Comment by doodlesdev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doodlesdev | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the video benchmark on the page: what would be fair is testing against the hardware that was available when the operating system was released. Windows 11 is absolutely not meant to run against hard drives, and current notebook and desktop offerings for home and enterprise users reflect that: you can get a 256gb SSD for a pretty decent price nowadays, to the point there's absolutely no reason to put in an HDD. When Windows Vista was released, your computer would absolutely have an HDD, so that would be a fair comparison.

That said, I was restoring a notebook owned by my aunt recently and I decided to run Ubuntu on it so I could mess with gparted a little bit. I'm already a full-time Linux user (have been for about five years now, I guess), but I was still surprised to see that one of the most bloated Linux distributions ran lightning fast on my aunt's Pentium Gold + 4gb RAM + HDD while Windows took over four minutes to boot.

It's absolutely time to abandon Windows if you're still dependent on it. There are alternatives. Heck, I'm not a fan of Apple either but at this point I'd recommend a MacBook for anyone wanting to get away from Windows and not comfortable with Linux or a Chromebook.

MacOS is a buggy mess, and it's also pretty slow lately. If you need full Office for work, your best bet is probably still Windows.

As a software engineer who has developed on Macs (and Linux) for most of my career and has recently started a job that requires me to use Windows again, I can tell you from experience that Office on the Mac is far, far more stable, easy to use, and considerably faster than on Win11. Microsoft’s macOS team are really good at their jobs.

But then I don’t find macOS to be slow or a buggy mess, so mileage may vary.

Man, I've been an Apple user for years, and the best rumor I've ever heard is that MacOS 27 is going to be a Snow Leopard (bug fix) release!

It's so buggy on 26, it drives me crazy. Just not nearly as crazy as Windows 11 drives me.

I totally agree with you, just yesterday I edited a document in Microsoft word and opened the second document for comparison. Suddenly, the first document froze and when I closed the program, I did not see the changes that I had made before. After complaining about my life, I started anew, and only the next time I downloaded Word offered me a recovery option.

> Office on the Mac is far, far more stable, easy to use, and considerably faster than on Win11

I haven't had stability issues with any Office program in years, but everything you mentioned is moot because there are Office features (especially Power___ features in Excel) that don't have parity on MacOS. If I get a workbook from a client, I need it to run exactly the same on my machine as it does on theirs.

One would think multi-monitor support is the hardest thing in the universe to solve. My Linux desktop has very bad multi-monitor support, but hey, it's Linux. My $2K Macbook Pro has, somehow, even worse multi-monitor support, so bad that sometimes the productivity of an external display feels not worth the hassle of plugging it in and wrestling with it.

Besides that no problems with MacOS, it feels snappy to me and Office apps work mostly fine (except for all the missing features Microsoft refuses to add to Outlook).

The first time I’ve had my multi-monitor setup(s) “just work” on Linux is recently installing Fedora 43 on my Ideapad. (After becoming exhausted trying to tweak Linux Mint to get tolerable sizing across all the screens).

Wayland per-monitor fractional scaling is delightful and after a couple gsettings tweaks restoring minimize/bottom dock I’ve been loving the polish and snappiness of Gnome. I also had to switch the WiFi backend from wpa_supplicant to iwn due to connection problems on one specific WiFi network but now it’s totally stable.

macOS multi-monitor support and scaling is a constant thorn in my side that was marginally improved by paying for Better Display. Windows 11 really is the most solid option for various monitor combinations not in Apple's happy path of resolutions/sizes.

But I don’t really like the ergonomics of using even clean de-bloated Windows as my main dev machine, so was very pleased to have such a great out-of-the-box experience trying Fedora for the first time.

Apple took a shortcut for DPI scaling implementation because they only care about selling their own hardware. If you use anything else, it's a pain in the ass. This is a big problem of today's Apple, because they can't manage to release competitively priced hardware in some categories.

I've had a good multi monitor experience in Pop!_OS with the COSMIC desktop. Not sure exactly how it compares to other desktop environments though.

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