in the right directory, but have an instance of Finder open that is? Just drag in the target directory into the dialog, and it will smartly switch to that folder. Windows: If you try that, it freaks out. Navigate manually.
In a vacuum, sure, I could agree with that. But in conjunction with cmd + [arrow] to move in and out of your current position, I think cmd + down to open a file continues that line of thought and is intuitive and obvious in the Finder context. After drilling down with cmd+down, if it's another directory, open it, else if it's a file... open it.
Alt-up and enter to do similar navigation all make sense in their own individual context, but in the context of each other or Explorer itself, is not intuitive and is nonsensical imo. That would be like mouse wheel down to scroll, but ctrl+up to scroll the other way. And F2 I guess, as you put it, is just pure randomness and would make no sense in any context.
Isn't this just the typical argument of "Well that's how it's always been!". You're advocating something arbitrary and nonsensical just because you're used to it.
And while we're on the subject of renaming files, I actually like how I can rename currently opened files.
IMO the main problem with Windows Explorer is the UI changes so often it's kind of confusing to do really basic tasks sometimes. There's so much functionality buried under toolbars, contextual menus of different kinds, nested property sheets, etc that any change to the UI effects a lot of things. For example in one release I always had to remind myself to right click on 'My Computer' in the Start Menu to get the contextual menu that included 'map network drive' because right clicking in a My Computer window only offered 'add network location' which is something different.
Amen to this. I can tolerate either OS but whenever I'm on a Mac, I miss Windows Explorer greatly.
I don't like either, and seldom touch the Finder. But the column browser is useful for some things.
Apple's current strategy for security fixes is "update or die". They now support only the latest and greatest OS on both desktop and mobile, with no "enterprise" exceptions. If you don't want to get owned, you have to use the newest OS that may have added/removed features that you may or may not want. MSFT is still supporting Windows 7, 8, and 10.
Yet every time Microsoft puts out a new version, even fairly minor revisions like Windows 7 or Windows 10 where the hardware requirements stay the same, there is a major backlash and a huge furor and everyone insists they will stay at the older version until they die.
It's as if they have the potential to build an amazing ecosystem but they trip over themselves and stuff comes out 3/4 baked. Mostly looking at the huge opportunity that they had with Windows Phone and still have with Xbox Live.
They seem to intentionally sabotage the wire that connects the harddrive to the board on macbook pros in order to force you to upgrade.
Also idk what you mean about build quality though because people build their own PCs. Our macs seem to break faster and more frequently than the PCs we build.
edit: It is also super fun trying to get a macbook to output both sound and video onto a tv.
By going to the Preferences -> Display?
>It is also super fun trying to get a macbook to output both sound and video onto a tv
Never had any issue with it, with 2 TV models, a projector, 2 Macs (Air, MBPr) -- using HDMI in all.
Don't even get me started on the couple of years when you couldn't even really use a second monitor after Lion. Dear god.
Funny you mention building your own, I got my first Mac when I got fed up with building and maintaining my own PC. I bought some new RAM and plugged it in, and suddenly it stopped booting. I put the old RAM back in, and it wouldn't boot with the old RAM either. This was the straw that broke the camel's back, after I had gotten fed up with rebooting every week for updates, overheating issues that had been starting to pop up, and how ridiculously loud the fans were for a not-that-good desktop. I was looking at a Surface, but plenty of people are like "oh it's great, but there are some driver issues". It's a first-party machine. There should be no driver issues. Zero.
I bought a Macbook that same day. Everything I was complaining about sounds completely normal to a PC enthusiast. "Of course you're getting overheating, just put more fans in." "Of course the fans are loud, put in more, bigger, slower fans." "Just disable automatic updates and reboot when it's convenient." "Just replace the motherboard."
It's completely asinine. If my car needed that much constant maintenance I'd call it a lemon and demand my money back. I have work to do, and it doesn't involve building a computer to do it.
You mean to prevent you from changing it? Recent MacBooks don't have SATA (instead opting for SSD chips straight on the board with NVMe), but I had one of the last models with a magnetic drive option and I put in a standard SATA SSD with no problem.
The problem is, in their line of work they only ever see the broken computers. So it kind of taints their view point.
I hear this comment so many times. Why don't you just disable automatic updates if they bother you so much?!
Not getting my hopes up though.
Really my current development needs consist of git, ssh, node, redis, mysql, apache, and python. If WSL can do that I'm all set.
Visual Studio runs absolute rings around XCode.
And I day this as a vim/make user with a significant Linux investment.
Sometimes, I'll port software to windows, only so that I can use Visual Studio!
Any OS is fine for browsing the web. Windows is better fort playing games. And VMWare means I can develop my Linux server software in a Linux environment, which avoids any compatibility surprises.
3dsMax or Inventor don't even run on MacOS, but most people luckily don't have that problem :-)
So why is MacOS better for "development" again?
You didn't say much about anything either. Hmmm.
Anyway, I've developed software for twenty years on Windows and so have a ton of others, so I'd really like to know what your problem is?
I actually have a harder time using OSX than Windows, but that just because I spend far more time using Windows.
Is silly to just condemn something blindly just because it isn't OSX.
Almost no (or maybe no now?) mac ships with a decent performance CUDA card, disciplines like 3D rendering are getting more and more reliant on GPU computing and almost no one supports OpenCL it's all CUDA.
I'm currently debating if I should put together a hackjob external GPU or if I should just spend about $200 and get a full PC to work on.