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The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019

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Re: The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019

#51

Post by drevil-v2 »

I had to use a Windows laptop for about a week as my MacBook was getting the keyboard replaced.

I hated it. It is hard to articulate exactly why I disliked it so much but I would guess it is almost entirely a visual thing. The font rendering is so much better on MacOS. This was Surface Book 2 laptop so the display resolution was not a factor.

And I hate the amount of whitespace in Windows 10 user interface. There is a dropdown panel in start bar that shows common settings icons. God I hated that entire minimal design. It felt like something high school student might mockup for the Year 12 computer science project. Two colours, thin drawing that vaguely resembles a visual representation of the task and HUGE whitespace.

I was contemplating buying a Lenovo X1 Extreme Thinkpad because everyone raves about their keyboards but after using Windows 10 for a week.. nah.. nope... nyet... na-uh

Re: The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019

#52

Post by BitwiseFool »

drevil-v2 wrote: post #51

I had to use a Windows laptop for about a week as my MacBook was getting the keyboard replaced. I hated it. It is hard to articulate exactly why I disliked it so much but I would guess it is almost entirely a visual thing. The font rendering is so much better on MacOS. This was Surface Book 2 laptop so the display resolution was not a factor. And I hate the amount of whitespace in Windows 10 user interface. There is…

Ironically, I feel like it's a result of designers trying to copy Apple's minimalism.

Re: The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019

#53

Post by cycop »

Been an Apple user for 20 years and the switch came down to the absurd hardware cost of Apple. We have 5 desktops in the house (Large family), we do gaming, graphic design, video and audio production. Easily save $10K on upgrading all of our systems to modern hardware running Windows. The stability and experience of using Apple for graphics, audio and video use to be a big advantage 10 to 15 years ago. Now it's the same if not better on Windows.

Re: The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019

#54

Post by dijit »

I really don't like Windows. There are justifiable reasons that I don't like it but that doesn't get to the root of it for me.

I just _don't_ like it. Not only does it not evoke any kind of pleasant feeling in use, it's so heavy and fumbly that I just cannot use it for any meaningful period of time without getting frustrated, lack of terminal not withstanding.

For context: I use a mac at work, I used a windows machine for 2 years before this, my personal machines are linux/bsd based (i3/sway)

The Mac experience hasn't improved a lot, granted I'm using a 2013 Trashcan mac and that's quite dated, but mac, like windows, is suffering from just kinda feeling bad these days, I'm not sure if it's mojave or that I'm becoming old and getting grumpy about my display manager not being able to be operated without a mouse... but I don't like it.

Don't get me wrong MacOS is still _miles_ ahead of Windows in my opinion, but their hardware these days is appalling, and really the hardware alone makes me want to move to a nice XPS13 with Linux for work.

My i3/sway machines are /nearly/ perfect, I can think of two things that make them kinda suck:

1) Hotswapping monitors on Sway is.. hit or miss.. I could hack my way to make this work better most likely but I shouldn't have to.

2) I work in a Microsoft based company and tools like teams (which has a linux varient.. kinda), skype and outlook aren't going to work, not to mention the UUNC SMB paths that get tossed around and the burning desire to use email as a version control system for Excel spreadsheets...

What I mean is that #2 is served by MacOS, but not linux. :\

Re: The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019

#55

Post by da_chicken »

School-Cotton wrote: post #12

When people refer to the entire suite of Unix-like tools as “bash” I don’t quite know what to make of it. Interpreted uncharitably, it would seem to imply that they think all those nice tools like grep, awk, etc. are all shell builtins, which would be a huge red flag as it would mean they have very little idea of how a typical Unix-like OS works. Interpreted charitably, maybe they do know that those are all separate…

> When people refer to the entire suite of Unix-like tools as “bash” I don’t quite know what to make of it.

Because nobody installs bash without coreutils and the 30 or so other common utility programs (grep, sed, awk, et al). Pointing out that bash doesn't include coreutils+standard is just being pedantic. Nobody runs a system without those utilities present. Everybody already knows what is meant. You're not adding to the meaning by requiring a comprehensive listing of core and standard utility programs.

You might as well be saying, "Actually, it's not Linux. It's GNU/Linux." Only Richard Stallman cares, but even Stallman recognizes that because "a long name such as GNU/X11/Apache/Linux/TeX/Perl/Python/FreeCiv becomes absurd, at some point you will have to set a threshold and omit the names of the many other secondary contributions." [0]

Nobody is going to say, "OMG, how can you say you have a proper environment if you don't mention that you have the very important yes utility." Nobody is really interested in a required-only install of Debian or a base-only install of Red Hat or whatever because the use case for that is so rare and narrow that it's not worth contextualizing. Anybody who is doing that knows that it's a weird setup.

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#many

Re: The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019

#56

Post by neilv »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #37
chrisseaton wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I try to use Linux I find it's essentially impossible due to terrible power management support for any hardware I can find. I'm used to 10 hours on my MacBook - how do I get that on Linux?

Their are a variety of ways to manage all of the power management settings on Linux. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management It can be a pain; enabeling sleep for every USB devices will likely result in the keyboard or touchpad becoming broken, increase the latency it takes to respond, etc. But once it's configured it just works very well. I'm getting 10+ hours on a Dell XPS 13" under light web browsing…

In case anyone reading doesn't know, the Arch Linux distro's wiki is great, and you don't need to use Arch to benefit from the wiki.

(The Arch wiki might be my single most useful source of technical info when tweaking things on Debian lately. I haven't tweaked laptop power management lately, but I used to do it aggressively, including building my own kernel, making sure CPU power management was working, tracking down every process that used CPU cycles or spun up the disk for no reason, turning off devices I didn't need, dimming CCFL backlight, etc.)

Re: The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019

#57

Post by pier25 »

I tried switching to Windows in late 2016 for my every-day machine and I went back to macOS.

It wasn't really a matter of familiarity. I've been using Windows since 3.1 and while I've been using mostly macOS since the Vista days, I've always had a Windows machine for gaming.

I was really surprised the problem for me was the Windows ecosystem.

Outside of the major players (Microsoft, Adobe, etc) most of the stuff you find are ugly Win32 apps that look straight from Windows 95, do not support scaling, etc. At the time even the Creative Cloud app from Adobe didn't support scaling and looked super small on a 4K display. Heck, even Photoshop didn't support Windows scaling, you only had a setting to change the UI size from 100% to 150% or something like that.

The other problem is that I couldn't find good replacements for my most used productivity/utility apps. For example Alfred, Karabiner, BetterTouchTool, or iStatMenus. There are some alternatives that solve some of the problems these apps solve, but none that are even half as good. A colleague which is 100% Windows told me that much like Android, Windows users are less likely to pay for quality software.

I also had a ton of hardware problems with the Surface Book 1 I bought and returned to Amazon.

The Mac hardware situation is a real problem though, that is certain. Hopefully Apple has already realized this and is slowly correcting course.

Re: The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019

#58

Post by thom »

At a certain point I gave up trying to fix various battery, keyboard and screen issues with my MacBook Pro and just started coding on a cheap netbook with Linux and realised I didn’t really experience much pain (spent a fair amount of time SSH’d into beefy servers, admittedly).

When I finally bought a fancy new machine I ended up getting a gaming laptop with a GPU I knew I could do CUDA stuff on. I’ve got one disk with Ubuntu and one with Windows and ultimately spend most of my time in Windows. I still use Cygwin because WSL annoyed me in various ways (mostly I just want Emacs to be able to call command line tools and work).

There is nothing to love about Windows, and plenty of aggravations (I’ve been logged into my son’s Microsoft account for months and Microsoft regularly send me screen time reports about myself, because I once tried to set up a network game of Minecraft). But honestly, I work in Emacs and Firefox and actually quite like having access to games. I can’t really imagine ever going back to a Mac. If battery life was better on Linux and GNOME would stop lobotomising itself with every release I imagine I’d drop Windows too, but it’s been so long since I felt genuinely thrilled by an OS.

Re: The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019

#60

Post by dstaley »

I'm planning on switching from macOS to Windows 10 in the fall, and could not be more excited. I specced out a pretty powerful workstation: 16 core/32 thread AMD Ryzen CPU, 32 GB RAM, 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, and AMD's newest graphics card. For the same price, the best MacBook I could get would be the 13in MacBook Pro with a quad-core CPU, 8GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, and integrated graphics. I'm really excited about the power switching away from macOS gives me. I initially thought about switching to Linux, but I didn't want to give up nice things like biometric authentication and real desktop apps (I use Affinity Photo pretty often). Plus, with Samsung Flow, I get some pretty nice integration with my phone. The improvements Microsoft is making to Windows 10 give me a lot of confidence, way more so than Apple, who seems to be entirely focused on the iPad Pro.
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