Really wish M$ work harder to attract me and other Mac user back to Windows. The PC hardware saw great improvements and continue to move in right directions. It is now up to the software / Windows to show what the are capable of.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'm happy with my Linux desktops and Mac laptops. They're interoperable, using Macs are trouble free 99.99% of the time, and my Linux desktops just work.
Life is good, at last.
It's a powershell GUI over power shell scripts overseen by one talented windows engineer with contributions from hundreds.
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
There are youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChrisTitusTech
It's a simple way to declutter windows 10 and or 11, build custom stripped install images, install useful utilities and dev environs, etc.
For any that care to look under the hood (and there are a number) it's open and transparent and a good way to get that Windows VM image for hosted OS's, gameplay, Qubes OS, etc.
https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
If you must, of course.
I stick to Linux.
But, we have been taking chisels & sledgehammers to shape our Windows installations to the shapes we like but Microsoft doesn't approve and try to counter since Windows 95.
I gave up the whole ecosystem. I'm fine.
(I went through OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, too, for desktop).
But..... the predatory nature of Windows and the half-ass revisions done to the UI elements, with decades-old applications with the legacy UI that can still be accessed directly, makes Windows a mess. To add to this, The hold that Microsoft has on Windows is so nasty that it keeps overriding settings like default browsers and applications, to favor Microsoft-built apps like Edge, along with the heavy telemetry just leads this platform to be a mess. It is not a clean system at all, and even sometimes pales in comparison to Linux Desktop, let alone OSX.
Shows how skewed the market is when you can actively fuck up your products and still stay ahead of the competition. Nobody without hundreds of billions behind them would stand a chance if they tried the same.
I'd give my interest in Hell for a successor to the Axiotron ModBook, and if the Wacom Movink 13 had a screen resolution to compeat w/ the 3K OLED on my GB3, I'd give up on having a battery and have it and a Mac Mini, so that I could get back to something like to my NeXT Cube w/ Wacom ArtZ (which was paired w/ an NCR-3125 running PenPoint for portability).
So yeah, the hardware on the Windows side is better suited to some folks, and I agree that the software really, really needs work. Things I miss:
- Miller Column File Browser
- Services
- emacs shortcuts when using a keyboard
- TeXshop and other Cocoa apps
Things which annoy me on Windows
- the need to keep Settings open and toggle how the stylus behaves
- not being able to select text in most web browsers (Firefox and derivatives at least still have a working configuration for allowing this)
- the need to manage various settings to keep ads and Copilot from intruding
That said, having a Wacom One paired w/ my MacBook works pretty well, it's just not something I can use away from my desk.
They did this in Windows 2000. Now Microsoft and Windows are only showing what they are _not_ capable of.
The default installation is annoying, but I can go from a clean install to having the annoying widgets cleaned up in a few minutes (hint: Try right clicking on anything you don’t want to see. If that doesn’t work, Google it and you’ll find a lot of solutions)
To my surprise, I’ve found my Windows workstation to be more stable with heavy RAM use and multitasking. I basically never reboot except for updates. Meanwhile, my high spec Mac seems to bog down with a lot of multitasking over the course of a week. Reboot fixes it. I find myself wishing for the stability and consistency of the Windows machine, which is not something I ever expected.
This has been true since the NT4 days where you could make that spinning rust beg for mercy under a heavily used page file and NT would never fall over.
macOS will complain fairly quickly after it's swap space runs out. And if you read /r/macos or /r/mac, you'll see that happens with innocuous programs as well as 1st party Apple apps like Pages/Music. There's a memory leak in userland across a wide variety of apps in macOS right now.
As for software, WSL2 is a step forward, but it's hard to beat a true native environment on my Mac. It's the modern version of "it just works" in the Mac vs PC debate.
All of this is made possible for me as a developer by the excellent work Microsoft has done in providing Win32 bindings for Rust. If only Apple would provide the same.
Take me for example. I want my OS to GTFO of my way. It's a toolbox, like the one a carpenter would carry around. I use the applications on it (the saw, hammer, nails etc.), not the OS itself (the carpenter toolbox).
In my case, the Enterprise LTO (or whatever it's called) is almost exactly what I need but the consumer variants are constantly trying to "help" me with shit I don't want.
Additionally I guess this weeks announcements prove the point Apple has given up to Windows and Linux mindshare, the composable desktop space.
Ended up getting back into PC games too as a side effect so that keeps me on the windows side too but if it wasn’t for Adobe and Cinema4D being windows I’d use Linux.
Crazy using both because some things on windows, file browsing, file manipulation, image thumbnails, unzipping, copying etc are all so dog slow compared to Mac yet when you run something like Octane Render you truly see what the same hardware is capable of. It’s kinda sickening.