Armed with Putty and a browser, I only missed the touchpad of my macbook. I do most of my work in Jupyter and in vim. It's rather liberating to realize you are not tied to one ecosystem. My point is I thought I would never be productive without my mac but that simply wasn't true.
I suppose I am an edge case though as most of my work is performed on my headless linux workstation.
For those wondering, TSA held on to my macbook which I retrieved over the weekend.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/top-20-airports-tsa-theft/stor...
Care to elaborate more on what really happened?
Windows 10 is IMO the best Windows ever, but I was surprised that the ecosystem was really poor compared to macOS. Most of the software you find online are outdated win32 apps with scaling problems. Even modern software from major companies still has scaling problems such as Adobe CC or even the mighty Photoshop.
I also didn't find worthy replacements for my most used apps such as Alfred. Even something like iStatMenus doesn't have a replacement in Windows, all the alternatives are really poor in comparison.
Which ecosystem is "poor" depends on your own current situation.
Sure you can. I've gotten macos installed in a vm and even ran a hackintosh for a while which was remarkably easy these days.
I do realllly wish Apple would open up and let us officially install on different hardware - especially if they’re only going to update the Mac pros every few years.
Indeed, I was speaking from my personal experience.
You can do fun things, like tail logs to a file using linux and simultaneously analyze the file using windows tools.
You shouldn't access files in WSL using windows, but the other way around it's absolutely ok.
So if my projects are at C:/Development/Projects/...
Then I just open /mnt/c/Development/Projects/... on WSL
I haven't had any permission problems, not even once.
Same for Docker for Windows. It uses Hyper-V + some network disk sharing magic, which makes directory mounts into docker containers work great. So sometimes, like, when I need to debug a non-cross-platform linux program. (WSL doesn't handle process forking well, so some debuggers, like Go Delve don't work) I just do something like
docker run -v C:/Development/Projects/MyProject:/mnt/MyProject -it ubuntu /bin/bash
On the other hand, outside of ML it's not like many software developers need to upgrade to a new GPU every (other) year and current processor trends show very little performance uplift between generations to upgrade - once Apple finally gets 32GB of memory in the MBP most developers will be set for many years.
Exactly.
I wrote this last year criticising the current state of Mac hardware.
https://medium.com/@Pier/the-problem-of-osx-hardware-in-2016...
Even though you don't need lots of power, there's plenty of solid and valid reasons why others might.
Moreover
1. latency is low enough that people are playing triple AAA video games on AWS for a $1/hr.
https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow...
2. Sure, that's a good reason. It had better be spewing out lots of data, though, or again, you might as well process in the cloud.
3. Being able to access your workstation via airport wifi at all is actually a benefit in this case, unless you intend to wheel it around like a suitcase.
Did you walk out of a 1980s time warp or something? The workstation in this case carries 1TB of storage and weighs 3.5 lbs. (And it still has wifi in case you need that).
Regarding your number 3. For a lot of this, we are talking about devices like the MacBook Pro line. Not huge workstations.
Apple's neglect.
- The laptop lineup only offers Intel graphics or AMD's weakest mobile GPUs. I suspect that Metal has something to do with why they've pretended Nvidia doesn't exist for the past ~5 years.
- The only non-abandoned[2] machine in the desktop lineup is a non-modular all-in-one.
- Apple ceded the creative-pro software market to Adobe. Final Cut, Logic, used to be industry leaders, and they had companion software products that Apple has either neglected or discontinued. Premiere + After Effects is a far more powerful & widely used toolset than Final Cut + Motion, plus Adobe's software also runs on powerful Windows PCs, eliminating Apple's lock-in.
- Pen-input is iPad exclusive. Apple has no desire to bring touch to the Mac, and while I agree that macOS is not designed for fingers, I'm sure artists would like a convertible MacBook Pro that supported the Apple Pencil.
[1] Obviously this is a generalization
[2] For all intents and purposes, the Mac Pro will still be abandoned until they release the promised new one circa 2018. The current Mac Pro and the Mac mini are terrible, ancient PCs that only sell any units because Apple has neglected giving macOS any good hardware to run on in those form factors or price points.
Elaborating on it, Custom hardware (esp. GPU) support. DX 11 over Metal. Apple chose not to upgrade OpenGL or implement Vulkan.
You can stick really fast processors, tons of RAM and one or two Nvidia graphics cards in a very cheap tower. If only Apple sold a cheesegrater-style tower that could do that ;-)
Thee are even some Windows laptops that do the job now. Wirecutter picked the Dell XPS 15 as The Best 15-Inch Laptop for Photo and Video Editing https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-15-inch-laptops-for-p...
There's also a fair amount of peer pressure.
I was at a big software company and I choose a Lenovo with Windows instead of a Mac. I was the only one, and the other members of the team constantly tried to get me to switch, and trolled me, as if they were embarrassed with me. Now I'm at another big company, where Windows is more prevalent (legacy), but team members are still shocked that I chose again a Lenovo with Windows and Ubuntu VM on top.
If you were to interview to a startup and the founder coded on a Windows, what would most devs feel about it?
I dunno why people say that one or the other is superior for work (except if you work with some special software that exists only for one OS). Both of them are equally good, since everything is moving to the cloud, for most non-specialized tasks you need one app - a browser. If you look at other fields like programming, graphics work, 3D,.. they are the same again (except for special cases like C# or Swift development).
And things like iStatMenus is not something that is used for work, its a widget that you like. Perhaps you simply like the look and feel of OSX more?
Not really. The features I want could be easily developed in Windows, or Linux, but for some reason this isn't the case.
A good example of this are launchers. Once you start using a launcher you wonder how you could have lived without it.
MacOS offers Spotlight which is very limited but there are 3 very good third party options: Alfred, Launchbar, and Quicksilver. These offer a lot more than simply opening files and applications.
There are launchers for Windows too (launchy, Wox, etc) but the functionality is very limited compared to the macOS options. I suspect this may be cultural. Maybe there are no good commercial solutions like in macOS because there is no market.
Even Linux has better free launchers than Windows. For example: https://github.com/qdore/Mutate
I have found this same problem with other types of applications. For some reason the macOS options are simply better. And again, this is completely unrelated to the OS. It seems there is simply no interest in the Windows world for these types of things.
For example macOS has Karabiner which allows to configure you keyboard in a myriad of ways. Terminals like iTerm are also better in macOS, maybe because of the *Nix tradition. Monitors like iStatMenus which offer you one click access to deep information on hardware, network, etc, are non existent. BetterTouchTool which allows to deeply configure gestures on your trackpad, again, nothing on Windows like it. I could go on, but you get the idea.
The ecosystem on windows 10 is poor but then again I just download from one of the million win32 applications. I just don't use "apps" from store.
Just last week I played a game of Age of Empires II with my cousin, a game which was "released" in 1999 on a Surface with Windows 10. While on my MacBook I have issues because every major OS upgrade breaks something and I have to repurchase newer versions or give up if the dev isn't interested/around anymore.
OTOH I've found that it's not such a big deal in practice. In my 10+ years as a mac user I've only hit this problem a couple of times. Likewise in Windows I rarely open old outdated software.
That is of course my anecdotal and personal experience.
A relic from HFS of old, there's some notable applications that still fail hard on case-sensitive HFS+/APFS volumes so the default is insensitive (hey, Adobe, I'm looking at you - OS X/macOS 10 has been out for a decade and a half, get your shit together).
1. By and large, OSX ships the BSD userland not GNU
2. You can trivially add up-to-date GNU tools to OSX: install homebrew, install whichever GNU stuff you want
If you really want to know how it'll perform under heavy workloads, you probably want to hit it with prime95 or blender for 30+ minutes and monitor core frequencies to see where it ends up running at.
Go to Desktop (This is stupid it is Fn + F11 OR Command F3 based on what keyboard you have) Also Win - D makes a lot more sense! It is a default motion on a track pad.
File Manager - Windows (Win - E) Mac OS NOTHING
I have never seen why Mac OS gets a pass by so many people when there are clear paper cuts in its interface and it gets worse and worse over the past 10 years.
Anyways my usual way of going to the desktop is to just command-tab to Finder, and then command N to create a new Finder window, or any of the shortcuts in the Go menu.
Nobody is claiming that the Mac UI is perfect, but it's been way more stable and unified than Windows. Of course there was Windows 8, but even Windows 10 still has things like both the new Settings and old Control Panel, and the old start menu next to the god-awful, ad-ridden Live Tiles. I recently tried to enable automatic login on my Windows 10 laptop and was told to run "netplwiz" in the Run dialog command line. It's a mess.
I like that the Mac uses the Super key for common shortcuts, which frees the control key for Emacs-style keybindings. It seems that besides i3, no other popular desktop environments allows a similar setup. I am a Mac convert after I start writing code seriously and as much as I still like Windows, I can't go back because of this.
As much as I also love Linux (I know, I love all 3 major OS for different reasons), I cannot use it as my full time desktop OS for obvious reasons. MacOS currently represents a perfect trade-off for me.
But. I need to do iOS development from time to time. At the very least, I need to be able to test web pages in Mac browsers. I can run a Windows VM on a Mac very easily, but I can't run a Mac VM inside Windows very easily. Sigh.
They work OK on stock kernels since around 4.10 (but one must "backport" the linux-firmware package from Ubuntu Artful for having a working Wifi).
For a "non fancy" work usage (no stylus etc.; mostly keyboard and touchpad), the "only" nags are:
- no sleep functionality
- you can't permanently enable the Fn button, and worse, it seems that it disables itself regularly, and even worse, independenly of it being active or not, the light is off (it's not a defect; the light just turns itself off shortly after activation).
On the other hand, Surface Books are the state of the art of large/work tablets. There's nothing remotely comparable: a 700gr 13.5" tablet is amazing (although the batteries don't last very long), and the fact that there is a 15" model is even more impressive.
Currently I'm buying a old X61s and going to convert it to X62: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-X62-Laptop-Review.21159...
My windows workflow involves a Virtualbox VM, with ~/ in the guest mounted as Z: on the windows host.
Use gvim installed direct on windows (so long as you don't need super complex plugins which shell out to utilities) to edit files in Z: which exist on the host, with PuTTy and tmux as your terminal. Done.
The thing holding windows back right now is a terminal emulator to sit ontop of WSL, and WSL's ability to run background processes properly without closing them all when i close a terminal (and to have things autostart on boot).
There are workarounds right now to solve this, though.
Why do they continue to ignore Gamers on the Mac Platform.
- Hardware: PC Gamers usually customize hardware to have pretty decent power (GPU, CPU, Memory, etc) for relatively cheap when compared to Mac. In PC market, there's hardware competition for literally every single part of the hardware. For games that require extra power, you would need a powerful machine and, while they do exist in newer generations of iMacs, it's just damn expensive. Which brings me to my next point: market.
- Market: Although Mac users grew significantly, I'd say it's still pretty small when compared to PC. If you are a game developer, especially an indie game dev, you may find how depressing it can be to publish a cross platform game. It's not super hard given the popularity of game engines such as Unity and UE4. But the issue, in my opinion, is if your game has multiplayer, for example, you're probably going to have a bad time dealing with platform differences. Aside from that, you're going to have to deal with other platform differences in a lot of different levels. At some point, you're going to ask the question: is it really worth the extra investment? You are going to delay publishing your game for probably little gain. Developing for the larger market first might make more sense. Not only for indie devs but for AAA games too.
This is changing fast if not changed already. Xbox One, DX12 lock in on Universal Windows Platform and finally,
> Windows 10 also has a "Gaming Mode" as part of the OS for performance improvement which some games might have it turned on automatically.
https://www.vg247.com/2016/10/14/dota-2-windows-10-anniversa...
Valve was skeptical about Microsoft turning Windows into a walled garden when they announced DX12 only for Windows Store exclusive games, that is when they started pushing their efforts into SteamOS, moreover a stable runtime (based on Ubuntu LTS) for Linux games, which has helped _a lot_ for linux gaming.
Xbox Game DVR predates Game Mode; you can enable/disable them independently.
So even if DX12 was restricted to UWP apps (which, reminder, it isn't) UWP apps are not restricted to the Store either, and Steam could install UWP apps, too.
Until then, maintaining a desktop gaming PC and buying the base MacBook Pro model every now and then seems to be more cost effective.
The primary issue for gaming on OSX is and has always been drivers. You can generally get 80~100% better framerates by running the same game on Windows (via Bootcamp).
There are plenty of Mac OS games and people don't play them.
Every pointing device they've made for well over a decade has had multiple clicks.
Also the laptops are also single click.
That's not out of the box :) But an Apple Mouse can not have right click added it physically has one button but it does it in software and it doesn't work or it button bounces whenever I have tried.
95% of all Mac I have ever seen or used have Official Mice.
Anyway, I agree with you. I have a pro at work, but recently got a plain macbook, and it is awesome. Great for even iPhone dev work.