21 ms·

>I mean Windows is good, but nowhere good as OS X Specifically? People typically point to the telemetry and forced updates, but I've managed to disable both, u

>I mean Windows is good, but nowhere good as OS X Specifically? People typically point to the telemetry and forced updates, but I've managed to disable both, using what were admittedly much-too-difficult procedures or third-party software. It's annoying, but not that annoying. I really like Finder and Spotlight, but not enough to be tied, via licensing, to any specific hardware. Less cluttering--I can uninstall apps on windows Native package manager-- I guess Windows has Chocolatey and I use npm for dev work.

phyrex 10y ago
It's terrible to script, you cannot make use of the billion unix command line utilities (and there is no equivalent eco system either), you need to use the mouse too much, and it's awful to program with in any but a small number of sanctioned programming languages.
- yokohummer7 10y ago
  > It's terrible to script I'm pretty sure you didn't try PowerShell. It is at least as good as bash, if not better. > you need to use the mouse too much I find this more problematic on macOS. I was forced to use a mouse much more on macOS. It doesn't even allow me to press the yes/no dialog only using a keyboard. On Windows nearly every item has a shortcut, sometimes even better than GNOME (but worse than KDE, IMO).
  - tachion 10y ago
    It does, you simply need to change a default configuration for keyboard shortcuts to be able to jump over UI elements with keyboard only.
    - yokohummer7 10y ago
      :( Why is it not the default? Is there a technical reason? I cannot think of any possible downside that the shortcuts would bring.
    - haxxorfreak 10y ago
      Control + F7 (Fn + Ctrl + F7 if you're on a MBP or using the wireless keyboard) Toggles on highlighting for all UI elements so you can Tab / Shift-Tab through them. It's usually the first thing I do when I touch a new Mac.
  - intoverflow2 10y ago
    > It doesn't even allow me to press the yes/no dialog only using a keyboard cmd+first letter of the dialog option. I actually find OS X far superior with shortcuts than Windows: More discoverable, actually configurable and more consistent. One of the only things I miss now I've switched to Win.
    - eppsilon 10y ago
      For me one of the joys of using macOS is when you realize adding option or shift to a shortcut does a similar but more specialized thing that is more useful. In Windows the shortcuts have always seemed less logical to me, though the newer Windows key ones are an improvement.
  - Operyl 10y ago
    I've yet to figure out what PowerShell can/can't do though really. Maybe I'm weird, but I like that it's bash on OS X, I already know it.
    - yokohummer7 10y ago
      You're not weird. PowerShell does have barriers to entry and that's why I also had used Cygwin on Windows until recently. And it might not change because it is a very different monster than POSIX. It is unfortunate for sure, but still I think it's worth learning especially if you use Windows frequently. Even if you don't, learning it is a fun experience. It's like learning Haskell just to feel another way to program, even though you're not using it in practice.
      - Operyl 10y ago
        Eh, it's just so .. nuts looking to me that I'll probably stick to *nix land.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    Powershell might have some neat features, but the verbosity of the commands (don't bring up shortcuts here either - you need the full commands as that's what everyone else is using) just drives me batty. I find that they don't lend themselves well to mnemonics or easy memorization. Who needs ls when you have Get-ChildItem? Who needs grep -r 'pattern' when you have Select-String -Path c:\ -Pattern pattern? Now that I think about it, Powershell has a conceptual similarity to Applescript. A proprietary, verbose, and hard-to-discover English-like syntax belying a great amount of power over the target platform.
    - Godel_unicode 10y ago
      Microsoft might have gone a little far on the whole "code is meant to be read first" thing, but the verbosity does make it immediately obvious what every line in your history does.
  - mort96 10y ago
    I find it hard to take powershell seriously, considering last time I tried using it for anything, I just wanted to quickly download something over http. Looked for something like 'wget <URL>' online, the only results I found was something like multiple verbose lines of instantiating an http client and calling methods on it. That's fine for a programming language, completely horrible for an everyday shell, from the perspective of someone who generally only uses Firefox and a terminal emulator in Linux. After some googling just now, it seems like there's now an Invoke-WebRequest command, but that too looks like a hell of a lot of typing compared to Linux shells. There's also the fact that lots of stuff in windows wasn't designed to be accessible through the cli. You can't, for example, make a powershell script to toggle an audio output device on and off, as that's only available through the GUI.
    - yokohummer7 10y ago
      > the only results I found was something like multiple verbose lines of instantiating an http client and calling methods on it. I blame the documentation. Not the official documentation (they're not excellent, but OK), but various outdated resources residing in many blogs and sites, including Stack Overflow. I mean, what's wrong with iwr REMOTE_URL -o LOCAL_FILENAME ? The situation this command wasn't searchable by you is unfortunate, possibly because PowerShell has come a long way since its introduction in 2006 and it is hard to remove the outdated resources online. But for those who know what features/commands are available in PowerShell, finding them isn't particularly difficult. > There's also the fact that lots of stuff in windows wasn't designed to be accessible through the cli. You can't, for example, make a powershell script to toggle an audio output device on and off This is just one example. On the other hand, I found nearly every thing I had done using GUI could be replaced by a few lines of PowerShell code. Actually automating my day-to-day GUI operations was my way to learn PowerShell, and mostly it worked great. Microsoft is adding tons of commands each release to expose more system functionalities. There are exceptions of course, but "lots of stuff" is a bit exaggerated.
- unoti 10y ago
  What language are you wanting to program in that is awful on Windows? And regarding your other points, Windows scripting story has come a long way in the last few years. Your concerns sound like they come from many years ago and that maybe you haven't taken a look lately.
  - fps 10y ago
    I've tried to do work on windows 10 Pro on a brand new 8 core Ryzen machine with 16 GB of RAM, SSD storage, and an RX480, and working in windows at the command line is 100x (no exaggeration) slower than Linux.
  - bobochan 10y ago
    What baffles me is that it is 2017 and Windows comes with less than it did decades ago. At least prior to Win2000 there was QBasic and edit.com, but now starting to work on a Windows machine means downloading and installing basic tools. Need to SSH/SFTP? Download. Need to edit code? Download. Python? Download. Perl? Download. A reasonable terminal? Download. Yes, I might have to go to the Mac App Store and get command line tools for C, C++, Objective-C, etc. It is unfortunate that XQuartz is no longer installed by default, granted. (PowerShell is very nice to work with though, I give MS full credit for that.) I could live with having to download python, perl, etc., but someone please explain why having an absolutely fundamental ability to edit text and securely connect to work and transfer data to/from remote machines is something that any OS should be shipping without?
    - yokohummer7 10y ago
      Windows does have a C# compiler by default. It is located in the `Windows\Microsoft.NET` folder. Not very discoverable, though. And starting with Windows 10 a metro app called 'Code Writer' seems to be installed by default for coding. (At least it's there in my installation.) I didn't try it though.
      - bobochan 10y ago
        I'm glad. MS has made a lot of good programming tools. I really like Visual Studio and was a huge fan of QuickBasic 4.5 back in the day. Turbo Pascal was the killer app that first enticed me to the PC world. It still befuddles me why some of this basic functionality cannot be a standard part of Windows. Not every Mac user uses emacs, or even knows how to open the Terminal app, but the fact that basic tools are supported means that there is just a baseline level of infrastructure to work with.
inetknght 10y ago
> It's annoying, but not that annoying. For you, maybe. For me, I have zero intention of going through the hassle when I can just use Linux instead. Any hassles here are easily learned and generally don't _require_ the use of third party stuff doing black magic under the hood.
- SippinLean 10y ago
  Fair enough, but Linux brings hassles of it's own, at least my Linux box does.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  The issue for linux are often things you can't solve at all. Like poor power management.
  - AsyncAwait 10y ago
    If anything, Linux is the only OS where you can solve that. Plus on modern kernels, battery life is seldom worse than on Windows.
    - throwaway91111 10y ago
      I'm not following here. Apple has great power management. Sure, it's closed, but you can actually rely on it today. Put linux on it and all of a suden you have power management issues.
chmln 10y ago
Windows is pretty bad on high DPI screens, and even third party tools don't help. There's inconsistency everywhere, and most older software is just blurry. Chocolatey is nowhere near as good as e.g. pacman. You mentioned disabling telemetry, but the fact that the OS you paid for spies on you and shows ads is a big turn off.
fps 10y ago
I find my workflow in "bash for windows" horribly slow. My prompt command (that does git/virtualenv/etc checks) takes 4 seconds to run on windows and 0.04 seconds to run on the same machine dual-booted to ubuntu, and about the same time on a 2015 Macbook pro running MacOS. Everything else in bash for windows is similarly slower than bash on ubuntu. I haven't found a native windows implementation of bash that's anywhere as responsive as Linux or MacOS. I actually find Windows to be a better window manager than MacOS at this point, but I find myself most effective under Ubuntu and i3.
ctrl-j 10y ago
> It's annoying, but not that annoying. I dunno, I've done all kinds of stuff to my windows 10 machine to keep Candy Crush Soda from reinstalling itself. Yet every few weeks/months that King garbage ends up on my start menu. I use windows 10 because I'm a .NET developer and a gamer. If I could use OSX on my desktop instead, and have access to the same steam games - I can't think of a reason I would stay. > Less cluttering--I can uninstall apps on windows On OSX you typically don't need to 'uninstall' just drag to the trash. Yeah, some apps leave some garbage behind - but the same happens on windows when you 'uninstall' > Native package manager-- I guess Windows has Chocolatey and I use npm for dev work. I think the biggest detriment on this point for windows is that the command line interface on windows is not friendly. I recently worked on a project where half the team didn't know powershell, and the other half really loved powershell. We also used some stuff from the node ecosystem. We had scripts that would only run in cmd.exe, powershell scripts, and scripts that only worked in bash. In the end http://cmder.net/ http://cmder.net/ saved my butt, since I could have all three shells open.
- maccard 10y ago
  > I dunno, I've done all kinds of stuff to my windows 10 machine to keep Candy Crush Soda from reinstalling itself. Yet every few weeks/months that King garbage ends up on my start menu. Another anecdote, I right clicked and clicked "unpin from start" and never saw it again.
  - jvzr 10y ago
    It's still there though, isn't it? Granted you don't see it in the Start Menu, but it remained installed on your system. God knows if it's not having its own process at launch, doing similarly nasty stuff?
    - Godel_unicode 10y ago
      God, and anyone who knows how to read logfiles.
    - scholia 10y ago
joshstrange 10y ago
I think you touched on a big win for macOS in my book: > Specifically? People typically point to the telemetry and forced updates, but I've managed to disable both, using what were admittedly much-too-difficult procedures or third-party software. It's annoying, but not that annoying. Before I switched to macOS about 8 years ago I was used to the mindset of "oh this doesn't work the way I want but I'm smart enough to figure out how to fix it" and I took great pride in being able to fix my PC no matter what happened. I'd dig into the registry, I'd futz with inf files, and drivers. I didn't mind it too much, it wasn't "that annoying". And then I switched to a MBP my freshman year of college mainly because it meant I could use Windows/Linux/macOS and I loved how solid they felt and had people around me rave about the hardware and longevity of the machines themselves. I played with macOS and found that after getting used to it it was a joy to work with. It took a little longer for me to realize that I wasn't spending all my time making sure my computer kept working, it just worked on it's own. The OS that I had belittled and mocked for years for being "a toy" or "dumbed down" actually was insanely powerful under the hood, extremely intuitive, and looked beautiful. That last point may sound stupid, I know I used to think it was, but it's a big deal. You are going to be staring at this for 8 hours+ a day. Trust me it is way more enjoyable to look at something pretty than something not. When it comes down to it for me macOS is built on a rock solid core and makes switching between it and the linux servers I work on a breeze with beautiful apps and a beautiful UI all of which JustWorks (tm). For that I am more than willing to pay the MacTax (tm).
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  Although Apple have been known to change things for change-sake, I find it is possible to take a Mac running Mac OS 10.2 and 10.12 and you will find your way around with ease. Of course, under the hood they've rewritten everything like DNS and actually using the hosts file etc. but from a usability perspective you are right that you end up fighting with the OS less (so I have found).
m_mueller 10y ago
Specifically: * HiDPI support in all apps, whethere they are aware of it or not. * Built-in PDF editing and creation from all printable content. * POSIX scripting and CLI. * Very clean and consistent configuration system (defaults). Reset an app to factory? Delete one plist file and potentially an app support folder. Got a new Mac? You could even boot it up from the old harddisk. Good luck doing that with windows registry. * Touchpad support. * Systemwide fulltext search with indexing and complex search terms. Somehow MS still hasn't caught up with 10.4 Tiger it seems to me. * Superb discoverability of power user features with in-app help system and hotkeys displayed in the menu. * A consistent menu system. * Powerful and system wide screenshots. * Very good screen calibration out of the box * Cmd-C / V work everywhere, including the Terminal. * Very good terminal with good color schemes, tabs, unicode and even emoji support. On the other hand Windows has: * The best keyboard-only UI (although ribbons were a big step backwards in that regard - very hard to discover now) * The best graphics drivers * The best Office version (although Google Docs has mostly replaced the need for me) * Windows-P, I really like that menu * The Windows 10 task manager, pretty neat. * Pen and Touchscreen support. Overall MacOS beats it hands down for me when it comes to productivity.
- nottorp 10y ago
  * Touchpad support. I think most people who haven't used an Apple laptop extensively are not aware that the touchpad actually works, and you do not need to carry an external mouse to use the device comfortably.
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    Precision touchpad gestures on Windows 10 solves that problem, especially on the Dell XPS/Precision machines. It's really, really good.
    - emptythought 10y ago
      Nah. We have those at my work, and we also have an iMac with a magic trackpad, and several of us have macbook pros. It's a huge improvement, but it's maybe 75% of the way there. And the points at which it's NOT there are very noticeable and annoying. There's still regularly times where the trackpad just gets totally confused and you can't move the cursor for 1-2 seconds. Mehhhhhh
smoe 10y ago
I recently installed Windows 10 as a secondary os on my laptop for music making. The biggest annoyance was configuring the system to not get in my way: Never ever put something in the front of the app I'm working in, forcing a change of context. Don't use up all of the bandwidth when downloading updates in the background, etc. This was much less of a hassle the last time I used OSX. Apple might give you less options for configuration, but at least out of the box it is/was much less disruptive. Overall I like the look and feel of windows 10, and some of the problems were caused by third party software. I do think a lot of the defaults actually make sense for the mass market, but they should be much more transparent and easier to change. For example, I expected disabling Cortana during installation would, well, actually disable it.
coldtea 10y ago
>Specifically? Just the fact that I can download some new software and still see a 2001 era file dialog or such (because it was made with an older, but still supported ancient UI lib), is enough to put me off windows for life...

phyrex 10y ago

It's terrible to script, you cannot make use of the billion unix command line utilities (and there is no equivalent eco system either), you need to use the mouse too much, and it's awful to program with in any but a small number of sanctioned programming languages.

yokohummer7 10y ago
> It's terrible to script I'm pretty sure you didn't try PowerShell. It is at least as good as bash, if not better. > you need to use the mouse too much I find this more problematic on macOS. I was forced to use a mouse much more on macOS. It doesn't even allow me to press the yes/no dialog only using a keyboard. On Windows nearly every item has a shortcut, sometimes even better than GNOME (but worse than KDE, IMO).
- tachion 10y ago
  It does, you simply need to change a default configuration for keyboard shortcuts to be able to jump over UI elements with keyboard only.
  - yokohummer7 10y ago
    :( Why is it not the default? Is there a technical reason? I cannot think of any possible downside that the shortcuts would bring.
  - haxxorfreak 10y ago
    Control + F7 (Fn + Ctrl + F7 if you're on a MBP or using the wireless keyboard) Toggles on highlighting for all UI elements so you can Tab / Shift-Tab through them. It's usually the first thing I do when I touch a new Mac.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  > It doesn't even allow me to press the yes/no dialog only using a keyboard cmd+first letter of the dialog option. I actually find OS X far superior with shortcuts than Windows: More discoverable, actually configurable and more consistent. One of the only things I miss now I've switched to Win.
  - eppsilon 10y ago
    For me one of the joys of using macOS is when you realize adding option or shift to a shortcut does a similar but more specialized thing that is more useful. In Windows the shortcuts have always seemed less logical to me, though the newer Windows key ones are an improvement.
- Operyl 10y ago
  I've yet to figure out what PowerShell can/can't do though really. Maybe I'm weird, but I like that it's bash on OS X, I already know it.
  - yokohummer7 10y ago
    You're not weird. PowerShell does have barriers to entry and that's why I also had used Cygwin on Windows until recently. And it might not change because it is a very different monster than POSIX. It is unfortunate for sure, but still I think it's worth learning especially if you use Windows frequently. Even if you don't, learning it is a fun experience. It's like learning Haskell just to feel another way to program, even though you're not using it in practice.
    - Operyl 10y ago
      Eh, it's just so .. nuts looking to me that I'll probably stick to *nix land.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  Powershell might have some neat features, but the verbosity of the commands (don't bring up shortcuts here either - you need the full commands as that's what everyone else is using) just drives me batty. I find that they don't lend themselves well to mnemonics or easy memorization. Who needs ls when you have Get-ChildItem? Who needs grep -r 'pattern' when you have Select-String -Path c:\ -Pattern pattern? Now that I think about it, Powershell has a conceptual similarity to Applescript. A proprietary, verbose, and hard-to-discover English-like syntax belying a great amount of power over the target platform.
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    Microsoft might have gone a little far on the whole "code is meant to be read first" thing, but the verbosity does make it immediately obvious what every line in your history does.
- mort96 10y ago
  I find it hard to take powershell seriously, considering last time I tried using it for anything, I just wanted to quickly download something over http. Looked for something like 'wget <URL>' online, the only results I found was something like multiple verbose lines of instantiating an http client and calling methods on it. That's fine for a programming language, completely horrible for an everyday shell, from the perspective of someone who generally only uses Firefox and a terminal emulator in Linux. After some googling just now, it seems like there's now an Invoke-WebRequest command, but that too looks like a hell of a lot of typing compared to Linux shells. There's also the fact that lots of stuff in windows wasn't designed to be accessible through the cli. You can't, for example, make a powershell script to toggle an audio output device on and off, as that's only available through the GUI.
  - yokohummer7 10y ago
    > the only results I found was something like multiple verbose lines of instantiating an http client and calling methods on it. I blame the documentation. Not the official documentation (they're not excellent, but OK), but various outdated resources residing in many blogs and sites, including Stack Overflow. I mean, what's wrong with iwr REMOTE_URL -o LOCAL_FILENAME ? The situation this command wasn't searchable by you is unfortunate, possibly because PowerShell has come a long way since its introduction in 2006 and it is hard to remove the outdated resources online. But for those who know what features/commands are available in PowerShell, finding them isn't particularly difficult. > There's also the fact that lots of stuff in windows wasn't designed to be accessible through the cli. You can't, for example, make a powershell script to toggle an audio output device on and off This is just one example. On the other hand, I found nearly every thing I had done using GUI could be replaced by a few lines of PowerShell code. Actually automating my day-to-day GUI operations was my way to learn PowerShell, and mostly it worked great. Microsoft is adding tons of commands each release to expose more system functionalities. There are exceptions of course, but "lots of stuff" is a bit exaggerated.
unoti 10y ago
What language are you wanting to program in that is awful on Windows? And regarding your other points, Windows scripting story has come a long way in the last few years. Your concerns sound like they come from many years ago and that maybe you haven't taken a look lately.
- fps 10y ago
  I've tried to do work on windows 10 Pro on a brand new 8 core Ryzen machine with 16 GB of RAM, SSD storage, and an RX480, and working in windows at the command line is 100x (no exaggeration) slower than Linux.
- bobochan 10y ago
  What baffles me is that it is 2017 and Windows comes with less than it did decades ago. At least prior to Win2000 there was QBasic and edit.com, but now starting to work on a Windows machine means downloading and installing basic tools. Need to SSH/SFTP? Download. Need to edit code? Download. Python? Download. Perl? Download. A reasonable terminal? Download. Yes, I might have to go to the Mac App Store and get command line tools for C, C++, Objective-C, etc. It is unfortunate that XQuartz is no longer installed by default, granted. (PowerShell is very nice to work with though, I give MS full credit for that.) I could live with having to download python, perl, etc., but someone please explain why having an absolutely fundamental ability to edit text and securely connect to work and transfer data to/from remote machines is something that any OS should be shipping without?
  - yokohummer7 10y ago
    Windows does have a C# compiler by default. It is located in the `Windows\Microsoft.NET` folder. Not very discoverable, though. And starting with Windows 10 a metro app called 'Code Writer' seems to be installed by default for coding. (At least it's there in my installation.) I didn't try it though.
    - bobochan 10y ago
      I'm glad. MS has made a lot of good programming tools. I really like Visual Studio and was a huge fan of QuickBasic 4.5 back in the day. Turbo Pascal was the killer app that first enticed me to the PC world. It still befuddles me why some of this basic functionality cannot be a standard part of Windows. Not every Mac user uses emacs, or even knows how to open the Terminal app, but the fact that basic tools are supported means that there is just a baseline level of infrastructure to work with.

inetknght 10y ago

> It's annoying, but not that annoying. For you, maybe. For me, I have zero intention of going through the hassle when I can just use Linux instead. Any hassles here are easily learned and generally don't _require_ the use of third party stuff doing black magic under the hood.

SippinLean 10y ago
Fair enough, but Linux brings hassles of it's own, at least my Linux box does.
throwaway91111 10y ago
The issue for linux are often things you can't solve at all. Like poor power management.
- AsyncAwait 10y ago
  If anything, Linux is the only OS where you can solve that. Plus on modern kernels, battery life is seldom worse than on Windows.
  - throwaway91111 10y ago
    I'm not following here. Apple has great power management. Sure, it's closed, but you can actually rely on it today. Put linux on it and all of a suden you have power management issues.

chmln 10y ago

Windows is pretty bad on high DPI screens, and even third party tools don't help. There's inconsistency everywhere, and most older software is just blurry. Chocolatey is nowhere near as good as e.g. pacman. You mentioned disabling telemetry, but the fact that the OS you paid for spies on you and shows ads is a big turn off.

fps 10y ago

I find my workflow in "bash for windows" horribly slow. My prompt command (that does git/virtualenv/etc checks) takes 4 seconds to run on windows and 0.04 seconds to run on the same machine dual-booted to ubuntu, and about the same time on a 2015 Macbook pro running MacOS. Everything else in bash for windows is similarly slower than bash on ubuntu. I haven't found a native windows implementation of bash that's anywhere as responsive as Linux or MacOS. I actually find Windows to be a better window manager than MacOS at this point, but I find myself most effective under Ubuntu and i3.

ctrl-j 10y ago

> It's annoying, but not that annoying. I dunno, I've done all kinds of stuff to my windows 10 machine to keep Candy Crush Soda from reinstalling itself. Yet every few weeks/months that King garbage ends up on my start menu. I use windows 10 because I'm a .NET developer and a gamer. If I could use OSX on my desktop instead, and have access to the same steam games - I can't think of a reason I would stay. > Less cluttering--I can uninstall apps on windows On OSX you typically don't need to 'uninstall' just drag to the trash. Yeah, some apps leave some garbage behind - but the same happens on windows when you 'uninstall' > Native package manager-- I guess Windows has Chocolatey and I use npm for dev work. I think the biggest detriment on this point for windows is that the command line interface on windows is not friendly. I recently worked on a project where half the team didn't know powershell, and the other half really loved powershell. We also used some stuff from the node ecosystem. We had scripts that would only run in cmd.exe, powershell scripts, and scripts that only worked in bash. In the end http://cmder.net/ http://cmder.net/ saved my butt, since I could have all three shells open.

maccard 10y ago
> I dunno, I've done all kinds of stuff to my windows 10 machine to keep Candy Crush Soda from reinstalling itself. Yet every few weeks/months that King garbage ends up on my start menu. Another anecdote, I right clicked and clicked "unpin from start" and never saw it again.
- jvzr 10y ago
  It's still there though, isn't it? Granted you don't see it in the Start Menu, but it remained installed on your system. God knows if it's not having its own process at launch, doing similarly nasty stuff?
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    God, and anyone who knows how to read logfiles.
  - scholia 10y ago

joshstrange 10y ago

I think you touched on a big win for macOS in my book: > Specifically? People typically point to the telemetry and forced updates, but I've managed to disable both, using what were admittedly much-too-difficult procedures or third-party software. It's annoying, but not that annoying. Before I switched to macOS about 8 years ago I was used to the mindset of "oh this doesn't work the way I want but I'm smart enough to figure out how to fix it" and I took great pride in being able to fix my PC no matter what happened. I'd dig into the registry, I'd futz with inf files, and drivers. I didn't mind it too much, it wasn't "that annoying". And then I switched to a MBP my freshman year of college mainly because it meant I could use Windows/Linux/macOS and I loved how solid they felt and had people around me rave about the hardware and longevity of the machines themselves. I played with macOS and found that after getting used to it it was a joy to work with. It took a little longer for me to realize that I wasn't spending all my time making sure my computer kept working, it just worked on it's own. The OS that I had belittled and mocked for years for being "a toy" or "dumbed down" actually was insanely powerful under the hood, extremely intuitive, and looked beautiful. That last point may sound stupid, I know I used to think it was, but it's a big deal. You are going to be staring at this for 8 hours+ a day. Trust me it is way more enjoyable to look at something pretty than something not. When it comes down to it for me macOS is built on a rock solid core and makes switching between it and the linux servers I work on a breeze with beautiful apps and a beautiful UI all of which JustWorks (tm). For that I am more than willing to pay the MacTax (tm).

72deluxe 10y ago
Although Apple have been known to change things for change-sake, I find it is possible to take a Mac running Mac OS 10.2 and 10.12 and you will find your way around with ease. Of course, under the hood they've rewritten everything like DNS and actually using the hosts file etc. but from a usability perspective you are right that you end up fighting with the OS less (so I have found).

m_mueller 10y ago

Specifically: * HiDPI support in all apps, whethere they are aware of it or not. * Built-in PDF editing and creation from all printable content. * POSIX scripting and CLI. * Very clean and consistent configuration system (defaults). Reset an app to factory? Delete one plist file and potentially an app support folder. Got a new Mac? You could even boot it up from the old harddisk. Good luck doing that with windows registry. * Touchpad support. * Systemwide fulltext search with indexing and complex search terms. Somehow MS still hasn't caught up with 10.4 Tiger it seems to me. * Superb discoverability of power user features with in-app help system and hotkeys displayed in the menu. * A consistent menu system. * Powerful and system wide screenshots. * Very good screen calibration out of the box * Cmd-C / V work everywhere, including the Terminal. * Very good terminal with good color schemes, tabs, unicode and even emoji support. On the other hand Windows has: * The best keyboard-only UI (although ribbons were a big step backwards in that regard - very hard to discover now) * The best graphics drivers * The best Office version (although Google Docs has mostly replaced the need for me) * Windows-P, I really like that menu * The Windows 10 task manager, pretty neat. * Pen and Touchscreen support. Overall MacOS beats it hands down for me when it comes to productivity.

nottorp 10y ago
* Touchpad support. I think most people who haven't used an Apple laptop extensively are not aware that the touchpad actually works, and you do not need to carry an external mouse to use the device comfortably.
- Godel_unicode 10y ago
  Precision touchpad gestures on Windows 10 solves that problem, especially on the Dell XPS/Precision machines. It's really, really good.
  - emptythought 10y ago
    Nah. We have those at my work, and we also have an iMac with a magic trackpad, and several of us have macbook pros. It's a huge improvement, but it's maybe 75% of the way there. And the points at which it's NOT there are very noticeable and annoying. There's still regularly times where the trackpad just gets totally confused and you can't move the cursor for 1-2 seconds. Mehhhhhh

smoe 10y ago

I recently installed Windows 10 as a secondary os on my laptop for music making. The biggest annoyance was configuring the system to not get in my way: Never ever put something in the front of the app I'm working in, forcing a change of context. Don't use up all of the bandwidth when downloading updates in the background, etc. This was much less of a hassle the last time I used OSX. Apple might give you less options for configuration, but at least out of the box it is/was much less disruptive. Overall I like the look and feel of windows 10, and some of the problems were caused by third party software. I do think a lot of the defaults actually make sense for the mass market, but they should be much more transparent and easier to change. For example, I expected disabling Cortana during installation would, well, actually disable it.

coldtea 10y ago

>Specifically? Just the fact that I can download some new software and still see a 2001 era file dialog or such (because it was made with an older, but still supported ancient UI lib), is enough to put me off windows for life...