Hacker News Reader

Comment by easymodex | Hacker News Reader

I've been using windows my whole life and especially on win 10 everything works fine, but I've been nagged on from all sides that mac is so much better than windows that I finally decided to try it and bought it 2 months ago. Long story short I rarely use it and I still don't have the proper tools and workflow to completely abandon my win laptop. And to make things even worse now everywhere I look people are saying windows has gotten better than mac and people are switching back to windows and such. Did I make a mistake or do I just need to figure it out more? I really don't know but mac is really super confusing so far and it looks more for home users or hipsters. I can't say anything about ubuntu though, I work with it all the time as far as bash and servers are concerned, but I've never used it as a primary OS.

View on HN

Your question feels open minded: did you make a mistake, or do you just need to figure it out more?

What could be going on for you could be individual windows versus end-to-end workflow.

Origins of Mac are neither home users nor hipsters, origins are content creators, from office to graphics and publishing. By contrast, origins of Windows is as window manager for backwards compatible DOS programs. Even today, many Windows programs in the workplace started as mainframe green screens now laid out in Windows Forms. This different DNA at the heart makes the surface behave differently.

MacOS design and feel is less about individual apps, more about creative flow, with gestures to swipe between apps and (mostly) the same keyboard shortcuts across tools, almost anything can cut and paste to almost anything, and so on. The oversized trackpad on the Macbooks is to drive with fluidity.

This difference in flow-centric versus window or app-centric makes crossing back and forth frustrating, the other side just doesn’t feel right. Neither is wrong, they’re just coming from a different place, for a different purpose.

To switch, you have to spend long enough in the other side to adapt how you think about work to the DNA of the ecosystem, develop the new muscle memory to turn your ideas into productivity in that paradigm for work.

PS. MacOS’s Terminal is remarkably fast, and its command line is bash, so that may feel comfortable to you. Darwin, the system on which MacOS was built, is a derivative of 4.4BSD-Lite2 and FreeBSD, so you can think of it as a unix under a workflow optimized GUI.

You can install all three os on your mac on different partitions and play with all of them if you'd like before you return the laptop. For my uses, software is either cross platform or a unix cli package. There usually are alternatives to popular windows-only software, sometimes free by someone just looking to share their tool with the community. Honestly, reddit is a good source for finding these alts, and apple related subreddits are pretty friendly and knowledgeable in my experiences (united from moaning about tim cook's apple I suppose).

Where I think macos shines is the freakish speed you can achieve when you get familiar with the keybinds and the baked in multitasking (nitpicky, but I find hitting cmd with my thumb more comfortable than reaching for ctrl with my pinky). I slap the desktops around, windows fly apart and come back together refocused on a new thought. Search dialog pops up on top of anything and a file from deep in my mess of folders is opened as fast as I can type out a portion of the name. Challenge yourself to use only your keyboard for a while (as much as you can of course). Write out some cheat sheets with keybinds (by hand so you actually remember them). Time machine is probably also the most painless backup solution beyond putting all your files behind a cloud folder, and it versions as long as you have space on your backup drive.

Then it's also a unix machine first and foremost. Lots of functionality is in the native packages, and there are plenty of ways to easily install other unix packages (brew). For instance, it wasn't hard to mount a server like a local drive on macos, using native finder to manage files and directories and the built in ssh for my pipelines. On windows, I have to use winscp and putty, which are great community tools but ultimately another layer of friction to deal with.

As far as what reviews say, ignore ignore ignore. Everyone has their preferences, all of what I've said is ultimately subjective and based on my experiences and biases. I remember that line, "windows is good now guise!!" when vista came out. Give it an honest shake and see what you prefer.

What are the things you struggle with on macOS? When I first switched from Windows to Mac some time in the 2000s, it took me getting used to the difference that in Windows you can do everything from the GUI whereas more advanced operations on macOS where better aborted via terminal. I think my usage pattern now approaches macOS first as a Unix-based system and secondarily as macOS.

Edit: don't get me wrong, I like the macOS UI, but I don't do anything fancy in it and would be a lot less happy with it if I want using shiftIt for window arrangement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com