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Comment by ValentineC | Hacker News Reader

> I've definitely gone from "I'll buy a mac because it's a mac" to "Maybe my next machine will be Windows. It's cheaper, more reliable, and just works"

I'm still on Mojave on my 2013 MacBook Pro.

The main reason I'd still consider a Mac for my next machine is because there's no other manufacturer that seems to take their trackpads seriously.

Why is there no real competition for Apple's trackpads?

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There are efforts to make libinput compete, but maybe a majority of GNU users just don’t care because keyboard-centric workflows (using tiling WMs, etc. so you never have to leave the home row) just feel so much more efficient and ergonomic.

Same for me, the trackpad is the main reason I don't want to switch away from Macbooks. It's just unreasonably good. I fear that the amount of software and hardware integration required to get to this level is so high the we will not see it anywhere else anytime soon. But I'd like to be wrong.

Some laptop manufactures want to be as successful as Apple and copying some of Macbook's features, such as soldered RAM, CPU and hard drive. But for some reason it just doesn't help. Instead, they should invest in display and trackpad and everyone will forgive such downsides as: extra thickness; maybe less "industrial" design; ports other than USB-C; keyboard keys that don't stick

I've been happily using Microsoft Surface Go for the past 6 months. No complaints (about the hardware - software is another issue, though TBH what I miss the most is a good command line & package manager).

Wsl ubuntu and hyper terminal for nix, then chocolatey for windows apps should have you covered

I’m not on Windows but whenever I have to be I use Chocolatey to manage installations.

Is WSL not supported?

WSL works, but it's not nearly as integrated as a native CLI in MacOSx. For example, accessing Windows files from WSL is tricky, the other direction as well. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely an improvement over what we had before, but the overhead is such that I still primarily seek out native Windows executables (was just installing JVM and Bison (parser generator) the other day).

My approach is to simply organize work so that anything development oriented is kept in the WSL home dir and keep docs and PowerPoints in the Windows Documents dir which covers 95% of my use cases. The new Windows terminal is also pretty cool. I prefer this because I've sometimes run into weird assumptions that Unix utils make in a Windows environment based on how they've been compiled (eg. If they're built using Cygwin)

It's not quite there, but I find my Lenovo trackpad to be quite excellent. Probably within 5% of Apple's, which is good enough for me.

Which Lenovo are you using? I have an older Ideapad (circa 2017) and a new 2020 Thinkpad and the trackpads on the two are uniformly awful

Which Lenovo? The trackpad on my t480 is subpar to say the least.

> The main reason I'd still consider a Mac for my next machine

Well you're in for a surprise once they render your Mac completely obsolete in a few years.

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