A month after switching to Macs | Hacker News Reader

A month after switching to Macs

jaequery.com

32 pointsjaequery67 comments

I switched over from Windows to Mac hardcore for 3 months as well. I did all my development on Mac and used Mac tools for everything.

I simply didn't enjoy the change, so I switched back. It's just personal preference, but I didn't like switching keys, or having to do finger-Twister in order to get certain things to work. I found that most of the programs were at best equal to Windows-equivalents, and most were much poorer.

It's just personal preference, I'm not trying to incite a religious war. I can adequately still use the Mac, and my wife had no such problems switching to the Mac, but I personally prefer Windows. The one thing I really despise, though, is Finder. I believe Windows Explorer is clearly superior to Finder in that sense, but then again, I think Windows 7 Explorer is a downgrade from Windows XP Explorer, by an order of magnitude.

I switched to Mac almost exclusively about a decade ago. I still miss Windows Explorer. The Finder is a piece of shit. FTFF.

What do you dislike about Finder?

No Cut&Paste. Column mode is brain dead and doesn't auto-size columns even when I have ample screen space. I have to fix the columns by hand. Difficult to compute the total size of the selected files and folders.

A drawback that I have with Mac OS in general is that in some dialogue boxes it's impossible to keyboard navigate from OK to Cancel, you have to select by mouse. At least in the default setting.

Check out Path Finder from Cocoatech.

I myself am rarely in Finder (or Spotlight, for that matter). Alfred (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/alfred/id405843582?mt=12) has been an absolute dream. I find every program, file, and everything else through Alfred, with just a few keystrokes and fuzzy search. My OS wouldn't be the same without it.

The problem with Finder is not so much finding things, but handling them once you've found them. Finder is probably the worst piece of file management software I've used in the last 20 years by far. Directory Opus on the Amiga was a better tool for moving things around.

Finder is so bad that I prefer dropping down to a Terminal and just doing things that way instead.

Yeah, I have to give you that, the Finder UX isn't fantastic for moving files around, and I often use the terminal like you. However, I never found Windows Explorer any better. Even on Windows, I wished I had a UNIX terminal to move things with—on Mac, I do.

Out of interest, what do the good file managers have?

My biggest annoyance with Finder is lack of tabs/split panes.

It's more what don't they do that Finder does poorly?

Personally, I find that explorer pretty much does what I'm expecting (most of the time). And it's not really just a Windows thing, as far back as I can remember, across several OSs, you don't really have to "figure out" how the file manager works. You click on something and it pretty much does what it says. You drag something and it moves there. Various *nix window managers, Amiga, geos, BeOS, and on and on and on are pretty much just walk-up usable.

With Finder I feel like I'm gambling. Where in the filesystem hierarchy will the new folder I just created get made? Why is enter rename? Why do you show me a useless file path that I can't use for any navigation? Network shares disappear. It's never wide enough to actually see the names of my files. All my files is probably one of the dumbest notions I've ever seen in a file management tool -- yay, I have a uselessly long list of all 2.7 million files I can go through, and we'll default to it also! and on and on and on, hour after mind-numbing hour. How about this folder? How much space do I have left? How big is the selection of files I have currently selected? Why don't the unintuitive iconoglyphs have some kind of description? Why are these ones down in the window, but other ones I need to use a million times a day up in the tool bar?

Almost every interaction with Finder feels like I'm about to lose data, or the default is so completely brain dead that I have to go into preferences to fix almost every interaction to make finder even remotely useful. It's no wonder there's a dozen or so finder replacements that end up as default installs for most of the old-timer Mac guys I know.

It's unbelievably unintuitive bitrot -- endless preference fiddling, and the feeling of walking a tightrope anchored with eggshells with every interaction. There's really few pieces of software I loathe to use, and it's a shame that it's pretty much the most basic piece of software in the OS.

In the context of how abysmal finder is, it actually makes sense that Apple has gone out of its way to abstract the user away from the file system. From the perspective of a Windows user it seems like madness, but after enough time in OS X finder hell it makes perfect rational sense. You simply don't want to subject users to this level of frustration just to organize their mp3s or pictures. It may also explain why similar efforts in Windows land don't do as well, managing and organizing files is no less mysterious or confusing than any other organizational app, usually less so.

I don't think your extremely harsh assessment is warranted at all. There's nothing really tangible in your post besides minor things you have to get used to like pressing Cmd+Down to open a file instead of Return.

Why exactly do you feel every interaction with Finder deletes your data? You can't just state something like that without giving examples. It's _the_ worst critique you can give a file manager.

Also, where do you even find those endless preferences you talk about? There's only a handful checkboxes in the Finder > Preferences window. (Compare this to the clusterfuck that is Windows: http://i.imgur.com/2ZcsX7w.png). The only commandline setting I've used is the hidden files toggle which I try to avoid anyway because of all the dotfiles in my home directory. What are all these "iconoglyphs" you talk about? Can we see a screenshot of your Finder window? Something tells me you have configured it wrong by trying to use some obscure commandline settings.

Looks like at least half of his alleged Mac benefits actually stem from ditching Windows and switching to Unix-based OS.

We went from Windows -> Mac -> Debian/Ubuntu

Most of the time macs "just work" however once you start digging deep and needing custom stuff (beyond `rails new HelloWorld`) things start to come apart.

You have to rely on brew/ports or hope someone provided instructions for compiling on mac. Normally brew or ports do work and their authors do keep things up to date, but not always.

We've just been down too many rabbit holes when we needed something custom.

On top of that our production machines don't run OSX either so we would have to keep 2 sets of instructions for making sure all libraries are installed.

Sure there is vagrant, but then you lose (or fight extremely hard to keep) your ability to debug in the IDE of your choice since it all has to happen remotely

Life has been so much better running Ubuntu. Here everything "Just works" from a programming point of view.

Games I still dual boot into Win7 however (tho I did that with OSX anyways since all games arent supported or you take a performance hit)

That's not terribly unexpected, to be honest. Apple's building the machines for the average consumer first, so the "just works" is their priority. Ubuntu, as much as they've been trying to emulate OSX recently, is still a full Linux system under the Mac-y gui. There'll be a little less "just works" for the average consumer, but a bit more for the developer.

I'm pretty sure that of the many devs who've switched from Windows to OS X (it's really fascinating to see how many) we're going to see at one point quite some switching, like you, to Linux.

Stuff that I can't stand on OS X: no great firewalling. Sure, I can have an "easy" firewall, but not a great one.

By great I mean that on Linux I can do stuff like: "Block every single packet that is not part of an established and only allow user whose user ID is xxx to contact port 80/443 and only allow user whose user ID is yyyy to connect to port 22".

But to me the biggest showstopper under OS X is that you can't have simultaneously several graphical sessions. A browser, for example, is something that begs to be run in its own user account (for example a throwaway user account or one severly crippled using quota + specific firewall rules only allowing that user to browse the web and that's it, no login shells, etc.). Then you can either have that user run it's own graphical session (even at a different screen size if you want) or have that user run its browser in the graphical session of another user (not the same safest, but still way more secure than simply browsing with your main user account -- which has to be the one most insecure thing most devs are doing).

Linux makes all that super easy and as a developer --and for anyone that is a bit concerned about security-- it is great.

You can't do that on OS X. There are limits once you want to "get fancy".

And when the exodus shall start, I'm sure quite a lot will realize that Linux is actually amazing and that they did actually miss a lot.

And I'm no sysadmin: just a dev. But of course it helps when your server are also running Linux (or another Unx) and it also helps when you have to talk to the sysadmin guy (say because your app is ruining its servers' perfs) and that he sees that you know a tiny bit of Unx work ; )

Regarding the firewall issue - doesn't OS X include OpenBSD's PF ? If it's the case, then you get great and easy firewalling. Provided you can actually configure it with $EDITOR + /etc/pf.conf. Having a GUI for PF doesn't make much sense when you have a rules syntax that is as expressive as PF's. There may be some edge cases where netfilter can do things that would require a work around in PF but in my eyes the latter wins when you look at the features + tooling + configuring package. Also there are some things PF can do that netfilter can't.

windows devs, eh? Out of the frying pan into the fire.

I tried to ditch the Mac for Ubuntu last year sometime, and that second half turned out to be a total deal-killer for me.

It's astonishing for how far one can get just by sticking Putty and PSCP in the Windows Path and renaming them to ssh.exe and scp.exe if all one ends up doing is just sshing into remote machines.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.h...

Mac’s apps are just so much better and nicer.

This is one of those things that just varies widely between users. I don't use IRC (actually is it still popular at all?), so I couldn't comment about mIRC or Textual.

But I still find VS better than Xcode. OneNote is still the best note taking app I know of. Word on Windows is better than the Mac version, and still probably my favorite collab word processor. And there's no Excel equivalent (it's olap, in-memory, and pivot table support across those two are still w/o peer).

And if you throw on the browser -- that probably covers 95% of the class of apps I spend my time in.

> Word on Windows is better than the Mac version

How so? If find the the OSX version of Word to be a lot more productive thanks to the prescence of the menu-bar. The ribbon bar may look nice, but requires more clicks to do anything.

I like the ribbon, but that's just one difference I prefer.

I like the ability to reply to comments and close a comment thread. Or directly edit PDFs. Or to collapse sections of the doc. There's just a bunch of random little things like these that I think make the Windows version better. That said, if all I had was the Mac version, it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Believe it or not, the single Windows application I still miss after almost 7 years of using a Mac is Microsoft Paint. It's laughably basic, but I used it for so long, and it worked so well for what I needed, that it felt `just right'. I've yet to find -- and probably never will find -- an ideal replacement.

I know what you mean. Lookup paintbrush, it was good for me

Sounds like you haven't discovered Pixen [1] yet.

[1]: http://pixenapp.com/

No easy way to maximize window and full screen mode weirded me out. On Windows, I’d just double click on the window title. But on Macs, I had to carefully hit the green plus button.

I'm a Windows refugee who made the switch in 2006 and I'm very happy with my Mac, but I still can't wrap my head around the behavior of this button. There doesn't seem to be any method to its madness. Clicking it consistently results in the window's size being altered somehow, but I've never really understood how OS X decides what dimensions to resize to.

When you create an app you tell it what the default size is. The green button sets the app to the default size.

I use shift-it for my basic tiling/resizing concerns. Maximizing is just option-command-F, which is pretty natural to hit for me.

https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt

It's the "zoom" button, and it's supposed to toggle between two sizes: user state (whatever you last dragged the window borders to be), and standard state (whatever the application thinks makes sense for the window's content [1].

This works for applications where the content has a natural fixed size (for example, Photoshop snaps the window to the size of the image), but breaks down for flexible content (web browsers, terminal windows, etc.). Also, it's up to application developers to get this right, which isn't always the case.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx...

Except Apple's own iTunes. I know it's a mess of an app to start with, but for iTunes 10 or earlier, the green button used to throw it into mini player mode. Now, it maximizes/restores the window, ignoring the content dimensions. And not to be confused with full screen.

You want to know what the Zoom button (the green one) does? Here's what it does: it toggles between user-managed size and app-managed size, where the user-managed size is the size that you last resized it to, and app-managed size is the size that the app thinks is the optimum size for the window's contents.

Did you understand all that? Yeah, it's not easy. Now you'll see why many developers simply give up, have it fill the screen, and cause people to call it the 'maximise' button instead.

As an example, as I click the button in the BBEdit window I'm typing this comment in, it resizes to take up the entire screen vertically (because you need lots of vertical space for coding), but only enough horizontal space to hold the sidebar and 80 characters of text (it depends on where you have your wrap margin set). It doesn't resize to lose any content out the window, it resizes to the optimum size. If I click it again, it resizes to the size I last manually set it to.

Honestly, I'm not sure quite why Apple added it in the first place, other than to have an aesthetically-pleasing three buttons: I use it rarely, much less often than maximising something in Windows. And it confuses people.

I only recently made the switch and I'm very pleased as well. I had the same thoughts as you for a while, but i recently started using slate, (tiling window manager) and I never think about clicking the plus and that, ctrl+cmd+space to full-screen a window, and I have bindings for lots of configurations. Never even use the trackpad for window-manipulation anymore, fantastic productivity booster.

I second slate, it's been a hugh time saver. Here's the url for those that are interested.

https://github.com/jigish/slate - It's free and open source.

When I switched to Macs, I abandoned the concept of toggling maximization state altogether. Each window gets a workspace, and four fingers in a direction takes me back and forth, or shows me all windows. No toggling, no alt-tabbing, etc. I find this excessively more convenient, but as usual, YMMV.

P.S. I do agree the + button has absolutely inane behavior. I just like the workspace method more than I ever liked toggling maximization state, moving windows, and alt-tabbing.

Thanks for mentioning that! I just tried setting up a work environment with 3 virtual screens. and the 4 finger swipe for switching really is nice.

I kind of feel like this is where OS X is almost at a moment of brilliance, but hasn't quite reach there yet (and is hampered a bit by legacy considerations)...on just a single screen, full-screen mode works almost exactly like you describe and is a joy to use.

I installed TotalSpaces and it really enhances the workspace experience. Very nice tool and workflow enhancement.

I hate the green button.

Shift clicking it maximises the window, which is handy to know.

My last job was a mac shop, and I got put on a mini doing web development.

I immediately got a keyboard and mouse that was large and comfortable, and didn't need batteries. Then I remapped some of the more familiar shortcuts on the keyboard like Delete.

Other than that, I take pride in the fact that I can work productively on any platform. My boss and co-workers would bitch endlessly if they had to touch a windows box, and I came to realize it was because they didn't know how to use it. This was especially salient when certain corporate clients had their own development environment on a VM for required for us to use.

The major selling point of a PC, for me, is the open hardware ecosystem. If you're not micro-managing the hardware yourself, than all OEM's are the same in my eyes. Even great design like apple does is mostly window dressing for casual users.

For me, aside from Terminal, the biggest productivity boost in OSX is probably Spaces. I tried a few virtual desktop applications in Windows and all of them kind of sucked in comparison. I also love using the help search (Cmd+?, I think) to find menu items in more complex applications. Really miss that feature in Windows!

> Basically the problem is, in order to extend your monitor, you need to hook them from your mini displayport to the monitor. But Macbook airs only have a single mini-displayport and from my research, there aren’t any mini-dp hubs as you’d have with usbs (i know some exists but they sell for $300+).

Modern Macs use Thunderbolt instead of Mini-DisplayPort, which Wikipedia says can be connected to a hub or daisy chained with up to six devices. I can't find any hubs or daisy-chainable adapters online, though. :/

As you've mentioned, Thunderbolt solves the problem.

However, I don't consider being limited to one monitor much of a problem anymore. Years ago dual screens made sense when we had squarer width/height ratios and the economics of two screens worked better than one large screen.

But nowadays, you can get a massive, widescreen LCD cheaply that has about as much screen space as the old dual screens combined. Plus, with only one screen, you don't have to deal with applications not playing well across screens.

You can daisy-chain two Thunderbolt monitors together (depending on what the host machine can support).

how do you daisy chain thunderbolt?

Just like with Firewire, the screen has both an input and an output. Not unlike a daisy chain, you just plug one into the other. There's security implications, but it is fairly efficient.

"1. No easy way to maximize window."

- Of course there's a way. You have to go to System Preferences >> Keyboard >> Keyboard Shortcuts >> Application Shortcuts >> + >> (Application) All Applications, (Menu Title) Zoom (http://cl.ly/image/1k462h342I28)

"2. Sometimes, my window would get minimized and when I cmd+tab back into it, I don’t see anything."

- Yep, you have to hold alt/option when you let go of cmd +tab for hidden windows.

"3. On Windows, I’d just start+e and just start typing to get to any folders/files on my PC. On Mac, closest I’ve come across was to just locate finder from cmd+tab, or launch finder via an app called Alfred."

- Alfred is amazing, but you can also bring up spotlight with cmd + spacebar.

"4. No Zend Studio 5.5. This was almost a deal breaker right on the spot."

- Can't help you there since I'm a vim user, but it seems like you've found an IDE you like.

"5. Mac keyboards aren’t too friendly for emacs user. Hitting that option button for meta is quite an excercise in itself."

- Also can't help you here since I haven't really used emacs enough, but I'm pretty sure you can remap the key to the windows counterpart.

---

For a GitHub app, I recommend you trying out http://mac.github.com/. I'm a fan of SequelPro (free) for MySQL http://www.sequelpro.com/

The emacs option-as-meta experience is terrible. Luckily, it's easy to change:

    (setq mac-option-key-is-meta nil)

    (setq mac-command-key-is-meta t)

    (setq mac-command-modifier 'meta)

    (setq mac-option-modifier nil)

Actually, those are the old Carbon Emacs settings. The new Cocoa ones are like this:

    (setq ns-alternate-modifier 'meta)
    (setq ns-command-modifier 'super)
    (setq ns-control-modifier 'control)

Better yet, use the customization interface to configure them: "M-x customize-group RET ns RET"

Huh, interestingly the old Carbon settings still seem to function, although the Cocoa versions certainly look cleaner.

> Better yet, use the customization interface to configure them: "M-x customize-group RET ns RET"

Ugh. I can't be the only person that hates the Custom interface with the firey passion of a thousand suns, can I? Far better to just define things cleanly in your init.el than to do it all in that obtuse UI and create enormous ;DO NOT TOUCH custom-set-variable forms.

I actually like the customize interface. That's not to say it couldn't be better. Something about it is very..... ugly. I think native widgets would go a long way to making it look like someone other than a programmer designed it. That being said, it fits the Emacs cross platform philosophy and it's a uniform way to look at settings, change them and get help on them and save them in your .emacs.

At some point I went and changed all my random "setq"s in my .emacs (built up over 10 or so years) to the equivalent customize versions and as a result was able to speed up my Emacs boot time by a significant amount (like 8ish seconds down to 2ish). The nice thing about customized variables is that you don't have to load in a mode to set it's variables (loading a bunch of modes during boot was what the slow part was).

The OP obviously never read this: http://the.taoofmac.com/space/HOWTO/Switch

(Covers all his gripes and a few more - the bit about Alt-Tab and some of the Quicksilver tips are amazing)

I have found there to be positives of each although I love my mac for 99.9% of daily usage.

The straw that broke the camel's back in my switch was Rails development, which I just found impossible on windows. I had a mess of msys, msysgit, cygwin, and the default ruby installed which meant a simple bundle install took more than 3 mins.

You have to be open minded when switching to be able to fully appreciate the differences.

This was my change agent, too. I could finally stop diagnosing install issues and focus on development. Cygwin was great for me from ~2003-2006, but with Intel chips + VMware or Parallels, I could get the right development and not give up Windows Excel or Windows Outlook (even today, the Mac versions of those both pale in comparison), which were still essential for me.

The start button + app name equivalent is Cmd-Space, which opens the spotlight bar in the upper right had corner. I launch Chrome with Cmd-Space-c-h-enter.

Sometimes I know exactly what app I wanted to launch, I could envision its app logo, the exact look of the app itself, but I would have a hard time remembering what the app is called. Is it called digital something or picture something then after some agonizing minutes trying to fuzzy match the app name in Spotlight I'll have to dig through the application folder and find the app I was looking is called ImageCapture. Anyone else have this problem?

use a gesture to bring up launchpad?

I have this problem all the time - the best solution I've found is to add a keyboard shortcut to LaunchPad.

You could add the Applications folder to the dock. http://i.imgur.com/qb7DB7u.jpg

I find quicksilver to be even faster. On my setup I have all my most frequently used applications bound to systemwide hotkeys that I turned off in the keyboard preference pane. I don't even have to think about switching applications muscle memory makes it automatic.

Yeah, "search to launch" using Spotlight (and before that, Quicksilver) existed in OSX before Windows (v7 I believe) added it.

If I wanted to choose one app that I miss from Windows, it is Visual Studio, XCode even the most recent version 4.5? does not even come close.

You should check out Alfred for quickly launching apps and many other useful things. Probably the most used app by many mac users.

The windows equivalent is Launchy. It's quite excellent.

You can also do cmd-tab and hold alt before letting go of the cmd. Let go of alt last and the minimised window comes back.

Honestly Apple and Windows are really complementary. All the weak points of one are the strongness of the other. I dream to see the products that a love affair between these 2 companies would produce.

I had a 2006 MBP that I loathed, shitty fragile hardware, every piece of software I used on it was somehow inferior to what I'd been using in Windows-land, probably one of the worst $3000 consumer electronics purchases I've ever made. I went Windows more or less since then and was pretty happy with whatever I had since then.

A few months ago my work got me a MBPr (much to my chagrin at the time) running Mountain Lion, and you know what? It ain't bad. My boss insisted that I give it a shot for a few months and if I still didn't like it they'd call up dell and get me whatever I wanted there.

Most of the initial problems I patiently chalked up to re-familiarizing myself with the OS, especially in the ways it's subtly changed since 2006.

Off the top of my head

The good: I don't think I can get a better system for spinning up 2 or 3 simultaneous VMs eating 3-4 gig of RAM a piece and having the whole system still run blindingly fast.

CMD+Space to find stuff works pretty brilliantly most of the time.

Searching for help is usually more helpful than I was expecting. I've almost always gotten help from the OS in clever and useful ways. The control panel search for example, is far superior to Windows.

When SSDs were first introduced I was skeptical, expensive and the space seemed far to small to be productive. I still wish I had about a TB of space like my old Dell had, but I'm just a bit more judicious about what I jam on there. SSDs were definitely the right way to go. I feel like I'm working on a $300,000 piece of server equipment.

The high DPI, bright screen is really nice to look at all day. I don't really think non-retina art looks like shit the way lots of pundits make it out to be, and overall looking at stuff is great.

There's some cool OS X only stuff out there where there's not really a good Windows variant. My favorite has to be Cathode. But there's lots of interesting looking writing and creativity software as well.

The trackpad really is that good. The barely functional PoS on my 2006 MBP had me tricked that any old trackpad on any old laptop was more or less the same. But I actually prefer to use the trackpad on my MBPr to a mouse. It's really more a size than a texture thing, but there's some slick software backing it up, movements are precise and the cursor goes more or less where I want it. Gestures are cool even if I only use 3 or 4 of them and they function much better than their Windows equivalents. I really do like two finger scrolling much better.

Multiple desktops work really well. I keep work stuff on one desktop, and personal/break stuff on another and fine transitioning really easy and helpful in compartmentalizing my day.

Notifications are better than in Windows. I'm actually usually pleased to receive a notification in OS X, whereas in Windows it seems like such an annoyance. Icons in the toolbar jumping up and down is also helpful. I don't autohide or zoom my toolbar, but I like it in general.

The physical hardware is awesome. It slips away into my backback so nicely I have to double check that it's actually in there.

A decent number of connectors for peripherals.

It does relatively smart things when connecting up extra monitors.

The keyboard is quiet, but really comfortable to type on.

The bad: I spend 90% of my time in terminal window or a web browser, things for which most of the good things above are entirely superfluous. Plus Chrome has some annoying hard edges that make it work worse in OS X than in Windows. I could literally get along just fine with my Android tablet and a keyboard for what I spend almost all day doing.

Window management is in general, worse than in Windows. Complaints include: tiny, over precise click targets, buttons on the top of windows which have unpredictable behavior, closing all open windows doesn't close the app (leaving zombie apps open and pissing me off 6 or 7 times a day), the menu bar is detached from the app window and with the poor maximization behavior makes knowing what application I'm in a confusing mess that bits me at least 3 times a day, unbelievably small and frigidity scroll bar target. Coming from windows, I never really got why Fitt's law was such a big deal to Mac users, now banging around this clumsy environment I finally get it. It's almost impossible to accurately and easily move things about your workspace. Better to just open the app and let it be and then get to work and just deal with whatever the window is doing.

Mouses suck in OS X. After some serious consideration I think it's that the OS has been subtly optimized for the trackpad. But it's subtly an inferior experience to mousing about in Windows (while the inverse is also true, Trackpads are inferior in Windows). Acceleration curve is never quite right, mouse wheels track in less predictable ways, and for legacy reasons right mouse button is very much an afterthought.

I find I'm often surprised at what isn't in the OS and results in getting nickle and dimed by the ecosystem to "complete the OS". Really no basic paint program?

Why, oh why, do I have to play finger twister all day with keyboard shortcuts? Really? Some of this shit is unbelievable. CMD+CTRL+SHIFT+4, Space, click and yay! I've taken a screenshot of a window! You have got to be kidding me. Far far too much is buried in the OS, and undiscoverable, behind layers of program altering button combinations...it's so bad that even lists of common shortcuts don't work half the time!

Office on windows is a hair better. There's lots of nice touches in Office, so it's not punishment to use it. But the Ribbon/menus just work better in Windows...no surprise.

It's more unstable that Windows (at least since XP). Sorry, it just is. I have to reboot my Mac at least twice a week and all I really do on it is use Chrome, terminal, ssh and run a few VMs. My creaky 5 year old home machine running 7 hasn't been rebooted in a couple months and generally doesn't flake out. I've heard this is a recent Mountain Lionish issue from the rest of the folks in my shop, but still.

The ugly: Finder is an absolute abortion of a file management tool. I could go on for pages and pages, but virtually every single thing in Finder is done wrong. From the default behavior for Enter to just simply knowing where the fuck you are in the file system. Explorer is light years better. I feel like I'm constantly stuck in an emulator showing me the worst of early 1990s file management tools from an Amiga.

Multi-monitor support is just...broken. It feels like such an afterthought, and other than turning things on and moving windows around smartly, almost every other activity after that feels subtly broken. It's hard to explain, but the best and most notable example is Mountain lions full-screen mode...which works brilliantly on the laptop by itself, but fails entirely in multi-monitor mode. This something windows hasn't had a problem with for something nearing 20 years. It's not that hard. It's also in multi-monitor mode that the failure of ideas that the menubar is starts to become rapidly apparent. Having to pad on my trackpad across two monitors to click a menu, then pad all they way back to where I was is a distracting waste of my time.

There's an uncountable number of ways to switch between applications and programs, yet none of them are as simple or reliable as windows. cmd-tab switches programs, but I spend half my day hunting around for the window I thought I had open, only for it to be minimized or behind another window. Moving to the toolbar means taking my hands off the keyboard, and on and on and on. CMD+` doesn't work in every application reliably.

I have yet to conceive of even the slightest use for the Dashboard.

I have other, smaller praises and gripes, but none of them rise to the level of daily notice like the above do. But overall, I feel generally happy in my computing experience during my work day. I don't feel like I'm in a penalty box when I fire up my work laptop and being able to my work without too much fuss is decent.

Some of the nice things in the OS make me feel like windows is a bit clunky in appearance when I go back to my home machine. OS X overall definitely feels smoother in most respects. Even simple things, like a built in SSH client are huge.

But once I adjust back to Windows, and realize I can stop fighting with basic file management issues and other OS X complaints I have, I find I still personally prefer Windows for my personal use. Most of the stuff I want to do in my off-time is Windows only (or the Windows version is simply better), and so that's that. I just don't see me buying a Mac for personal use as none of the things that are offered by the software ecosystem appeal to me in a holistic way. There are spotlight of brilliance that's for sure, but on the whole I still think Windows offers a better, more diversified and more vibrant ecosystem overall.

almost exactly like my experience, I agree with most of the things you pointed out. my transition only happened after i learned to accept that mac indeed has a lot of pitfalls, only then was i able to appreciate the other things mac had to offer.

yeah, your experience and mine sound very similar.

I'm actually pretty happy using it, but I've had to get two notions out of my head.

1) Problems with OS X doesn't mean it sucks. I could make a similar list of complaints about Windows. Likewise things that OS X does better does not mean Windows sucks.

2) Apple is not the pinnacle of design and usability, they're just a company. It's just software. Apple is just as confused and misguided as anybody else is in figuring out how to make perfect software.

In the end, I'm going to spend the majority of my day either way in a console and a browser (and hey, I'm not paying for it, my company is). I can just simply adapt a little and get over myself and get productive.

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