The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019 • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by pier25 » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 8:57 PM UTC

Alas1 wrote: post #187

pier25 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen this issue myself. I'm on High Sierra now. In Yosemite PDF rendering performance was crap for me in some high resolution documents for print, but other than that it has been flawless for as long as I've been using macOS. I've only seen the issue shown in the Reddit post (which looks like some rendering lag) in Android actually.

As I said it's difficult to see on a high PPI screen unless you're looking for it. High Sierra, I think, is the first version where this bug was introduced, so you most certainly have it but it just isn't drastic enough a change to bother most people on a Macbook's screen. The rendering lag is another problem that was introduced with the one I'm referring to, which is a separate issue but they are probably related.

I have to admit I haven't used a low DPI screen in macOS since Maverick times, so you might be right. PDFs in Preview look perfectly fine to me.

Maybe Apple actually optimized rendering for hiDPI displays since probably that's where the majority of users are these days.

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

#192

Post by dublin » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

Alas1 wrote: post #149

rayiner wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing here. Sold my 2013 MBP and bought a Thinkpad X1 carbon. After a year of frustration, bought a used 2013 MBP. Windows is somehow worse than it used to be. There's two control centers for some reason. Much more notifications and intrusiveness. Taskbar auto-hide doesn't work consistently. Updates install without permission. The big thing is the apps. Apps are getting much less functional (just like how the Se…

Are you serious about the PDF viewers? Windows has Sumatra, Xodo, Drawboard all of which are fine and the first two are free. Mac OS on the other hand, has had a broken pdfkit implementation since around Sierra, and any PDF viewer that relies on it (Preview, Skim) has broken and blurry rendering of which there are several reports online. This makes any PDF reader other than Adobe's (which is an abomination) unusable.…

Although it's a bit of a pig, Acrobat Reader DC is still the best thing out there. I bought and really love Drawboard, but since there's no reliable way to gracefully make it persist as the default PDF app for the OS (and consequently, the browsers), I just went back to DC. (This is a general problem with "modern" apps - they can't really be made to act as reasonable default apps for Win32 apps, AFAIK.)

That said, for all its warts, the Win10/WSL combo is light-years ahead of MacOS. (I had to use a Mac for a recent client engagement, and truly felt like I'd been cast back to the turn of the century. Seriously, MacOS is really primitive, especially for dev, compared to Win10/WSL.) But more than that, I'll just never go back to a computer without really awesome pen and touch support. The only problem I've had with several versions of Surface Pro hardware is Intel's execrable Skylake power management cluster-foxtrot.

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

#193

Post by dublin » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #129

pbreit wrote: post #9

I just switched from Mac to Windows and had to move back. I cannot believe how miserable the Windows experience is. I mistakenly thought that since so much is browser-based, it's not a big deal. But literally every single little thing is slightly-to-much worse on Windows. Even stupid things like changing scroll direction, saving the 5 second preference for notifications to disappear, finding a wifi password, arrangin…

Just to +1 the experiences here: I have a surface pro 4. I enjoy the touchscreen for some things, but otherwise I roundly hate it, almost entirely due to Windows. Some things work in touchpad mode, some don't, sometimes a feature is crippled in one mode, the gestures are finicky and weird and the only reason I know how to use them is because I read a few blog posts, notifications that are undismissable for no reason,…

If you've marked every network as metered, then Windows is doing exactly what you told it and NOT upgrading over those networks. Even a manual update request should fail, because you've already told it not to upgrade over a metered network. It's not Microsoft's fault you're an idiot...

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

#194

Post by dublin » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

tambourine_man wrote: post #113

>I keep touching other people's screens out of instinct. Please, don’t do this. I get palpitations simply when people start getting their fingers, or worse, a pen, too close to my screen. I warn them. I try to be cute: “there’s this thing called cursor, you know? You can use many devices to control it”. When they do, eventually and inevitably, accidentally touch it, I get visibly upset and make no effort to lighten t…

It's reasonable to expect any modern computer screen to support touch. By far the most annoying feature of my 4K desktop monitor is that it lacks touch. I will never buy another non-touch monitor. While you are clearly anchored to the quaint ways of the past, the rest of us have progressed two decades into the 21st century. Come join us in the modern world - and loosen up a bit on the OCD!

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

#195

Post by dublin » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 10:25 PM UTC

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…

What lots of people call "Bash on Windows" is technically the "Windows Subsystem for Linux", although that's a bit of a misnomer, since it's all the usual apps from a standard distro (several common distros can be downloaded directly from the Microsoft Store) but actually running directly on the Windows kernel, through an impressively fast adaptation layer that looks just like a real Linux kernel to the apps. (With the exception of a few bizarre corner cases like Dbus, but you can even make those work if you really need to.)

Similar (and similarly speedy) adaptation layers provide transparent access across Linux and Windows filesystems, too - the ability to safely work bidirectionally from a windows app to the Linux filesystem and vice-versa is new in the recently pushed 1903 release of Win10.

Not only does WSL work quite well, it's a bit of a righteous hack or technological marvel in its own right, especially since it makes Linux a fully equal partner in the the dev ecosystem, something the old Microsoft would never have allowed.

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

#196

Post by Groxx » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

dublin wrote: post #193

Groxx wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to +1 the experiences here: I have a surface pro 4. I enjoy the touchscreen for some things, but otherwise I roundly hate it, almost entirely due to Windows. Some things work in touchpad mode, some don't, sometimes a feature is crippled in one mode, the gestures are finicky and weird and the only reason I know how to use them is because I read a few blog posts, notifications that are undismissable for no reason,…

If you've marked every network as metered, then Windows is doing exactly what you told it and NOT upgrading over those networks. Even a manual update request should fail, because you've already told it not to upgrade over a metered network. It's not Microsoft's fault you're an idiot...

Manual requests intentionally bypass that, as their own documentation states when you enable that setting. Plus "check for updates when I press a button" is enormously different than "automatically download and install updates in the background". Wanting one without the other is entirely reasonable and technically simple.

Even if it wasn't, it's unreasonable to offer a "check for updates" button that just turns into an indefinite progress bar forever without mentioning "can't check on this network" or something.

Also, as I mentioned, it does work sometimes, which is why it's clear when it's breaking. Though I didn't mention it earlier, it remains broken even when I turn off the metered mode, so yea. I'm pretty sure the updater is just plain broken most of the time.

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

#197

Post by dublin » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 10:36 PM UTC

cgio wrote: post #48

samdixon wrote: post #29

An operating system with advertisements will never be my first choice.

That. I loved windows, was probably at some time one of the last people using windows phone, but the moment I started getting a candy crash or something icon in my start menu and could not remove it unless I did some powershell tricks and even then I had it coming back was the end for me. I still believe there’s more innovation going into windows than other os but just cannot work on a system where every time I press…

That's funny, I never see any Microsoft-pushed advertising (other than in the Windows Store, which is kinda its point). I right-clicked on CandyCrush, removed it, and have NEVER seen anything I didn't put in my start menu since. I'm on record as having a well-justified hatred/distrust of Microsoft for their stance on things decades back. But that was long ago, and they've changed. I've been using Win10 for five years now, and it's without question the best operating system I've ever used. Both MacOS and any Linux are a huge step backwards, especially when it comes to running 21st century pen/touch apps on 21st century hardware!

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

#198

Post by School-Cotton » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 10:59 PM UTC

dublin wrote: post #195

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…

What lots of people call "Bash on Windows" is technically the "Windows Subsystem for Linux", although that's a bit of a misnomer, since it's all the usual apps from a standard distro (several common distros can be downloaded directly from the Microsoft Store) but actually running directly on the Windows kernel, through an impressively fast adaptation layer that looks just like a real Linux kernel to the apps. (With t…

I know what he means. I’m asking why it’s popularly referred to as “bash”.

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

#199

Post by tbrock » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 11:15 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #126

tbrock wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you made one huge mistake... you must run Linux on the x1 Carbon for it to be amazing.

Yeah, no: https://medium.com/@hkdb/ubuntu-18-04-on-lenovo-x1-carbon-6g... . I did my time already. Compiled my own kernel back in the 2.2 days. Futzed with X11 mode settings. I’m too old for that now. I’ve come to the conclusion that, especially for mobile devices, developing the OS separately from the hardware is a disastrous idea. It makes no sense. The people best suited to do things like tweak the throttling prof…

I haven't done anything like that and my experience has been great. I'm not even running Ubuntu or Fedora or anything like that, just vanilla arch linux.

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

#200

Post by skygazer » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 12:53 AM UTC

ThoAppelsin wrote: post #190

pbreit wrote: post #9

I just switched from Mac to Windows and had to move back. I cannot believe how miserable the Windows experience is. I mistakenly thought that since so much is browser-based, it's not a big deal. But literally every single little thing is slightly-to-much worse on Windows. Even stupid things like changing scroll direction, saving the 5 second preference for notifications to disappear, finding a wifi password, arrangin…

"Saving screenshots" Nice way to hint that you are definitely being sarcastic, because cmd+something+3 surely and clearly is no way intuitive, contrary to the use of dedicated Print Screen key on Windows.

Just to point for the unfamiliar, the "hotkey" defaults for screen shotting are user configurable on macOS, in System Preferences/Keyboard/Shortcuts. In fact, shortcuts can be changed not only for all actions, but also menu items in any/all programs can be remapped to desired key combos, or indeed added for menu items with default hotkeys. This is actually staggeringly powerful, and frequently overlooked.