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Comment by walexander | Hacker News Reader

OK, someone convince me to go Mac.

I've had essentially zero issues with Windows. I do 99% of my development in Linux (access my devbox through VNC). For desktop use, I have absolutely no problems. I work very fast zooming around with keyboard shortcuts. I don't get viruses or bloatware. Everything is calm and familiar.

Every time I get my hands on a Mac, even to simply Google something, I immediately hit issues. Paste is crazy squiggly hash v (or maybe apple v?), I can't right click, I can't win+d to the desktop. I'm sure all of these things are possible, but I'm fumbling around like my grandpa when I taught him to email.

At this point, I'm pretty sure it can't all be brand hype (my thoughts a few years ago). I'd really like to know what the incentive is for throwing away years of muscle memory, familiarity, and tweaking ability.

So, go ahead, someone sell me on Macs.

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> Every time I get my hands on a Mac, even to simply Google something, I immediately hit issues.

You seem to hit issues because you want to hit them.

> Paste is crazy squiggly hash v (or maybe apple v?)

The key is called "command". Does "Command V" not make more sense than "Control V"? And free up the Control key for more interesting stuff?

> I can't right click

You can, unless it's a 4+ years old machine it's just a preference (if you're using a trackpad). Any 2+ buttons mouse will natively "right click". Even on older machine, Ctrl+click will open a contextual menu.

> I can't win+d to the desktop

"Show Desktop" is natively bound to Command-F3 on modern macs, on older ones it was on F11. It may also be bound to an active corner.

> So, go ahead, someone sell me on Macs.

Don't know if that will sell you. For me it was a combination of several things:

* Unix environment with an actually useable terminal. By default. Even in 10.3/10.4 (and Terminal has come a long way since then). cmd.exe never "felt" right, I never found a windows shell worth using (even Putty is a pain), and if you're going to remote log into a nix machine anyway why not use one in the first place?

Spotlight works much, much better than Windows Search, and dedicated launcher applications (QS, Alfred, QSB, Butler, etc...) take that a step further

* 99% of the time, managing applications is Simply Easier. No fudging around with installer or painfully browsing to your Program Files folder (and wondering if the soft is 32 or 64b and in which program files you should put it and if you should create a shortcut so the bloody windows search can find it and...). Instead, open your archive (zip or dmg), drop the .app bundle in the Applications directory (via the dock or your finder sidebar) and launch it whenever. You can even launch it right there, nothing to do, no time wasted.

* A thriving indie community with loads of good software at fair price. I did buy licenses one Windows, but not many, and I did not find much which made me go "damn I have to give these guys some dough back for their work", even after I stopped being a poor student.

* Package managers. Whichever your pick is between Macports, Fink and Homebrew having one is invaluable.

* The machine is generally useable as is. Even if you don't download anything it can be used, you have a good PDF & image viewer (Preview is fairly amazing), lots of serviceable software, and it does not "feel" as clunky as windows long did.

Only negative I've found is that Finder is not as good as the Windows Explorer. Though with Windows 7, they've become significantly closer in that search has become shit in 7's explorer.

Essentially, OSX is a full unix with a bearable interface, softed by people who care.

Now if you don't do any dev on your box, it might lose some of its appeal.

The Finder can be replaced with Pathfinder - the Finder for Hacker News readers...

Meh. I find Pathfinder clunky and ugly. For improvements to the Finder I much prefer TotalFinder: http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/

Oooh, nice, hadn't heard of that.

Good points. Though it seems like you and the other repliers are selling him based purely on downsides of Windows. A modern Linux such as Ubuntu has more or less all of the things you've mentioned, and as a biased Gentoo Linux user I'd argue in many cases Linux does it better. ( http://www.thingsfittogether.com/2011/08/start-developing-fo... ) So it seems like you're arguing "Mac is a better environment to use VNC for your Linux than Windows is." Unless you want to convince him he also should switch to Mac for development? I'm actually curious how much the GP does on his Linux box besides development. Personally I only use Windows for games and the occasional x-to-exe conversion. (Oh and Flex development at work with Adobe's Flash Builder.)

You get the features of Linux with the ability to run commercial content creation apps like Flash, Photoshop and Cubase. It's very win-win for someone who does a lot of different kinds of work. And since all the shortcuts use Command, the Control key gives you free Emacs keybindings in every text field.

I was only able to give up on Mac OS X when I decided to give up on Adobe software thanks to Adobe's abysmal customer service. Now that I don't need to be able to run Photoshop, I just use Linux.

Until you want to go mobile. Linux on a laptop is still a hit-or-miss experience w.r.t fully functioning power management, wifi without workarounds, and integrated/discrete graphics cards. I know there are perfectly working laptops available out there, but it's still a hassle to track down, find reviews, verify compatibility as stated, then actually install linux since almost nothing ships preinstalled. Then you might want to run QT/GTK/Wx/Tk stuff all side by side on the same machine and that lacks cohesiveness and makes a linux desktop feel very hacked together.

Also, trackpads.

What about Home and End keys? I used a Mac for 6 months, but really really really missed the Home and End keys to go to the beginning and end of lines... Terminal is hell without them...

Ctrl-a, ctrl-e for beginning/end of line. Standard emacs keybindings work almost everywhere in OS X. But, you can also rebind the home/end keys - http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html

Edit: On a Macbook Pro, home/end are fn-left/right-arrow and page-up/down are fn-up/down-arrow.

>>> Ctrl-a, ctrl-e for beginning/end of line.

Alternatively: Command+← and Command+→ .

Don't have the iMac anymore, but what made matters worse was that I switched Control and Command to make more of my shortcuts work. Command+C or Command+V isn't a very natural finger movement on the Mac keyboard I had. Ctrl+V fits much better and matched up many more (Windows) keyboard shortcuts.

But it made shortcut listings more confusing, because that would become Ctrl+← and Ctrl+→ (which I'm pretty sure I tried in Terminal but would always skip to the end of the command line, not the end of the screen line). The only keyboard shortcut that hurt after switching command and ctrl was in chrome. Chrome's History is Ctrl+H on windows, but Command-Y on mac, due to Command+H hiding the current window. That got me every time.

The home and end keys drive me crazy.

Why is a package manager useful? (I really don't know what's wrong with the default environment of OSX, if there's anything wrong at all.)

If you're coming from a linux environment, you're probably used to having Apt or Yum available. OSX has no built in package manager so you've either got go out and find compiled binaries somewhere or install from source, both of which are tedious and searching the web for it is time consuming vs. the `brew install wget` commands that you can probably guess and it'll take care of installation in the background while you do something else.

See here for stuff you can install with one command: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tree/master/Library/Formula...

Oh, I see, so you cannot use yum on OSX? I never realised it (or its packages) wouldn't be compatible.

No, Yum isn't available or compatible, it's coupled to Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS linux distributions like Apt is coupled to Debian/Ubuntu/Mint distributions.

Homebrew/MacPorts/Fink are nearly the same thing, they just don't come installed by default on OSX.

Got it! Thank you!

Speed and reliability. Take open source. You could manually find, download, untar, configure, make, install and track dependencies. A good package manager lets you do that in one command e.g.:

  $ brew install package_name

OSX includes a package manager for proprietary packages blessed by Apple. It's fast and reliable but its curators forbid most open source and proprietary packages. It's called App Store.

Ignoring the problem of software availability, the App Store also lacks a fast command line interface. I can kick off a homebrew package install process and return to whatever I was doing faster than the App Store.app launches.

Thanks. A lot of people are telling me how to do the keyboard shortcuts in Mac. Well, I realize you can do them, I realize I'll have a small learning curve. My point was: that's a saved cost if I don't switch, so what's the ROI for taking that time? I'm not trying to start a holy war or point out how "ridiculous" macs are to use. I'm simply stating I have to go grok mac, I see a lot of other people have, and wonder if I should.

I'll say, cmd.exe is complete shit and almost enough. The OSX terminal has essentially been the only thing I've seen in the past that makes me want to switch and maybe one day that will do it.

Also, I guess the compatibility mode and admin mode constant switching around is a bit of a PITA. So, that's probably a good reason as well.

Maybe it will come down to apps though. So far, I'm quite happy with Win desktop apps, but I guess I can get most in OSX anyway.

Thanks for your comments.

I switched to mac from windows a couple of months ago. I guess I am still waiting for the magic to happen.

OS X is fine. There are the initial annoyances which I was expecting, like the different hotkeys. Fine, I got over most of those pretty quickly. But there are things that still annoy me. For instance, there seems to be only one hotkey that opens the application menu. On Windows I am used to pressing the alt-key and then the given underlined letter of the menu that I want to open. I have a lot of "secondary" hotkeys memorized this way. In Photoshop for instance, "alt+i, p" is "crop" -- there is no (default) hotkey for crop and now I have to use the mouse.

Not using Lion yet so I couldn't say if the fullscreen mode is going to cure my longing for maximize but the point of that green plus-thing on every window is completely beyond me. The reason I maximize windows is because I want to focus on a single thing, not because I want to see a bit more of content.

I prefer Explorer to Finder. I'm sure this will get better but again it feels like Finder was made for the mouse more than the keyboard, compared to Explorer (mac-gurus, how can I see and copy the path that I am currently browsing?). I also prefer the behavior of alt-tab in Windows of switching between windows rather than apps. The fact that two documents happen to be opened by the same executable seems arbitrary to me and it annoys me that I have to first switch to the app I want and then to the window I want.

There is, I think, a noticeable difference in the way processes and threads are prioritized. I am sure OSX is better at this but it mostly just feels different to me. Processes seem less able to take down the entire system but on the other hand, music playing apps will sometimes lag which seems to never happen on Windows.

All that said, I am still happy. I love the hardware. The air has enough performance for me (even running two simultaneous win7 vm's with visual studio) and I get happy every time I double check my bag to make sure I remembered my laptop because it's so light. And there are definitely upsides to OSX such as Spotlight which feels like your own personal google (with everything including calculator and dictionary) whereas on Windows it feels like all search gets me is the indexer eating up all my cpu.

Here's how I did it:

Step One: Come up with some lame excuse for why you probably need a Mac. You know, Testing. Gotta make sure it looks right on Safari and all that. Maybe we'll be doing an iOS version at some point.

Step Two: Convince yourself that you'll install Windows 7 on it to see if you can maybe use it as your dev box. It'll just be a windows machine on cooler hardware.

Step Three: Go to Apple.com and configure the most pimped-out Macbook Air they'll let you specify. Hey, it's only Two Grand. That's less than your last laptop cost. And look at it! It's half an inch thick.

Step Four: Actually buy it. Get it home, take it out of the box, pick it up (between your thumb and forefinger it's so freaking light), and play with it.

(optional by this point) Step Five: Install Windows 7 and Parallels. It really does work as well as they say. It'll be the fastest windows box you've ever run. Oh, and if you're doing VS.NET web dev, specify a big partition because it won't let you run in debug mode if your project files are sitting on the main partition.

... And that's it. Now you have a Mac. It's actually a pretty cool little machine.

yeah its actually pretty slow compared to my vaio Z on Windows... and the energy saving drivers on Windows are poor at best on Macs. (by design, heh)

I am amused by the number of people who actually run Windows in // or vmware or vbox on their Mac cause they need apps that don't exist on Macs, or just have crappy support. Likewise for Linux apps which they run on OSX that way because the so great OSX underlaying unix makes it too complicated to port a couple of CLI apps (not even mentioning the GUI apps - UI toolkits for OSX all look horrible)

Running OSX is actually just to be part of the hype.

I bought a Mac two years ago for iPhone dev (which I ended up not doing), and in my opinion you don't have to switch to a Mac if you are already a Linux user. I still prefer Linux.

The only problem is buying any other notebooks that are good. It is very difficult to find notebooks with acceptable design and specs.

I have to say I am not a Mac power user. I am too lazy to learn gestures (and hence don't want to update to Lion, either). I never use the F3 to show the desktop because I keep forgetting the key (Linux and Windows have clickable icons in the taskbar, much better for me).

Agreed. When looking at laptops that have decent spec and to run Ubuntu on, you suddenly reach the same price as a Macbook Air.

Asus.

May I suggest you look into "Hot Corners", which is built into OS X and allows you to specify certain actions when moving the mouse to the very corner of the screen.

I heavily use the gestures, but I still find these rather handy

My setup is; Top Left: Show Desktop Top Right: Expose (on Lion, Mission Control) Bottom Left: Blank Screen (without sleeping) Bottom Right: Screensaver

Hot corners seem like a terrible idea, simply because they're far too easy to acquire (by Fitts' Law). I don't want Expose or whatever to show up every single time I move my mouse to the top right corner, which is often accidentally.

I've had this setup for years now, and never accidentally done this.

Don't forget on a Mac you're much less often moving your mouse to the top right corner (window closing is on the top left of a window.

The further most icons are always the Apple on the left, and Spotlight on the right. Both of which I rarely open by hand. If I'm using Spotlight it's always by keyboard command Cmd-Space (though often I use Alfred instead).

And at least on a Laptop I rarely need to shutdown the Mac, which is all I'd use the Apple menu for. Though again, anything I'd go to that menu for I use Alfred for instead.

May be worth turning it on and see how you get on with it?

Don't forget on a Mac you're much less often moving your mouse to the top right corner (window closing is on the top left of a window.

I move the mouse to the top right whenever I want to just get it out of the way.

May be worth turning it on and see how you get on with it?

I don't use a Mac. Wait, let me correct that -- I use a MacBook, but with Windows on it almost all the time.

As for leaving windows, just leave. It doesn't matter where. There's a pain to using windows you just get used to, it's just more of a subtle irritation that comes from using a system where the creators didn't want to make something particularly good. It's literally painful for me to use windows now that I don't do it very often anymore. There are just so many little things that hurt that I just can't do it. I start yelling at the screen about random UI choices rather quickly.

The Mac is honestly more pleasurable to use. Copy/Paste are Apple-C, Apple-V, and the other keyboard shortcuts are honestly more sensible than on windows. Not perfect -- there is no such thing as a perfect mapping, but very good. You can tell that someone on the UI side (or rather, many someones) actually cares about the little things that make the system easy to use.

With all that said, why not use a linux box? On major platforms (e.g. lenovo), they're reasonably well behaved on laptops, and really, it's more than good enough (in my book, windows is playing catch-up with ubuntu in usability now) for daily use.

(for the record: Ubuntu desktop at work, Mac work & home laptops, solaris desktop at home (long story))

They care so much they bind execute to cmd-down rather than the completely sensible Enter.

after almost 2 years of using os x i only knew that now... always wondered how you could start an app from the keyboard. i never bothered to ask since i'm mostly in iterm and tmux sessions. thanks :)

Cmd-O has opened files and applications alike since I can remember (OS 6.) It's no more/less sensible than Windows, just different.

I would argue in this instance that open is a more common action than rename and thus belongs to the enter key.

Plus every terminal (including on Mac) and every other OS uses Enter to execute a command or program.

Edit: wow, downvoted for expressing a fact. Stay classy.

  So, go ahead, someone sell me on Macs.

Why? If what you got is working for you, why should you switch? Why should anyone want to "sell" you on Macs?

  I immediately hit issues. Paste is crazy squiggly hash v (or maybe apple v?), 
  I can't right click, I can't win+d to the desktop.

I'm not quite sure what to make of your somewhat ridiculous list of issues, but that's really secondary to the main concern: people have different tastes, different usage styles and different expectations. If the Mac isn't for you, it's not for you period. Facts don't matter, preferences do. What's the point in evangelizing another platform when you're happy with your current one?

It's hard to understand where all this aggression around operating systems comes from. We're all extremely lucky because we get to choose freely from a great set of systems. You can pick any one of them that relates to you the most and then you can go out and be productive with it. Why is there any need to evangelize, criticize, sell, pressure, or judge other people based on their platform choice?

I simply don't get why people feel it's necessary to make statements like "XYZ sucks so much, I don't understand how to do the simplest things with it, can someone please sell me on this stupid XYZ?"

Then don’t switch. It doesn’t seem like the right choice for you. And that’s that.

I never again want to use Windows but I won’t be caught dead recommending OS X to anyone. It’s just stressful. (I’m suddenly personally responsible for any and all failures of the OS and hardware or I feel that way at any rate.)

I am sorry to say so, but as a constant switcher: all problems you describe are problems that are as easily solved on a Mac as on Windows. Yes, it is CTRL vs. APPLE and there is a Button for accessing the desktop (its on a different key for some machines. For mine, its F3). It won't sell you on a mac, but: it takes me roughly 5 Minutes to get it right again after switching and it took me about half a day to get it right. Its a problem of constant use and memory.

I also wouldn't recommend one solution over the other. I prefer APPLE (or COMMAND) as a command key more, but I'm sure thats because its positioned more favorably on the mac keyboard.

I can't win+d to the desktop.

Four finger swipe upwards if you are on a macbook or have a magic trackpad. Cmd-F3 otherwise.

Bottom line, if you're used to driving a car, getting around on a motorcycle is going to take some investment of effort and willingness to learn. I got to my mac from windows via a year or two of linux. I'm happy using all three. Happiest on mac.

That is pretty much like complaining why your new car has no built-in right of way.

Sure, keyboard shortcuts are different. But you kind of knew that beforehand, right? Seriously, if that is your biggest complaint, how did you ever get used to Linux?

If what you want from a Mac is for it to work exactly like Windows, down to the last keyboard shortcut: stick with Windows. You seem perfect for each other.

* Command-V to paste.

* Command-F3/the Exposé function button to reveal the desktop (on Apple keyboards, or you can change it; just search for Exposé in System Preferences).

* Enable right click in System Preferences > Mouse or Trackpad.

It just takes a little getting used to. But in the end all that really matters is what makes you most productive. All this elitism is stupid.

I'm a Unix person. My desktops still run Linux, and my laptops use to run Linux, too. I switched to Mac laptops simply because they are now good Unix boxes that actually work well on laptops.

Linux on laptops was inevitably painful in one way or another, and with a small price premium, I get the best of both worlds with Mac laptops now.

<i>So, go ahead, someone sell me on Macs.</i>

I can only tell you why I use one: OS X just gets out of my way and lets me get at my work.

What I do is systems administration - Windows, Solaris, Linux, BSD. Some light coding on the side.

Your mileage may vary.

For me it's about all the little things. There are so many little frustrating things on Windows that you don't even notice because you're just used to them and you don't even realize that life is possible without them.

It seems to me that a main overarching idea behind the design of OS X is "let's not overcomplicate things" and this really makes your life simpler, not just as a user, but also as a developer.

Easy. Keep Windows. It works - and well in fact. It's technologically well advanced. No matter what they want you to believe, the latest 10.7 OSX implemented features Windows had for 3 to 20 years. 20! And it's still missing some.

There no need to switch. It's not because everyone would start jumping off the cliff that you need to be convinced to do the same, right? Same story.

Why not to count which features in Lion Windows 7 has missing?

You really, really can't right click? Are you sure? How old is this Mac you are using?

Want to go Mac? Today? Forget it.

It was cool 10 years ago, but not today. Apple is turning into what M$ was back then: a control and patronize the users company. The main difference to Microsoft is, that Mac OS is a really good operating system.

I use Macs since 1995. Nowadays I hesitate to recommend a switch, although Mac OS is certainly better than Linux and, in my opinion, also Windows.

Apples notebook hardware was also superior for a long time. But today, look at Sony, Samsung, Lenovo. Not bad at all what you see there. And they still include optical drives :o).

This right here disqualifies any legitimate point you might have made in your post.

Hey, maybe some even have FDD?

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