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Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

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Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#131

Post by okaram »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #56
FreakyT wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely disagree -- the Apple trackpad drivers on windows are awful, and on a laptop, most of your time will probably be spent using a trackpad. Trackpad++, which the author of the article mentions, can help, but it's a horrible program for the following reasons: 1. The developer requires that you put windows into "test mode" (creating a non-removable desktop watermark) to install it at all, apparently to get arou…

Apple's windows trackpad drivers are indeed not that great, but I haven't seen a windows laptop yet that can provide a better trackpad experience in spite of the bad drivers.

For some ungodly reason, I haven't seen any windows laptop with a nice trackpad that doesn't break in 6 months :(. At least my Acer netbooks have reliable trackpads (no gestures or anything, but ...)

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#132

Post by mwfunk »

nbevans wrote: post #95
acdha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that it's a Unix – Apple even got it certified in years past – but it's not that simple: Mach is not a Unix kernel and the Mach interfaces percolate up to the higher levels for many tasks which aren't covered by the POSIX layers. The bigger difference, though, is higher up. While you certainly can compile POSIX code on OS X, most of the applications which people run use Cocoa and that owes far more t…

This post backs up the statement you hated so much though. That OSX is just a mod of various components plus an old era Unix kernel at the core. You literally validated the point. OSX is a strange OS to use. It looks and feels good at first glance but when you have used it for a year, one really longs to return to a pure Windows environment. OSX has weird bugs like the beachball cursor which is something that simply…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#133

Post by acdha »

nbevans wrote: post #95
acdha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that it's a Unix – Apple even got it certified in years past – but it's not that simple: Mach is not a Unix kernel and the Mach interfaces percolate up to the higher levels for many tasks which aren't covered by the POSIX layers. The bigger difference, though, is higher up. While you certainly can compile POSIX code on OS X, most of the applications which people run use Cocoa and that owes far more t…

This post backs up the statement you hated so much though. That OSX is just a mod of various components plus an old era Unix kernel at the core. You literally validated the point. OSX is a strange OS to use. It looks and feels good at first glance but when you have used it for a year, one really longs to return to a pure Windows environment. OSX has weird bugs like the beachball cursor which is something that simply…

> That OSX is just a mod of various components plus an old era Unix kernel at the core. You literally validated the point.

Mach is not an “old era Unix kernel” and OS X is not exactly a vanilla Mach:

http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx/arch_xnu....

It has a BSD subsystem but plenty of other different things, like a completely custom device driver model (IOKit).

Secondly, you just called everything above the level of the kernel a mod, when that's where most of the code and almost all of the significant differences live. Is Android also “just a mod” on top of Linux?

> OSX has weird bugs like the beachball cursor which is something that simply shouldn't happen in a modern OS. The last Windows to have a global lock like that was 9x.

Windows 10 and most X window managers have the same thing for the same reason: you see the busy cursor when an application stops responding to events within some defined timeout. It's not due to the Win95/Mac OS Classic-like “global lock” you're thinking about but rather access to an unresponsive shared resource. I most commonly see it due to either doing blocking network I/O in the main thread (e.g. Outlook) or making the mistake of assuming that the filesystem won't block which affects just about every app with a network home directory or flaky drive, but it's also common with things like web browsers using a large cache directory where the startup blocks for awhile while the file system churns through millions of files.

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#134

Post by jdhawk »

kule wrote: post #127
danieltillett wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes 10.10 was released at least a year too early - it really should not be out of beta. I get daily "pizza wheels of death" with 10.10.3 on my Mac Pro. On the same machine I have yet to have Windows 8.1 crash. The hardware is fantastic, the software far less so.

btw did you do a fresh install? I'd always just upgraded and had no problems; until Yosemite. It's a bit more time consuming but Yosemite has worked great for me since I did a fresh install.

Interesting, I was in the same upgrade boat, but went back to 10.8 on my Mid-2011 MBAir. With only 4GB of ram, 10.10 was killing me, constantly spooling up the i7 & fan to screaming levels.

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#135

Post by dman »

coldtea wrote: post #75
danieltillett wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on how buggy Yosemite is this should really be rephrased as a beta version of Windows runs better than a beta version of MacOS.

How buggy was it, really? I've heard several painful stories, but nothing concrete, except some changes Apple made to the DNS infrastructure. The same kind of stories I've heard for every release since 10.4, about how the new one is so buggy, etc. Then, the next release comes and people wax nostalgically about how stable the previous one was.

Yosemite was bad enough that I do not accept Apple updates until a few months have passed and I know what the fallout will be based on complaints on websites. List of broken things

a) Battery life on my macbook pro plummeted after the upgrade.

b) I get visual artifacts (black lines on screen and some flashing) when OSX auto switches between the intel gpu and the nvidia gpu.

c) Cannot get nfs transfers to work with acceptable speeds (they seem to top out at 2 MBPs)

d) Broke drag and drop in Qt because of some changes to the string supplied to the drop event.

e) Bottom of my macbook pro gets unacceptably warm. I dont recall it being this bad before the update.

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#136

Post by Adaptive »

xyby wrote: post #59

How about Linux on the new MacBook? It's a nice machine and my old lenovo looks a bit "unhipsterish" when I work in a cafe. Also it's heavier. But I live in Linux, so I would have to be sure it works.

I'm running Linux on a Dell XPS 13 (dev edition, FHD screen + i5 for power savings). Plenty of power for most of my laptop use, big "infinity" screen (thin bezel) making the machine small but screen big, and overall positive experience.

It's also driving a 34" screen right now, and not breaking a sweat. http://imgur.com/WvGwGo9

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#137

Post by whoopdedo »

Artemis2 wrote: post #126
anonymfus wrote: post #43

>Little design touches have really improved the way things look, such as the switch to circular account pictures on the login screen This is the thing I and many other Windows users hate with passion, see rants like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/35zsgk/excuse... https://windowsphone.uservoice.com/forums/101801-feature-sug... https://windows.uservoice.com/forums/265757-windows-feature-... https:…

It's actually a UX improvement: a lead designer at Microsoft talked about how "people aren't squares" in a recent blog post [1]. I'm not sure it looks that great, but once you know the logic behind it it's a lot more interesting. [1]: http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/04/29/windows-...

My rebuttal is that an account ID picture is not necessarily a portrait photograph. Oh, sure, social data miners like Facebook want you to only use a photo of yourself for a profile picture. But many people -- such as on Twitter -- don't.

Profile pictures I've used are a photo of my computer, a still from a movie, an animated GIF of a flying pig (alas no one I know of supports animated profile pictures), and yes even a photo of myself every once in a while.

That said, complaining about the shape of the profile picture is pure bikeshedding. Big deal. How much time on your computer do you spend staring at your own picture? (Please don't answer that.) Although if given the choice I'd prefer rectangular. My computer screen is a rectangle. The area reserved to display the picture is a rectangle. Does a click in the invisible rectangle register as part of the picture? And most of all, it's easier to crop a photo to appear circular when displayed in a rectangle than it is to show a rectangle inside a circle. So the "safe" default should be a rectangle.

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#138

Post by acdha »

anonymfus wrote: post #52
acdha wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding random people on the internet to complain about change is as hard as finding grains of sand at the beach. The real question is what percentage of users will actually even notice a week after release, much less actually be inconvenienced in some measurable way.

The links were provided because these discussions contains arguments (good and bad), it was not about quantification.

Yeah, it's just that I remember people saying the same thing about Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, etc. (or each OS X release on the Mac side, since 10.1 or so – I think everyone agrees 10.0 was over the top).

Some people initially have strong negative reactions to something familiar changing but those tend go away quickly as the new version becomes familiar and then the same people will rant about the next version. Remember the “Fisher-Price My First OS” jokes when Windows XP came out? I'd bet you could find similar cracks at Windows 7 from some of the same people who are now saying the XP UI was the Platonic ideal of Windows.

ArsTechnica actually did the legwork looking through their forums when the now-staunchly-defended Windows XP was approaching EOL:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04 /memory-lane-before-everyone-loved-windows-xp-they-hated-it/

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#139

Post by acdha »

geographomics wrote: post #94
acdha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that it's a Unix – Apple even got it certified in years past – but it's not that simple: Mach is not a Unix kernel and the Mach interfaces percolate up to the higher levels for many tasks which aren't covered by the POSIX layers. The bigger difference, though, is higher up. While you certainly can compile POSIX code on OS X, most of the applications which people run use Cocoa and that owes far more t…

That's an interesting point, and indeed NT has a curious history in that regard - Microsoft was originally planning an OS/2-based API as the dominant one, and it was only due to the success of Windows 3.0 that they ended up adapting the Windows API to 32 bits. Microsoft has always been dominated by backwards compatibility constraints so there probably wasn't much scope for a massive redesign of the API, as it was in…

Backwards compatibility was definitely a driving factor for a lot of bad decisions back then. Here's a great example of how they wanted to avoid breaking a few apps written for a Win95 beta build:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/11/03/55532...

That's a bit silly but it also meant things like dutifully porting the real-mode Windows messaging system's feature which allowed any app to execute code in any other app:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatter_attack

Like, say, sending a message to the anti-virus software running as SYSTEM to get root…

The most entertaining bug I found was one of the times they failed at portability: one of the Win32 APIs to enumerate the contents of a directory worked 100% of the time on the Windows NT systems our development team used but returned no results on Windows 95 unless you had enabled network sharing (you didn't even need to share something; just starting the service was enough). This manifested in a very confused user wondering why our open dialog showed C:\ as empty when Explorer showed their files were still there.

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#140

Post by toddchambery »

jszymborski wrote: post #80
roma1n wrote: post #76

While we're talking about windows, any advice on how to make it developer friendly outside of .net? (Say for people whose main tools are bash, vi and a compiler)

Step one: Install Cmdr http://gooseberrycreative.com/cmder/ Step two: If on !Win10, use the chocolatey nu-get package manager ( https://chocolatey.org/ ), but if on Win10, I _think_ the native package manager will be a drop-in, tho I'm not sure. That is literally _all_ you have to do to get 90% of what I do on a linux terminal into a windows console.

Agree about Cmdr, but I'd add PyCmd[1] and UnxUtils[2]. I've never had much success with Chocolatey (probably due to corporate firewall issues). Gets me acceptably close to bash.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/pycmd/ [2] http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

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