I'll get Surface 4 Pro if it'll ship with powerful enough processor and 16 gigs of RAM.
As for developing side, I already switched to C# and am very happy. It's clean, fast and reliable. LINQ is a beast.
Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
21–30 of 114 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#22I maintain a 250 Gb partition on my Mac that's dedicated to Windows. While I primarily use it for gaming, I also intend to install both Windows 10 and VS2015 on it. Bootcamp was a key selling point to me for purchasing a Mac when I was in the market for a new desktop.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#23I may pick up the next iteration of the Surface with Windows 10 once it's released. I may also install the Windows 10 beta on an old laptop...
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#24I built a PC -- my first in ~10 years -- because I want to follow what will be going on with Windows 10. I won't get rid of my Mac anytime soon, though, but I do agree with the sentiment that Apple has lost its way in parts. I don't feel the level of excitement for OS X as a couple of years back.
I don't think that's Apple losing its way, more just the operating system having matured. They're still adding some cool features (Continuity being the latest major new thing) but for the most part, it doesn't change much.
The same is happening on iOS really. It's becoming more and more boring - in a good way. It's reached a point where it's pretty much complete and now they're just tweaking bits, adding a few new features as things become possible, etc.
Windows 8, on the other hand, was really exciting - but not in a good way.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#25Many people have been burned by Microsoft's grandiose promises and biting the bullet early on. See Kinect, Surface RT adopters, Windows Phone 7 adopters (no WP8 update), Windows 8 adopters (with the promise of 100,000 apps in the first 90 days), HoloLens which I'm sure will disappoint many after they buy it and they see it's nothing like what Microsoft showed on stage, and so on. The best advice is to wait a few year…
Besides products that get killed, Microsoft has a decades long history of documented bad behavior in every arena they operate in. I'm not about to reverse my distrust of them this quickly. I'm open to changing my opinion, but as of today, this feels like an abused spouse asking their friends to forgive their abuser because of an empty promise and a relatively short term change of behavior. No. If they can keep up the good work for like 5 or 10 years, then maybe the ship has really turned around, but right now this feels like a company feeling irrelevant doing anything they can to bring attention back on themselves.
edit: Thanks for the downvotes on a Ask HN.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#26I was playing around with a Surface Pro in a store a while back and genuinely loved it - I can imagine being very happy with a docking station at my desk that turns it into a full machine and just carrying it around as a tablet the rest of the time. Two things hold me back. One is the lack of a POSIX console - I know that there are some possibilities to bring equivalent functionality to Windows, but I don't yet know…
I would suggest playing with Cygwin - I use it all the time for access to Unix command line tools.
I work exclusively with Microsoft at work (MS Gold Partner consulting firm BI focused and also app dev). Thus, anything I build for a client or internal use won't be Unix-based, but I have to do a good amount of ad-hoc text munging and data transformation (a good number of CSVs and log files in various formats as data sources) where I can use any tools I need. I appreciate the strength of Unix tools for this.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#27Microsoft is a shareholder/board of directors driven company. Their positions change with the wind. Today, they like open source. Tomorrow? Who the hell knows.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#28I'm idly curious about whether Microsoft will ever "pull an OS X".
In my imagination, they'd drop their whole legacy OS except for an emulation layer, and port their Windows Store stuff to a new platform.
The new platform, as I imagine it, would be based on Linux and focus primarily on web apps and games. One part web-based cross-device UI runtime, one part serious gaming support.
The idea of Microsoft embracing Linux on the desktop is, I think, a popular April's Fools joke, but from my naïve perspective, it seems like a pretty reasonable idea.
I thought OS X was really cool in 2006, and since then I've become gradually more and more annoyed with it. I'm more and more confused by why I need to use this complicated operating system... I feel like its whole paradigm is dated and tedious.
Like when I run out of hard drive space. OS X will tell me with some ugly alert box that "you're out of space." No clue why. I have to download some external software that can figure this out by scanning my drives. Junk keeps accumulating in weird folders that I didn't know existed. I feel like I'm dealing with a huge bureaucracy.
And when I open Finder, for some reason I am presented with a (rather slow) list of, like, all files, in an intimidating and overwhelming way. Of course I know how file systems work, but in the shoes of an everyday computer user, the whole thing is unfriendly and weird.
Then there's the issue of all the overlapping windows that I'm always fidgeting with, resizing, moving, maximizing and unmaximizing. For some reason maximizing and unmaximizing feels like an extremely heavy task for the computer. I don't know why it takes more than a millisecond. It all adds up to make my user experience annoying and like I have to do unnecessary work.
Not to even mention iTunes and the App Store... Jeez! It's enough to make me question the whole narrative of technological progress. I think Microsoft could pretty easily make something convincingly better than all this.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#29nope, cant say ill ever trust a corporation like Microsoft to do my thinking for me, i doubt theyll ever outlive their legacy for being the mcdonalds of software, and i really cant ever imagine software development being better in any Microsoft environment that it is in a linux environment.
Well, I haven't found anything as good as Visual Studio on either Mac or Linux. I work at a games studio and everyone works on Windows. Back when I was a CS student I would swear by Linux for development,but nowadays I would rather not bother - everything just works for us on Windows.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#30When Windows 10 comes out I'll probably pull the trigger and get a Microsoft Surface for testing, but I don't think I'll ever leave OS X for Windows. (to name a few) 1: Recently helped a friend install a new hard drive in a Lenovo Edge 15 only to find out the laptop has problems with Crucial SSDs (it brought back to many driver / hardware compatibility issues from my past jobs) 2: Features like Dashboard, Expose, Not…
#2:I feel that Windows 8.1, and the coming 10 has much much better workflow savers. One such example is having grouped apps in the task bar where I can hover and select is wonderful, whereas in mac I have to go to another screen with some hidden finger incantation to see the current windows in an app. Perhaps I'm too windows focused, but as someone that spends about 25% of their time in Mac, I feel trapped and frustrated when working in OSX.
#5: There's SublimeText for Windows, Komodo, Notepad++, and most other tools. Transmit is nice, but there's ExpanDrive for both mac and windows which is equivalent, not to mention open source tools like WinSCP (http://winscp.net/eng/docs/interfaces). MobaXTerm (http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/) is hands down better than iTerm or any other mac terminal that I've seen.