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

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

#21

Post by saagarjha » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 9:36 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…

I often say that I like using macOS, but what I really mean is that I like macOS itself along with its apps and ecosystem. Perhaps the same thing was meant here.

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

#22

Post by everyone » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

Just letting ya'll know the best version of Windows 10 by miles is called 'LTSB'. It doesnt come with any shit on it (windows store, xboxlive, cortana etc etc.) MS have also promised It will not receive any updates that change its functionality but will receive security updates, for 10 years. You can only get it if u buy in bulk tho. Or, u can just get it from tpb.. Considering MS are intentionally not selling by far the most user-respecting version of their OS to regular folks, it behooves us to pirate it.

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

#23

Post by gjmacd » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

"Bash on Windows is maturing quickly." -- Hold my beer. Sorry, maturing quickly isn't going to cut it if you're a hardcore developer that works off the bash command line.

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

#24

Post by dsego » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #13

neilv wrote: post #10

The writer is a journalist. For techies using Mac, there's a bigger question of whether you want to just move from Mac to GNU/Linux.

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?

4-5 hours on T480s, I have TLP installed and I tried tinkering with it, but that's the best I've managed. People claim more, but I think it's just wishful thinking.

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

#25

Post by skunkworker » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #10

The writer is a journalist. For techies using Mac, there's a bigger question of whether you want to just move from Mac to GNU/Linux.

I have a friend who moved from a 2016 MBP to a Dell XPS with Ubuntu and has liked it a lot. Personally that's the only jump I would make from my current MBP as a development computer because even though WSL2 has come a long way, I still like having a psuedo*nix system to program on.

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

#26

Post by hising » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

Off-topic(ish): I didn't know about Microsoft UI Fabric until I read this, but found it to be really interesting, huge collection of components, well documented and for Web, iOS and Android. Anyone tried it out?

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric#/

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

#27

Post by diminoten » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

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…

If you're changing the scroll direction, you're not moving, you're trying to recreate your MacOS experience on Windows, and it isn't surprising that didn't go well.

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

#28

Post by crispinb » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #14

jaden wrote: post #4

> I'll be honest: it wasn't an easy switch at first, but as time went by it's become clear it was the right choice. Let's stop pretending there's a correct OS. We all have different needs and it depends on what you're optimizing for. I have a Macbook for work and run Windows 7 on my home desktop with Ubuntu on my home laptop. They all have their benefits and drawbacks. And Windows 10 has been having plenty of problem…

[deleted]

> The best OS is the one you enjoy and are most productive on.

What if like me you dislike them all? Actually I'm not kidding - I find the desktop OS in 2019 pretty miserable. I'm using Windows right now, but not because I like it. Current Apple hardware is of no interest to me, so macOS is ruled out. Linux and Windows are kind of neck and neck - I dislike each roughly equally, but find Windows wastes less of my time fiddling to get & keep things working.

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

#29

Post by samdixon » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

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

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

#30

Post by nextos » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

I have used all 3 major OS (Windows, Mac & Linux) for at least a decade each, and I review my current choice every few months.

I have regained a lot of sanity by realizing computing happens within platforms, and regarding the OS as just plumbing. My platforms of choice are the web (for hypertext), elisp text applications (for interactive development, task management, email), and Unix.

I only need a browser (Firefox), a text editor (Emacs) and a terminal. I prefer to use a tiling window manager (StumpWM), but it's not a big deal to use the WM provided by my current OS.

These 3 platforms (web, elisp and Unix) will be long-lived. Whereas native Windows, Mac and Linux applications tend to have much shorter lifecycles. Furthermore, they don't tend to talk well to each other. They are little silos.

Also, since the lifecycles are so short, by the time I work out all inconveniences and learn all tricks, the platform is beyond its prime time. This has already happened to me several times. I was really happy with Gnome 2 circa 2005, but the whole ecosystem collapsed with the transition to Gnome 3. Same thing, to some extent, in OS X Tiger-Snow Leopard. A really nice ecosystem of indie applications that has slowly lost a lot of momentum to iOS.

That said, I prefer to use Linux because it's so component-ized I can always replace frustrating things, and nothing gets pushed into me by a corporation. Plus code is open, and some userland things like Nix are so unique. And first-class centralized package management is great.