The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019
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Not having a Unix shell is of course ludicrous.
Pretty fair article, though.
But it was a feature limited to their own devices, and was set via a special Trackpad Settings app that you had to download from the Windows Store, not a standard part of the OS.
Which is a pretty good example of why I don't use Windows much anymore.
On a phone, you drag the page so when your finger moves up, you are scrolling down. MacOS has had this be the standard for a long time.
Changing the direction makes touch scroll act like you're click-dragging on a scroll bar. when your finger moves down, you scroll down.
Before 10.7, the scroll behavior acts like you've grabbed the scroll bar and your fingers drag it, so moving your fingers down makes the scroll grip move down and the page content move up. Moving your fingers left makes the scroll grip move left and the page content move right. The scrolling paradigm is that your fingers grab the viewport and move it with respect to the content.
In 10.7 and later, it instead acts as though your fingers are grabbing the content and moving it around within a stationary viewport. So moving your fingers up pushes the content upward. So the scroll interaction is like the direct interaction on a touchscreen, but via a trackpad instead.
That's been their default since back in 2011, and although a lot of people disabled it at the time I definitely prefer this mode of scroll interaction. It's more direct and is consistent across all the gadgets I use.
It acts like you're grabbing the content and moving it around, rather than grabbing a scroll indicator at the side of the page and pushing that up or down. Especially when you factor in other gestures like pinch to zoom with multitouch trackpads, it now very weird to turn this off. For zoom, it feels like you're grabbing the content, but then when you pan suddenly you're grabbing the viewport instead? Next time you're on a Mac, open up Maps and try it both ways.
The fact that grabbing content this way feels natural may have a bit to do with Apple having large, smooth, and very responsive trackpads. YMMV on other hardware.
I don’t ever touch laptop screen even if it is touch enabled. To me mouse is strictly superior to touchpad which is superior to touchscreen and keyboard - outside of operations that require precise positioning on the surface of the screen - is superior to pretty much everything.
I thought about why I prefer things this way and decided that it is about travel time. With a touch screen if you want to love from a to b your finger has to travel all the way, whereas mouse can be tuned for maximal sensitivity. And for operations where you can use a keyboard shortcut the interaction time is even more immediate.
Once upon a time I had an 8 button mouse with several of the buttons bound to Exposé functions, but I don't think I'd go back to that from Apple's trackpads.
The problem is that a touchpad is still fundamentally an indirect pointing device, rather than a direct pointing device like a touchscreen. The "consistency" argument relies on the same flawed reasoning that led Microsoft so astray with their Windows 8/Metro UI efforts to unify touchscreen and desktop interfaces.
And ergonomically, it's easier to perform a down scroll on a touchpad with the non-"natural" scroll direction, because your fingers have more room to curl further than to straighten out when they're resting normally on the trackpad.
Based on what? I don't think there's any logical advantage to each of these options although I prefer the Mac-way now. You just get used to it.
As a counterpoint, cursor movement with a trackpad is just as indirect, yet we make the cursor move around directly with your finger.
Why not make the cursor act like traditional scrolling? Treat the cursor like the contents of a scrollable view, and your finger motion acts like it's moving the viewport relative to the contents even though the cursor/page is actually moving while the screen/viewport is stationary?
That sounds super weird, yeah?
Having flipped my mental model to "one finger drags the cursor, two fingers drags the content", going back to "one finger drags the cursor, two fingers drags the viewport relative to the content" sounds similarly strange.
>And ergonomically, it's easier to perform a down scroll on a touchpad with the non-"natural" scroll direction, because your fingers have more room to curl further than to straighten out when they're resting normally on the trackpad.
Not really an issue; scrolling has momentum and requires very little movement. Give it a push and then put your fingers back down to stop it, it's not like a clicky mouse wheel where you have to scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll to go more than a few lines at a time.
Taking screenshots has a shortcut key. Alt + Shift + S.
I use a screen manager called Aqua Snap. It's great.
I turned off notifications. They are awful.
I use Windows and OSX, but I understand how you feel. I still prefer OSX.
It might be asking too much but perhaps you could write something up?
In Windows, you now have a Spaces alternative (It hasn't been called Spaces for a while). It's super cool. You hit WindowsKey + Tab and up top there are desktops. You can use the plus sign to create a new one and continue to use that expose like feature to drag apps between desktops. Next, you can either navigate via expose or you can Ctrl + Windows + [Left | Right] to change between them.
If you're doing any kind of javascript development, there is NVM, which will allow you to change node versions. That's a nice tool.
For installing software, some people use Chocolatey. There is some danger because there isn't any code signing as far as I know so I don't use it. But basically, that is a tool that allows you to install apps into windows with a config file.
For MITM proxy, Fiddler2 is pretty great.
For process management, there is a whole suite of tools called SysInternals. They allow you to see which processes are open and the files they are accessing. That can help tremendously in certain scenarios.
Rainmeter is a cool desktop customization tool that you don't have as good alternatives on OSX.
7zip is a must have for compression.
Deluge is a decent torrent client.
Some of the console commands you want to learn are ipconfig [/all] to check your IP address.
On Task Manager, you can set affinity to certain CPUs so that processes don't eat up all of your CPUs. That's a neat trick. I'd have to get a good night's sleep before I can think of anything else, but I hope it was helpful.
Edit: Oh and I almost forgot.. You do have a Unix shell on windows. You can google how to turn on "bash subsystem for windows". Then you can install Ubuntu. I don't think it's virtualized. But I still currently prefer Cmder since I can copy and paste on it. But yes it's linux and you can mount your C drive and just linux away at your windows. Pretty soon, their new terminal with better font rendering should be a show stopper. It's currently on some kind of preview that can only be run on pre release versions of Windows 10 so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting.
I don't know how you work out it doesn't have a unix shell though. It does, in the estimation of many a better one by default than on macs.
I've never really used a Mac much, but it did cause a problem at a previous employer where most devs on the team worked on Macs natively and then tests would pass locally and fail in CI, because the CI was running on the target Linux config. I'd usually notice them first as I'd run the tests on my Linux VM (pre WSL) and anything with a case mismatch in a config or module import would fail. Was a pain to fix the first time because of bad assumptions about the Mac env, but subsequent issues were quickly fixed.
One big issue I ran into with WSL (not sure it's been fixed, not an issue for me anymore) was building large C++ projects under WSL with MacAfee installed. Apparently a known issue, but it (MacAfee) would leak memory like a seive as it scanned the files in a way that wasnt recoverable. The only way to get the memory back was to reboot. Even after the processes in WSL ended, the memory was lost. You couldn't see what process was using the mem. But, it showed in the system utilization. It is possible to hard freeze Windows due to this bug. Solution? Uninstall MacAfee. Had to have an antivirus due to company rules and (I think) financial regs, but Defender didn't leak memory and was sufficient (albeit slow while building). Don't know if it's still an issue as I haven't used that configuration in close to a year and a half.
There have been issues with the Console Host (I noticed artifacts using Vim in bash under WSL under certain circumstances), good news is that the Console Host is getting much needed love and is probably getting the most attention it has in over a decade. Its already improved quite a bit, and some big changes are coming soon. Also, the team behind it is very engaged on Github issues (the source isn't available, but they use GH for issue tracking directly from the public without having to use the Feedback Hub or file an issue with MS support).
These days you can prepare a completely isolated docker instance to each devs, so they don't even need to set anything up themselves and just let them upload on save and run whatever packages and daemons they want as root with the added benefit that anyone check their state as their code is always on a server.
Windows is somehow worse than it used to be. There's two control centers for some reason. Much more notifications and intrusiveness. Taskbar auto-hide doesn't work consistently. Updates install without permission. The big thing is the apps. Apps are getting much less functional (just like how the Settings app does a fraction of what Control Center used to do.) OneNote is a great example: the UWP version lost so much functionality compared to ON 2016, but the latter has been abandoned.
Weirdly enough, I never found a good PDF viewer. Acrobat DC is a slow and a battery hog. Edge/Chrome are non-functional (don't handle search properly on many PDFs). Many alternatives are .NET based on battery hogs. Moreover, since Edge/Chrome won't let you use a PDF plugin anymore, the workflow is completely broken. (Download the PDF then open it in a separate app.) I never thought that Preview would be the "must have" Mac app.
Oh, and the trackpad! RDP from a Mac into a Windows terminal server is a better mousing/scrolling experience than native windows on the X1 (which has an MS Precision touchpad).
Oh, and power management was real hit-and-miss. Sometimes I'd get a full 10 hours, and sometimes, under the same workload, it'd be like 6. The synaptics touchpad comes with a driver (even though it's supposed to be an MS Precision touchpad) that had some helper utility that would randomly go crazy. (If you killed it, it would restart automatically. Deleting the binary fixed that, and had no discernable affect on mouse behavior.)
In my experience, deleting the Synaptics binaries does restore access to the operating system's built-in touchpad control panel, rather than forcing you to use the Synaptics utilities that appear to be barely modified from what I remember encountering on a Windows 95 machine. That makes it quite a bit easier to take advantage of the halfway-decent set of configuration options that Windows now offers.
You have to repeat the purging after upgrading to a new Windows build, or if Windows Update tries to reinstall the Synaptics drivers behind your back. (Updated userspace tools shipped as part of driver updates don't show in the list of installed Windows updates!)
I have to agree. I use Windows probably 90% of the time, but I have to say it peaked with Windows 7 and started going downhill with 8. Now it's a game of "guess which config system has the option you need" + Microsoft forcing all kinds of things power users really should be able to disable.
We don't know if Windows is in maintenance mode or not either, or what the next version would look like if one eventually comes out (maybe it'll all be in TypeScript?). After all, UWP was mostly retired and the visions of "your next desktop computer is a tablet" have significantly died down- the technology and the will of the market just weren't there.
However, Microsoft has failed once before to develop a proper, stable OS- though Vista did bring a great number of graphical and usability updates to XP, chief among them the "Show Desktop" button, the ability to snap windows onto sides of the screen, and putting a Firefox-style search bar in Explorer, it suffered from poor functional quality (file copy windows should never ever be broken, for instance), so I'm not convinced it's solely the fault of newer developers.
It would give them a better return to just make a new OS from scratch while keep supporting Windows for the next 10 years (maybe 20 for extended support) and let it slowly fade.
Or better yet, take the Edge route and use Linux underneath and change the appearance to MS' taste, have binary compatibility layer and call it Windows.
Can't believe things haven't changed since then.
I right clicked the rightmost icon in the task bar, then chose {Focus Assist > Alarms Only}. After I did that, the only times I have been notified on Windows is because I set a timer in the {Alarms & Clocks} app.
(I would probably have noticed any other notifications because I am sensitive enough to being notified that I completely disabled Notification Center on my Mac.)
IIRC the quartz team was involved with Adobe when they were developing the PDF format.
It's just what they are used to.
Aside from blurry PDFs, I also used to like font rendering in OS X and prefer it to Windows but unfortunately it also got screwed up with Mojave after they disabled subpixel rendering.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/295427/what-causes...
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8531638
https://twitter.com/deivi_dragon/status/938663751158501376
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/72lxjx/macos_high_si...
It is less visible on a high PPI screen although still there and noticable if you know it exists. Unfortunately I know it exists, can see it and am bothered, so I stopped using my Macbook and left it to collect dust.
In Yosemite PDF rendering performance was crap for me in some high resolution documents for print, but other than that it has been flawless for as long as I've been using macOS.
I've only seen the issue shown in the Reddit post (which looks like some rendering lag) in Android actually.
Maybe Apple actually optimized rendering for hiDPI displays since probably that's where the majority of users are these days.
Many professors in our department have a MBP, and their LaTeX presentations look bad, just because macOS is bad. I notice it every single time, and sometimes (without me even saying, I just tolerate it, don't make a sound) they themselves do, too, asking themselves whether they've grown that so old or something.
I only have the leftovers of my girlfriend, 2015 MBA, as a macOS device. The PDFs look like crap on Preview and many other ".app"s I have tried. SumatraPDF running on Wine works properly though. Yeah, I'd say Preview simply does not work properly at this point. Shame, but also fun to watch from the Windows's side.
Mac OS on the other hand, has had a broken pdfkit implementation since around Sierra, and any PDF viewer that relies on it (Preview, Skim) has broken and blurry rendering of which there are several reports online. This makes any PDF reader other than Adobe's (which is an abomination) unusable. This has gone mostly unnoticed or ignored as the blur is reduced by the high PPI screens, although it is there and becomes much more apparent on a lower PPI external screen.
This single fact makes Mac OS unusable for me. Windows has its own faults, but at least I can read crisp PDFs on it.
That said, for all its warts, the Win10/WSL combo is light-years ahead of MacOS. (I had to use a Mac for a recent client engagement, and truly felt like I'd been cast back to the turn of the century. Seriously, MacOS is really primitive, especially for dev, compared to Win10/WSL.) But more than that, I'll just never go back to a computer without really awesome pen and touch support. The only problem I've had with several versions of Surface Pro hardware is Intel's execrable Skylake power management cluster-foxtrot.
Upgraded from my 2009 MBP to a 2017 MBP a couple years ago. Immediately regretted the purchase after the keyboard screwed up multiple times so I returned within 14 days for a refund. Ended up buying a Surface Pro and hated it. Upon booting up my machine I was instantly met with severe backlight bleeding so I returned it. The store gave me another device - same issue. This time I decided to see if I can put up with it. I immediately regretted not having a proper shell for dev work. In addition to this, I couldn't believe how hard it was to remove certain applications/programs from the computer. Why is there a menu for Apps and also one for Programs and Features? These issues kept piling up until after a few days I returned it again. Decided to grab a 2015 MBP from the Apple refurb store and have used it since. No regrets.
I have a surface pro 4. I enjoy the touchscreen for some things, but otherwise I roundly hate it, almost entirely due to Windows. Some things work in touchpad mode, some don't, sometimes a feature is crippled in one mode, the gestures are finicky and weird and the only reason I know how to use them is because I read a few blog posts, notifications that are undismissable for no reason, and sometimes the touchscreen keyboard doesn't come up for 30 seconds.
The very best thing I've done has been to mark every network as "metered" so it stops auto-installing (non-critical) updates and forcing lengthy shutdowns. The only downside (if you can call it that) is that now it seems update is half-broken most of the time, and it won't find updates for a month or two even if I say "check now". Sometimes it works for like a week or two and I can pull updates about every day like I'd expect, and on the day of their release, so it's pretty clear when it's broken. It's usually broken.
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I have Elementary OS installed on it too. It's a much better experience, except for needing a custom kernel for touchscreen (a simple google + apt-get away, thankfully, which is about my limit to put up with), and I don't know how to get the on-screen keyboard to be available at login. There's just so much less nonsense though.
Even if it wasn't, it's unreasonable to offer a "check for updates" button that just turns into an indefinite progress bar forever without mentioning "can't check on this network" or something.
Also, as I mentioned, it does work sometimes, which is why it's clear when it's breaking. Though I didn't mention it earlier, it remains broken even when I turn off the metered mode, so yea. I'm pretty sure the updater is just plain broken most of the time.
But I can probably still be fine what OS I am on as long as it has quality third party apps but interestingly as a web dev, it's all on macOS and have no intention of moving away as it'll kill my smooth workflow.
Tried to check if I could use Windows for it a few years ago but figured it's a pain in a few hours. I can see MS is trying though, when they start including Linux in Windows. And I like their tooling very much, like VS Code and TypeScript but I don't see myself switching away at least for the next 5 years.
Also windows absolutely refuses to update. It didn't update to 1803 without downloading the install iso manually, it didn't update to 1806, and now it's refusing to update to 1903.
Windows (also visual studio, but that's another story) is incredibly just... Bad.
The reliance on the mouse and generally terrible keyboard shortcut story annoys me, but it can be fixed with third party software which is ok I guess.
Rant over. Sorry for wasting everyone's time.
Or from command line https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Quickly-c...
Microsoft has leaned very conservative in offering the feature updates after complaints from the earlier ones. Especially if your laptop has high usage patterns that likely suggest a work laptop it may not offer you the feature update until late in the cycle. Or in some cases specific hardware or software installed.
(A big block right now still for 1903 is it can be hesitant if you have a lot of unpatched games installed because several versions of highly deployed anti-cheat software cause BSODs if not up to date, affecting even major games like Fortnite.)
There is a good alternative to downloading the ISO, called the Update Assistant. It's an app that can tell you why you are currently blocked, if that is the case, and/or force install the update. It's at the top of this download page (the "Update Now" button in the gray region, not the Media Creation Tool below it):
- it's not possible to switch between multiple windows of the same application with Cmd+Tab
- it's not possible to display two windows side by side without switching to fullscreen mode
- it's hard to make some applications take the whole screen without using the weird fullscreen mode
- the apps don't close when you click the close button. I get that there used to be a reason for this, nowadays it's just bad design
- it's not possible at all to split the screen horizontally
- multi-monitor sucks hard
- there's no mini calendar on the clock
- the contextual top bar is awful
- the Finder is a monstrosity
- Cmd+shift+4 for a screen capture? come on...
- the difference between cmd, option and control is still not clear
There are a lot of good things on macOS but come on, a lot of things suck really bad
> finding a wifi password
what?
> arranging windows
No. Just no.
The window management via keyboard is also much better in Windows.
Also I hate that the Home/End keys are broken in OS X. I get that you can use command+right/left instead, but that doesn't work in the terminal for some reason :(
What do you mean? If you have a dialog button you just need to click Cmd-"First letter of the command that you need". The system never teaches you, true, but it's there.
- Key combo to switch between apps, another to switch between windows of the current app. Makes sense to me
- It is possible, although not easily as Windows 10
- Double-click on title bar and/or cmd-click on green traffic light
- You mean vertically? I'm pretty sure macOS only allows horizontal splitting, which feels limited I agree
- Agree to disagree. Windows losing their position when connecting/disconnecting displays on Win 10 infuriates me
- Agreed. Though there are a lot of apps that can replace the clock with a clock + calendar combo, some are free. On Win 10, I can't believe the calendar doesn't display week numbers, and I cannot replace that
- I love it. To each their own
- you mean UX or bugs? I much prefer the Finder to Explorer, which always looks so bloated to me
- the beauty is in having full screen / box capture as file / to clipboard in 4 easy shortcuts, system wide. Compare to Win 10 Snipping Tool, it's night & day
I think Cmd + backtick will do what you want.
I wind up installing Contexts on my Macs, which changes Cmd-tab to behave just like Windows' Alt-tab.
I'm sure you can retrieve the wifi password on Windows, but there's probably a learning curve for someone unfamiliar with the ecosystem.
They've made it far worse in Windows 10 to find your wifi password. You have to click through a bunch of Metro windows before stumbling into the right dialog, which is a Win32 application. In Windows 7, it took a total of 2 clicks to reach it. Now? I feel like I have to guess every time how to get to the right dialog because it seems to change with every update. It used to be much quicker to reach on Win10 even, but they removed all the quick paths to reach it.
Are there any apps in particular for which you feel that this behavior is worse? It's supposed to be for document-centric applications or those that do something useful in the background (eg. iTunes). On Windows, the latter category tends to clutter up the system tray, while the former category just forces the user to wait for the whole application to re-launch if the last document was closed. Splash screens are mostly a thing of the past, but app launch times are still noticeable, and re-activating an application that was merely swapped out by the OS is faster than a cold start of the app.
The same goes for phones, too. The last time I used Discord on my phone I ended up restarting the whole phone because I couldn't figure out how to close it.
That's reasonable, because on Windows there's no clear distinction between the process and the window. On MacOS, there's real functionality provided by the dock icon and menu even in the absence of any window.
>No. Just no.
The smartest thing that developers of window managers on Linux can do (as many have done) is straight-up copy Windows' winkey-arrow behaviour. It's one of those things that should be standard on every system with a keyboard and some sort of multiple-window multitasking. When I used OSX I really liked it for the under-the-hood stuff, but window management was a miserable experience.
Nice way to hint that you are definitely being sarcastic, because cmd+something+3 surely and clearly is no way intuitive, contrary to the use of dedicated Print Screen key on Windows.
I have regained a lot of sanity by realizing computing happens within platforms, and regarding the OS as just plumbing. My platforms of choice are the web (for hypertext), elisp text applications (for interactive development, task management, email), and Unix.
I only need a browser (Firefox), a text editor (Emacs) and a terminal. I prefer to use a tiling window manager (StumpWM), but it's not a big deal to use the WM provided by my current OS.
These 3 platforms (web, elisp and Unix) will be long-lived. Whereas native Windows, Mac and Linux applications tend to have much shorter lifecycles. Furthermore, they don't tend to talk well to each other. They are little silos.
Also, since the lifecycles are so short, by the time I work out all inconveniences and learn all tricks, the platform is beyond its prime time. This has already happened to me several times. I was really happy with Gnome 2 circa 2005, but the whole ecosystem collapsed with the transition to Gnome 3. Same thing, to some extent, in OS X Tiger-Snow Leopard. A really nice ecosystem of indie applications that has slowly lost a lot of momentum to iOS.
That said, I prefer to use Linux because it's so component-ized I can always replace frustrating things, and nothing gets pushed into me by a corporation. Plus code is open, and some userland things like Nix are so unique. And first-class centralized package management is great.
Likely to use Pop_OS! (weird spelling, hope they change it), as I do like Ubuntu/Debian, but want a faster pace on parts of it. I'll probably continue to work more against containers rather than on the desktop itself. But at least I'll get real volume mounts.
It wasn't really a matter of familiarity. I've been using Windows since 3.1 and while I've been using mostly macOS since the Vista days, I've always had a Windows machine for gaming.
I was really surprised the problem for me was the Windows ecosystem.
Outside of the major players (Microsoft, Adobe, etc) most of the stuff you find are ugly Win32 apps that look straight from Windows 95, do not support scaling, etc. At the time even the Creative Cloud app from Adobe didn't support scaling and looked super small on a 4K display. Heck, even Photoshop didn't support Windows scaling, you only had a setting to change the UI size from 100% to 150% or something like that.
The other problem is that I couldn't find good replacements for my most used productivity/utility apps. For example Alfred, Karabiner, BetterTouchTool, or iStatMenus. There are some alternatives that solve some of the problems these apps solve, but none that are even half as good. A colleague which is 100% Windows told me that much like Android, Windows users are less likely to pay for quality software.
I also had a ton of hardware problems with the Surface Book 1 I bought and returned to Amazon.
The Mac hardware situation is a real problem though, that is certain. Hopefully Apple has already realized this and is slowly correcting course.
Mac's culture of 'I made something decent and I ask you only $15.' was a great start for OSX and had gotten better by App Store's presence to provide people the spot on experience of quality third party apps.
Windows, having only either of free but never too good or commercial offering that is bloated and expensive is getting old.
I really wish that people would stick with writings things as "from SOURCE to DESTINATION" or "from INITIAL to FINAL".
Perhaps it's just me, but I find it reduces mental drag if you describe things in temporal progression instead of having to go 'in reverse'.† It's not a big deal, but I find it irksome.
† I am reminded of the bomb defusing joke: Cut the blue wire [snip] ...after cutting the red one.
* https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WireDilemma * https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CueCardPause
Please, don’t do this. I get palpitations simply when people start getting their fingers, or worse, a pen, too close to my screen. I warn them. I try to be cute: “there’s this thing called cursor, you know? You can use many devices to control it”.
When they do, eventually and inevitably, accidentally touch it, I get visibly upset and make no effort to lighten the mood. High paying clients, I don’t care. I’ll get up, get a cleaning cloth and take my time until it is, hopefully, pristine again.
For all the amazing things that touchscreens brought to the world, it also made people who already loved smudging monitors suddenly feel even more authorized to do so.
It’s not the same with my phone, you could even drop it, I often do.
But do not touch my computer’s work screen.
Next time someone smudges your screen, you could try something like that in retaliation.
A finger obstructs the view, is laughably imprecise and leaves oil and water behind, which blurs and distorts the image.
A finger is, however, the most natural interface and readily available.
Which is why it is amazing for the phone we carry with us and terrible for a 27” 5k display, viewed at almost arms length distance.
I just _don't_ like it. Not only does it not evoke any kind of pleasant feeling in use, it's so heavy and fumbly that I just cannot use it for any meaningful period of time without getting frustrated, lack of terminal not withstanding.
For context: I use a mac at work, I used a windows machine for 2 years before this, my personal machines are linux/bsd based (i3/sway)
The Mac experience hasn't improved a lot, granted I'm using a 2013 Trashcan mac and that's quite dated, but mac, like windows, is suffering from just kinda feeling bad these days, I'm not sure if it's mojave or that I'm becoming old and getting grumpy about my display manager not being able to be operated without a mouse... but I don't like it.
Don't get me wrong MacOS is still _miles_ ahead of Windows in my opinion, but their hardware these days is appalling, and really the hardware alone makes me want to move to a nice XPS13 with Linux for work.
My i3/sway machines are /nearly/ perfect, I can think of two things that make them kinda suck:
1) Hotswapping monitors on Sway is.. hit or miss.. I could hack my way to make this work better most likely but I shouldn't have to.
2) I work in a Microsoft based company and tools like teams (which has a linux varient.. kinda), skype and outlook aren't going to work, not to mention the UUNC SMB paths that get tossed around and the burning desire to use email as a version control system for Excel spreadsheets...
What I mean is that #2 is served by MacOS, but not linux. :\
I have two remaining major issues with Windows, which is down from the remarkably sizeable list that had me switch to Mac and OSX, which makes it easy to keep the Windows box as games only:
+ Extreme monochrome flatness. It's obtuse and hides information, like the edges of icons, encouraging misclicks, and is quite frankly pig ugly. I quite liked aero glass and the UI as Windows 7 had it. The first Windows that "looked right". If only they'd modernised and flattened that a little...
+ Abusive view of the users: Tracking and telemetry you can't easily disable. Knowing better than me when to reboot, to install, when to display ads.
There's lots of minor issues, like 3 to 5 different incarnations of every feature from menus, to dialogues, to preferences. Or Explorer usability. Or how discoverable some things are. Or the whole mess of registry and installing. Or the 40GB of ever-growing Windows sub folders. All I can live with, but ugly and tracking? Much harder to tolerate.
So as ever I'll end up with a mix, rebalanced a little. One day I'll have a lovely seamless all-something world, but it hasn't happened since the 80s when it was Amigas everywhere. :)
FWIW Metro was originally super bright and cheerful, even if it was flat.
"We heard you when you said you didn't want cameras automatically monitoring you. So we added this new feature where you can disable cameras based on DAY OF THE WEEK and turned every day on for your convenience"
Microsoft knows it lost the online tracking game, so it's playing dumb and putting in privacy-invading features and overriding user selections yearly. Why rely on a browser when you control the OS?
The paranoid part of me thinks windows is giving away windows 10 for free because it's making money selling the user data and access to intelligence agencies.
I know apple has received some flak for updates slowing their computers, but windows is no better. My 4 year old laptop is basically unusable at this point because every action takes 10-15s.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management
It can be a pain; enabeling sleep for every USB devices will likely result in the keyboard or touchpad becoming broken, increase the latency it takes to respond, etc. But once it's configured it just works very well. I'm getting 10+ hours on a Dell XPS 13" under light web browsing + youtube.
Any Apple laptop will likely need some unique customizations for everything to work and for maximum battery life. It could be argued that instead its popularity drives up the number of discovered errata. Case in point, the Archlinux page contains not only an extensive "Mac" page but it also has dozens of pages for specific Apple computers documenting pretty much everything you would need to know to get every feature working and get comparable battery life (could be a little better or worse).
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBookPro#Power_manage...
(The Arch wiki might be my single most useful source of technical info when tweaking things on Debian lately. I haven't tweaked laptop power management lately, but I used to do it aggressively, including building my own kernel, making sure CPU power management was working, tracking down every process that used CPU cycles or spun up the disk for no reason, turning off devices I didn't need, dimming CCFL backlight, etc.)
That said, it’s a great OS. I just wish it was less buggy. Not planning to switch in the near future
- macbook air with OS X for holidays or house related
- macbook pro with OS X for work
- desktop with Ubuntu for long programming sessions
- home-office headless server with Ubuntu for NAS/webapp hosting/home-automation/backups
I have setup my systems to synchronise all my files through my NAS using unison. So all my project files are accessible locally on all my personal computers. I've been using this setup for at least 6 years now.
Though I'm still a huge proponent for using GNU/Linux where it shines the best: i.e. server environments.
Probably far more likely in my case would be to follow the articles suggestion and just switch to windows... perhaps even using WSL.
Funny thing is, as I'm no longer attached to macOS, I'm considering switching from iPhone to Android. I'll have much better synchronization for Google Chrome and newer iPhones are really weird (similar to Macs, LoL). And, again, no need to pay their crazy prices.
The idea that upgrades could even be qualified with "for free" is such a foreign idea that it gives me pause.
With Microsoft, “for free” actually means that you’re the product. And since Windows isn’t free, you have to pay for the privilege too.
I honestly am not sure which it is.
Whereas when you say you “like using macOS” I assume you don’t just mean that you like using computers in general and you would have absolutely no preference for macOS over Linux or Windows.
Because nobody installs bash without coreutils and the 30 or so other common utility programs (grep, sed, awk, et al). Pointing out that bash doesn't include coreutils+standard is just being pedantic. Nobody runs a system without those utilities present. Everybody already knows what is meant. You're not adding to the meaning by requiring a comprehensive listing of core and standard utility programs.
You might as well be saying, "Actually, it's not Linux. It's GNU/Linux." Only Richard Stallman cares, but even Stallman recognizes that because "a long name such as GNU/X11/Apache/Linux/TeX/Perl/Python/FreeCiv becomes absurd, at some point you will have to set a threshold and omit the names of the many other secondary contributions." [0]
Nobody is going to say, "OMG, how can you say you have a proper environment if you don't mention that you have the very important yes utility." Nobody is really interested in a required-only install of Debian or a base-only install of Red Hat or whatever because the use case for that is so rare and narrow that it's not worth contextualizing. Anybody who is doing that knows that it's a weird setup.
I’m aware that very few people install bash outside the context of a typical Unix OS. It would indeed be pedantic and useless to point out that that’s theoretically possible, and that’s not what I’m doing.
It’s also very rare to install, say, grep outside of a typical Unix OS. But you wouldn’t say “the grep workflow on WSL is great” to mean the entire WSL experience, unless you were specifically talking about actual grep. So why do people do it with bash?
The first two make much more sense to me than the third.
(As an aside, it’s not true that Bash is “the Unix shell” and it is in fact not the default on several Unix-like systems. But in fairness to your point, it is the default on most GNU/Linux distros).
Similar (and similarly speedy) adaptation layers provide transparent access across Linux and Windows filesystems, too - the ability to safely work bidirectionally from a windows app to the Linux filesystem and vice-versa is new in the recently pushed 1903 release of Win10.
Not only does WSL work quite well, it's a bit of a righteous hack or technological marvel in its own right, especially since it makes Linux a fully equal partner in the the dev ecosystem, something the old Microsoft would never have allowed.
While I'm happy with my personal Thinkpad, being nearly the only front-end guy on Windows sucks (missing out on various tools, and regularly having to fix slightly broken scripts etc.).
But above all, my corpo Dell is a misery (current status: malfunctioning audio drivers hence all audio sounds like 32 kbps crap; issues with external monitors when replugging laptop to the docking station; cherry on a cake is laptop going berserk while presenting at a conference, due to loose RAM; there's an issue like this every few weeks lately).
Current Dells have much better battery and are half as heavy as the previous generation, but I still wouldn't buy a Dell for myself, and sadly those are still the default Windows corpo laptops.
I use both OSes, and the only Windows laptop I've found compelling over the last four years is the Surface Book line.
I hated it. It is hard to articulate exactly why I disliked it so much but I would guess it is almost entirely a visual thing. The font rendering is so much better on MacOS. This was Surface Book 2 laptop so the display resolution was not a factor.
And I hate the amount of whitespace in Windows 10 user interface. There is a dropdown panel in start bar that shows common settings icons. God I hated that entire minimal design. It felt like something high school student might mockup for the Year 12 computer science project. Two colours, thin drawing that vaguely resembles a visual representation of the task and HUGE whitespace.
I was contemplating buying a Lenovo X1 Extreme Thinkpad because everyone raves about their keyboards but after using Windows 10 for a week.. nah.. nope... nyet... na-uh
These are bad things (especially the keyboard switch issue, which is greatly compounded by the issue of the keyboard being a very heavy-weight repair) but... where's the manufacturer without problems?
I think what you're looking for is a manufacturer with a relatively decent reliability record and a record of "making things right" when they do go wrong. I'm really not sure of the best way to measure that, though Apple seems to consistently do well on various user satisfaction and reliability surveys.
Shudder to think what it’s like to get through on phone support and/or file a warranty claim with Dell, Microsoft, what have you. No thanks.
Not bashing Windows, I’ve had a pleasant history with msft, but when almost everything “new and exciting” listed here is old news for MacOS, it kinda dulls the argument.
Let's stop pretending there's a correct OS. We all have different needs and it depends on what you're optimizing for.
I have a Macbook for work and run Windows 7 on my home desktop with Ubuntu on my home laptop. They all have their benefits and drawbacks.
And Windows 10 has been having plenty of problems of its own with recent vulnerabilities and a bug that could break VPN connections.
When I finally bought a fancy new machine I ended up getting a gaming laptop with a GPU I knew I could do CUDA stuff on. I’ve got one disk with Ubuntu and one with Windows and ultimately spend most of my time in Windows. I still use Cygwin because WSL annoyed me in various ways (mostly I just want Emacs to be able to call command line tools and work).
There is nothing to love about Windows, and plenty of aggravations (I’ve been logged into my son’s Microsoft account for months and Microsoft regularly send me screen time reports about myself, because I once tried to set up a network game of Minecraft). But honestly, I work in Emacs and Firefox and actually quite like having access to games. I can’t really imagine ever going back to a Mac. If battery life was better on Linux and GNOME would stop lobotomising itself with every release I imagine I’d drop Windows too, but it’s been so long since I felt genuinely thrilled by an OS.
(using a plugin to get grid style desktop layout) with apps designated to open in their own
desktop, or to be available in all (finder, notes, mail, etc). I only use trackpad (with swipes to move between desktops) and no external monitors
I was interested to try windows 10 when they'd finally got to allowing multiple desktops a few years ago. That turned out to be a
disappointment though. Windows switches between desktops without any clear visual
indication of their relative positioning. You can't designate apps to be available on any desktop, so I'd get a bunch of different instances of explorer on different desktops.
Swiping to move between the desktops was not nearly customisable enough either When (if) Microsoft gets multiple desktops to par with the implementation on Mac OS, and they or some other laptop producer manages to make a trackpad that at least comes close to the
macbook pro ones, I'll consider giving it another go. For now, my feeling is that microsoft still can't really get UX right
Ended up getting a Mid-2015 MacBook Pro 15" Retina manufactured in 2017 with 14 battery cycles. Paid €900 for it two weeks ago, refurbished. The hardware is still very fast and the Retina screen is more than adequate for backend software development.
I also think that Windows has worsened over time. Both 7 and 10 have their own pros and cons, but I feel 10 is just worse overall as an experience. There's so much unnecessary extra bloat (apps, UI, settings in two different places, annoying notifications) and weird UI mismatches. At least 7 felt mostly internally "consistent".
And I mean they're better than DBeaver, GIMP and LibreOffice.
Curiously I use a Mac to access them because the Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac has some niceties such as opening each RDP session in a new Mac Desktop and best of all I can very conveniently navigate from RDP session to RDP session with a Mac hotkey.
With Windows Microsoft Remote Desktop the whole RDP session switching experience is pretty cumbersome.
So I do all programming and LOB apps use on Windows RDP sessions.
On Mac only Internet browsing and RDP session management via Microsoft Remote Desktop.
So my iMacs are mostly thin clients.
(ignoring the extra battery back that I really should have attached to my MacBook Pro compared to just running Safari)
But what definitely is bothersome with the MacBooks is that I can’t use CUDA worth a damn without an nVidia GPU so if I work with most machine learning toolkits I have to ship the code off to some expensive cloud just to see a quick run for prototyping or port all my code to support Apple APIs specifically instead of the open source ones primarily centered around nVidia tooling.
Those exist? I’m not being facetious. Are there really examples of non-Apple laptops that are as nice of hardware? (I primarily care about screen and trackpad.)
I wouldn't even call that stealing, as many folks legitimately want stable Windows and MS does not want to sell LTSB to them.