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Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?

#51

Post by rgacote »

a2tech wrote: post #17

Nope. The Unix underpinnings of OS X are way too valuable for me. Powershell is (imho) a verbose mess and is the current best attempt at making a working scripting language for Windows. I use Powershell all the time but its..inelegant. Give me bash scripting any time. MS is always flirting with new technologies and sexy R&D, but at their heart they're never going to change.

Not only the base Unix underpinnings, but the sheer lack of support tools on Windows vs. Mac is frustrating. - network problems? just try a quick curl (not on Windows) - did a file transfer properly? do a quick md5 hash (not on Windows) - need to do some quick data manipulation? write a quick Perl, Python, or Ruby script (not on Windows) - connect to one of our remote servers? bring up terminal and ssh (not on Windows) - move files around with sftp (not on Windows) - remove all files in a directory tree older than 60 days? bring up terminal and do a quick find... -delete. (not on Windows). - etc, etc, etc. Yes, all these tools can be installed on Windows, but they are on every Mac by default.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?

#53

Post by kaolinite »

vilmosi wrote: post #42
kaolinite wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (no proof, but I seem to remember) that there are a number of plugins that are only available for Linux / OS X. Also, I think that point was less about Sublime and more about the other development tools that are Mac only.

Surely non of the Mac only tools are non-replaceable, are they??

When I moved from a Windows/Linux setup to Mac, I was shocked at the quality of the software, including the various development tools. It felt like I'd been lied to a bit: the common thought at the time was that Macs had no software, at least compared to Windows, but after switching I found that there wasn't really anything I missed (besides some games) and that there was a lot of software that was vastly better than the equivalents on Windows.

I'm sure most of the tools have alternatives on Windows, I don't think it'll be anywhere near as good, however. Examples include software by the OmniGroup and Panic, which make some of the best desktop software I've ever used.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?

#54

Post by contergan »

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #35
Delmania wrote: post #22

I 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.

This is actually a really good point, and perhaps one against OSX. I'm not really a Windows guy, but I can keep a partition with Windows super easily for the things I do need Windows for. I can't do that from Windows to OSX. That's not Windows fault, because Apple prevents you from doing so, but if you're on Windows, you can't (concurrently) run OSX.

Well not officially. There are easy workarounds though and I'm running a OSX VM right now on my Windows box for example.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?

#55

Post by wvenable »

mbrock wrote: post #28

I'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 Linu…

Windows isn't a legacy OS. The old 95/98 was the legacy OS and it's long gone. Windows is one of the most advanced operating systems and rivals Linux and OS X in many ways.

But Microsoft is trying to get out from the shackles of their Win32 history -- the "modern" store apps are only allowed to use a subset of the API.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?

#56

Post by midnitewarrior »

zorked wrote: post #20

No the best UI. Not Unix. Not a major mobile platform. Dominates a huge but dying market. Why would you do that?

The desktop isn't going away any time soon. When you have work to do, you get out a keyboard and a PC.

As far as mobile platform goes, Windows 10 mobile runs the same apps that the Windows desktop does. There's now a dynamic view engine and you simply create a tablet view or a mobile view of your app and it runs the same executable.

Businesses are going to run to this because it will bring their internal app development costs way down because they don't have to have multiple version of apps they don't care to run as web sites. Companies who develop apps for the Windows desktop will have an incremental effort to also deploy to mobile.

Additionally, Microsoft is releasing tools to cross compile Android and iOS apps for Windows, so expect the availability of apps for Windows Mobile to increase significantly as the barrier to publishing to that platform is torn down. Yes, you can take Objective C iOS app and compile it on Visual Studio and deploy it to Windows Mobile now. The same holds true for Android.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?

#57

Post by whatisapancake »

lucb1e wrote: post #45
lsiunsuex wrote: post #3

When 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…

> 3: I've never seen a PC laptop with a touchpad as good as on a Mac I've customized mine with touchegg (made for GNU/Linux systems) and it does everything I've seen Mac users do and more. Need no Apple for that one, and there are probably Windows tools as well though I wouldn't know which. > 6: Handoff in OS X with my iPhone is such a great convenience. I don't know what "handoff" is, but regarding interoperability,…

Handoff lets you continue your current task on another device, from where you left off (it hands off the task). So if you have a text document open or you're writing an email on a mac, it will let you continue doing that on an iphone, with the text you entered on the mac already being there.

You can also make calls or send texts from a mac if your iphone is nearby.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?

#58

Post by BrianEatWorld »

I initially read this as returning to work for Microsoft.

I actually never left their tech realm. Even though both my work and home machine run flavours of Linux, I fell in love with Windows Phone back on WP7 and haven't been able to go back to Android of iOS since. If the integration between phone and desktop are really as tight as they look to be in Windows 10, I may consider converting my home machine to Windows, but at work running the same OS on my box as I do in prod is way too valuable.

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