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akulbe

I upgraded my 2016 MBP w/Touch Bar to a ThinkPad P1.

For the same price, I get a far superior machine.

For less than what I paid for the maxed out '16 MBP I get:

* Hexacore Xeon CPU

* 64GB of RAM

* 2TB NVMe SSD

* Nvidia Quadro P2000.

* a keyboard that is nice to type on again, instead of the butterfly SH!T that is on the 2016+ models.

I had concerns about switching my dev workflow from macOS to Windows 10, but WSL is fantastic.

Can't help but think Apple doesn't make macOS a priority anymore. The experience with High Sierra was just the straw that broke the camels back.

I sold my MBP for much less than what I used to get on resale. They don't hold their value like they used to. I wonder if this is lost on Apple management. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If anyone is thinking about switching from macOS to Windows… unless you're doing {mac,i,watch}OS dev, I say jump on in. The water is nice.

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Sorry, but Windows 10 is absolute dogshit. Even if you're using a Linux compatibility layer, you're still running a Windows host and being subjected to all the bullshit that comes with it including spying, forced updates (bringing forced restarts!), ads, and general worse performance.

Luckily, it takes all of 30 minutes to just wipe your hard drive and install Ubuntu on your ThinkPad and you'd be much better off for it.

> Luckily, it takes all of 30 minutes to just wipe your hard drive and install Ubuntu on your ThinkPad and you'd be much better off for it.

But how long it takes to fix all drivers and other Linux issues (WiFi, sounds, video, mouse...)?

I used a few Linux versions last year and none could do the switch window feature without breaking (alt tab on Windows).

Everything in Linux worked out of the box for me. I only had to click a checkbox saying I wanted to use Nvidia proprietary drivers.

Meanwhile, installing Windows is a pain in the ass. I had to go to Realtek's site on a separate machine to get ethernet drivers before I could even use the internet. Then I had to go to Nvidia's site to get the GPU driver. Rinse and repeat for various exes on various sites for everything you need. Package management is a joke, so good luck installing all the software you need since you're about to go on a scavenger hunt through somewhat questionable download sites. Then spend hours trying to disable all the spying and forced updates, only for your settings to get reset in the next big release.

> I used a few Linux versions last year and none could do the switch window feature without breaking (alt tab on Windows).

This is Windows specific and completely idiotic IMHO. Just like on macOS you can switch windows belonging to a single application with a certain key combination (in Gnome it's Alt + the key left to the 1 key).

Of course it's a hassle to fix some driver issues, although this has drastically improved over the last 10 years. These days it's usually more firmware that leaves you hanging.

But at least I don't have to jump through a ton of hoops to get the most basic development software installed. Unless you do Windows specific development or you're forced by your corporate environment I don't really see any advantages to Windows.

It will all work out of the box. :)

You can pause updates for 35 days and I have not seen any ads yet in my win10 pro. Restarting a Laptop/Desktop every 35 days is not too bad.

"it takes all of 30 minutes to just wipe your hard drive and install Ubuntu on your ThinkPad and you'd be much better off for it" is a VERY incomplete picture.

You're leaving out the part where you're spending countless hours figuring out how to make $TASK work on Linux (i.e. scan + OCR, photo editing, accounting, pivot tables in a spreadsheet, to name a few examples) with any number of WORKAROUNDS, rather than a it-works-out-of-the-box experience because software exists for Windows already, that works out of the box.

You might want to deal with getting those workarounds going, because you're a purist, or you're in your 20s, and have nothing but time on your hands.

I'm 45, have a family I want to spend time with. I don't have time for that shit anymore. I want things to work and stay out of my way.

macOS used to be that good. I don't feel like it is any more.

Windows 10 has been that good, here. I turn off the telemetry. I don't know where you've seen ads. I get no ads. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

BS.

First off, you're not being spied on any more w/ Windows than you are on a Mac--the NSA doesn't give a crap about what kind of computer you use.

Updates are only "forced" if you choose them to be, otherwise you can accept/decline updates.

There are NO ads. Zero.

Worse performance than what? In what? In which application? I use Excel all the time and I recently used it on a Mac and thought about killing myself.

I'm still sitting on my Macbook pro 2012 (non-retina). I have postponed upgrading to new macbook for the last 2 years (16gb ram, 2x250GB SDD in raid-0) During that time I easily replaced battery, replaced broken LCD, replaced broken hdd. However I'm slowly considering moving to Thinkpad P1 because I don't see any macbook that would be suitable for me.

The biggest concert is I'm an iOS developer. I consider to move to programming either Android or cross-platform with Qt framework. Then either jailbreak my iphone XS and compile code on it (iphone XS is more powerfull than my macbook i7) or go virtual machine or hackintosh road just to do app sideloading while testing or real iphone devices. Or switch even to android device.

I really like Thinkpad P1 that it gives lots of room for future upgrades with 2x ram slots and 2x m.2 ssd slots so I don't need to max out my rams or ssd now.

The final straw for me on new macbooks is that they soldered SSD and even removed backup port. I'm contracting so I'm loosing money if I have to wait 2 weeks for repairs. Besides I often work from developing countries in south east asia - where you would have to wait even longer instead of picking up off-the-shelf ram or ssd. Keyboard reliability issue also scares me a lot in new macbooks.

I’m considering a Mac mini. For portability, “just” remote into it with an iOS hdmi wireless adapter. Even that still feels like I’m being fleeced by Apple, but you do get better hardware for the buck.

WSL is still missing a lot of stuff. For example, there's no straightforward way to mount NFS shares in the Linux environment. I'm not even sure if it's possible, last I checked I don't think it is. It's a huge issue for me since I connect to some NFS shares for development.

From my time with it, I ultimately concluded that I'd be better off just running Linux. If I had to use Windows, I'd setup a VM and avoid using WSL.

I absolutely despise Windows 10. I only deal with it for some gaming. What is your development workflow like? Any terminal? When I used the Ubuntu subsystem or whatever they call it, it was so slow pulling down some dependencies that it was unusable.

I also do almost all of my development on Windows 10 these days after years on Linux and find that it basically just works for almost all cases. For terminal I mostly use Cmder and Msys2, when not using WSL.

As to performance problems with regards to WSL and disc IO, there has been problems with how Windows AV software's real time virus protection interacts with WSL. Adding an exclusion to the part of the file system used by WSL should give a significant performance increase.

I just recently built a PC with Windows in it and started using it for development (Ruby, NodeJS, Python, Ionic). Some of my experiences:

- Scoop is "ok" but not on par with homebrew.

- Cmder is not on par with iTerm2 (CMD+D, CMD+Shift+D, CMD+T)

- Powershell terminal is utter crap

- WSL is just OK but still the integration is not that good

- VSCode works well

- Vagrant does not work that well. In general setting up the PATHs is clumsy

- Working with Ruby/rbenv or NodeJS/NPM is clumsy

- I miss Cmd+Space for calculator. using Windows Key + entering the formula doesn't work half the time

- Ninite is a godsend, but nowadays lacks several programs

- I love Paint ... why doesn't OSX have a similar paint program (I have to download Paint from sf.net)

- I loved the Windows spanned volume HDD. I had 7 plate-disks that I installed in my ATX tower and made one 1Gb disk with all of them, quite easily

- Impressed (with Windows) that several old hardware that I dug from a box (old webcam, old usb WiFi, old BlueTooth) worked as soon as I connected them.

There is a lot of stuff that I am still getting used to, but in general, although my experience doing development in Windows "works" it is still somewhat painful, while compared to OSX.

OTOH, I installed ubuntu on the same Machine, and god I removed it after 2 hours of tinkering here and there (to make work multiple monitors, wireless, bluetooth, webcam, stuff not working after resume-after-sleep). I was sad because I really like bash (that was my "safe place" when I first started to use Mac).

Your last point is exactly what I wanted to communicate to the first commenter. Lots of tinkering needed to get even close to the same functionality. That is exactly the opposite of "works out of the box".

And regarding the Cmder <--> iTerm2 comparison…

Ctrl-Shift-E and Ctrl-Shift-O? (split windows)

Ctrl-T to create new tabs? (create new tabs)

For whatever reason installing via apt or maybe IO in general is slow. AFAIK they are working on it.

But CPU intensive tasks should be be similar to host system.

How is WSL working out so far?

I had a Sufrace Pro 4 for about a year, until I ditched it for a Dell XPS 13 running Linux (the Surface wouldn't run Linux properly). It happened when the x-org server suddenly stopped supporting retina/high DPI, and I couldn't figure it out after a couple of hours of fiddling. Definitely not something I want in my life.

The reason I needed an x-org server is that I use IntelliJ for my editing, and it doesn't support running stuff in WSL. So I had to run IntelliJ under WSL too, meaning I had to run an x-org server on the win10 side. It did work quite well really, except from the high DPI issue. And bad file system performance..

Currently experimenting working directly on win10 for a side project, that works quit well, actually. The tech stack is Rust and ClojureScript, both seems to work fine on windows so far at least.

I ordered a machine similar to that a few days ago. Went with the i7, 64gb of ram, Nvidia 1050 ti, and 1tb of nvme ssds. Cost me only $2700, which is significantly less than what I'd get with a mbp. I'm pretty confident that I can swap over to Linux if I really need to, but I doubt that will be necessary. I'm going to be doing a lot of work with ionic, android, and virtual machines, nothing too crazy.

I also though about going with one of the system76 machines, but the terrible battery life spooked me away. I'll probably still get one early next year, though.

Without BSD underneath, I wouldn’t take Windows seriously for dev outside of .NET

I would love to hear more!

1. How did you set it all up?

2. What stack are you using?

3. Do you have to use (gasp) Docker?

4. Performance issues?

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