Hacker News Reader

Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

I'll be holding on to my 2012 MacBook Pro until they switch to a different kind of keyboard. If they don't, then I'm getting a Surface instead.

View on HN

If you don't care about the default telemetry and ads, switch to Windows 10 with WSL. I was a die hard Mac user for a decade and since switching I haven't looked back. Windows is a different beast than it was 10 years ago, and having the whole ecosystem of hardware and software at your disposal is fantastic.

I still am trying to figure out what WSL has solved for anyone. It works fine for the little tutorials they use to showcase it, but on any real project it is just as bad as what many of us have had to do for the last 10 years if we were stuck with Windows: use a VM with all the problems it brings like using extra CPU and memory, poor filesystem performance, duplicating tools and configs in both the Windows and Linux environments, etc.

I'm not sure what your threshold is for a real project, but I've been using it for multi-stack dev environments with no trouble at all for the past year. You shouldn't use it to host a production environment, but I'm not sure why you would want to. What it solves is you don't have to use the minority, poorly supported windows ports of your language runtime, if it even has one. Many smaller languages I've tried don't support windows at all, and many NPM libraries have terrible bugs in windows (hard coding posix paths/environment variables, etc). WSL allows you to skip all of that trouble and use windows without changing any of your workflows or having to learn a totally new shell. The upcoming 2.0 release should be even better.

I'm definitely not running a production environment. But imagine this scenario:

I've got my Linux shell with various tools like GIt, JDK, NPM, NVM, Maven, etc. All the config files are setup in my Linux home in the VM. But the whole point of WSL is that I can use the nice GUIs available on Windows. So now I've SourceTree for Git, IntelliJ, WebStorm, etc running on Windows. And they all need the same tools installed like maven, Git, JDK, etc.

First problem is that the I now have to duplicate all the tools in both Windows and Linux - all sorts of fun problems when they get out of sync. Same with the config files which are always screwing up due to differences in line endings and path slashes.

But the worst of all is performance. If I compile some huge multi-module Scala and Java project completely in native Windows, it takes five minutes. Doing it in WSL bash takes 15 minutes. And having my IDE in Windows doing it on the code that's on the Linux WSL filesystem takes 60 minutes, assuming it even works with all the path and line ending problems as the tools are sometimes called in Windows, sometimes called in Linux.

Exact same problems with python apps, Node apps, and everything else that is common these days.

It's absolutely no better than what I did 10 years ago when I had my company spend $200 for VMWare Workstation license and I ran Fedora or Ubuntu VMs with Linux, but still tried to use Windows for half the build. Same with Cygwin...

> But the whole point of WSL is that I can use the nice GUIs available on Windows.

I think the point is that you can have a linux environment on your windows machine without running your own VM, not that you can use GUIs for your platform back end. If I just wanted GUIs I would use Mac OS. The real godsend of WSL is that we poor souls who are forced to use windows machines at work can finally have a development environment that isn't a second class citizen (assuming you aren't a windows platform developer). I'm not sure that it's fair to say that WSL doesn't solve anything for anyone just because it doesn't fit your workflow. I run node, haskell, and python in WSL and VSCode remote development extensions provides me with a full featured IDE for each of those environments, along with git integration if I should need it. Usually I just open up a terminal when I need to use git. Anyway, the next version of WSL will host a full linux kernel, so it should be easier to use X forwarding if you need linux-native GUI applications.

One example, Qiime[1] can now run on windows via WSL. Much faster than the previous best solution, which was virtualbox.

[1] https://qiime2.org/

I blocked telemetry through hosts file blocking as detailed here, might be helpful to some. https://www.thurrott.com/forums/microsoft/windows/thread/dis...

If you do care about the telemetry and ads, try a Linux computer

As well as the other methods in this thread, check out Windows Privacy Dashboard. It's got a simple toggle to turn off almost everything ad/privacy/telemetry related you can think off.

https://wpd.app/

Unless you live far from any Apple Stores, shouldn’t this warranty program mean that you can upgrade without worry? These laptops effectively require “regular maintenance” (sort of like replacing balding tires on a car); but by buying one of the affected notebooks, you’re getting a free subscription to that maintenance. It’s like using a rental car long-term—whenever the tires wear out, you bring it back to the rental agency and they replace them (or give you a different car.)

The problem is that Apple has often been replacing logic boards when this type of thing happens as well. Some people see it as a good thing, but it usually results in the complete wipe of data.

Also there's obviously the idea where a keyboard shouldn't be failing after months of moderate use. Somehow, this seems to be a fairly modern problem as we've been making keyboards for 40+ years now.

> Somehow, this seems to be a fairly modern problem

With keyboards, yes, but gunk getting stuck in your mouse used to be a big problem, back when mice had balls. :)

Before even that, in PC towers and notebooks with active cooling, they used to be built without dust grates in front of the ventilation fans. The fans themselves used to gunk up!

The real “modern problem” is that you basically can’t clean a MacBook keyboard, since removing any key-cap has a 90% chance of permanently damaging the butterfly key-mech underneath. (I think the main improvement with the successive revisions of the butterfly key-mech is that they don’t snap their pegs off as easily when you remove the key-cap, so you can—in theory—clean them. If you’re a trained repair tech.)

> The problem is that Apple has often been replacing logic boards when this type of thing happens as well. Some people see it as a good thing, but it usually results in the complete wipe of data.

You should have backups anyway. Especially with Time Machine it's dead simple to keep good backups.

Dead simple and 100% free. I seriously do not understand how every person with a Mac is not using Time Machine. It is the best, easiest, and most dummy-proof backup solution I've ever seen. The world somehow made a better dummy.

Time machine is glacially slow, and it is finicky to use with network storage, and doesn't play nice with non-macs. Newer portable Macs had been annoying to use with most existing external storage until rather recently because of Type C.

I have to disagree on all points. If you leave it on, you don't have to worry about its speed because it's always up-to-date. The first backup may be slow but you shouldn't be waiting until an emergency to do that anyways. I have also had 0 issues backing it up to my Synology. I literally enabled Time Machine on the Synology, enabled it on the Mac, and I've never had to worry about it again.

The warranty program is only for four years, while these computers last longer. My MBP from 2010 has been usable to this today. However, I just bought a used 2015 MBP to replace it, as that is the last model with a working keyboard and the possibility to upgrade the SSD aftermarket.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com