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Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

> In the meantime, let’s give some other companies a shot. Dell and HP have gorgeous, reliable, repairable flagship laptops that are getting rave reviews. Right now, I think they’ve done more to earn your business than Apple has.

The laptop mentioned in the "rave review" link is an elitebook 840 g5. I have been using the 840 g1 as my primary laptop for the last 4 years and it really is a sturdy device. The hardware is flawless, I haven't had a single issue with it. However, do yourself a favor and wipe it clean the moment you buy it, and install a fresh copy of windows. HP's added software is literally poison.

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I'd have absolutely no problem using PC hardware. I'd love to be able to pick my components and build a better desktop for half of the price - in fact I already have such a machine for gaming purposes. However unless I can put macOS on it that hardware is useless to me.

As a web developer I want a unix environment and I'm not sure if Windows' subsystem for Linux is going to cut it. However I also use a lot of audio software like Ableton Live as well as countless VST/AU plugins, which renders any native Linux flavor useless. macOS is the only option and until that changes I'll continue to begrudgingly wait for Apple's infrequent and late desktop hardware updates that feel unnecessarily expensive.

I agree that Linux doesn't it cut it for audio, but that situation seems to be improving - I was surprised to see Bitwig, Renoise & Pianoteq all have Linux versions, and the JUCE SDK that many VST plugins use also supports Linux.

And with macOS deprecating OpenGL, which many VST plugins currently rely on for their interface, I'm concerned about the future of music on the Mac & how long I'll be able to use those older VSTs.

I can confirm that window's wsl and bash systems are moving along very quickly. I moved to windows about a month back and have only one use case for which I need to boot ubuntu up: docker with symlinked folders.

Apart from the above use case, I've missed nothing. There's some hacking I'm attempting to do to get vscode to use the underlying bash mechanism for its code linting tools but that's more a preparation for the inevitable moment when some linting tool or package depends purely on a Linux/Unix environment.

Windows is so terrible, though. I could never go back.

Twoish years ago I moved from Linux full time to Windows at home and whatever the Apple OS is called at work.

The Apple one was a pain. Command line tools are almost but not quite right (zcat in particular just doesn't work) and I found the user experience pretty annoying at first but passable after that. Still don't really understand how "installing software" is supposed to go, and lots of struggle against Homebrew and lots of other software packaging.

Windows had WSL when I got my laptop. Real Linux command-line, nice. Filesystem performance was crap, and they didn't have postgres at first, but it was probably a better dev environment than my Mac, with one exception: no Docker in Windows 10 home. Explorer started getting a bit slow and unstable after a while, but I was on preview releases.

A couple of months ago I quit my job, and yesterday I formatted my home laptop to install Linux again (decided to put my hobby project onto a Docker-heavy workflow) and oh my God it's lovely. Installing packages is fast again, software compatibility goes without saying, and Unity was surprisingly pleasant (though I did drop it for i3 because I'm a masochist.) Hard to say how much of that experience is "Linux is nice" and how much is "I'm a Linux person" though.

> The Apple one was a pain. Command line tools are almost but not quite right (zcat in particular just doesn't work)

That's because it's BSD, and are you sure you don't want gzcat?

> zcat in particular just doesn't work

I used `zcat` on macOS just today. What issue do you have with it?

The issue with Apple's unix environment is that it comes with BSD tools. A lot of functionality that you'd expect to work doesn't end up working, which can be frustrating. You have to go through some pretty annoying steps [1], which are more involved than the steps required to get a Linux environment on Windows [2].

1: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-repla... 2: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

The zcat that comes with macOS works fine.

Learning how to use the BSD tools is not that hard.

Also, you mean GNU environment I guess, not Linux environment.

Linux doesn't cut it for me after I've tried a BSD. It isn't as bad as Windows, but BSDs have a certain kind of elegance. And because the things you can do on them are limited (browsing and coding) and there aren't as many packages you are much more focused.

The fact that MacOS/Darwin has BSD utilities instead of GNU is a common gotcha. Not a showstopper though, `brew install coreutils` will get you the tools you are used to!

Windows is better than anything. Nothing else even comes close to its mix of quality, flexibility, stability and commercial support.

Nothing.

Plus you get free spyware and adware included!

Sure, where pre-installed apps are "adware" and debug logging is "spyware". In which case you should never use Android, iOS, a Mac, Ubuntu or any website.

Sadly true.

Though you didn't mention UX which is more important to me than all of the above.

I'd even take Linux with i3 over Windows.

The things I mentioned are what constitute the superior UX that you get with Windows.

Also, the majority of programmers and the vast majority of desktop users are on Windows. So, outside of the tiny HN/SV bubble the market disagrees with you.

That's actually quite subjective. I've had it on the desktop on and off for decades and it's constantly been a source of unhappiness. Linux had been the solid rock for me, and MacOS was good for a while.

I feel the same.

Especially the endless Update-hell in Windows which regularly and spontaneously brakes things and consumes hours and hours of your time.

Never experienced this on my Macs. (Of course nothing is 100% perfect, but the difference is huge in my experience.)

Yeah, updates is why I really dislike Windows. The rest I can live with. I prefer Ubuntu + i3 or Mac OS X, but if I have to use Windows, then it’s mostly doable besides the updates. Be it updates to the OS or Visual Studio (which is why I do use it; Xamarin); random breakage and it takes far too long and happens far too often.

Honestly updates seems to be a more or less solved problem in Win10, for general use at least.

Well... about 3 months ago my Windows 10 machine got stuck updating. Basically it just kept endlessly updating the same update consuming huge amount of resources;

At first I figured i just let it do it's thing so i waited and waited and just kept it running over night. After a few days i noticed it was the exact identical update it kept installing over and over.

I searched online, and many people were having exactly the same problem. At that time there wasn't a solution yet. So in the end, i just gave up...

- i'm a developer btw so i have at least some technical knowledge :)

(can't remember the exact KBxxxxx number unfortunately.)

I've been curious to see if could get a laptop to be a dual boot linux and hackintosh

https://www.modmy.com/how-dual-boot-macos-and-linux-hackinto...

Windows is so fine. I will never switch away.

For me OSX is a nightmare for usability. Just the window management alone can drive you insane.

I am not a person who has one just application open at a time.

I agree with you. However, with Spectacle I am able to have a really nice workflow with my window management.

Spectacle is nice, but may I direct you toward hammerspoon (general purpose OS X workflow 'wrangler'), e.g window management: http://thume.ca/2016/07/16/advanced-hackery-with-the-hammers...

Have you explored the multitouch gestures for all this? I work on a 40" 4K monitor and I can't live without OSX's window management exactly for that reason. Windows wants you to fullscreen everything, while OSX has nice little touches like making the windows subtly magnetic or letting you resize symmetrically by holding alt.

Not to mention OSX is the only OS where you can drag the file icon out of a window's title bar to do stuff with it (eg. upload a file you have open) or right clicking the title to see the folder structure it resides in.

All these little affordances exactly where they need to be, and invisible when you don't need them. In my experience OSX is designed with a degree of consistency unheard of elsewhere, and that's why it gets accused of being unusable: people keep looking for the crutches you need on other platforms instead of just interacting directly.

I wish these comments would at least mention one thing that is so terrible.

My work Dell does not hold a candle to my MBP in build quality or reliability. Good thing we bought the Dell service whateveritis that lets us send back broken ones to be replaced

Get a disable app, turn everything off. Update regularly. Done.

Bought the XPS 15, unpacked it, touched it and sent it back on the same day.

I am not paying 2k for a laptop that wobbles.

The 840 G5 has an off center trackpad with buttons and a number key block. How this is still a thing is absolutely beyond me.

Off center track pad is not an issue. Just a matter of getting used to it. Buttons is a great addition. I don't understand why having buttons is an issue. You can still tap if you want to. But with buttons, things like dragging become much easier.

What's a number key block?

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