Ask HN: Tips on moving from macOS to Windows 10 | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tips on moving from macOS to Windows 10

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As DIY PC builds drop in price and rise in power, we're looking heavily at bailing on the MacOS ecosystem for work purposes. Our computers are tools and most of our work sees gains from Nvidia GPUs (video, graphics).

Does anyone who has recently made the switch have any tips, feedback, things to look out for?

A big thing for me, is the loss of terminal. File management, tools like rsync, have been a big part of why I love MacOS. Windows has come a long way but there's a lot to learn and figure out to get that kind of workflow back up and running.

Heck, just not being able to hit the space bar to preview media files is going to take months to get used to.

I'm not sure I'll ever get used to limitations of drive letter assignments either. Unix like volume names are so forgiving.

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I moved from Mac to Windows at beginning of this year. I thought it would be pain but it was not. I had used Windows years ago which was sluggish; so I was afraid a little but Windows 10 is as smooth as it can get.

With WSL you are not going to miss terminal. Other small features you mentioned like previewing media files with space, I still miss them. I still sometimes hit space on media files and wait for preview.

But there are some inbuilt features of Windows 10 like to be able to keep multiple items in clipboard and choose from them during pasting which I really like.

Overall as a dev I would still prefer a Mac over Windows; but new Windows is not as bad as I had thought.

Well this is probably not the Windows you remember. WSL is a thing now if you want your bash shell and powershell is actually a great alternative. Passing structured objects instead of formatted text you have to parse is pretty amazing.

Also it feels like Microsoft is catering to the power user more and more while Apple is dumbing their OS down with every release. In a few more years you may have no choice.

I'm also looking to move off Mac as primary desktop but looking more towards Linux and FreeBSD. But I use Windows, Linux and Mac every day.

So I've been a windows user for years, for the cost/benefit reasons you mention.

The first thing I used to do was install bash via cygwin. Now I install git + bash. That gets me most of the unix tools I'm familiar with. I haven't played with the WSL, though.

The second thing I install is virtualbox and vagrant, which lets me develop on linux. It's a bit of a pain in terms of mapping ports and remembering to bind servers to 0.0.0.0 rather than localhost, but again, you get all the benefits of unix.

What I don’t like about WSL is that I spend most of my time in the shell doing stuff and interacting with the OS.

But WSL isn’t the OS. It’s still a Linux virtual machine running on top of Windows.

Now, there’s ways to interact with Windows from WSL and vice versa but they’re not fast nor efficient.

I just wanted to warn others thinks about making this jump. If you spend a lot of time in shell interacting with the OS, it’s probably not going to work like you think it will.

Don’t make any big financial bets until you’ve played around with it awhile.

Just to nitpick technically the Linux VM is running beside a Windows VM, when you use WSL.

But your point remains, and frankly I don’t quite get all the hubbub about WSL when Linux VMs have existed for years. Do people really think it’s somehow different?

> technically the Linux VM is running beside a Windows VM

Say what now? I think I was correct in my initial comment.

In WSL2, Windows uses Hyper-V to run a VM. But Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, so it runs on bare metal, not as a service within a regular Operating system.

So when you use WSL2, both Windows and Linux are running as virtual machines, under Hyper-V.

I use both mac and windows and when i need to use command line utilities i use MobaXTerm give it a try is a really nice terminal for windows and also allows you to install other unix utilities .

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