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Comment by fizzled | Hacker News Reader

All of these people saying: switch to Windows, its better than mac!

Have you really done that? REALLY? Because I work on Mac, Win10 and Linux every day. And Win10 doesn't even come close to the other two in terms of reliability, stability, and lack of unnecessary bullshit.

I just don't understand who can make this claim that Win is better than Macos with a straight face. Maybe for gaming. Maybe. The cost/fps is clearly better for Windows machines, but Apple puts so much more thought into their OS than windows. Hell, Windows still pops a Win95 dialog for drivers. Come on, man. Seriously? MacOs doesn't have built in ads on the home screen. MacOS has no REAL viruses, and clicking on malware is even harder now than Windows.

Downvote me all you want, but I think a lot of people on this thread have never even used a mac for more than five minutes, let alone developed on one. HN monoculture is real.

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> I think a lot of people on this thread have never even used a mac for more than five minutes, let alone developed on one.

I have when I started a new job and they gave me a macbook and said it's the only option. After 2 weeks I told them I'll need a linux box asap or I'll look for a different job.

It's in my opinion the absolute worst garbage of an operating system I've ever had the displeasure of using and their window manager is a completely unusable pile of shit. Their hardware doesn't have proper cooling and burns your hands if you actually use your CPU.

People have different tastes and I really don't think you should assume people haven't tried.

Yes, I too think windows is way better than OSX, but well I also think windows is pretty shit. However, I wouldn't quit my job over having to use windows, I would have for OSX.

I have the same opinion as well, to each their own. On my case Mac OS is dead last in my personal list when it comes to developing, I would even put it behind windows despite all the windows issues I hate.

I had similar experience. They gave me a brand new beefed up macbook. I tried to like that thing. I really did. For months.

One day I just got tired of that thing overheating and being loud. Was given a real linux machine to work with.

What OS are you running on linux that makes the experience worth it over macOS? I've grown up using macs and am used to the UI quite a bit. Have a work machine (t580) and used Ubuntu and Fedore. Both have been quite challenging to use with lots of Graphics Issues. Sure the thing runs everything I throws at it in terms of docker/system-services/etc., but UI stuff is really ugly.

(not the OP) If you like the macOS style interface, I would recommend ElementaryOS which is the closest thing UI-wise.

> Ubuntu and Fedora

> but UI stuff is really ugly.

Have you tried a linux distro without an ugly UI ? Ubuntu especially is a horrid horrid UI.

I use both daily, I love a lot of things about MacOS but I also love how insanely powerful my PC is for the price, OS preferences stop mattering when one machine can render a 4K image in 40 seconds using CUDA GPUs and the other it would take hours.

Windows 10 is slowly getting better every year and honestly there are only a handful of things left that I think really lag behind Mac, Explorer being the main one.

> reliability, stability,

They're basically identical at this point, my PC runs for months on end just fine. One of my macs does the same, my USB-C MBP is the only standout as it kernel panics in it's sleep most nights.

If your Windows machine is having stability issues you probably have bad hardware, like my USB-C MacBook.

> and lack of unnecessary bullshit.

I'd say they're both about the same, windows has it's issues but so does MacOS, my mac asks me every single day if I want to update the OS and there is no "No" option only "Restart" and "Later", it also warns me 10 times a day that the disk space is running low, yep I know it's low because it's a 128GB machine, nothing I can do to fix that.

The days of Apple being against this sort of stuff is over, my iPhone asks me once a month to subscribe to Apple music when I open my Music app, out of the box iPhones have Apple News notifications. Daily OS upgrade request on MacOS

>but I think a lot of people on this thread have never even used a mac for more than five minutes, let alone developed on one. HN monoculture is real.

I for one, use mac and develop on it for my job, and I like windows significantly more than mac. Dunno how many people here are like me, but I don't think this kind of assumption is fair.

Number 2 here, use Mac as my day job, Windows for side jobs/home, Linux for server and things like media boxes. I prefer Windows.

I used exclusively Mac on my personal machines from 2005 to 2018. Then I switched to a Windows 10 laptop mostly because I was curious and it was cheap.

Windows 10 + WSL is amazing. It's definitely getting better all the time while macOS is getting worse each year. Plus more and more I just seem to only need Chrome, VSCode, and a Terminal.

So yes I have done it, and I now prefer Windows.

> Windows 10 + WSL is amazing.

It truly is. Especially Surface Go - the best portable computer IMO (iPads aren't real computers).

Until it forcefully restarts to update overnight, killing all you apps.

Perhaps it's you who is bad if you need handrails to not fall off the stairs when using Win10.

I'm not claiming it's a good OS, but it is definitely possible to make it usable if you spend 20 minutes reading and 1 hour configuring.

>Have you really done that? REALLY?

I did that after 13 years as an Apple/Mac customer. I was enough of an Apple fanboy that I queued on Day 1 for iPhone 4, and did various other things that only diehard Mac users who obsessively read Daring Fireball and MacRumors do.

I use a ThinkPad X1 running Windows 10 as my daily driver now.

The last Mac I bought was so unreliable that it had to be repaired six times by the Apple Store. Every six months the internal SATA cable failed. (Mid-2012 MBP, it's a known design flaw.) On one of those occasions, I had to help the Apple "Genius" understand what a SATA flex cable was, how it plugs into a drive, and provide him with part numbers because he couldn't find the parts on his Genius iPad. Apple refused to give me a replacement machine when I saw the manager after the second incident. It wasn't until the 5th time (!) that they finally offered a replacement Mac laptop... however, it would have been a 1st Gen butterfly keyboard model. Y'know, the model known to break so often that Apple introduced a separate "warranty" just for the keyboards.

It honestly took me until the 6th repair to understand that being an Apple customer (nevermind an Apple developer) is being in an abusive relationship. I had to get out, because frankly I needed to get work done instead of all this Apple Store repair downtime.

And that's not counting the $100s of App Store software I've lost when Apple forgot to renew their App Store Developer certificates & now the OS thinks those apps are corrupt, and I can't redownload them because the App Store doesn't keep old versions. Or how Apple mistakenly revoked the developer certificate for Charlie Munroe Software, so now the Eon business timer app I use has been remotely disabled by Apple, even though there's nothing wrong with it and Apple admits it was a false positive. Much like the false positive that won't let me launch my old REALbasic compiler anymore because Apple has flagged it as malware too. At least I stayed on High Sierra, so the 32-bit software that interfaces with my digital hardware guitar amp still works.

I've had my ThinkPad a couple of years now. I don't "love" it, but it hasn't broken on me in all that time, making it more reliable than all 4 Mac laptops I've owned. The keyboard is better than any Mac keyboard I've used, except maybe the 2000-era Pismo G3. Sometimes reliability and stability is more important - just get work done with the least downtime. I can run more audio software on Windows than was ever available for my Mac. I've never had a virus on Windows and I only run the built-in firewall & anti-virus, and I don't need to deal with that Xcode worm that's going around right now. And while there's a ton of apps that don't use it yet, the Windows approach to HiDPI works better for me than the Mac 2x / 4x system... being able to run a crisp 1.5x on my external monitor instead of jumbo 2x icons is bliss.

Honestly, I do understand where you're coming from, there's a lot Mac OS X got right and a ton of areas for Windows still to improve, but this is not the Snow Leopard era Apple anymore. Apple just doesn't care, unless it's an iPhone. And I switched to Android years ago....

Windows 10 is fine in terms of reliability and stability. In fact I find it better than Mac.

However in terms of the actual topic - code signing, Windows is almost as bad. If you run an unsigned program now you get a Smart Screen prompt and you have to click a small "More info" link and then "Run anyway".

It's a bit more obvious than Mac, and I believe there is some system to recognise common but unsigned binaries, but they're still clearly trying to head in the same direction, Apple are just a bit further down the slope.

I switched to Win10 last November after 7 years on OSX (and 9 years before that on Linux). I've had no issues with it. Are you sure you use Win10 everyday?

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