Tried to leave a few years ago, but the pain of using Xcode ruined the attempt...
All the MSFT goodness seems to be getting even better.
Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
61–70 of 114 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#62Nope. 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.
What about cygwin or mingw? They give you a pretty full-featured bash scripting on Windows.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#63When 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,…
> I don't know what "handoff" is,
I think this refers for your phone and computer to integrate. For example:
- When your phone is near your computer, your phone ringing will pop up a notification on your computer, which allows you to answer it via OSX (e.g. using headphones plugged into your computer).
- When your phone is near your computer, Messages.app can text message via your iPhone.
From here[1]:
> When your Mac computers and iOS devices are within Bluetooth range of each other (about 33 feet or 10 meters), they can automatically “hand off” what you’re doing from one device to another. For example, you can start writing an email in Mail on your iPhone, then instantly pick up where you left off in Mail on your Mac.
> Handoff works with several apps that come with OS X Yosemite and iOS 8: Calendar, Contacts, Mail, Maps, Messages, Notes, Phone (iOS only), Reminders, and Safari. It also works with Keynote v6.5, Numbers v3.5, and Pages v5.5 for Mac, and Keynote, Numbers, and Pages v2.5 for iOS. Third-party apps may also work with Handoff.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#64Nope. As long as we keep deploying on Linux there is no point in developing on Windows. I'm perfectly happy to use Ubuntu as my desktop, most people around me use Macs. A VM for testing with IE will be enough and there are web services for that. With the open sourcing of .NET we're probably going to see .NET applications running on Linux servers too. So Windows clients get less and less valuable. Remember that there…
Nope. As long as we keep deploying on Linux there is no point in developing on Windows.
True, but in the Dockerised world we're all moving towards your development machine doesn't matter too much anyway - you can just stick everything in a VM.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#65When 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,…
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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
#67Has anyone gone through the horror of doing things like installing python or mysql on a windows machine? Maybe it's easier nowadays, but last time I tried installing python I had to follow multiple tutorials, one of which actually worked. Installing mysql was a little more pain-free, but still too much work.
Also the lack of a linux/unix/whatever shell in windows? There's no way to measure the infinite utility in having a shell at your fingertips on a mac. I use the shell everyday, not sure how anybody could get on without one.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#68Many 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 th…
There's a really good chance this is a "new" Microsoft. Gates and Ballmer were the "old school" Microsoft that only thought that obstructing the competition was the best path to success. The new CEO Satya Nadela built the Azure platform, the most "open" technology that Microsoft has. His mantra is "mobile first, cloud first". This outlook is the opposite of Ballmer's, which was to drive everybody back to Windows.
Microsoft is now a multi-device, multi-technology company that is focused on getting their software and services on as many platforms as possible. The cloud and their services are their future, if they cannot make the transition to interoperability, they will collapse. Prior to this, Microsoft was structured in such a way that everything depended on their OS, so Microsoft declared war on OS/2, Linux and MacOS.
Windows sold Office, and Office and NT sold the enterprise market.
Now, any platform sells office, mobile and desktop. Windows sells Microsoft's cloud services like OneDrive and Office 365, but so does OS X now. NT drove enterprise revenues, but now it's Windows Azure running Linux or Windows, either way Microsoft makes money in hosting it. For consumers, Windows licenses were a cash cow for Microsoft, but Apple has set the price of Operating Systems to $0 with their upgrade policy, now Microsoft is following with free Windows 10 licenses for a year. My guess is that they will bundle Windows licensing as a service that gives you access to Office , XBOX Live and other Microsoft properties, so it will is less of a Windows license and more of a Microsoft Experience license. Either way, if you use Microsoft's services on any platform, Microsoft will still earn their revenue.
To sum that up, Microsoft's interests are no longer in opposition to the rest of the computing market, it is in alignment with it due to their multi-platform strategy. They are in a position to more easily do things to earn your trust, as those things will also add to their revenues.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#69No, because every time I interact with something they make, it's a crappy experience. Documentation is awful. Everything they do is crazy verbose and feels overengineered and underengineered at the same time, somehow. Windows is unpleasant to use every single time I dip my toe back into it.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#70Has anyone gone through the horror of doing things like installing python or mysql on a windows machine? Maybe it's easier nowadays, but last time I tried installing python I had to follow multiple tutorials, one of which actually worked. Installing mysql was a little more pain-free, but still too much work. Also the lack of a linux/unix/whatever shell in windows? There's no way to measure the infinite utility in hav…
For the 2 specific cases you've mentioned, there are installers for both Python and MySQL for Windows. You could even use the unoffical Windows package manager, Chocolately to get them.
As for the lack of a *NIX shell, PowerShell is an acceptable alternative, but with both GoW and msysgit, it's easy to use the most common shell tools.