Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#441

Post by grub5000 » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 11:43 PM UTC

746F7475 wrote: post #181

grub5000 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming, VR, upcoming 3D and Cortana are a few reasons I can think of why someone might pick Windows over MacOS. I think you're discounting the performance aspect as well - if workload X is too slow on the fastest mac, it may well still run on a windows machine since they can be specced higher. Cost isn't a factor for everyone - sometimes you literally just need the fastest possible machine, in which case Windows can…

>Gaming, VR, upcoming 3D Am I missing something or does this seem like one thing? Or is there use case for VR that isn't gaming? And what is 'upcoming 3D' exactly? >if workload X is too slow on the fastest mac, it may well still run on a windows machine Can't argue with that, but what are such workloads if you are not game developer? Wouldn't cluster of Linux servers always be a better choice? Unless of course you ar…

I was thinking media editing/consumption (e.g. Video production, music making etc.). Presumably the Machine Learning GPU crowd get some use out of Windows machines too

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#442

Post by comex » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 11:44 PM UTC

CJefferson wrote: post #291

atl4s wrote: post #91

More FOTM moaning about the state of Apple. I can't believe people keep reading these "I left Apple and here's why you should care" articles by front end devs with no real idea of what goes into OS dev and where macOS has come from since the days of OS8. Give me a break, surely if you want to use Windows you don't need to write 2000 words in the form of some needlessly pronoun heavy (because your opinion is really im…

> macOS has never been more stable or developer friendly * I have to turn off gatekeeper to run unsigned apps. * I can't write into /bin or /usr on my own machine without flipping some magic option * I can't run gdb without some complicated signing dance I have to do every time I update it. * I can't run dtrace without rebooting and switching some secret flag off. I have to tell other people to turn they same thing o…

I agree this is annoying, but regarding gdb: lldb works fine, and it's not Apple's fault that gdb hasn't automated the complicated signing dance. In my experience, gdb is broken on macOS in several other ways too...

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#443

Post by lobster_johnson » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 11:45 PM UTC

comex wrote: post #419

lobster_johnson wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Integration of Cloud storage directly to the desktop? This was done extremely poorly, though. Among the big sync providers (Dropbox, Sync, Box, Google), iCloud Drive is easily the worst. The iOS app looks like something an intern cooked up. Hardly any iOS apps can read or write from the drive. There's no way to share anything in your drive. There's no way to share anything into your drive, either. While Apple intro…

> "My Music", "Microsoft User Data", etc. Neither of these are Apple's doing - obviously in the case of "Microsoft User Data", and I don't know what "My Music" is but Apple's software puts music in ~/Music. (Heh, it seems I have a "My Music" in Documents, as well as "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My Games"… not sure whether this is Wine or VMware's doing, or whether they're there for the same reason as on your syste…

My Music etc., are made by Apple. My Music is Garage Band, I believe. My Videos would be iMovie, I believe. I think savegames end up in Documents because they are considered to be "documents" as opposed to app state (which would go under ~/Library/Application Support), but I'm not sure what the Apple guidelines are.

"Microsoft User Data" is apparently from earlier versions of Office. Newer versions will look for it in ~/Library/Preferences, and you can actually move the folder there to get rid of it. [1]

Here [2] is my Documents folder. It's 100% crap that I did not ask for.

As for sharing: This discussion was about macOS, although the same limitation applies to iOS: There's no way to share an iCloud Drive file directly. If you do right-click -> Share -> Email, you get an attachment that you need to send, even though the file is already reachable through the cloud. Every other competitor (Dropbox etc.) adds a "Copy Link" option to the Finder context menu.

[1] https://www.atulhost.com/remove-microsoft-user-data-from-doc...

[2] http://i.imgur.com/PvXbmJk.png

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#444

Post by wstrange » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 11:46 PM UTC

comex wrote: post #390

ynniv wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a professional developer, I don't want a new toy language. I'm buying a powerful laptop, I don't want cloud storage. I want the possibility to dual boot or share drives with other operating systems, I don't need a new proprietary filesystem. I don't want compressed memory, I want 32GB of RAM. And while I'm at it, I want a laptop with a real keyboard, not keys that have so little travel they feel like a touchscree…

> I want the possibility to dual boot or share drives with other operating systems, I don't need a new proprietary filesystem. Then you're in luck. APFS isn't proprietary, as Apple's website claims that "Apple plans to document and publish the APFS volume format specification when Apple File System is released for macOS in 2017." So there will be nothing preventing drivers from being written for other operating syste…

What about patents?

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#445

Post by voltagex_ » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 11:47 PM UTC

nul_byte wrote: post #342

bluedino wrote: post #41

I'm not 100% happy with where Apple is at, but I don't think I ever was. But I'm not going to switch. I get the slickest hardware, great battery life, the best touchpad and keyboard, and a hi-resolution screen that doesn't have battery life, flicker, tint, or scaling issues. Windows is still...Windows. The bash subsystem is half-baked. Windows itself is still the same mess. Docking is still a joke. Performance is ter…

> Linux is still as bad as it ever was. It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. I've been using Linux on laptops since Redhat 7 (the first one from 2000) and a Dell Latitude C-series. This is so far removed from my world as a daily Linux user. I put Fedora 25 onto a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition and everything worked perfectly out of the box. The OS looks gorgeus, and I now have the tooling so p…

Does the XPS Developer Edition have a 4K screen?

I have a standing offer to buy a developer a laptop with a high DPI screen [1] if they can make High DPI support suck less on any distribution.

At least Fedora auto detected the screen and enabled 2x scaling. GRUB is still unreadable. WINE apps are unreadable. QT less than 5.6 is unreadable. GTK is unreadable.

1: http://en.chuwi.com/product/items/Chuwi-HiBook-pro.html although there's a newer one I can't find

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#446

Post by danielsju6 » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 11:49 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #41

I'm not 100% happy with where Apple is at, but I don't think I ever was. But I'm not going to switch. I get the slickest hardware, great battery life, the best touchpad and keyboard, and a hi-resolution screen that doesn't have battery life, flicker, tint, or scaling issues. Windows is still...Windows. The bash subsystem is half-baked. Windows itself is still the same mess. Docking is still a joke. Performance is ter…

"great battery life"? really? that's why I gave up Apple, they aren't keeping up. What's the new Macbook 3-6 hours, maybe? Meanwhile Windows laptops are pushing past 12.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#447

Post by srssays » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 11:49 PM UTC

jhoechtl wrote: post #356

baobrain wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireless charging is horribly inefficient...IIRC there aren't even any that go over 10W. Magsafe may be deprecated by Apple, but that's a step backwards in functionality. One cannot deny that using USB C for charging is inferior in terms of protecting the device.

How many devices did you break because they did not have a magsafe like functionality? I did not break a single one. Magsafe is a differentiating feature of Apple with little to none daily life saving rationality for existance. Its there to be different not to be better.

Those computers are like $3000. Even if it only saves 10% of MacBooks from an untimely end, it's still $300's worth of insurance.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#448

Post by AsyncAwait » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 11:49 PM UTC

hamandcheese wrote: post #104

vhakulinen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you "can" switch between Windows Mac, why not give linux a spin? Like, if you're not building apps with native UI kits on those platforms, what is holding you on them?

Lack of compelling evidence that there's a *nix distro out there that will serve me better than macOS.

I really recommend looking outside the Ubuntu ecosystem, (Arch is a personal favourite), if you ever decide to try it.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#449

Post by voltagex_ » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 11:50 PM UTC

dualogy wrote: post #426

nul_byte wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux is still as bad as it ever was. It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. I've been using Linux on laptops since Redhat 7 (the first one from 2000) and a Dell Latitude C-series. This is so far removed from my world as a daily Linux user. I put Fedora 25 onto a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition and everything worked perfectly out of the box. The OS looks gorgeus, and I now have the tooling so p…

Absolutely. Maybe it's also just a Fedora thing, installed it a week ago on my laptop that only had Win on it before, and from prior Linux experiences (Xubuntu & friends) just some ~3 years back I was absolutely baffled how everything installed quickly without a hitch, without glitches. HiDPI graphics recognition with a good default scaling, there , no config-file messing required. Wifi, there . NumPad, multi-touch t…

I'm surprised HiDPI is working so well for you. See my other comment but I'm guessing you don't run anything in WINE. Yes Fedora is miles better than other distros regarding HiDPI but there's still no way to force per-application scaling in Wayland.

I mean, Windows doesn't get a pass here - you still can't scale HyperV, or anything involving mmc.exe, but Mac's HiDPI support is flawless.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#450

Post by symlinkk » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 11:51 PM UTC

nul_byte wrote: post #342

bluedino wrote: post #41

I'm not 100% happy with where Apple is at, but I don't think I ever was. But I'm not going to switch. I get the slickest hardware, great battery life, the best touchpad and keyboard, and a hi-resolution screen that doesn't have battery life, flicker, tint, or scaling issues. Windows is still...Windows. The bash subsystem is half-baked. Windows itself is still the same mess. Docking is still a joke. Performance is ter…

> Linux is still as bad as it ever was. It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. I've been using Linux on laptops since Redhat 7 (the first one from 2000) and a Dell Latitude C-series. This is so far removed from my world as a daily Linux user. I put Fedora 25 onto a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition and everything worked perfectly out of the box. The OS looks gorgeus, and I now have the tooling so p…

> I put Fedora 25 onto a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition and everything worked perfectly out of the box

You have a 13" 1080p screen correct? Then all text will be absurdly small because Fedora only supports scaling at 1x and 2x but not at 1.5x, which is what that screen size / resolution combination requires for a comfortable DPI. Windows does support 1.5x scaling.