Why I switched to Mac after being a long time Windows evangelist

> Consistently, Windows freezes, locks up, crashes explorer, between 1 and 7 times per week

This doesn't happen to me. As it stands, my laptop hasn't done a power cycle since the last Windows update (10th). You are the common factor here, so the group policy (as you mentioned) is a good starting point. Try leaving it alone. Additionally, it could be 3rd party stuff that you typically install; Realtek is suspect because their software is utter garbage. Windows now includes support for a universal driver (Aria, or something to that tune) so you may be able to skip the Realtek installation entirely. The only driver I've installed on Windows in about half a decade is for the graphics card.

I work in aerospace and my organization is on windows. I have never encountered a more productivity - killing operating system in my life. Forced reboots for upgrades, laptops that randomly won't reauthenticate after wake, network drives that fail to map, other transient network problems, you name it.

Day to day, the biggest obstacle to getting my job done is consistently Windows. It's a thoroughly wretched piece of software.

> laptops that randomly won't reauthenticate after wake, network drives that fail to map, other transient network problems, you name it.

Sounds like a problem with the System Administrators at your workplace. For example who is still using mapped network drives? Group Policy is the modern way to do it and has been for over ten years.

As to the two network issues, I'd have to dive into the event log to see why. I've seen WiFi drivers cause this, specifically a HP driver that took almost a year to get fixed.

Poor technical support and setup will hamper your work on any operating system.

Not for nothing but I haven't needed tech support on the job in 7 years. That's precisely the last time I used Windows professionally. Prior to that I'd spent a decade running Windows at work, across multiple organizations and had similar experiences as described.

I completely buy that a competent IT dept can make windows painless, but I haven't needed any support competent or not on Mac or Linux.

> I haven't needed any support competent or not on Mac or Linux

An overreaching admin could be precisely why Windows was such a pain for you (or the poster, who mentioned GPO). That is one of the downfalls of Windows - it's enterprise ready, which means that your experience is at the whim of another person or policy.

> Sounds like a problem with the System Administrators at your workplace

So you're saying Windows isn't fundamentally unreliable, it's just fragile. You need to know how to treat it gently for it to work reliably. It's not robust under common misuses.

Maybe they're using group policy, I don't know.

All I know is that I routinely cannot do my job because of windows.

Typical Microsoft apologist "No, it can't be Windows' design - Look over there! Kill that witch!"

His point is that the OS should be designed properly so that even if there are glitches in drivers or external factors, the entire OS shouldn't become unusable, only the portion with the problem. Every OS since the 68000 chip came out has done this (AmigaDOS, BeOS, Sun, MacOSX, even OS/2), but Windows is so fundamentally flawed that any small flaw in any other component can bring it to its knees.

> His point is that the OS should be designed properly so that even if there are glitches in drivers

Funny you say that, Windows is the only desktop OS I've seen calmly inform me that sorry, my GPU driver just crashed and had to be restarted, instead of freezing or throwing a kernel panic. The kernel really isn't Windows' problem

I recently bought a MacBook Pro because it for a majority of the time it simply works. I feel like MacOS stays out of my way. On Mac, there is the app dock at the bottom, and the task bar at the top. Swipe between full screen programs. Simple. On Windows 10, there seems to be WAY too much going on. Press the start menu (which is an actual menu again), and there are tiles spinning everywhere and way too much clutter. Plus changing system settings is a pain too. I wish I can directly get to the original windows settings menu (for example, change hostname) but the process turns into this: Windows 10 menu, Windows 8 menu, Windows 7 menu, then finally the old school menu. To be fair, MacOS does hide some of its settings, but they are much easier to find and often relocated, instead of BURIED under different menus.

FYI - I just learned this trick (which was actually introduced in Windows 8 or 8.1): right click the start menu for a shortcut to a lot of system-level shortcuts (Event Viewer, System, Disk Management, etc).

Both operating systems have there idiosyncrasies, but that should be expected. Both work exceptionally well for development and leisure use. Personally, I prefer a macbook pro, but I've been developing on a windows machine for the last year and have come to enjoy my time with it quite a bit. These higher level issues not relating to the core processes can generally be handled by your own skill as an administrator.

My gripe with Windows 10 is that it's trying to evolve, bu not break backwards compatibility. I've found that there are two ways to do so many things. The Windows 10 way and the classic Windows way.

I went to the, possibly, only university in the country that did not have C & UNIX. In 1973, at USF Tampa, we had an IBM 360 system, complete with punch cards. Horrible. Engineering required Fortran IV, boring, and the instructor smoked. I finally worked at a defense contractor, which used DEC's VAX 11/780 running VAX/VMS. I was hardware and a good-natured soul introduced me to VAX/VMS. VAX/VMS was painless, easy to learn and use. In October 1981, IBM came out with the IBM PC. $6,000 with a monochrome monitor, no hard-drive, and DOS 1.0, not much more than a loader. Over time, MicroSoft improved DOS and eventually started the Windows franchise with Windows 95. The MS hired Dave Cutler away from DEC to be principle sw architect on the Windows New Technology. Windows was good and MS was innovative. Prices came down. Capability went up. But a new "feature" showed up: software "viruses", then trojans, then on-and-on, building a $10Billion per year anti-malware industry. I still stayed with MS. I liked and knew the user interface. Then came Windows 8, 9, and 10. Over time I had had periodic positive discussions with folks who knew and used C, UNIX, GNU, Linux. My wife is legally blind and finds her way around the display partly by vision (limited) and partly by memory. Windows 8-10 made computer use by my wife impossible. I switched to Linux Mint 17.3, love it, enjoy it, have fun with it. I installed Linux on both mine and my wife's machines, on a friends machine, and no-one has any complaints. Starting on Monday, 22 May 2017, I am teaching my 11yo grandson how to program in C on Linux. I doubt that I will ever go back to Windows.

> MicroSoft improved DOS and eventually started the Windows franchise with Windows 95

Windows 95 was, iirc, Windows 4.0. The Windows franchise started well before Windows 95: 1985 for Windows 1.0.

I've had the opposite experience. Used Windows for 2 decades and rarely had problems. Switched to macs 4 years ago and all of them (4) crash a few times per week.

Did you install some (the same) software on all four of your macs? A few crashes per week per mac, on all four macs, seems more than a coincidence. I have had three macs and they always ran very stable. I only reboot when macOS updates require it.

Def seems more than a coincidence. But wouldn't OP having consistent crashes in recent years (past decade) for Windows indicate something similar when Windows for many people is pretty stable?

I find stories of someone switching to Macs at this late date very interesting, because it seems like the benefits for switching were always better a while ago.

Given Apple continues to gain market share, maybe I'm wrong.

> Given Apple continues to gain market share, maybe I'm wrong.

In Mac? I'm pretty sure they're steadily losing market share[0]. The whole market for desktop computing (inc laptops) has compressed, but Apple seem to be losing share faster than PC competitors.

iOS they remain in good shape however, but the OP's post was specifically about Mac/PC.

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-mac-lost-most-pc-market...

Apple did lose market share in 2016, but its rebounded the last two quarters and is back to outgrowing the market. And note that the Macs average sales price is 2-3x the average PC price, and even increased the last quarter.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/04/11/apples-mac-continu...

2016 was the the only year Apple failed to outgrow the market in at least a decade, its market share was as low as 2% before Jobs came back.

FYI, Mac sales have been increasing for years. If the market is contracting around them, then there's no way they're losing market share.

I don't get the regular crashes on my Win10 desktop I use for all my side projects and gaming at home. However, what I do see:

- Firefox freezes constantly requiring force-quits. Reinstalls and updates don't help much. Probably Firefox's fault.

- Mouse randomly clicks off in a different monitor, or in the upper left corner, losing application focus. While a minor annoyance while typing, photoshopping, using hotkeys, it makes me flip my shit when I'm gaming.

- Wakes up from sleep without reason or indication or any way to stop it: The actual fuck. This is the worst. I have fiddled with every setting and registry entry that has anything to do with the computer's sleep state, captured logs to view activity leading to power on and after, changed OS's, formatted, switched hard drives, everything. This bugs the shit out of me, as my aging desktop is loud and hot and makes my bedroom a terrible place to sleep. I have scripts and shortcut keys from my wireless headphones to put my computer back to sleep from my bed, but what the heck is this anyway.

These are all random quality of life improvements that shouldn't need to be so hard to put in place.

I have a Win10 laptop which it's performance is nowhere near a gaming machine. 3 Firefox flavors are installed on it (2 of them with a lot of extensions) and I don't remember the last time I've seen them crash or require force-quits. Don't have a good guess about the experience you have been through with it.

About that mouse issue; have you ever tried a different mouse or reinstalling it's driver? I don't know Mac and I don't remember how it was on Linux, but if a mouse clicks or moves just a little bit, that wakes the system up on Windows machines. Till you got the random mouse clicks, it looks like it's a #1 suspect.

I have the same issue with one of my computers coming out of sleep at random. It is the only real issue I have had with windows 10 but it is extremely annoying.

  Has anyone ever listed the group 
  policies that cause Windows to lock 
  up while they are updating every 
  day at 3:00 PM? I know they exist...

I can't wait to hear about this one. In all my years of reading about security and systems administration... What on earth? A global stop-the-world policy update that spans time zones? Why have I never heard of such a thing?

Could it be that this only happens on OP's machine because of a failure to remove malware?

Windows 10 Creator's edition was incredibly unstable for me: after the upgrade, it would hang within minutes after boot. Each and every time. This went away after upgrading firmware of my Samsung SSD EVO 840 drive. But yeah, windows has never been an industrial strength OS like QNX and UNIX are.

why not just dual boot?

Agree. I have a Mac for the sole reason that I can boot into any OS I want and thus run/debug any app I want.

If there was a Windows laptop that allowed me to boot into macOS with relatively simple set up (meaning as simple as Bootcamp setup) I would strongly consider it.

Because the Mac Bootcamp drivers are terrible. Last time I used them they'd only allow you to use the discrete graphics card and it ran the fans full-out the entire time.

Apple due to either indifference or intent wants Windows running on Mac hardware to be a bad experience and they succeed. You're better off grabbing a copy of Parallels, since they seemingly care about you having a good experience on both the MacOS and Windows side of things (and in my opinion succeed).