Ask HN: What's it like coming back to Windows from OS X? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's it like coming back to Windows from OS X?

#11

Post by Ezra » Fri, Nov 25, 2016, 5:14 PM UTC

I moved from OSX to Linux-only laptop in 2012. I'd intended to dual-boot, but re-installing Windows[1], even by itself, was much, much more pain than I expected; I eventually gave up on it. Go figure.

Linux having poor compatibility with laptops is, in my experience, a myth. Ubuntu worked fine, but I've since moved to Fedora, and extremely happy with it. Everything "just works". I can't really see my self going back at this point.

For me at least, the Mac's original value-proposition being a no-hassle Linux-like machine. Now that the real thing is hassle free[2], there is no point in anything else.

Finally, I've heard that it's gotten much better lately, with the "new" Microsoft (which I applaud) but, as a developer who did so for a few months this year talking about "just works", the amount of friction involved in building anything outside the narrowest "MSFT-only" niches on Windows is crazy. I'm not a ragey guy, but it got to me, and not in a good way.

[1]: The then-new Windows 8 installer had a forever-grey "next" button at one point in the install-wizard that no amount of hair-pulling seemed to fix.

[2]: I would still recommend spending a few minutes online looking for red flags when choosing a model to use.

Re: Ask HN: What's it like coming back to Windows from OS X?

#12

Post by rpeden » Fri, Nov 25, 2016, 8:13 PM UTC

I haven't left Apple completely, but I've gone from having just a Macbook to also having a Thinkpad X220 running Win10 and Linux, an Asus Zenbook running Win10, and a beefy desktop running Win10 and Linux.

My goal has been to make it so that I can do most of my development work on any of the OSes, on any of the computers. Before the Win10 Linux subsystem, it was a little bit painful on Windows, but now it mostly just works. Node.js and Ruby native extensions have so far worked perfectly in WSL once I apt-get installed build-essential.

So far, I've only run into a couple of issues:

- A few ruby gems with native extensions have given me some trouble on OS X, but were fine on Linux and Win10 (using the Linux subsystem).

- Last time I tried React Native (a few months ago), there was a bug that prevented the build system from working on Windows. I found a fix had been added to the master branch, but hadn't yet made it into a release. I added the fix on my machine by hand and everything worked after that.

I mostly use VSCode and Atom for editing, so my editing experience is pretty consistent across operating systems. I've done a bit of F# in Visual Studio on Windows, and was able to load the project up unmodified in Xamarin Studio in OSX. I imagine it'd be the same now in VS for Mac.

I only use Photoshop occasionally, and it seems to perform a little bit better in Windows.

Other thoughts:

- Ultraportable, high DPI laptops are a much better value outside of Apple land. I picked up an Asus Zenbook with a hidpi IPS touch screen, and pretty well exactly the same specs as the current Core M Macbook for $649CDN on sale. The Macbook sells for $1549.

- Consider a previous generation Thinkpad if you'd like to run Linux. I picked up my X220 for $300CDN earlier this year. It was technically 'refurbished', but they refurb'ed it so well it looked like new. It had a crappy TN display, but I picked up an inexpensive IPS panel for it on eBay, and it was super easy to install. The Core i5 it in still performs well. A bit slow clock-for-clock than the newest i5s, but still lots of power for most tasks I've thrown at it. I'd say that Win10 and Linux Mint perform equally well on it.

- Lots of Thinkpads make good Hackintoshes in case you ever want to try that.

Re: Ask HN: What's it like coming back to Windows from OS X?

#13

Post by solarsavior » Sun, Nov 27, 2016, 2:34 PM UTC

themoat wrote: post #10

peller wrote: post #9

If you haven't run Linux on a laptop recently, I suspect you'll be pleasantly surprised. As long as you're not buying a really cheap consumer-grade machine, or a bleeding-edge high-end machine, the chances it works out of the box are very high. Furthermore, the level of software support has improved drastically from even a few years ago. Look at it this way. You're going to wipe and reinstall anyway, right? Might as…

That is my suggestion as well. I can't go back to Windows, it just doesn't do it for me. I have been lucky to have my company buy laptops for me for the past bunch of years, but on my personal machine, the only reason I have Windows at all is for gaming. For anything else I'm using some flavor of Linux. No question.

I recently installed Linux Mint to an external SSD and boot into it for gaming in Linux. Steam and many games work just fine in Linux. (I pretty much just play TF2.) I've used Linux on and off through the years, but don't use it daily in my work. I was very pleasantly surprised at how for the most part Linux Mint just works.

My current personal machine is a MacBook Air, but given the the direction Apple is headed with laptops, I won't be buying an Apple when I need to replace it. I don't want to use Microsoft spyware. So, I will likely use Linux for a new personal machine when my MBA is too old.

Re: Ask HN: What's it like coming back to Windows from OS X?

#14

Post by kosherbeefcake » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 2:55 AM UTC

I switched from Windows to OSX about 7 years ago. I recently gave my MacBook Pro to my partner, I was interested in a new laptop, and looked at the market offerings. I was very impressed with what had been released in the Windows ecosystem; so much that I bought a Surface 4. Windows 10 is significantly more polished than the windows that I left. The Ubuntu subsystem also satisfies my requirements for Bash. All-in-all, I am impressed with how much Microsoft has improved.

Re: Ask HN: What's it like coming back to Windows from OS X?

#15

Post by DanBC » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 2:58 AM UTC

having ads baked into the OS so deeply just feels weird to me. The lock screen[1] has ads, the start menu has ads[1].

there's a frustrating bug on 1511/10586.678 where all my carefully created file associations keep getting reclaimed.

[1] I'm not sure what they're actually called. :/