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Comment by SippinLean | Hacker News Reader

>I mean Windows is good, but nowhere good as OS X

Specifically? People typically point to the telemetry and forced updates, but I've managed to disable both, using what were admittedly much-too-difficult procedures or third-party software. It's annoying, but not that annoying.

I really like Finder and Spotlight, but not enough to be tied, via licensing, to any specific hardware.

Less cluttering--I can uninstall apps on windows

Native package manager-- I guess Windows has Chocolatey and I use npm for dev work.

View on HN

Specifically:

* HiDPI support in all apps, whethere they are aware of it or not.

* Built-in PDF editing and creation from all printable content.

* POSIX scripting and CLI.

* Very clean and consistent configuration system (defaults). Reset an app to factory? Delete one plist file and potentially an app support folder. Got a new Mac? You could even boot it up from the old harddisk. Good luck doing that with windows registry.

* Touchpad support.

* Systemwide fulltext search with indexing and complex search terms. Somehow MS still hasn't caught up with 10.4 Tiger it seems to me.

* Superb discoverability of power user features with in-app help system and hotkeys displayed in the menu.

* A consistent menu system.

* Powerful and system wide screenshots.

* Very good screen calibration out of the box

* Cmd-C / V work everywhere, including the Terminal.

* Very good terminal with good color schemes, tabs, unicode and even emoji support.

On the other hand Windows has:

* The best keyboard-only UI (although ribbons were a big step backwards in that regard - very hard to discover now)

* The best graphics drivers

* The best Office version (although Google Docs has mostly replaced the need for me)

* Windows-P, I really like that menu

* The Windows 10 task manager, pretty neat.

* Pen and Touchscreen support.

Overall MacOS beats it hands down for me when it comes to productivity.

* Touchpad support.

I think most people who haven't used an Apple laptop extensively are not aware that the touchpad actually works, and you do not need to carry an external mouse to use the device comfortably.

Precision touchpad gestures on Windows 10 solves that problem, especially on the Dell XPS/Precision machines. It's really, really good.

Nah.

We have those at my work, and we also have an iMac with a magic trackpad, and several of us have macbook pros.

It's a huge improvement, but it's maybe 75% of the way there. And the points at which it's NOT there are very noticeable and annoying. There's still regularly times where the trackpad just gets totally confused and you can't move the cursor for 1-2 seconds. Mehhhhhh

That's interesting, I've used a precision at work and an XPS at home for the last year, both have been totally rock solid.

Apple touchpads work so well that I don't use a mouse at all anymore. I have a Bluetooth touchpad with my external keyboard, and I even bought an old Fingerworks touchpad to use with my PC.

The power of gestures is incredible. Managing macOS windows without a touchpad is awful. With a touchpad it is the best.

I have had a work Mac for the last two years. I haven't found Apple touchpads to be this revolutionary change that'd make me like touchpads that others have and still carry a wireless mouse around. I'm not the only one in my office.

The touchpad is literally the single hurdle to me going back to a windows/linux laptop.

This is very true. When I reboot my MacBook into Windows the touchpad becomes dumb.

> The best keyboard-only UI (although ribbons were a big step backwards in that regard - very hard to discover now)

Use the Alt key.

For example, open Word and press Alt to show the keyboard commands. If you want the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press H as shown.

Alternatively, to open the Ribbon and show the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press Alt-H.

So, if you want to center some selected text in Word, press Alt, H, then AC

If you want to insert an image, press Alt, N, P and so on.

The Ribbon makes Office programs much easier to use, so you probably won't want to learn many of these key sequences. However, the ones you already know will almost certainly work.

For the record, I much prefer Windows 10. However, the fact is that Apple doesn't sell any of the hardware I use. It doesn't make a proper tower desktop and it doesn't make a small rotating-screen laptop that doubles as a touch tablet.

Even if I was willing to compromise on hardware, less-functional Apple products would cost 2x to 4x more.

As I wrote I still do consider keyboard UI on windows the best, because it's AFAIK the only widely supported destop OS with full keyboard control of the GUI. But the Ribbons are not for me - it's a menu system that's also trying to be a context aware palette, which makes it worse than either a classic menu (easy to skim though and find what you want, especially on MacOS) or a palette (can be placed wherever it's the most useful, i.e. allowing the shortest mouse travel).

Please note that I still do consider Windows Office the best version nevertheless, but for different reasons.

macOS does have keyboard menu control and it is pretty good. http://lifehacker.com/321595/access-the-dock-and-menu-bar-fr...

The Ribbon is a much better UI because it takes up less room, makes more features more accessible, and provides much better discoverability. To appreciate the pros and cons, I'd suggest going though the full account of the development [1], though there is a simpler intro/index [2] that links to a good video [3].

Of course, there's also personal taste, and you are perfectly entitled to prefer whichever menu system you like. However, the Ribbon won a decade ago, so at this stage, it would probably be more useful to learn how to make better use of it. My Alt tip is just one example.

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/13/table-of...

[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/12/the-stor...

[3] https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09

Big items for me on MacOS

* Drag-and-drop automation, scripting and workflow tools. I love folder actions.

* Built-in screen recording in QuickTime Player, which also works with attached iOS devices

* Time Machine backups. So easy to use and has saved my bacon over and over

* iMovie and Photos. I don't use the rest of the bundled apps, both those two are essentials for me.

I agree, all of these are part of why MacOS is just more ready for work out of the box.

I literally don't know what I'd do if I didn't have the capability of Automator combined with completely-customizable keyboard shortcuts everywhere. It's seriously a power user's dream.

TimeMachine is really great. Does anyone have experience with the Windows 10 backups? I know the Windows 7 one was dire.

>* POSIX scripting and CLI.

Windows has WSL which gets better in the new Creator's update.

>* Touchpad support.

I don't use laptops, but I've heard good things about the touchpad in the Surface line, and Dell XPS.

>* Superb discoverability of power user features with in-app help system and hotkeys displayed in the menu.

Windows has had hotkeys in menus as long as I can remember. I know they where there in 3.1. If you press Alt in Explorer you'll get overlays with hotkeys over the buttons and menus.

>* A consistent menu system.

I'm guessing you mean that the ribbon is inconsistent. Most programs use the regular menus, and the ribbon is just a glorified toolbar with tabs. I don't see the big deal.

>* Powerful and system wide screenshots.

Windows 10 has Win+Print screen to save fullscreen screenshots as a file. For more control, there's the snipping tool that's been included for years now.

>* Cmd-C / V work everywhere, including the Terminal.

Ctrl+C/V works in Windows terminal too.

>* Very good terminal with good color schemes, tabs, unicode and even emoji support.

I usually use ConEmu. I just tested, it does support emoji, but I don't see the point. I just tried "mkdir " (edit: seems like HN eats my emoji, but that's supposed to be a directory with an emoji in the name), and it worked as expected. If I use the built in terminal in VSCode it even looks nice, with colors, but it's just two blank rectangles in both cmd and powershell.

The built in terminal supports 24-bit color now though: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/09/22/24-b...

>>* Cmd-C / V work everywhere, including the Terminal. > Ctrl+C/V works in Windows terminal too.

If you mean Command Prompt by "Windows Terminal", this is not the case (if not, I'd really like to know what "Windows Terminal" is - I use Command Prompt for DOS/Windows things and Kitty for *nix related things). At least I have had to turn it on explicitly in the Command Prompt options (quick edit mode), and it's one of the first things I do on a Windows machine after setup.

You could use Ctrl+M to mark it.

> help system

alt key in windows does nowhere near what the help on macs does. you're looking for a command or forgot where it was in the menu or want some documentation -> open up help, type a query in the unified search and you're presented with docs as well as commands. Highlighting a command shows you the full path in the menu by opening it up and now you can even sed the hotkey. That's what I mean with discoverability. Every provrammer who uses GUIs should have a look at how that works, I consider that mandatory homework.

> screenshots

Obviously windows has screenshots, but you overlooked the word powerful. MacOS has all the features of the snipping tool right there on system wide hotkeys, no need to open up an app first - including delayed shots and area selections. It's not a big deal, but it saves enough time that it's a total no brainer for me to provide screenshots fo whatever question someone has (even when it's just a distraction from my actual task) while on Windows it takes a crucial 10-15 secs longer to do the same per shot and would disrupt my workflow.

> WSL / Terminal

I do acknowledge that things are getting better there and this is a great development - if/when it gets there I'll consider windows among my primary PC choices again.

Btw. it's telling that Windows-only users always overlook my point about the registry in these discussions. I use all three desktops and I can tell you, not having a central registry in an OS is a huge productivity win. With windows I spend days every 2 years getting a fresh state again while on Mac I can just copy over the file system (using automated tools that support thunderbolt cables, copy half a TB in 30min and are again built in) and start working after a coffee break. Yes there's imaging in Windows, but then you have to regularly keep those up to date and in the end you spend even more time if you only manage a handful of PCs.

> * Very good terminal with good color schemes, tabs, unicode and even emoji support.

To be fair, the built in Terminal.app sucks, you have to get iTerm2, which is a 3rd-party app, but at least it's not another $40 replacement app that shouldn't suck by default, (the same cannot be said for Finder and its replacements).

What is it that sucks about Terminal.app that iTerm2 fixes?

I'd be interested in that too. I've never wanted anything more than what Terminal.app offers, but maybe I just don't know what I'm missing.

The iTerm2 features page[1] has a pretty good run-down of all the extra stuff it can do. Personally, I'm a big fan of the split panes, and I use iTerm2 full screen with two panes.

That said, almost identical behaviour can be had in fullscreen with two Terminal windows sharing a full screen desktop space.

I also enjoy having my terminal be a slightly-transparent black rectangular slate, with no title bars, corner curving, etc., but that's purely preference and has no impact on functionality.

[1] https://www.iterm2.com/features.html

You forget: Windows has NTFS which is still lightyears ahead of Apple's upcoming APFS, let alone HFS+ (how on earth is it still in use??)

And I say this as Mac user.

John Siracusa, is that you? ;)

Btw. in what way is NTFS ahead of APFS?

NTFS supports compression, hard links, streams, transactions, quotas, and has a master file table (or multiples of them) which enables tools such as Voidtool's Everything utility to find files in nanoseconds. APFS does not support any of this.

The MFT is very helpful in that it is on the disk itself, as opposed to Apple's solution of getting a separate utility to index the disk (Spotlight) and generating a giant database file on the filesystem in your hidden Spotlight-V100 directory. Spotlight is on the filesystem, not IN the filesystem.

The NTFS page on Wikipedia lists all of the wonderful features of NTFS. Also Windows Internals 6 details some in wonderous detail.

In any case, APFS is far better than HFS+ (which has to flip all metadata's endianness as it is stored in big-endian format). It also has single-threaded access to this metadata, from what I recall. John Siracusa's review 6 years ago of OSX 10.7 Lion detailed the poor state of HFS+: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/

Makes for sad reading.

I think you touched on a big win for macOS in my book:

> Specifically? People typically point to the telemetry and forced updates, but I've managed to disable both, using what were admittedly much-too-difficult procedures or third-party software. It's annoying, but not that annoying.

Before I switched to macOS about 8 years ago I was used to the mindset of "oh this doesn't work the way I want but I'm smart enough to figure out how to fix it" and I took great pride in being able to fix my PC no matter what happened. I'd dig into the registry, I'd futz with inf files, and drivers. I didn't mind it too much, it wasn't "that annoying". And then I switched to a MBP my freshman year of college mainly because it meant I could use Windows/Linux/macOS and I loved how solid they felt and had people around me rave about the hardware and longevity of the machines themselves. I played with macOS and found that after getting used to it it was a joy to work with. It took a little longer for me to realize that I wasn't spending all my time making sure my computer kept working, it just worked on it's own. The OS that I had belittled and mocked for years for being "a toy" or "dumbed down" actually was insanely powerful under the hood, extremely intuitive, and looked beautiful. That last point may sound stupid, I know I used to think it was, but it's a big deal. You are going to be staring at this for 8 hours+ a day. Trust me it is way more enjoyable to look at something pretty than something not. When it comes down to it for me macOS is built on a rock solid core and makes switching between it and the linux servers I work on a breeze with beautiful apps and a beautiful UI all of which JustWorks (tm). For that I am more than willing to pay the MacTax (tm).

Although Apple have been known to change things for change-sake, I find it is possible to take a Mac running Mac OS 10.2 and 10.12 and you will find your way around with ease.

Of course, under the hood they've rewritten everything like DNS and actually using the hosts file etc. but from a usability perspective you are right that you end up fighting with the OS less (so I have found).

> It's annoying, but not that annoying.

I dunno, I've done all kinds of stuff to my windows 10 machine to keep Candy Crush Soda from reinstalling itself. Yet every few weeks/months that King garbage ends up on my start menu.

I use windows 10 because I'm a .NET developer and a gamer. If I could use OSX on my desktop instead, and have access to the same steam games - I can't think of a reason I would stay.

> Less cluttering--I can uninstall apps on windows

On OSX you typically don't need to 'uninstall' just drag to the trash. Yeah, some apps leave some garbage behind - but the same happens on windows when you 'uninstall'

> Native package manager-- I guess Windows has Chocolatey and I use npm for dev work.

I think the biggest detriment on this point for windows is that the command line interface on windows is not friendly. I recently worked on a project where half the team didn't know powershell, and the other half really loved powershell. We also used some stuff from the node ecosystem. We had scripts that would only run in cmd.exe, powershell scripts, and scripts that only worked in bash. In the end http://cmder.net/ saved my butt, since I could have all three shells open.

> I dunno, I've done all kinds of stuff to my windows 10 machine to keep Candy Crush Soda from reinstalling itself. Yet every few weeks/months that King garbage ends up on my start menu.

Another anecdote, I right clicked and clicked "unpin from start" and never saw it again.

It's still there though, isn't it? Granted you don't see it in the Start Menu, but it remained installed on your system. God knows if it's not having its own process at launch, doing similarly nasty stuff?

God, and anyone who knows how to read logfiles.

It isn't. You could easily check that in Task Manager or Process Explorer and/or Glasswire or whatever.

Most of these things take up a trivial amount of disk space -- some of them are just placeholders -- so they're not worth the time taken to worry about them.

I understand they are not worth it, but it boggles my mind that you have to accept their presence in the first place.

You never explicitly asked for it to be added there, did you?

You never asked for Solitaire or Freecell either. And you never asked for Notepad or Calculator or whatever. Did you have mini-hysterics about Solitaire being bundled, and did you waste hours worrying about it or removing it?

What about the pernicious inclusion of Edie Brickell's Good Times in Windows 95? ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc

Candy Crush Saga was actually one of the benefits of Windows 10 that Microsoft promoted, for two reasons: (1) Candy Crush was enormously popular, and (2) it provides practice in touch operations, just as Solitaire got people used to using a mouse.

This is idiocy. Solitaire and Freecell are originally not video games, and nobody is making money off selling them. Candy Crush Saga, on the other hand...well, I don't think I need to explain to you who benefits from having it preinstalled on Windows.

This is idiocy. Freecell was originally sold as part of a games pack for Windows, and Candy Crush Saga is a highly-rated game that's otherwise available from the Windows Store. Thousands of people have downloaded it.

The Good Times video in Windows 95 also sold Edie a lot of CDs, but it would be equally stupid to criticize that. In both cases, Microsoft is providing something entertaining that demonstrates some benefit of the operating system.

No, I think King is paying Microsoft a hefty price to advertise to you directly in your start menu.

Evidence?

Note the "think" in my statement. I have no evidence. I just can't fathom Microsoft actually thinking pre-installing Candy Crush on Windows 10 provides a net positive value to their customer, more than the company King Digital. With its psychological scammy IAP scheme. Or maybe Microsoft is just in on the IAP scam. Either way, its the first thing I removed when I installed Windows 10.

Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc certainly promoted it as a feature:

"Solitaire. Hearts. Minesweeper. These are games that have been played millions of times over the years in Windows. And they are coming back in Windows 10. If you’re a Windows Insider, you can check out a preview of the new Microsoft Solitaire Collection that’s included in the latest build of the Windows 10 Insider Preview (Build 10074). In addition to these games, we’re also working with partners to bring some of their great games to Windows 10 too. And we’re excited to be able to announce today that King will bring their game, Candy Crush Saga, to Windows 10. Candy Crush Saga will be automatically installed for customers that upgrade to or download Windows 10 during the launch! Over time, other popular and awesome King game titles will be available for Windows 10. Ever since Candy Crush Saga arrived for Windows Phone, I’ve spent countless hours of fun matching candies. I’m really looking to playing Candy Crush Saga and King’s other game titles on Windows 10."

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/05/14/candy...

I don't give a shit if it's highly rated. The Chainsmokers are also highly rated and completely critically empty as well, just like Candy Crush. To compare the two is lunacy, it's the difference between Windows Media Player coming with Bach sample music versus Nickelback. Thousands of people downloading something is no excuse for advertising it and forcing it down the throats of probably millions more paying customers. It sets a bad precedent for Microsoft either way because they're supposed to be the company that supports Freedom Zero where Apple doesn't, and yet increasingly your use of their software is contingent on accepting ugly and invasive advertising. This is also why "you can turn it off" is a non-criticism. "You can turn it off" is an acceptable response to Siri being included with macOS, I shouldn't even have to deal with advertisements in the first place.

If you don't see this as part of a bigger trend I don't think I can help you do so.

You're insane if you think it's an advertisement. If you can't see that, I don't think I can help you do so.

I guess you think it's clever to imitate me or something? Anyways you clearly have nothing more to contribute. Microsoft wanted to give away Windows 10 "for free" but realized they'd be screwed money wise, so they loaded it up with advertising and telemetric crap to try and compensate. It's really that simple. I'm sorry I bothered engaging in the first place, and I certainly won't continue if you just imitate me with more inane bullshit in your reply.

LOL. I certainly won't continue if you just imitate me with more inane bullshit in your reply.

Unstoppable force, meet immovable object.

Sure, but I told windows to uninstall it. Windows reinstalled it. I told it to again, windows did it again.

It bothers me. It doesn't bother you. That's fine.

Microsoft lost points with me, doesn't mean it has to affect you in any way.

Makes sense from a philosophical view, practically it's insignificant.

Besides, I thought only the Anniversary Update had CC? How would it get reinstalled?

Some people don't like having junk they are not using on their computers, even if they 'never see it again', it's all about being in control of your own computer, (as much as possible, that is).

> It's annoying, but not that annoying.

For you, maybe. For me, I have zero intention of going through the hassle when I can just use Linux instead. Any hassles here are easily learned and generally don't _require_ the use of third party stuff doing black magic under the hood.

Fair enough, but Linux brings hassles of it's own, at least my Linux box does.

The issue for linux are often things you can't solve at all. Like poor power management.

If anything, Linux is the only OS where you can solve that. Plus on modern kernels, battery life is seldom worse than on Windows.

I'm not following here. Apple has great power management. Sure, it's closed, but you can actually rely on it today. Put linux on it and all of a suden you have power management issues.

Windows is pretty bad on high DPI screens, and even third party tools don't help. There's inconsistency everywhere, and most older software is just blurry.

Chocolatey is nowhere near as good as e.g. pacman.

You mentioned disabling telemetry, but the fact that the OS you paid for spies on you and shows ads is a big turn off.

It's terrible to script, you cannot make use of the billion unix command line utilities (and there is no equivalent eco system either), you need to use the mouse too much, and it's awful to program with in any but a small number of sanctioned programming languages.

> It's terrible to script

I'm pretty sure you didn't try PowerShell. It is at least as good as bash, if not better.

> you need to use the mouse too much

I find this more problematic on macOS. I was forced to use a mouse much more on macOS. It doesn't even allow me to press the yes/no dialog only using a keyboard. On Windows nearly every item has a shortcut, sometimes even better than GNOME (but worse than KDE, IMO).

It does, you simply need to change a default configuration for keyboard shortcuts to be able to jump over UI elements with keyboard only.

:( Why is it not the default? Is there a technical reason? I cannot think of any possible downside that the shortcuts would bring.

Control + F7 (Fn + Ctrl + F7 if you're on a MBP or using the wireless keyboard)

Toggles on highlighting for all UI elements so you can Tab / Shift-Tab through them. It's usually the first thing I do when I touch a new Mac.

> It doesn't even allow me to press the yes/no dialog only using a keyboard

cmd+first letter of the dialog option.

I actually find OS X far superior with shortcuts than Windows: More discoverable, actually configurable and more consistent.

One of the only things I miss now I've switched to Win.

For me one of the joys of using macOS is when you realize adding option or shift to a shortcut does a similar but more specialized thing that is more useful.

In Windows the shortcuts have always seemed less logical to me, though the newer Windows key ones are an improvement.

I've yet to figure out what PowerShell can/can't do though really. Maybe I'm weird, but I like that it's bash on OS X, I already know it.

You're not weird. PowerShell does have barriers to entry and that's why I also had used Cygwin on Windows until recently. And it might not change because it is a very different monster than POSIX. It is unfortunate for sure, but still I think it's worth learning especially if you use Windows frequently.

Even if you don't, learning it is a fun experience. It's like learning Haskell just to feel another way to program, even though you're not using it in practice.

Eh, it's just so .. nuts looking to me that I'll probably stick to *nix land.

Powershell might have some neat features, but the verbosity of the commands (don't bring up shortcuts here either - you need the full commands as that's what everyone else is using) just drives me batty. I find that they don't lend themselves well to mnemonics or easy memorization.

Who needs ls when you have Get-ChildItem?

Who needs grep -r 'pattern' when you have Select-String -Path c:\ -Pattern pattern?

Now that I think about it, Powershell has a conceptual similarity to Applescript. A proprietary, verbose, and hard-to-discover English-like syntax belying a great amount of power over the target platform.

Microsoft might have gone a little far on the whole "code is meant to be read first" thing, but the verbosity does make it immediately obvious what every line in your history does.

I find it hard to take powershell seriously, considering last time I tried using it for anything, I just wanted to quickly download something over http. Looked for something like 'wget <URL>' online, the only results I found was something like multiple verbose lines of instantiating an http client and calling methods on it. That's fine for a programming language, completely horrible for an everyday shell, from the perspective of someone who generally only uses Firefox and a terminal emulator in Linux.

After some googling just now, it seems like there's now an Invoke-WebRequest command, but that too looks like a hell of a lot of typing compared to Linux shells.

There's also the fact that lots of stuff in windows wasn't designed to be accessible through the cli. You can't, for example, make a powershell script to toggle an audio output device on and off, as that's only available through the GUI.

> the only results I found was something like multiple verbose lines of instantiating an http client and calling methods on it.

I blame the documentation. Not the official documentation (they're not excellent, but OK), but various outdated resources residing in many blogs and sites, including Stack Overflow. I mean, what's wrong with

  iwr REMOTE_URL -o LOCAL_FILENAME

? The situation this command wasn't searchable by you is unfortunate, possibly because PowerShell has come a long way since its introduction in 2006 and it is hard to remove the outdated resources online. But for those who know what features/commands are available in PowerShell, finding them isn't particularly difficult.

> There's also the fact that lots of stuff in windows wasn't designed to be accessible through the cli. You can't, for example, make a powershell script to toggle an audio output device on and off

This is just one example. On the other hand, I found nearly every thing I had done using GUI could be replaced by a few lines of PowerShell code. Actually automating my day-to-day GUI operations was my way to learn PowerShell, and mostly it worked great. Microsoft is adding tons of commands each release to expose more system functionalities. There are exceptions of course, but "lots of stuff" is a bit exaggerated.

What language are you wanting to program in that is awful on Windows? And regarding your other points, Windows scripting story has come a long way in the last few years.

Your concerns sound like they come from many years ago and that maybe you haven't taken a look lately.

I've tried to do work on windows 10 Pro on a brand new 8 core Ryzen machine with 16 GB of RAM, SSD storage, and an RX480, and working in windows at the command line is 100x (no exaggeration) slower than Linux.

What baffles me is that it is 2017 and Windows comes with less than it did decades ago. At least prior to Win2000 there was QBasic and edit.com, but now starting to work on a Windows machine means downloading and installing basic tools.

Need to SSH/SFTP? Download. Need to edit code? Download. Python? Download. Perl? Download. A reasonable terminal? Download.

Yes, I might have to go to the Mac App Store and get command line tools for C, C++, Objective-C, etc. It is unfortunate that XQuartz is no longer installed by default, granted. (PowerShell is very nice to work with though, I give MS full credit for that.)

I could live with having to download python, perl, etc., but someone please explain why having an absolutely fundamental ability to edit text and securely connect to work and transfer data to/from remote machines is something that any OS should be shipping without?

Windows does have a C# compiler by default. It is located in the `Windows\Microsoft.NET` folder. Not very discoverable, though.

And starting with Windows 10 a metro app called 'Code Writer' seems to be installed by default for coding. (At least it's there in my installation.) I didn't try it though.

I'm glad. MS has made a lot of good programming tools. I really like Visual Studio and was a huge fan of QuickBasic 4.5 back in the day. Turbo Pascal was the killer app that first enticed me to the PC world.

It still befuddles me why some of this basic functionality cannot be a standard part of Windows. Not every Mac user uses emacs, or even knows how to open the Terminal app, but the fact that basic tools are supported means that there is just a baseline level of infrastructure to work with.

I have a feeling they cut a lot of these things in trying to reduce the install footprint when netbooks/tablets were all the rage.

> but someone please explain why having an absolutely fundamental ability to edit text and securely connect to work and transfer data to/from remote machines is something that any OS should be shipping without?

The ability to edit text _does_ ship on windows - notepad. (not that I'd recommend it but it does exist). Also, OSX doesn't ship with anything better.

FTP isn't a fundamental requirement for everyone, I don't have an FTP client installed on my machine, and don't have any intention of installing one.

Notepad??? OS X has shipped with both emacs and vim since Day 1. I'm sorry, but you seem quite unfamiliar with Macs.

You are correct, I would never suggest anyone have an FTP client; I have that service turned off on every machine I administer. SSH / SFTP are fundamental tools however.

> SSH / SFTP are fundamental tools

They are provided out of the box (and newer versions than OSX ships with) by WSL. As is vim, emacs, apt, etc.

Excellent point. WSL is certainly a step in the right direction.

They are provided in WSL, but the Windows Subsystem for Linux is a separate install atop Windows, and the installation process is currently very complex and lengthy.

Windows key, type "developer mode", hit enter, click "developer mode" (or 3x tabs, space, enter). PowerShell, send "lxrun /install /y"

Done. Pro-tip. Pin PowerShell to your taskbar and drag all the way left. Now you can open it with win+1.

Edit: now with no mouse required!

After going to the Windows store and upgrading to Windows Pro. That's another advantage of OS X- no need to target various OS revisions- the baseline OS IS the OS.

I just sort of assume if you're a developer that you buy the developer version of your software :)

Edit: for reference, home also doesn't come with bitlocker (!?), Domain join, Group Policy, client hyper-v, and others. Don't buy home to do work.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/compare

You've missed a step. After enabling Developer Mode, you need to enable support for WSL in Programs and Features, then restart Windows.

When I tested it on my laptop out of the box that was not the case. Maybe Dell does that on the xps line...?

Am i going mad? Windows has a command line ftp tool, I used it this morning. Is it just a Windows 10 thing? because it was also on my netbook running 8.1 out of the box.

The installation process is not at all complex. You just have to turn on developer mode and check the box that says you want to enable WSL.

Apooogies, I forgot that it ships with emacs and vim. So you use the vanilla installations of emacs and vim for your editing? Or do you download a more recent version and configure plugins? Notepad is a perfectly adequate editor if you need to quickly change a config value, but I wouldn't consider it a usable day to day tool. Nor would I consider a vanilla vim install with no customisation a usable day to day tool.

> I would never suggest anyone have an FTP client; I have that service turned off on every machine I administer. SSH / SFTP are fundamental tools however.

Pedantry at its finest.

I have neither ssh nor sftp on my workstation and I have no need for either.

> The ability to edit text _does_ ship on windows - notepad.

Windows also ships with WordPad, which is a simple word processor.

starting to work on a Windows machine means downloading and installing basic tools

While that is true, it's a bit of a moot point imo. I have yet to see an OS which had everything I needed for any actual work installed out of the box. As such, the way to deal with this is have a script download/install everything for you (and eventually copy or link all configuration files). Using Powershell getting any of the examples you mention is basically a one-liner just like for other package management tools, something like `openssh, miniconda, strawberryperl, conemu | Install-Package`. Or you can go more of a DSC way with Powershell Dsc.

I recently installed Windows 10 as a secondary os on my laptop for music making.

The biggest annoyance was configuring the system to not get in my way: Never ever put something in the front of the app I'm working in, forcing a change of context. Don't use up all of the bandwidth when downloading updates in the background, etc. This was much less of a hassle the last time I used OSX. Apple might give you less options for configuration, but at least out of the box it is/was much less disruptive.

Overall I like the look and feel of windows 10, and some of the problems were caused by third party software. I do think a lot of the defaults actually make sense for the mass market, but they should be much more transparent and easier to change. For example, I expected disabling Cortana during installation would, well, actually disable it.

I find my workflow in "bash for windows" horribly slow. My prompt command (that does git/virtualenv/etc checks) takes 4 seconds to run on windows and 0.04 seconds to run on the same machine dual-booted to ubuntu, and about the same time on a 2015 Macbook pro running MacOS. Everything else in bash for windows is similarly slower than bash on ubuntu. I haven't found a native windows implementation of bash that's anywhere as responsive as Linux or MacOS. I actually find Windows to be a better window manager than MacOS at this point, but I find myself most effective under Ubuntu and i3.

>Specifically?

Just the fact that I can download some new software and still see a 2001 era file dialog or such (because it was made with an older, but still supported ancient UI lib), is enough to put me off windows for life...

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