Comment by nstart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nstart | Hacker News Reader

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I dont know how to explain it. I’ve used all major OS’s including a couple of flavors of Linux. I just love windows. 11 is pretty awesome for me where I use it on my surface pro 8 and it’s just really nice especially with touch. Touch is definitely a huge part of my workflow too to the point that when I sit at my desktop I sometimes try to touch the screen.

There are so many tiny quality of life things like being able to use auto hot key to macro my way around daily stuff or how the file explorer works in a way that feels more intuitive. The little thing of being able to win+shift+s and snip a part of the screen where it loads into the clipboard immediately and does not save to a file by default. I heart power toys so much especially fancy zones which I use extensively. I also do like customizing my start menu. I find building my native home brew apps for the OS to be more pleasant. I find the windows terminal to be a fabulous experience I couldn’t live without now. Wsl is a blessing where I have multiple OS’s which I need and they don’t bog the system down. All my games work fine. I just… I really love the OS and what it lets me do.

Other OS’s could probably do similar things (auto hot key is your final boss though) but I guess windows just clicks for me really really well.

Literally, the only things I’d change about it right now are the whole adware/spyware bit and making the file path work like it does in Unix based systems. Backslashes! Urgh.

Interesting, thanks. Many of those things I'd make the same argument for Linux, I think a lot is simply what you are used to.

I don't use touch in my main OS, but maybe I should consider it!

Wsl does look really useful too (although the one time I tried to use it failed because it didn't support shared memory yet).

EDIT: Backslashes argghhh! Agree strongly here. Would be nice to get away from drive letters too and have a unified file system.

I would quibble about the fact that the screenshot functionality was stolen from macOS, but the thing that really kills me is your comment about File Explorer. My impression, after decades of Windows and now a decade of macOS, is that you just don't have to spend as much time with Finder in macOS as you do with Explorer on Windows. There's something about working on a Mac that simply alleviates a lot of the work of fiddling with files like you have to do in Windows. Maybe it's because I don't deal with Office docs much any more. I don't know. Anyone else feel this difference?

Not OP but I hate Finder. I just want to see my folders and access them, let me do that ffs, why does that left panel hate me?

I guess this is what makes the world go 'round, because I say the same thing about the left panel on Windows. From versions 7 through 10, that thing was a freaking nightmare. They seem to have cleaned it up a lot, but there's still a dedicated folder for "3D Models." Seriously?

Yeah, it's frustrating that I can't easily just access the root directory.

I feel that MacOS tries very hard to hide the fact that it's Unix under the hood and tries to hide all the Unix directories.

Huh? The "Macintosh HD" folder in Finder is /. Just drag it into your sidebar.

As for hidden files, cmd + shift + . to show them.

> Huh? The "Macintosh HD" folder in Finder is /. Just drag it into your sidebar.

I somehow did not know this. I just saw Applications, Library, System, and Users and figured it was something else.

> As for hidden files, cmd + shift + . to show them.

Ah, that would be why I didn't realize "Macintosh HD" was /.

But how was I supposed to know this? I just went through all the menus and I didn't see any options regarding hidden files and no references to the cmd+shift+. keyboard shortcut.

For me it's the nature of the things I do on each OS.

I use MacOS almost exclusively for work. Most of my file browsing is done via terminal, most of the docs I access are somewhere in the cloud. I don't really mess around with stuff on my mac and don't need to open finder often

I use windows for everything else. The nature of "everything else" implies that I have a lot more weird programs and files scattered about, that I often need to find somewhere in program files or my junk folder because the start menu doesn't find it

Finder is the only think I don't like on OSX. I just wish I could natively install something like Caja and be done with it. I'm a bit new to OSX but I have no idea how anyone could prefer Finder.

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