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Comment by sontek | Hacker News Reader

I've been using macbooks full time for 3 years now and I hate them. They are bad hardware for a high price tag.

As a developer they are the perfect middle ground. OSX runs everything I usually run in Linux and I have all the paid for software I'd run on windows (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc).

Prior to switching to mac I just dual booted windows and linux depending on what I needed. Then sketch came out and it was only OSX and I had to make the decision on having a third setup.

Then I realized everything I was doing in my 2 OSes I could do in a single one even though I hated the hardware.

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Can you define "bad hardware"? To my coworkers, this usually means they can't get the largest amount of RAM on the mac that they can get when they buy a $WINTEL.

On the flipside, their battery life always ends up worse and they go through twice as many machines in the same time frame, which is _much_ more annoying. A week of productivity loss a year isn't worth the cost savings.

The cost issue is always strange one for me. Most employers are happy to drop $2500 on a laptop. If you are purchasing it yourself, fine, but that's usually not the case for a work machine.

Windows Insider Preview with Ubuntu for Windows is what you want now if you really don't care for macOS or Apple hardware.

Yeah, I need to try it out again. When it first came out I tried it and things like RethinkDB and Redis wouldn't start-up on it.

Its on my list to try again and see if they've made it better.

Or the other way around - Windows under kvm on Linux.

You ever tried to do photo manipulation, graphic design, or video editing in a virtualized OS? It is miserable. There is a reason I said I was dual booting and not running virtualization :)

I use GPU passthrough and run games in Windows under KVM with equal or slightly less (~3-5%) frames. Photo manipulation and graphic design work fine in Photoshop in my setup. Not so sure about video editing.

I haven’t used Windows in a while. Do you still have to run your own virus scanner or is it built in now ?

Windows Defender is built-in and is good enough IMHO. But AFAIK you can still install something else on top, if you don't trust Microsoft.

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