Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019

char.gd

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 206 posts

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

#141

Post by devonkim »

School-Cotton wrote: post #122
devonkim wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like I need hardware that Just Works (a lot of Windows laptops that are of similar quality to MacBooks were nearly the same price, go figure) a native POSIX-like environment that works mostly with my Linux-centric tools and don’t like dealing with any more differences from my server than I have to but would rather not fight for hardware compatibility constantly. But what definitely is bothersome with the MacBook…

> a lot of Windows laptops that are of similar quality to MacBooks were nearly the same price, go figure Those exist? I’m not being facetious. Are there really examples of non-Apple laptops that are as nice of hardware? (I primarily care about screen and trackpad.)

Trackpad no, but the IBM / Lenovo X1 Carbon series were pretty solid laptops for a while and also quite expensive for years. And more recently the Surface Book models have been really nice to work with if it weren’t for pesky power management issues. If the Surface Book 2 ran macOS and had the same suspend / resume experience as Macs all do I’d have been quite happy with Microsoft. Before the Surface line most OEMs have been primarily about driving costs down in the face of commoditization and races to the bottom rather than trying to compete head on with Apple from the hardware and consumer experience side and it appears that Microsoft is still going at the gargantuan task of making PC laptops sexy alone.

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

#142

Post by h1d »

galkk wrote: post #89

I prefer to use Ubuntu for development and Windows+WSL for home/gaming. Somehow I don't have the need for Mac in my life. If ever there will be iTerm2 style integration with tmux, I will be able to say that there's nothing at all that holds me to Mac.

I would miss GUI DB apps, image editors, decent trackpad utility, QR code generator to copy text data to my phone, MS office to open files being passed, Quick Look and other little useful ones.

And I mean they're better than DBeaver, GIMP and LibreOffice.

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

#143

Post by h1d »

cycop wrote: post #53

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 s…

Saving $2k a desktop doesn't sound right.

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

#144

Post by h1d »

everyone wrote: post #80
silversconfused wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well to be fair, pirates are far more honest and helpful than corporations.

Agreed, pirated anything from a known trusted group or uploader is what I consider a clean copy of something. If I buy the official version of anything I usually use the pirated version anyway.

That is dangerous. They can plant whatever the hell they want as soon as it looks financially attractive. What repercussion do they have against corporations doing the same?

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

#145

Post by jamra »

dijit wrote: post #44
jamra wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a better terminal coming out, but I use Cmder in the meantime. Taking screenshots has a shortcut key. Alt + Shift + S. I use a screen manager called Aqua Snap. It's great. I turned off notifications. They are awful. I use Windows and OSX, but I understand how you feel. I still prefer OSX.

These are good tips, I'm not a windows user and would have never found that hotkey or aqua snap. Do you have any more tips? It might be asking too much but perhaps you could write something up?

Ok. I don't have the mental capacity to write something up at the moment, but here's another one.

In Windows, you now have a Spaces alternative (It hasn't been called Spaces for a while). It's super cool. You hit WindowsKey + Tab and up top there are desktops. You can use the plus sign to create a new one and continue to use that expose like feature to drag apps between desktops. Next, you can either navigate via expose or you can Ctrl + Windows + [Left | Right] to change between them.

If you're doing any kind of javascript development, there is NVM, which will allow you to change node versions. That's a nice tool.

For installing software, some people use Chocolatey. There is some danger because there isn't any code signing as far as I know so I don't use it. But basically, that is a tool that allows you to install apps into windows with a config file.

For MITM proxy, Fiddler2 is pretty great.

For process management, there is a whole suite of tools called SysInternals. They allow you to see which processes are open and the files they are accessing. That can help tremendously in certain scenarios.

Rainmeter is a cool desktop customization tool that you don't have as good alternatives on OSX.

7zip is a must have for compression.

Deluge is a decent torrent client.

Some of the console commands you want to learn are ipconfig [/all] to check your IP address.

On Task Manager, you can set affinity to certain CPUs so that processes don't eat up all of your CPUs. That's a neat trick. I'd have to get a good night's sleep before I can think of anything else, but I hope it was helpful.

Edit: Oh and I almost forgot.. You do have a Unix shell on windows. You can google how to turn on "bash subsystem for windows". Then you can install Ubuntu. I don't think it's virtualized. But I still currently prefer Cmder since I can copy and paste on it. But yes it's linux and you can mount your C drive and just linux away at your windows. Pretty soon, their new terminal with better font rendering should be a show stopper. It's currently on some kind of preview that can only be run on pre release versions of Windows 10 so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting.

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

#146

Post by pier25 »

rayiner wrote: post #61
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…

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…

PDF rendering is baked directly into Quartz which it's why it's so great on macOS and iOS.

IIRC the quartz team was involved with Adobe when they were developing the PDF format.

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

#147

Post by lonelappde »

School-Cotton wrote: post #92
da_chicken wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You seem to be responding to points that I’m not making. I’m aware that very few people install bash outside the context of a typical Unix OS. It would indeed be pedantic and useless to point out that that’s theoretically possible, and that’s not what I’m doing. It’s also very rare to install, say, grep outside of a typical Unix OS. But you wouldn’t say “the grep workflow on WSL is great” to mean the entire WSL exper…

Because bash is the name of the Unix shell, differentiated from the traditional Windows shell.

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

#148

Post by School-Cotton »

lonelappde wrote: post #147
School-Cotton wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be responding to points that I’m not making. I’m aware that very few people install bash outside the context of a typical Unix OS. It would indeed be pedantic and useless to point out that that’s theoretically possible, and that’s not what I’m doing. It’s also very rare to install, say, grep outside of a typical Unix OS. But you wouldn’t say “the grep workflow on WSL is great” to mean the entire WSL exper…

Because bash is the name of the Unix shell, differentiated from the traditional Windows shell.

Would you say “I’m using Chrome and Visual Studio” or “I’m using a Windows workflow and tools” or “I’m using explorer.exe” ?

The first two make much more sense to me than the third.

(As an aside, it’s not true that Bash is “the Unix shell” and it is in fact not the default on several Unix-like systems. But in fairness to your point, it is the default on most GNU/Linux distros).

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

#149

Post by Alas1 »

rayiner wrote: post #61
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…

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. This has gone mostly unnoticed or ignored as the blur is reduced by the high PPI screens, although it is there and becomes much more apparent on a lower PPI external screen.

This single fact makes Mac OS unusable for me. Windows has its own faults, but at least I can read crisp PDFs on it.

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

#150

Post by Alas1 »

pier25 wrote: post #146
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…

PDF rendering is baked directly into Quartz which it's why it's so great on macOS and iOS. IIRC the quartz team was involved with Adobe when they were developing the PDF format.

It is no longer great (it used to be so around Mavericks). Current pdfkit is broken, and renders PDFs blurry, with the effect enhanced on low PPI screens. This holds for iOS as well since the same pdfkit is used, but since the devices running those are extremely high PPI this bug goes unnoticed by all but those looking for it or those with sensitivity to such imperfections. I think the state of PDF rendering on macOS right now is unnacceptable.
Post reply on HN