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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

That's a definite it depends.

Macs are finnicky with hardware (but hdmi sucks by definition, they think you bought the cable and monitor to pirate movies and not to do some work).

However the GUI actually works and if you spend a week on windows 10+ you'll remember why people buy Mac OS.

Personally I have a Mac for stuff that requires a GUI and a headless linux box that I ssh into. And I switched to Macs from ... Linux on the desktop.

Edit: docker is shit because they just install a Linux VM and run their Linux stuff in there. Same on Windows I guess.

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Windows 10 (can’t speak for 11…I haven’t upgraded) with a lot of the animations etc turned off is a far superior developer experience than macOS.

macOS is just so clunky. It tried to be so smooth all the time but just ends up being annoying.

I just set up a windows box for some development last week. Spent 2-3 hours per day on it (on work not setup).

So far I haven't managed to turn off the firewall scare popups, I did manage to remove that crap in the task bar that pops up the weather and selected news covering half the screen if you hover in the wrong place, I may or may not have turned off the OneDrive upsell, and I also got a full screen message to upgrade to 11 for free when booting once.

Great user experience overall. And don't tell me I can spend another week to turn those off, is Microsoft paying for that wasted time?

Let's not pretend that Mac OS is immune to a bit of the old upsell too. Core OS that features only work when paired with iPad/iPhone. iCloud is actively difficult not to use. The sidebar with the Apple shares and news apps.

> iCloud is actively difficult not to use.

Agreed, but if you turn it off it stays off, it doesn't pop up something every day.

> The sidebar with the Apple shares and news apps.

I kinda know it's there, but I can't remember when I last activated it by mistake *. But then I turn off all notifications except app icon badges so I don't use it at all otherwise.

> Core OS that features only work when paired with iPad/iPhone.

Which ones? Doing phone calls and texts from your laptop? I suppose that requires control of the OS on both sides to work well. I don't know what's available on the Android side.

If there are other features that work when paired with apple mobiles and don't work with Android, I don't know about them.

* Last time I've seen that bar I think it was my cat's butt on the F keys :) She taught me a lot of keyboard shortcuts.

> Let's not pretend that Mac OS is immune to a bit of the old upsell too.

Of course but Microsoft is way more obnoxious about it. In macOS (and iOS) the upsell is a small icon in your system settings. On Windows it's big notifications when you start up your devices. Links in your start menu to third party apps. Notifications when you install and run third-party browsers.

Most mac apps work without an Apple ID. On Windows you can't even use the built in video editor (Clipchamp) without logging in to a Microsoft account.

Microsoft just sucks at UX. On Windows 11 a lot of people now have three versions of Microsoft teams installed. Teams Classic, Teams New, and Teams personal edition. And the search makes sure to avoid showing you the one you use most as the default result.

Don't get me started on how many nag screens and cookie warnings you have to go through when you start Microsoft Edge. I use both Windows and macOS regularly (macOS is my daily driver right now) and Windows has the way worse user experience.

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