Hard to beat a Thinkpad with Linux for dev work. a year ago I switched from a mbp to a Thinkpad with Ubuntu and I cringe every time I have to go back to the Mac in order to do something.
Every Windows and Linux machine I've used has had issues with individual apps, and most of the time I've plugged them into things that cross multiple scaling factors simultaneously, they've have had rather significant issues (when it isn't just "issues with everything except device-native"). I haven't had an issue with that at all in a few years now on my Mac, and I plug it into literally 10x more screens and configurations.
That is, if the name is `abcdefgh` and I type `abc`, then it'll complete it; but if momentum carries me and I type `abcd`, then it'll drop the desired file entirely off the list of suggestions, and give me a different, non-matching one.
Well, that's not quite true, for a few years after spotlight was released it would get slow after a while, so I mainly stuck with Quicksilver. Eventually spotlight got faster, but I never had that particular problem with it, even though I very regularly have that particular problem on Windows.
Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays. It's just a shame their OS is otherwise such a walled garden, and their hardware is a bad joke ($6k for an 8 core desktop with a years old GPU and no storage, come on.) It really boiled down to a "pick your poison" scenario for me and I sided with the OS (and hardware) that lets me tinker to my heart's content.
Worse, if for some reason you want to change the size of the elements on the display, the only way I know how to do that on a Mac (namely, to use System Preferences :: Displays to change the "resolution" to some value other than "default for display") makes the text much blurrier. I don't have a Retina display on my Mac, but someone who does claims that even on Retina, he prefers Windows because of the blurriness of the Mac
In contrast, if you can be somewhat picky about which apps you use, text on Windows is just as sharp no matter how big or small you configure the elements on the screen relative to the default size.
(In most Mac apps, it is easy to adjust the size of the text in the main pane, but all the other text and all the other non-textual elements, e.g., icons, stay at the default size.)
>Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays.
That might be true, but the Mac does a poor job accommodating sub-par or non-standard human visual systems (and I would guess that people who cannot easily control how far their eyes are from the screen -- e.g., people living in a small van -- would find a Mac frustrating as well relative to Windows).
How would making the pixel grid finer exacerbate the problems with a strategy of hammering glyphs to the pixel grid?
I use 24 inch monitors at 1080p all day and I can see the pixels if I look, but images still look plenty good and text is super readable. I switch between this pixel density and my Pixel 3 XL and while I can definitely notice the difference in density if I look, my productivity isn't affected whatsoever by having a less dense screen. Is everyone else putting their face 2 inches from the screen every 5 minutes just for the sense of satisfaction they get from not seeing the pixels?
> Apple has done a great job with their window manager I think that's a pretty massive stretch. I haven't used a Mac as my primary machine for a few years now, but I've been watching the window management get worse and worse over the years. It used to be you could have a grid of Spaces and proper intuitive window management, but now Maximize is hidden behind the Fullscreen button. Virtually everyone I've watched use a recent version of macOS either has everything fullscreen, uses one window at a time with 4" of spacing around it because it's a pain to properly size the windows, or has 7 different apps installed to fill in missing features that have been around in Linux for as long as I can remember and in Windows since Windows 7.
I agree with everything you said about the more recent releases of MacOS. Maybe I was being too generous in my previous comment - it really does seem optimized for very small laptop displays, so that's probably why they have recently placed so much emphasis on fullscreening everything (and also why they got rid of the Expose grid - horizontal swipe works better on a laptop trackpad).
In other words, you've never had a large high-dpi monitor setup with multiple screens large enough to appreciate it. And you haven't ever been an advanced enough Mac user to learn keyboard commands and the various ways to manage windows.
Workaround is to provide two inputs to the monitor and run it in picture by picture mode. This is ok but when waking from sleep MacOS gets confused about what monitors windows were on and the arrangement of the panels. This has always been a problem and why I got away from dual/multi panels in the first place. MacOS support for that has always been abysmal.
It’s one of the first examples of Apple gear not “Just working (tm)”. I suppose it’s my fault for not buying a monitor with an Apple logo on it.
I find myself wondering why I deal with the headaches in MacOS. I switched because it was easy. Now Apple is making it hard. At this point fighting with Linux actually appears to be easier than using MacOS.
You can also option-click on the scaled options in display manager and get more options but none of those are reasonable either.
The whole reason I use Macs is because I don’t have to constantly hack and fiddle with them. At that point I may as well install a Linux or BSD.
The software quality from Apple was never great but it is really falling off a cliff recently. It’s getting to a point I wonder why I pay the premium.
Granted, my monitors are 1080p and 720p (ugh), so I haven't had to wrangle with high DPI issues, which does not sound fun.
I think the biggest thing I would miss is being able to send texts from my computer. I use that all the time. I and a Windows computer at work for a bit and it absolutely drove me nuts.
That's primarily an issue with iOS APIs (or lack thereof), though. Gotta switch phones as well :)
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