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Comment by hbosch | Hacker News Reader

I have worked mainly on OSX for my career, and recently had to switch to Windows for VR work. I started on Windows 7 and absolutely hated it. I hated the visual style of it, the awful UX of it, and just found it to be painful all-the-way-around. Sitting down at my desk in the morning, I'd almost always utter a small sigh of frustration just logging in.

When we finally got cleared by IT to go ahead with Windows 10 I was cautiously optimistic but after using it for a few months I was totally bought in. I will/would never go back to any pre-10 release.

I'm back on OSX now (new job) and still miss Windows 10 most days. I'm going to be building a personal machine soon, and unless the new MacBook Pro's can astound me it'll be a Windows 10 rig – no question.

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Interesting. I have the opposite opinion. My measure of quality is how quickly i can do common tasks, and i found that Win10 gets in the way so much, that i am now installing win7 in my new laptops. Imho win7 hit a gold standard for usability in many years

Off-topic: Is it now possible to keep a Windows 7 machine on W7 and fully prevent it from being upgraded to 10 (without an absurd amount of effort being required)? My daily usage is probably 90% Linux/10% Mac but recently I've been considering setting up a W7 VM on my laptop. I do NOT want W10 at all, however, and don't want to even bother if it's just going to end up with W10 anyways (I've heard plenty of "forced upgrade" horror stories). If it matters, this would be a W7 Pro volume license.

https://www.google.gr/search?q=prevent+windows+10+upgrades&g...

I don't even remember if i followed said procedure, but my win7 installs no longer beg to be upgraded. Maybe MS pulled back its aggressive policy (also, i m in europe).

Personally, for me though Pre-W10: Average UI, Great UX. W10: Nice UI touches, No-so great UX.

>I was totally bought in.

why?

I can't answer for Op, but I've been a Linux user at work for many years and OSX at home. I sold my last Mac in 2013 and used Linux for a couple of years until I tried Windows 10. I never used (or plan to use) Windows for servers. I had interest in Nano Server, then I realized it's not free and although running in the cloud I could probably feel no big difference in spending, I just don't have expertise (or will to learn maybe).

I was making a list of things I like from Windows 10, but some are as good in Linux and OSX. To be honest I'm not entirely sure why I'm sticking to Windows 10. I think it is comfortable to use and I have no reason to leave it either. It is installed in the computer, it gets big updates every now and then. It looks stunningly beautiful compared to any other Windows before.

In any case here's a list of things I like right now:

- It just works

- PowerShell and PowerShell ISE

- Office and especially Outlook (with an Exchange server) and OneNote

- I've got Bash now, which runs Linux binaries, with apt-get and in a terminal that sucks less than cmd. I had a tingling feeling the other day compiling a Go app in my WSL window. I know Go is multiplatform, but it was fun to compile a Linux binary in a Windows OS and run it.

It feels a lot how OS X used to make me feel years ago. It just worked. The difference is that here I've got all the Windows software and I can choose laptop from Macbook-like stuff to a £149 Lenovo Ideapad 100S, passing through tablets of all sorts. The OS is the same.

I don't feel like I'm tied to a platform when I'm working on my laptop. I guess having multiple putty sessions to Linux servers opened helps a lot :)

I'm not so sure about Cortana and Edge. I want to like both, but so far my feelings are just "meh".

On the other hand, the updates are definitely more insistent than before; but I don't think I ever got an ultimatum without prior notice of pending updates. I too defer many times (after all, if I'm looking at the computer means I'm probably busy), but it helps me keep up to date. Now that I think about it, I think I've found my computer restarted and installed updates overnight a couple of times in the last year.

One Note runs on Mac.

I honestly haven't tried it on Mac. It also runs on Android and iOS which is great.

I'm in the market for a cheap-ish ultraportable with good battery and I'm considering a second hand Air or MacBook. When it comes to the OS, why would I go back to macOS?

(Note that I would go back if I've found a cheap enough Air ;))

I'm not saying you ncessarily should. Windows has gotten better, but still has some infuriating stuff for development, like the 260 character path-length limit. Mac has more native Unix stuff, if you don't care about that there really aren't huge differences in experience anymore.

"It just works" - in my experience it really doesn't.

- I run win10 on a Vaio Canvas Z, a pretty recent machine. Graphics driver crashes regularly, although it remains stable doing so, screen freezes for around 2 seconds.

- when I wanted to install international keyboard profiles it has become way worse then older windows versions, which already weren't great. On OSX this is a totally solved problem. On Windows it would often show me the wrong thing installed until reboot, couldn't switch over to something newly added, the whole list is buggy.

- the terminal... god I hate it. It's stuck in the mid 90ies. Even Apple who supposedly doesn't care about power users anymore, has continuously improved its terminal application and it has become pretty great. On Windows I can't even have a decent color setting that would make all the standard unix colors readable without doing all kinds of hacks in .bashrc. Yes it's MinGW, but it uses the MS given terminal as-is.

- preinstalled PDF support is still a joke. Can't even annotate or rotate or really do anything with it.

- I can't get the preinstalled Mail/Calendar to reliably connect to gmail, gave up after an hour of fiddling around. That thing is a complete joke. And I hate Outlook's UI even though I've developed for it in the past.

About terminal, After Nadella they are improving terminal as fast as possible, but it may take a little while to become available for end user:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/09/22/24-b...

Is it really better than Ubuntu though? I guess I don't use Microsoft office at all, so that could be a compelling reason, but Linux can be Linux with any kind of UI you want. Which for me is anything other than the touch-centric metro monstrosity with pages and pages of menus. You can make it your machine instead of microsofts auto-restarting spyware bundle of bugs

Define better :)

I don't think it's better than Ubuntu, but it's not worse. There are some aspects where Windows would be a no-brainer (gaming) and others where it is catching up with Linux (development outside Visual Studio? I'm just a hobbyist).

I never got 3 monitors to work reliably on Ubuntu or Fedora, though. Apart from that, I could probably switch back to Ubuntu and be as happy.

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