Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I hope you like high heat, high fan noise, and thermal throttling issues (common XPS issues that myself and others have experienced). I hope you also like random Wifi failures, random freeze-the-world-while-some-app-is-having-a-network-timeout issues.

macOS is getting worse, no doubt. But Windows still has multiple unacceptable problems (ungodly slow unzipping, still!, random heavy lag or freezing, surprise 30 minute Windows Update installations happening during a reboot you had to do during important work, etc. etc.)

Plus, the day to day file management story is still sub-par in Windows. If you've gotten used to Quicklook on a Mac (because it's so handy), you're SOL on Windows. How hard is it to provide a spacebar activated preview popup?

PDF reading and printing is still a nightmare on Windows compared to macOS. Again I refer to Quicklook, whereby you can open and scan/read a PDF near instantaneously; in Windows it's slow and clumsy. Saving (printing) anything as a PDF on a Mac is fast and easy. In Windows it's a slow, multi-click process.

And Linux... on the desktop... still not there. Yes with the right hardware and the right drivers and config, distros like Fedora can be pretty close to perfect. But you still have HiDPI problems sometimes (Windows does as well), random UI-related service crashes, app/package-system conflicts (since there is no one standard package management system that all apps agree upon), and more.

Sadly, the entire computing experience has peaked and declined in the last few years. That said, macOS is still the best desktop OS for everything but gaming.

Your comment reads as someone who has an axe to grind with windows since you just trash it without explaining why and just saying that 'X is so much better on Mac, why can't windows be like that' is hardly an impartial argument and more you being more familiar with the Mac platform and less with windows.

Assuming everyone has all the problems you claim to have with Windows or XPSs and that MacOS is 'the best operating system' is anecdotal at best.

We've definitely had some issues with some XPSs at work but Dell's service was great, and I can't remember the last time someone got annoyed by windows or had any issues like you described without the fault coming from poor choices from our corporate IT or buggy apps.

> I hope you like high heat, high fan noise, and thermal throttling issues (common XPS issues that myself and others have experienced).

Highlighting these as issues on a machine compared to a Macbook Pro is kind of hilarious. Macbooks have notoriously bad thermals and throttling.

I use a XPS13 from 2019? with KUbuntu running Plasma, it's really good. Had hardly any issues and runs great. Main issue with XPS13 is that the RAM is soldered on. Great unit otherwise. Screen is great.

I was going to shrug off this comment as someone trying to hate, but there is a lot of truth to it.

I prefer Windows to IoS and the XPS to MBP, but the XPS has problems - it does overheat like hell (but Dell's gaming laptops don't, so there is that). But more importantly, the screen randomly dies on random updates for me and a lot of my co-workers. So does the WiFi.

Nonetheless, we had entire teams convert to the XPS after they saw mine.

None of them regretted it...though they all installed Linux and stopped having the screen going dead problems.

I'm sure the bugs you mention about Windows exist and are terrible, but I made the switch to Windows after converting to Mac ~9 years ago and I haven't experienced anything but very minor annoyances.

I still prefer the Mac OS experience, design, and usability, but the price premium for Apple products is not worth this modest improvement. I still have and enjoy my Iphone Xs but might consider switching to Android in a couple years whenever I need to upgrade.

I switched to Windows 10 about 3 years ago. Absolutely no problems. I'm careful to stay on the "happy path", but my Lenovo laptop works fine out of the box, and my Supermicro based desktop dual-Xeon workstation works great, too. Speedy and reliable.

I do agree with you on thermal management on Windows 'ultra'books. I've had two now with crazy bad thermal throttling. Often fans going when very little CPU load, and then when I do use the CPU/GPU hard, it pegs it back so much that it is unusable. I've seen it pegging a Ryzen CPU down to 0.5GHz which makes the whole system unusable. The laptop doesn't feel ridiculously hot to touch, so no idea what is going on.

Being a lifelong Windows users I am always baffled at comments such as these because I have never experienced any of those issues except for maybe the Windows update happening for a couple minutes when I shut down. I'm no gamer, but I am usually cramming my computers with high CPU IDEs, VMs, crypto mining software, and anything else I can fart around with. Am I doing it wrong? How can I have this terrible experience?

I've generally had your experience but I've had a few instances where third parties failed to play nice. HP puts weird bloatware and recovery partitions that do some naughty things in their laptops. I had one relatively recent hp workstation laptop that HP messed up so bad it wouldn't update. I just run Arch on it now.

In general though, I've not had those kind of hardware/driver issues ever.

> And Linux... on the desktop... still not there.

Disagreed. Besides HiDPI, which is not an issue for me, I don't experience the other problems you mentioned.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com