4 ms·

Why do you think Windows is a tire fire and OSX is usable? I used my first OSX machine ever earlier this year. I wanted to add some extra keyboard commands, so

by nathas 10y ago

Why do you think Windows is a tire fire and OSX is usable? I used my first OSX machine ever earlier this year. I wanted to add some extra keyboard commands, so I had to download a 3rd party program that had to unlock accessibility controls and essentially take full control of the machine. That's absurd to me. I also hit tons of external display problems. Things wouldn't connect or sync right, desktops not correctly moving to the right screens, no window snapping even though it's a high res screen, etc. I hit way more beach balls/lags than I do with my modern Windows machines. Windows 7 was solid, Windows 8 was a bit of a mess (as has been every 1st iteration of Windows [98, 2000, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10]), but Win 10 is really enjoyable. It's unfortunate that the BSODs caused largely by shitty drivers in Windows 98/XP has hounded the Windows ecosystem for over a decade, even though the driver verifier has fixed the vast majority of those.

jolux 10y ago
How do you edit which keys do what on Windows? I had to do registry edits to get the caps lock to function as control which is baked into the macOS preferences. You can also add as many shortcuts as you like that control anything on macOS in the Keyboard pane. Sure you can't remap every key to something different out of the box but I don't think you can do that on Windows either.
- lqdc13 10y ago
  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/keyboardlayouts https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/keyboardlayou...
  - jolux 10y ago
    That's a tool you have to download. It doesn't come with the OS.
    - lqdc13 10y ago
      And yet OSX doesn't have such a tool from an official or even unofficial source without a daemon running and wasting CPU cycles. I bought a non-apple keyboard and still can't map home+end keys in all applications without a daemon running.
      - kalleboo 10y ago
        Ukelele? I used to create a hybrid custom Swedish layout that shows up among all the system key layouts http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele
mark_kalvelage 10y ago
Last year I bought a new Macbook Air that came with Yosemite, so after I got home and went through the setup process, I tried to update it to El Capitan through the app store. The laptop went to reboot... and didn't come back up. I thought it was completely bricked because pressing the power button did nothing: no LED light, no startup chime. Apple support guides said to hold down the power button for ten seconds and then re-press it, which at least made the laptop turn on and chime, but nothing happened beyond that. Booting into recovery mode didn't work, but luckily booting into internet recovery mode did. I had to reinstall Yosemite over the internet, create a USB image of El Capitan, then install from the USB. Even after that, things never went smoothly. There was some sort of bug where I couldn't enter my Apple ID security answers in the OS dialog box. Like you, I had problems with external displays, especially with waking up a display when the laptop itself woke up. The very first time I tried to restore from a Time Machine backup I got errors. Problems with iTunes and Photos sync. Not to mention more or less subjective issues I had. I had more problems with this laptop than I've had with any Windows machine.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  In my experience Macs have never worked very well with non-Apple displays. Switching from a Dell to an Apple display was like night and day.
makecheck 10y ago
You can customize a almost everything using the Keyboard panel of System Preferences. Yes, 3rd party tools like Karabiner are needed for control of absolutely everything but that is pretty rare. Also note that accessibility must be “unlocked” because it fundamentally adds a security risk: processes that can inspect inputs in arbitrary unknown applications have a lot of power. What macOS does is actually a feature and it prevents one of the “tire fires” in Windows. Beach balls in my experience are usually produced by problems in drivers, or programs that are unnecessarily complex (like the ones that are 400 MB installs with entire virtualization layers instead of being all native code). The OS can only do so much. External displays: yes, definitely buggy on Macs these days, and with some obscure settings. Something to try: with at least 3 desktops/Spaces defined (need to use "+" in Mission Control), you can right-click on the Dock icon of an application to specify the default space to use for windows in that app. These menu commands are not available with less than 3 Spaces created.
- DHowett 10y ago
  > These menu commands are not available with less than 3 Spaces created. Well, discoverability certainly has been a problem with Apple software lately. Take Force Touch as an example. Perhaps the menu items will show up with fewer than three Spaces created if you just press it harder?
blhack 10y ago
>Why do you think Windows is a tire fire and OSX is usable? Because OSX comes with a terminal environment that is almost identical to GNU.

by nathas 10y ago

jolux 10y ago

How do you edit which keys do what on Windows? I had to do registry edits to get the caps lock to function as control which is baked into the macOS preferences. You can also add as many shortcuts as you like that control anything on macOS in the Keyboard pane. Sure you can't remap every key to something different out of the box but I don't think you can do that on Windows either.

lqdc13 10y ago
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/keyboardlayouts https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/keyboardlayou...
- jolux 10y ago
  That's a tool you have to download. It doesn't come with the OS.
  - lqdc13 10y ago
    And yet OSX doesn't have such a tool from an official or even unofficial source without a daemon running and wasting CPU cycles. I bought a non-apple keyboard and still can't map home+end keys in all applications without a daemon running.
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      Ukelele? I used to create a hybrid custom Swedish layout that shows up among all the system key layouts http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele

mark_kalvelage 10y ago

Last year I bought a new Macbook Air that came with Yosemite, so after I got home and went through the setup process, I tried to update it to El Capitan through the app store. The laptop went to reboot... and didn't come back up. I thought it was completely bricked because pressing the power button did nothing: no LED light, no startup chime. Apple support guides said to hold down the power button for ten seconds and then re-press it, which at least made the laptop turn on and chime, but nothing happened beyond that. Booting into recovery mode didn't work, but luckily booting into internet recovery mode did. I had to reinstall Yosemite over the internet, create a USB image of El Capitan, then install from the USB. Even after that, things never went smoothly. There was some sort of bug where I couldn't enter my Apple ID security answers in the OS dialog box. Like you, I had problems with external displays, especially with waking up a display when the laptop itself woke up. The very first time I tried to restore from a Time Machine backup I got errors. Problems with iTunes and Photos sync. Not to mention more or less subjective issues I had. I had more problems with this laptop than I've had with any Windows machine.

brazzledazzle 10y ago
In my experience Macs have never worked very well with non-Apple displays. Switching from a Dell to an Apple display was like night and day.

makecheck 10y ago

You can customize a almost everything using the Keyboard panel of System Preferences. Yes, 3rd party tools like Karabiner are needed for control of absolutely everything but that is pretty rare. Also note that accessibility must be “unlocked” because it fundamentally adds a security risk: processes that can inspect inputs in arbitrary unknown applications have a lot of power. What macOS does is actually a feature and it prevents one of the “tire fires” in Windows. Beach balls in my experience are usually produced by problems in drivers, or programs that are unnecessarily complex (like the ones that are 400 MB installs with entire virtualization layers instead of being all native code). The OS can only do so much. External displays: yes, definitely buggy on Macs these days, and with some obscure settings. Something to try: with at least 3 desktops/Spaces defined (need to use "+" in Mission Control), you can right-click on the Dock icon of an application to specify the default space to use for windows in that app. These menu commands are not available with less than 3 Spaces created.

DHowett 10y ago
> These menu commands are not available with less than 3 Spaces created. Well, discoverability certainly has been a problem with Apple software lately. Take Force Touch as an example. Perhaps the menu items will show up with fewer than three Spaces created if you just press it harder?

blhack 10y ago

>Why do you think Windows is a tire fire and OSX is usable? Because OSX comes with a terminal environment that is almost identical to GNU.