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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

That's unfortunately their loss in my opinion. Windows has a pretty awesome development story, far better than Apple's authoritarian hold on what software can be run and distributed for that platform.

Moreover, gaming is great on Windows, and always has been, and WSL2 is extremely slick.

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During the past three years I went from being my workplace's Windows hater to ditching Linux in my personal machines in favor of Win + WSL2.

Why did you ditch Linux for WSL2?

> Apple's authoritarian hold on what software can be run and distributed for that platform

What does that mean? I've never needed Apple's permission to run any software on macOS.

Unless you go out out of your way to disable code signing using the terminal & a root account, macOS will only run code signed by an Apple issued certificate [1]. It will also phone home [2] every time a binary is ran for the first time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatekeeper_(macOS)

[2] https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/391399

You can literally just right click and press 'open'. Might not be obvious to the layman, but you don't need to do a whole code signing bypass song and dance.

Big Sur has made this intentionally more tedious [1]. You apparently have to right click, click open, close the dialogue and then open it again in order to actually get the option to approve the application.

[1] https://disable-gatekeeper.github.io/

I'd say this is a good thing.

If you can't even figure out how to bypass it, then you probably shouldn't.

I can't edit my comment so I'll just put this here: what is up with HN heavily downvoting factual, useful information? It seems something from the past 1-1.5y or so and it infuriates me to no end.

In aggregate, HN hates Apple. It's that simple, really.

In aggregate, HN loves/hates all of {GOOG, APPL, NFLX, TSLA, MS}.

Except for FB, everyone actually seems to hate them.

I had an overnight update install itself on my sole Windows machine the other night. When it rebooted it refused to let me use my own computer until I obtained direct permission from Microsoft giving them my email address. Once I was past that lock it told me "the computer is all yours now" as if it hadn't been earlier.

Does Apple completely deny your use of your own hardware like this until you submit? Asking because I have been used to Linux as a daily driver for over 20 years and haven't used Apple since Jobs banned clones.

1. You can disable auto updates

2. I've never entered an email for using Windows 10, they do try to hide it but you can set up an offline account.

> I had an overnight update install itself on my sole Windows machine the other night. When it rebooted it refused to let me use my own computer until I obtained direct permission from Microsoft giving them my email address.

This is not something that Windows does. Ever.

What do you mean by "obtained direct permission from Microsoft giving them my email address"? You're clearly not talking about logging into a Microsoft account so I'm struggling to understand what you're referring to.

Doesn’t Apple provide a system preference option to disable gatekeeper completely (set to running signed applications by default, and it also allows you to limit apps to App Store only).

The system preference option is no longer visible in recent releases of macOS – it can only be enabled via the terminal.

IOW, yes, you can disable it.

Right click -> Open -> Open

That's not needing Apple's permission; that's me giving my permission.

Actually, they had an outage when Catalina was released because Macs phone home before starting 3rd party software.

https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/15/apple-explains-addresses-mac-...

Gaming is, in fact, the only reason to have Windows installed on any computer. Even though Wine and Proton are impressive projects, I'm somewhat pessimistic about their ability to completely replace Windows.

I won't be sad if I'm wrong there.

Right now, it's a bit like using Firefox instead of Chrome. They both render the website but some devs exploit Chrome only tech that Firefox hasn't yet implemented workarounds for and those won't work.

If you're ok with that, you can officially replace windows with Linux.

>far better than Apple's authoritarian hold on what software can be run and distributed for that platform.

No such hold exists on MacOS. You're confusing it with iOS.

Windows is better for gaming, but that doesn't matter to everybody.

You realize there’s no issue with development internally for Apple products at Apple on macOS, right?

And generally if you work at Apple you actually like/prefer/love Apple products?

WSL2 is slick, but the process of getting on Windows Insider Program and updating Windows to the right version is quite clunky.

You no longer have to be a member of the Windows Insider Program. There's a simplified installation method if you are, but if you're not, you can install WSL2 manually.

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