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Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

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Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#411

Post by int_19h »

Razengan wrote: post #320
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By default the ribbon is hidden: http://i.imgur.com/5hxOIcb.png I don't use Windows, but it's important to use fair comparisons.

> By default the ribbon is hidden: http://i.imgur.com/5hxOIcb.png You have to expand it and be faced with that hodgepodge of cluttered buttons to perform many functions. Even with it collapsed, it's still 4! toolbars (counting the buttons in the title bar and the ones in the bottom status bar) and a menu (?) style that is inconsistent with many other built-in Windows apps.

You don't really have to expand it for typical day-to-day operations - everything of interest is in the context menu.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#412

Post by ntsplnkv3 »

scholia wrote: post #349
ntsplnkv3 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a huge fan of Windows 7. The UI is simple, everyone is familiar with it, it's relatively stable, but most importantly, basic tasks are so much easier to deal with. In my opinion, it is the best Windows OS made. Unfortunately Windows 8 and 10 are just not great OSs, in my opinion. A major theme on these threads is "Apple is trying to force mobile onto desktop computers." yet I see Windows doing it just as much, an…

> Just give me a control panel. The old Control Panel is still there. > Trying to disable things like Cortana never works right. Cortana is a settable option. There's no reason to try to disable it. *> Now we have "Settings" too, which is just a mess. Settings is a clean, well-organized and simple app that does what most people want. It saves ordinary users from having to grapple with the Control Panel. You'd probabl…

> You'd probably do better if you spent more time in learn mode instead of in angry mode.

And you'd probably do better if you weren't condescending towards other people's experiences and preferences.

You say the Settings app is great, yet it's not great enough to replace the control panel? Redundant settings abound between the two?

There are many reasons to want to disable Cortana-not just turn it off, because it doesn't actually turn it off.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#413

Post by throwawayish »

nik736 wrote: post #148
diego_moita wrote: post #85

It is so funny to read these Apple vs. Windows discussions when you live outside of North America... The truth is that, for the rest of the world, "Apple platform" means only iOS, only the IPhone, nothing more. In Asia, Africa, Latin America and some parts of Europe, Macs and OSX are a rare species, most people spend years without even seeing a Mac computer "in the wild". They are used only for graphics editing and I…

Here in Germany I see Mac products every day. Even in the train there are more MacBooks than Windows Laptops.

My casual observation: most commuters don't use a laptop in the train. Those who do, mostly Windows. Apples seem fairly rare, as in, every 20th unit or so.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#414

Post by int_19h »

Neeek wrote: post #391
keevie wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, it doesn't make sense to you that enter would correspond to the most common, least destructive action? Alt-F4 makes little sense, true, but in almost all windows apps control-q or control-w does exactly the same thing as on osx. Also, having sane defaults for keys people are likely to press is much more important than /not/ having obscure keyboard shortcuts that users never have to know even exist.

I want to say ctrl+q is an exit command from within the application (graceful shutdown) whereas alt+f4 is more of a system level halt for whatever is in focus (hard reset).

That's not actually true. Alt+F4 is exactly the same as clicking the Close window button, and sends WM_CLOSE to the app, which can then handle it gracefully (or not) as it chooses.

In particular, if you have unsaved data, most apps will prompt to save on Alt+F4.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#415

Post by stonewareslord »

euroclydon wrote: post #206
bradgessler wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have become annoyed recently at really basic stuff not working in macOS, like I can't drag and drop a picture out of Photos app into Pixelmator to edit. In fact, dragging and dropping a picture out of Photos into any application is completely broken and doesn't work. Its as-if the Apple QA team no longer tests to make sure their applications play nice with each other in a way that has been fundamental to deskto…

Is it even possible to chose a photo out of your photo librry from a browser's file upload dialog? I don't think it is, when the photos are in iPhoto. How many steps does it take to get a picture off your camera, into iPhoto, then exported, and finally uploaded to Craigslist?

It is possible and very easy. Just drag the photo from iPhoto to the upload dialog.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#416

Post by int_19h »

Razengan wrote: post #234
xorblurb wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"macOS Finder": you are talking about that software that rename folders when you press the enter key? :p

Can you give a reason why Enter to open a file is ideal, other than just because it's how Windows does it? The Windows Explorer uses Alt+Enter to show the properties of something, and in games and other apps that shortcut means Full Screen. Also, why does Alt+F4 quit an app? What does F4 stand for? Compared to Cmd+Q to Quit or Cmd+W to close it's a lot less intuitive. And so on and so forth.

> Can you give a reason why Enter to open a file is ideal

Because "Enter" has been used a key to activate/open the currently selected item in various UIs across various platforms for several decades now?

Also, possibly, because the button is labeled "Enter"? I guess on Macs it's "Return" though, but that doesn't really make any more sense.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#417

Post by Const-me »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #299
coldtea wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a professional developer, I don't want a new toy language. First, there's nothing "toy: about Swift. It's a full featured language on par with Rust, Go, etc. Second, whether some random web dev or embedded C dev or Java dev wants Swift or not is irrelevant to its intended audience and utility. It's not for "professional developers" in general, it's for Mac/iOS application developers, and thus, for Mac/iOS users…

> You can still format the rest of the hard disk on another fs to dual boot, and you can still share drives with other systems in NTFS, xFAT, etc. Until that other OS has support for the new proprietary filesystem, it won't be able to read it. Since Apple and Microsoft categorically refuse to implement any of the many featureful existing filesystems, one is stuck with archaic NTFS (with no file permissions) or FAT (w…

Why do you think there’s no file permissions in NTFS?

In NTFS, each file or directory can have arbitrary access control list specifying granted and denied permissions for users and groups.

Those lists are typically inherited down the directory hierarchy, but that inheritance can be stopped.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#418

Post by hpcjoe »

bluedino wrote: post #41

I'm not 100% happy with where Apple is at, but I don't think I ever was. But I'm not going to switch. I get the slickest hardware, great battery life, the best touchpad and keyboard, and a hi-resolution screen that doesn't have battery life, flicker, tint, or scaling issues. Windows is still...Windows. The bash subsystem is half-baked. Windows itself is still the same mess. Docking is still a joke. Performance is ter…

Hmmm ... I've been running Linux on laptops and desktops since 1997 (yes, really). My current laptops are 1 Mac OSX and 1 old linux machine of similar spec. My current desktop is a big honking many core, huge ram machine, with lots of SSD/disk goodness, and a nice recent Nvidia card.

The only problem I've had with this desktop has been the occasional hissyfit of compiling the Nvidia driver against a modern kernel. Thats a story for another post, but the Linux systems I've built and used for my day-to-day work are and have been rock solid. Without me sitting there struggling to make things work.

On the laptops, I've not had an issue in like 5 or 6 years, apart from a single Wifi driver ... which also didn't work in windows. So I added a simple Panda nub and off to the races I went.

Really, from my own personal experience, the OSX interface is a pain in terms of how it maps against keyboards, and the lack of a sloppy focus equivalence in OSX.

From a programming scenario, the toolchain is maddening (I am looking at you Xcode ... every (&(&^&^&* update, you have to reapply the click-this-license-button) on OSX. I use homebrew (having left macports in the dust), as I want stuff to work. And then along comes an update which just breaks everything.

And then the SMB stack in OSX. Yeah, the SMB stack. Using a lowest common denominator for our office meant using crappy file system technology, but thanks to either licensing issues or a NIH mentality, OSX has an almost completely neutered SMB implementation. It is awful. Painfully slow even over fast connections.

Then there is the desktop experience. Many of the customers of my previous employer are creative types whom used to use Mac for their video bits. Most are migrating to Linux, some back to windows. They are done fighting the battles (don't shoot the messenger, this is what they tell me).

I know the article was clickbait, and had a number of issues. But blasting Linux, which is a perfectly good, and very functional OS for many by rehashing issues from 10 years ago ... might not be the best approach for advocating your view.

FWIW: I run windows. In a window. Having had the joyful experience of self-destructing windows installations on wife/offspring's laptops, I've sworn to never again allow a windows OS to run installed on bare metal. I've taken wife/offspring's old laptops, virtualized them, and they can run their old stuff in a VM. They use Macs now, and I won't try to force them to change, because they just work for their use case.

Linux is a great OS for desktops (ignore the haters). Linux Mint is definitely one of the best user experiences I've had on a system so far, for day to day use.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#419

Post by comex »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #339
coldtea wrote: post #3

> But recently, I realized I’d gotten tired of Apple’s attitude toward the desktop. The progress in macOS land has basically been dead since Yosemite, two years ago, and Apple’s updates to the platform have been incredibly small. So, like creating a full blown new programming language (Swift)? Or a full new filesystem (AFS)? Integration of Cloud storage directly to the desktop? Siri on the desktop? Saving RAM through…

> Integration of Cloud storage directly to the desktop? This was done extremely poorly, though. Among the big sync providers (Dropbox, Sync, Box, Google), iCloud Drive is easily the worst. The iOS app looks like something an intern cooked up. Hardly any iOS apps can read or write from the drive. There's no way to share anything in your drive. There's no way to share anything into your drive, either. While Apple intro…

> "My Music", "Microsoft User Data", etc.

Neither of these are Apple's doing - obviously in the case of "Microsoft User Data", and I don't know what "My Music" is but Apple's software puts music in ~/Music. (Heh, it seems I have a "My Music" in Documents, as well as "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My Games"… not sure whether this is Wine or VMware's doing, or whether they're there for the same reason as on your system.)

Applications are not supposed to use random subdirectories of Documents (that's what Library/Application Support is for), and in the case of sandboxed Mac App Store apps, can't. But I don't know what you want Apple to do about random unsandboxed third party apps deciding to do it anyway. I guess if the Mac App Store had been more of a success, more apps would be sandboxed, but still…

I guess it would be nice if macOS made it easy to sync custom (existing) folders to iCloud rather than just desktop and documents. But if you're starting from scratch, you can just create the folder under iCloud Drive and drag it to Finder favorites. If you're a CLI user, add a symlink in the home directory or whatever.

I agree iCloud Drive on iOS is really inconsistent and awkward, and it would be nice if you could share folders with other users. I don't know what you mean by "no way to share into your drive", though. You can add arbitrary files to iCloud Drive from the share menu (and you can access arbitrary files from the iCloud Drive app).

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#420

Post by DigitalJack »

jrnichols wrote: post #273
bradgessler wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have become annoyed recently at really basic stuff not working in macOS, like I can't drag and drop a picture out of Photos app into Pixelmator to edit. In fact, dragging and dropping a picture out of Photos into any application is completely broken and doesn't work. Its as-if the Apple QA team no longer tests to make sure their applications play nice with each other in a way that has been fundamental to deskto…

Is dragging a photo to the Desktop and then into the app really a huge deal? Just curious, because that works fine for me.

It's not a big deal, but it's a death by a thousand cuts. These little things that used to be part of the refined experience of OSX are turning the "just works" part of their slogan into "damnit, why can't I"
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