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> For now Windows is off the table. It's a pity there's so much antagonism against Windows from MacOS/Linux users. I've been using both MacOS and Windows on

> For now Windows is off the table. It's a pity there's so much antagonism against Windows from MacOS/Linux users. I've been using both MacOS and Windows on a daily basis for the past ten years (and a lot of Linux before that) and to me, Windows has become the best OS for developers. First of all, let's get this out of the way: Bash works just fine. Install a distribution and a console with bash and you'll get everything (dotfiles, ssh, etc...) working under an hour. Another important point is that Windows is the most keyboard friendly OS out of the three. As a developer, I use my mouse as little as possible so it's vital that I have access to all functions and all menus from the mouse. MacOS is terrible in that area (how come I still can't pop up the File menu from the keyboard in 2017?). Windows also has some of the best file managers of all. My preference is for xPlorer2 because, again, I can manipulate files at the speed of light with just the keyboard, but there are plenty of alternatives. Anyway, keep an open mind if you're looking for another OS and make sure you include Windows 10 in your trials, or you might be missing out on something that will make you at least as productive as you used to be with your current OS.

swang 10y ago
I am both a MacOS and Windows user, I have trouble completely recommending Windows 10 to anyone solely on the basis of Microsoft's invasive telemetry services. That and the catastrophically anti-consumer upgrade paths they forced on people. I am still running Win 7, and still have a MBP with MacOS installed. At this time I'm not buying another Mac laptop/desktop(LOL) but if I do get a new laptop that is Win only I'm going to install Win 7 over Win 10. Windows Explorer to me is way more intuitive that MacOS Finder, which I find to be more difficult to use.
- Longhanks 10y ago
  You'll probably have trouble installing Windows 7, it's not even supported on Kaby Lake processors anymore and the security patches are going to stop in 2020.
warmfuzzykitten 10y ago
Keyboard lovers unite! It's amusing to see GUI-resistance all these years later, after Microsoft has worked so very hard to make Windows work and look just like MacOS. Well, like it would look if it had been designed by people with no taste.
mattnewton 10y ago
Forced adware and terrible update experience == a total nonstarter for me. I am continually boggled by how bad the user experience is for me on my windows 10 partition that I try to use for gaming. Everything from the standard networking drivers not working in windows (but worked in ubunu out of the box), ads for edge or office 365 whenever I open the thing up, or forced restarts when I am gaming in the middle of the night continually baffle me. I just keep asking why I gave these guys money, why I payed for this experience and become complicit in setting this standard. This is on all new top of the line hardware. So no thank you. I also don't share your frustration with the keyboard use in Mac OS; I rarely take my hands off home row but when I do it's to use a beautifully responsive trackpad full of powerful and useful gestures just inches below. It's the one thing I miss on ubuntu.
Longhanks 10y ago
> Another important point is that Windows is the most keyboard friendly OS out of the three. I'm sorry, but have you ever seen a true master of the command line?
- hota_mazi 10y ago
  I've yet to meet someone who uses their keyboard as well as me :-) I routinely juggle between vi, emacs, IDEA, bash, Word and Excel and I use the keyboard on most of these apps. But I'm forced to reach for the mouse a lot more on MacOS than on Windows.
fanf2 10y ago
>> how come I still can't pop up the File menu from the keyboard in 2017? << Fn+Ctrl+F2 = focus on menu bar
nikdaheratik 10y ago
I use Windows daily in my job. It has come a long way from the consumer/business driven PITA it was years ago. The issues are pretty simple: I don't trust Microsoft to not screw me over a few years down the line, and I don't like the in your face consumerism of every aspect of the OS. I literally had to spend an hour removing every POS adware app installed by the OEM, then I still have to put up with notices from M$ asking me to buy their stuff, even though I don't use their software for anything. And there's the virus software, which are all installed by two or three different people and all of which are asking me everyday to buy their stuff. It's nice that they've moved devs out of the ghetto and I admire the work people have put in to make sure we have nice things again. But I still will be at best lukewarm to anything from M$.
krrrh 10y ago
> Another important point is that Windows is the most keyboard friendly OS out of the three. Maybe keyboard shortcuts in windows have improved since Win7 which is the last time I used it semi-regularly, but I've always found the opposite to be true, and don't understand where the notion that windows relies less on the mouse comes from. The consistency of keyboard shortcuts between apps on the mac has been much better in my experience, and it's very straightforward for regular users to discover, customize or add keyboard shortcuts to specific menu items that you access frequently via keyboard preferences. It's also just more consistently designed; it's intuitive that if cmd-z is undo then shift-cmd-z is redo. ctrl-z and ctrl-y on windows is much harder to learn & conceptualize. Even more important is that every text entry field in the mac os gui implements emacs cursor selection and movement and has since 10.0.[1] While windows relies on less powerful modified arrow key commands. If you know or learn these, then not having them all in other OS GUIs is painful. I also much prefer that cmd takes on shortcuts for GUI apps while ctrl is relied upon much less frequently in this context. It drives me a bit nuts in windows that ctrl-c is copy for gui apps, but still also abort process in the commandline. Not overloading historical commandline control characters is an underrated reason why mac os is so comfortable to use it as a unix system. As for the menubar, it's ctrl-F2, but if you're spending a lot of time paging through menus using the arrow keys, there are better solutions to accessing frequently used commands. Add to this the bevy popular third party text ui tools over the years that allow one to carry out complex tasks without leaving the keyboard, from launchbar, to quicksilver, alfred, and spotlight (which has itself improved a lot over the years). Mac 'power users' kept their hands on the keyboard using these for years before windows implemented win+r to bring up a very limited application launcher. Taking it to an extreme, utilities such as the actively-developed Karabiner[2] offer a ridiculous amount of additional functionality for keyboard shortcuts, including different takes on global vi-binding, adding a 'hyper' key for more custom shortcuts (actually cmd-opt-ctrl-shift), modifying access to international characters (changing it so that opt-a,o,u quickly produces umlaut characters for writing in German on an american keyboard is hugely helpful for instance), or allowing the caps-lock key to function as escape if you're a heavy vim user, while preserving a mapping of caps-c to ctrl-c (amongst any other shortcuts) if your muscle memory for that is too powerful to give up. I realize that similar tools must exist on windows, but the uptake on stuff like this and the aforementioned quicksilver and alfred seems higher amongst mac devs than windows devs. [1] See here for example: http://jblevins.org/log/kbd http://jblevins.org/log/kbd [2] https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner Edit: I'd be remiss to not link to these incredible old posts by Brent Terpstra on changing keymappings and using Karabiner (then called KeyRemap4MacBook). Some of the stuff people do is nuts, but it shows the power, and how easy it is to achieve a lot just by editing a DefaultKeyBindings.dict file in your home directory. http://brettterpstra.com/2012/12/08/a-useful-caps-lock-key/ http://brettterpstra.com/2012/12/08/a-useful-caps-lock-key/ http://brettterpstra.com/2011/08/13/keybinding-madness/ http://brettterpstra.com/2011/08/13/keybinding-madness/
wtetzner 10y ago
The worst part about Windows 10 is the forced restarts.

swang 10y ago

I am both a MacOS and Windows user, I have trouble completely recommending Windows 10 to anyone solely on the basis of Microsoft's invasive telemetry services. That and the catastrophically anti-consumer upgrade paths they forced on people. I am still running Win 7, and still have a MBP with MacOS installed. At this time I'm not buying another Mac laptop/desktop(LOL) but if I do get a new laptop that is Win only I'm going to install Win 7 over Win 10. Windows Explorer to me is way more intuitive that MacOS Finder, which I find to be more difficult to use.

Longhanks 10y ago
You'll probably have trouble installing Windows 7, it's not even supported on Kaby Lake processors anymore and the security patches are going to stop in 2020.

warmfuzzykitten 10y ago

Keyboard lovers unite! It's amusing to see GUI-resistance all these years later, after Microsoft has worked so very hard to make Windows work and look just like MacOS. Well, like it would look if it had been designed by people with no taste.

mattnewton 10y ago

Forced adware and terrible update experience == a total nonstarter for me. I am continually boggled by how bad the user experience is for me on my windows 10 partition that I try to use for gaming. Everything from the standard networking drivers not working in windows (but worked in ubunu out of the box), ads for edge or office 365 whenever I open the thing up, or forced restarts when I am gaming in the middle of the night continually baffle me. I just keep asking why I gave these guys money, why I payed for this experience and become complicit in setting this standard. This is on all new top of the line hardware. So no thank you. I also don't share your frustration with the keyboard use in Mac OS; I rarely take my hands off home row but when I do it's to use a beautifully responsive trackpad full of powerful and useful gestures just inches below. It's the one thing I miss on ubuntu.

Longhanks 10y ago

> Another important point is that Windows is the most keyboard friendly OS out of the three. I'm sorry, but have you ever seen a true master of the command line?

hota_mazi 10y ago
I've yet to meet someone who uses their keyboard as well as me :-) I routinely juggle between vi, emacs, IDEA, bash, Word and Excel and I use the keyboard on most of these apps. But I'm forced to reach for the mouse a lot more on MacOS than on Windows.

fanf2 10y ago

>> how come I still can't pop up the File menu from the keyboard in 2017? << Fn+Ctrl+F2 = focus on menu bar

nikdaheratik 10y ago

I use Windows daily in my job. It has come a long way from the consumer/business driven PITA it was years ago. The issues are pretty simple: I don't trust Microsoft to not screw me over a few years down the line, and I don't like the in your face consumerism of every aspect of the OS. I literally had to spend an hour removing every POS adware app installed by the OEM, then I still have to put up with notices from M$ asking me to buy their stuff, even though I don't use their software for anything. And there's the virus software, which are all installed by two or three different people and all of which are asking me everyday to buy their stuff. It's nice that they've moved devs out of the ghetto and I admire the work people have put in to make sure we have nice things again. But I still will be at best lukewarm to anything from M$.

krrrh 10y ago

> Another important point is that Windows is the most keyboard friendly OS out of the three. Maybe keyboard shortcuts in windows have improved since Win7 which is the last time I used it semi-regularly, but I've always found the opposite to be true, and don't understand where the notion that windows relies less on the mouse comes from. The consistency of keyboard shortcuts between apps on the mac has been much better in my experience, and it's very straightforward for regular users to discover, customize or add keyboard shortcuts to specific menu items that you access frequently via keyboard preferences. It's also just more consistently designed; it's intuitive that if cmd-z is undo then shift-cmd-z is redo. ctrl-z and ctrl-y on windows is much harder to learn & conceptualize. Even more important is that every text entry field in the mac os gui implements emacs cursor selection and movement and has since 10.0.[1] While windows relies on less powerful modified arrow key commands. If you know or learn these, then not having them all in other OS GUIs is painful. I also much prefer that cmd takes on shortcuts for GUI apps while ctrl is relied upon much less frequently in this context. It drives me a bit nuts in windows that ctrl-c is copy for gui apps, but still also abort process in the commandline. Not overloading historical commandline control characters is an underrated reason why mac os is so comfortable to use it as a unix system. As for the menubar, it's ctrl-F2, but if you're spending a lot of time paging through menus using the arrow keys, there are better solutions to accessing frequently used commands. Add to this the bevy popular third party text ui tools over the years that allow one to carry out complex tasks without leaving the keyboard, from launchbar, to quicksilver, alfred, and spotlight (which has itself improved a lot over the years). Mac 'power users' kept their hands on the keyboard using these for years before windows implemented win+r to bring up a very limited application launcher. Taking it to an extreme, utilities such as the actively-developed Karabiner[2] offer a ridiculous amount of additional functionality for keyboard shortcuts, including different takes on global vi-binding, adding a 'hyper' key for more custom shortcuts (actually cmd-opt-ctrl-shift), modifying access to international characters (changing it so that opt-a,o,u quickly produces umlaut characters for writing in German on an american keyboard is hugely helpful for instance), or allowing the caps-lock key to function as escape if you're a heavy vim user, while preserving a mapping of caps-c to ctrl-c (amongst any other shortcuts) if your muscle memory for that is too powerful to give up. I realize that similar tools must exist on windows, but the uptake on stuff like this and the aforementioned quicksilver and alfred seems higher amongst mac devs than windows devs. [1] See here for example: http://jblevins.org/log/kbd http://jblevins.org/log/kbd [2] https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner Edit: I'd be remiss to not link to these incredible old posts by Brent Terpstra on changing keymappings and using Karabiner (then called KeyRemap4MacBook). Some of the stuff people do is nuts, but it shows the power, and how easy it is to achieve a lot just by editing a DefaultKeyBindings.dict file in your home directory. http://brettterpstra.com/2012/12/08/a-useful-caps-lock-key/ http://brettterpstra.com/2012/12/08/a-useful-caps-lock-key/ http://brettterpstra.com/2011/08/13/keybinding-madness/ http://brettterpstra.com/2011/08/13/keybinding-madness/

wtetzner 10y ago

The worst part about Windows 10 is the forced restarts.