Not having a Unix shell is of course ludicrous.
Pretty fair article, though.
Not having a Unix shell is of course ludicrous.
Pretty fair article, though.
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.
- 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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
---
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.
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.
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.