Much better. In general, "creative" APIs (e.g. audio playback, camera/image processing) tend to have well-rounded APIs on iOS.
For many things, they both work well in general (Windows is better for "document stuff" and file management, Mac a little better in window management etc., but comparable in general).
But when it comes to media stuff (think: cropping a lossless audio file and compressing the result into an AAC or MP3, resizing 20 images, transcoding a movie from one format to the other, removing one page from a PDF), on Mac it can usually be done with built in tools. On Windows you often need either a prohibitively expensive software suite or go on an ad infested crapware hunt resulting in a borderline unusable tool.
I wanted to download a program so that I could control my fans a bit better. Before I knew it, it took over my browser and would redirect me to other sites, couldn't remove the program either. Norton didn't do its job, and I didn't do mine because I probably unchecked one box too few during the installation process. The only way to fix this was to wipe the disk completely.
I've never had this experience on Mac or Linux.
I personally just uninstall Malwarebytes and bitdefender after I clean up and make sure windows defenders up and running and I'm ready to download all kinds of shit off the internet again.
I think the best way to find niche software on windows is to search for open source alternatives.
Making a system restore point from time to time can help greatly too on windows! (make sure you change the setting so that it doesn't delete your old system restore points due to low disk space making the whole thing useless)
I would not assume that malware is actually purged, and unpacking backup archive and running script to reinstall software is not so troublesome (assuming that you have backups and script to automate installing your programs, but if you are on HN then you probably have it)
I use Clonezilla for backups.
Executing strange binary files from untrusted sources could ruin your day on Mac and Linux as well. It is only less common because market share is so small compared to Windows, and as such these systems are less of a target.
I know what I do, I generally try to find user reviews, but someone had to install it first.
Which tools are these? On Mac I ended up using Audacity for cropping audio files, ffmpeg (cli) to compress it, and used either ffmpeg or Handbrake for transcoding. I don't remember what I used for pdf page split/combine, but I do remember that it was a pain.
Honest question - as I still use Mac occasionally, it'd be great to know what are those builtin tools so I can actually use the features the OS has.
PDF page manipulation is the easiest thing on macOS, also quite robust usually. Just open the document in Preview and open the page sidebar. You can reorder or remove pages there; or drag and drop pages from other documents.
Quicktime Pro could do this all very well, Quicktime X however? It can trim but the UI is bad and encoding options are so limited I stopped using it all together.
Apart from that, more advanced 1st party apps for editing (for certain values of advanced) are available free - iMovie for video, GarageBand for audio, Pages for documents, etc.
I am still to discover a built in set of tools on either platform. I use 3rd party to accomplish my daily tasks on both.
Can you elaborate on this? I've been using a Mac for work for a couple of years now and I find the out-of-the-box window management experience pretty bad compared to Windows. No snapping to sides or corners, no quick resize to standard sizes other than maximum, and most importantly no easy way to change between multiple windows of the same program using keyboard shortcuts. I've been using Magnet [1] and Contexts [2] to improve things, but it's a shame I have to use paid third party apps for basic functionality like this.
But, everyone has a different workflow. I can imagine that if you're a heavier shortcuts user, Windows works better.
[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-task-view-windows-10
Spotlight is great and puts Windows 10's search to shame, although it feels like it has gotten worse in the past few years.
Try also using “Move focus to active or next window”. I have that mapped to Option-Command-` (and implicitly Option-Shift-Command-` for reverse order).
That's fine by me to be honest—I paid for it once and it's done everything I need it to ever since.
CMD + ` (backtick)
I picked it because it was closest to the window-snapping / sizing bindings I had in XFCE years ago, but it basically makes OSX window management no longer frustrating.
For basic audio/video stuff on Windows, try http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/
Didn't use to be this way in the QuickTime Pro ecosystem but since QuickTime X you can't just work with any old video files.
I need to echo the sibling comment. I was overwhelmed with how bad Mac window management is in a multi-monitor setup. This is compounded by Apple's apparent hatred of keyboard shortcuts and power users. Speaking to my longtime Mac-loving coworkers, they displayed Sapir-Whorf-like inability to understand why the missing features/behaviors are even a problem.
In a the Covid/WFH world, I'm happy to let the 16" MBP collect dust while I use computers that adapt to me, rather than forcefully adapting myself to one particular computer's eccentricities.
If your willing to spend the money Adobe Media Encoder works perfectly fine on Windows as well.