7 ms·

Looks like a proper MacBook Pro replacement HW wise, but the OS is not one I would use for work.. =/ So attached to OSX for the past 6 years and cannot see me u

by Jaqua 9y ago

Looks like a proper MacBook Pro replacement HW wise, but the OS is not one I would use for work.. =/ So attached to OSX for the past 6 years and cannot see me using a windows OS for work , but at home only for gaming. The new MacBook Pro has many flaws. Not sure how this compares in real use for it?

zeveb 9y ago
I imagine that it can run Linux, right — if not now, soon. I personally much prefer Linux to both macOS & Windows, although obviously tastes differ. I get a tiling WM with no cruft, I can completely control my UI, I can get work done quickly and easily.
- kanishkdudeja 9y ago
  The stylus and the touch might not work perfectly with Linux.
  - masklinn 9y ago
    On the SB1, IIRC the touch screen worked but the dGPU, bluetooth and camera did not, you needed a patched kernel for hardware buttons and wifi, and hibernation didn't work (and the hardware didn't properly support suspend to ram). Not sure about the "tablet" mode.
  - jjuel 9y ago
    If the parent is using a tiling WM I doubt they need the touch or the stylus much.
- jackielii 9y ago
  Same here. I can live without touch or stylus, just want a performance laptop with good screen (3:2 ratio) and keyboard.
  - artursapek 9y ago
    Thinkpad?
    - jackielii 9y ago
      Exactly! if only have have 3:2 screens!!! or better yet, a 4:3 screen! Currently I'm buying a old X61s and going to convert it to X62: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-X62-Laptop-Review.211598.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-X62-Laptop-Review.21159...
      - artursapek 9y ago
        Is that ratio really so important? I have a wider ratio X1 Carbon and it has never bothered me, but I guess I wasn't used to anything in particular. The screen quality is really nice though.
        harrygeez 9y ago
        Perhaps it's less evident especially if you have a multi-head setup with big monitors. But for almost every laptop now that uses display scaling to make screen content readable, screen estate is precious and the extra vertical space does make coding on a small screen much more enjoyable.
- pizza234 9y ago
  I've been (also) working on Surface machines for a couple of years now, on Ubuntu. They work OK on stock kernels since around 4.10 (but one must "backport" the linux-firmware package from Ubuntu Artful for having a working Wifi). For a "non fancy" work usage (no stylus etc.; mostly keyboard and touchpad), the "only" nags are: - no sleep functionality - you can't permanently enable the Fn button, and worse, it seems that it disables itself regularly, and even worse, independenly of it being active or not, the light is off (it's not a defect; the light just turns itself off shortly after activation). With those points in mind (point 2 is much more annoying than it reads), I think Surface machines are poor solutions for Linux users, unless the user needs to have tablet and laptop in a single machine. In fact, I'll buy the next-gen XPS 13 once it's available and mature. On the other hand, Surface Books are the state of the art of large/work tablets. There's nothing remotely comparable: a 700gr 13.5" tablet is amazing (although the batteries don't last very long), and the fact that there is a 15" model is even more impressive.
chx 9y ago
https://github.com/chx/chx.github.io/wiki/How-I-set-up-my-Windows-10-(coming-from-Linux) https://github.com/chx/chx.github.io/wiki/How-I-set-up-my-Wi... does this help?
- Jaqua 9y ago
  Hmm.. Not really..
pier25 9y ago
I tried to switch to Windows for work (for gaming it's the obvious choice) but I just couldn't. Windows 10 is IMO the best Windows ever, but I was surprised that the ecosystem was really poor compared to macOS. Most of the software you find online are outdated win32 apps with scaling problems. Even modern software from major companies still has scaling problems such as Adobe CC or even the mighty Photoshop. I also didn't find worthy replacements for my most used apps such as Alfred. Even something like iStatMenus doesn't have a replacement in Windows, all the alternatives are really poor in comparison.
- agmcleod 9y ago
  agreed. I have a gaming PC at home, as well as a separate gaming laptop that I use for events. I've tried coding on it, and it's just not as good. Little things like the apps you mentioned I miss. Soulver, text expander, proper twitter clients, spotlight, brew.
- seanalltogether 9y ago
  Oddly enough I think mac and windows switched professional users somehow. I don't know a single developer on a windows machine, however most people I know working in 3d, digital illustration or video work all use windows machines now.
  - snuxoll 9y ago
    Apple lost a lot of the creative market with the trashcan Mac Pro. If I was doing heavy video editing or other work that demanded a high-end workstation I would immediately look at HP or Dell because I don't want to buy hardware that's obsolete out of the gate with no internal expansion support, or at least no STANDARD internal expansion support (proprietary GPU and SSD connections are stupid, why do you do this Apple). On the other hand, outside of ML it's not like many software developers need to upgrade to a new GPU every (other) year and current processor trends show very little performance uplift between generations to upgrade - once Apple finally gets 32GB of memory in the MBP most developers will be set for many years.
    - 9y ago
itodd 9y ago
I recently left my macbook with the TSA after a frantic sprint through security. I was stuck with a windows 7 PC for the week. Armed with Putty and a browser, I only missed the touchpad of my macbook. I do most of my work in Jupyter and in vim. It's rather liberating to realize you are not tied to one ecosystem. My point is I thought I would never be productive without my mac but that simply wasn't true. I suppose I am an edge case though as most of my work is performed on my headless linux workstation. For those wondering, TSA held on to my macbook which I retrieved over the weekend.
- splintercell 9y ago
  > I recently left my macbook with the TSA after a frantic sprint through security. I was stuck with a windows 7 PC for the week. Care to elaborate more on what really happened?
  - kharms 9y ago
    Sounds like he forgot it after taking it out to be x-rayed,
    - splintercell 9y ago
      Oh I thought that TSA didn't let him continue with his Macbook.
    - itodd 9y ago
      Correct.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Good on the TSA!
  - multibit 9y ago
    yes, good on the TSA for not stealing the laptop they confiscated/found.
- 9y ago
mbell 9y ago
That seems to depend on the task. The highest end CPU available, even the 15", is the i7-8650U which is a 1.9Ghz @ 15W part. This is also how they pull off 17hr battery life, they are putting an ultrabook processor in a 15" laptop. Current 15" MBP can be had with a i7-7920HQ, 3.1Ghz @ 45W which I would expect to be quite a bit faster for multi-core workloads.
- MikusR 9y ago
  Which they run at 20W
  - mbell 9y ago
    i7-8650U is rated at 2.1Ghz @ 25W in it's TDP up config, so running it at 20W may get you 2.0Ghz instead of 1.9Ghz. But this doesn't tell the entire story either. Modern processors are constantly adjusting their frequencies across all cores to hit their power targets. e.g. if the thermal management can't sustain 20W in perpetuity in may actually run slower than it's rated speed. Unfortunately this isn't something that is easy to determine from most benchmarking tools. Things like geekbench will only tell you the system could maintain certain performance for the length of the test, which is usually only a couple minutes, you may find that doing longer running work will cause throttling. If you really want to know how it'll perform under heavy workloads, you probably want to hit it with prime95 or blender for 30+ minutes and monitor core frequencies to see where it ends up running at.
  - jrs95 9y ago
    Do they really? Wow...fuck Apple. I have been using Mac for years but I don't want to pay that much for severely handicapped hardware. Especially when it's just in pursuit of thinness and aesthetics.
    - mbell 9y ago
      I assume that MikusR was talking about the i7-8650U. Apple doesn't down-TDP the processors in the MBP. I don't know where this idea even came from and it's trivial to prove it false.
ksec 9y ago
Gaming, the world has changed and this generation of Apple users has way more Gamers then what they had before. Why do they continue to ignore Gamers on the Mac Platform.
- fhood 9y ago
  They are working on it, but in typical apple fashion they will not capitulate to existing standards.
  - mbel 9y ago
    Are you referring to any concrete facts/leaks/rumors when you say they are working on it? I can hardly see any movements from Apple in that direction.
    - fhood 9y ago
      No, just their pushing of metal and all the games demos they've been doing. Nothing concrete.
- baldfat 9y ago
  One HUGE Issue Hardware. While the build quality is awesome the muscle power of most Macs graphically is just abysmal. Also the lack of a native Right Click! There are plenty of Mac OS games and people don't play them.
  - robotresearcher 9y ago
    Macs have supported right click out of the box for many years.
    - baldfat 9y ago
      With the Mac Mouse having a right click? No you buy an official apple mouse you have single click options only. Also the laptops are also single click.
d1egoaz 9y ago
I've been trying Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and it's a great idea, I can see my self moving to windows (from Linux) in the next months when they fix the slow IO. The combination would work great for me, a terminal with Linux tools + a nice windows 10 experience (nice fonts, devices support) .
dalacv 9y ago
My, how times have changed. I'm freaking old.
lmm 9y ago
I was a Linux diehard for years but I'm very happy with my Surface Book. With "Ubuntu on Windows" you can run the usual unix command line tools; if anything it's more comfortable than OSX since you get up-to-date GNU versions rather than older GNU tools.
- baldfat 9y ago
  I am also most comfortable with my OpenSUSE but Windows 10 is great and I have OpenSUSE Bash for Windows installed. It really is nice and it is case sensitive! Why is Mac OS OPTIONAL case sensitivity?
  - snuxoll 9y ago
    > Why is Mac OS OPTIONAL case sensitivity? A relic from HFS of old, there's some notable applications that still fail hard on case-sensitive HFS+/APFS volumes so the default is insensitive (hey, Adobe, I'm looking at you - OS X/macOS 10 has been out for a decade and a half, get your shit together).
    - baldfat 9y ago
      I do contract work for Video/Audio production (Usually fix the crappy audio that they recorded UGH) I ran into that one a few times. Once all my work was over written because I capitalized the fixed files. The other time is we joined all our work into a pool and that crashed every Adobe application working on the job.
- masklinn 9y ago
  > if anything it's more comfortable than OSX since you get up-to-date GNU versions rather than older GNU tools. 1. By and large, OSX ships the BSD userland not GNU 2. You can trivially add up-to-date GNU tools to OSX: install homebrew, install whichever GNU stuff you want
  - damnyou 9y ago
    I have better things to do with my life than prefix every command with a g.
avenoir 9y ago
I've been saying this about every model of XPS then I'd buy one and suffer through constant driver issues. The build quality is definitely there which was lacking before but the quality of drivers make me run for hills.
baldfat 9y ago
It certainly feels like Mac OS is stuck in in-between land with iOS and OS X and it just feels a mess if your on a desktop with no track pad. The scroll bars are not mouse friendly. Windows 10 seems so much more stable and modern to Mac OS for the last two years. One job I use a Macbook and the OS just drives me nuts. The lack of decent short cuts drives is mind boggling.
- millstone 9y ago
  You can use the Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad. Not sure what you mean by "last of decent short cuts," OS X is pretty keyboard friendly. Maybe just unfamiliarity?
  - baldfat 9y ago
    I've search they are not there (Oh there are TWO different shortcuts based on your keyboard??????)) http://www.noproblemmac.com/blog/2015/05/21/how-to-always-get-to-your-macs-desktop/ http://www.noproblemmac.com/blog/2015/05/21/how-to-always-ge... Go to Desktop (This is stupid it is Fn + F11 OR Command F3 based on what keyboard you have) Also Win - D makes a lot more sense! It is a default motion on a track pad. File Manager - Windows (Win - E) Mac OS NOTHING I have never seen why Mac OS gets a pass by so many people when there are clear paper cuts in its interface and it gets worse and worse over the past 10 years.
    - millstone 9y ago
      That damn Windows key drives me nuts - press it accidentally during a game and it kicks you out! Anyways my usual way of going to the desktop is to just command-tab to Finder, and then command N to create a new Finder window, or any of the shortcuts in the Go menu. Nobody is claiming that the Mac UI is perfect, but it's been way more stable and unified than Windows. Of course there was Windows 8, but even Windows 10 still has things like both the new Settings and old Control Panel, and the old start menu next to the god-awful, ad-ridden Live Tiles. I recently tried to enable automatic login on my Windows 10 laptop and was told to run "netplwiz" in the Run dialog command line. It's a mess.
  - 9y ago
untog 9y ago
I'm the same. I'm not at all interested in the new Macbook Pros with the touch bar and crappy keyboard, and the Surface Book 2 looks amazing. I don't even actually like macOS that much any more. And Windows has the Linux subsystem! But. I need to do iOS development from time to time. At the very least, I need to be able to test web pages in Mac browsers. I can run a Windows VM on a Mac very easily, but I can't run a Mac VM inside Windows very easily. Sigh.
kalleth 9y ago
You can absolutely use this for work. My windows workflow involves a Virtualbox VM, with ~/ in the guest mounted as Z: on the windows host. Use gvim installed direct on windows (so long as you don't need super complex plugins which shell out to utilities) to edit files in Z: which exist on the host, with PuTTy and tmux as your terminal. Done. The thing holding windows back right now is a terminal emulator to sit ontop of WSL, and WSL's ability to run background processes properly without closing them all when i close a terminal (and to have things autostart on boot). There are workarounds right now to solve this, though.
megy 9y ago
I used Microsoft OS from MS-Dos v3.3 right up until they launched Vista. I have to go back every now and again for work, and it is still horrible for me. The current work machine I have requires a reboot sometimes 3 times a day for updates. Surely this can not be the norm? Anyway, I agree with you. I have a pro at work, but recently got a plain macbook, and it is awesome. Great for even iPhone dev work.

by Jaqua 9y ago

zeveb 9y ago

I imagine that it can run Linux, right — if not now, soon. I personally much prefer Linux to both macOS & Windows, although obviously tastes differ. I get a tiling WM with no cruft, I can completely control my UI, I can get work done quickly and easily.

kanishkdudeja 9y ago
The stylus and the touch might not work perfectly with Linux.
- masklinn 9y ago
  On the SB1, IIRC the touch screen worked but the dGPU, bluetooth and camera did not, you needed a patched kernel for hardware buttons and wifi, and hibernation didn't work (and the hardware didn't properly support suspend to ram). Not sure about the "tablet" mode.
- jjuel 9y ago
  If the parent is using a tiling WM I doubt they need the touch or the stylus much.
jackielii 9y ago
Same here. I can live without touch or stylus, just want a performance laptop with good screen (3:2 ratio) and keyboard.
- artursapek 9y ago
  Thinkpad?
  - jackielii 9y ago
    Exactly! if only have have 3:2 screens!!! or better yet, a 4:3 screen! Currently I'm buying a old X61s and going to convert it to X62: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-X62-Laptop-Review.211598.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-X62-Laptop-Review.21159...
    - artursapek 9y ago
      Is that ratio really so important? I have a wider ratio X1 Carbon and it has never bothered me, but I guess I wasn't used to anything in particular. The screen quality is really nice though.
      - harrygeez 9y ago
        Perhaps it's less evident especially if you have a multi-head setup with big monitors. But for almost every laptop now that uses display scaling to make screen content readable, screen estate is precious and the extra vertical space does make coding on a small screen much more enjoyable.
pizza234 9y ago
I've been (also) working on Surface machines for a couple of years now, on Ubuntu. They work OK on stock kernels since around 4.10 (but one must "backport" the linux-firmware package from Ubuntu Artful for having a working Wifi). For a "non fancy" work usage (no stylus etc.; mostly keyboard and touchpad), the "only" nags are: - no sleep functionality - you can't permanently enable the Fn button, and worse, it seems that it disables itself regularly, and even worse, independenly of it being active or not, the light is off (it's not a defect; the light just turns itself off shortly after activation). With those points in mind (point 2 is much more annoying than it reads), I think Surface machines are poor solutions for Linux users, unless the user needs to have tablet and laptop in a single machine. In fact, I'll buy the next-gen XPS 13 once it's available and mature. On the other hand, Surface Books are the state of the art of large/work tablets. There's nothing remotely comparable: a 700gr 13.5" tablet is amazing (although the batteries don't last very long), and the fact that there is a 15" model is even more impressive.

chx 9y ago

https://github.com/chx/chx.github.io/wiki/How-I-set-up-my-Windows-10-(coming-from-Linux) https://github.com/chx/chx.github.io/wiki/How-I-set-up-my-Wi... does this help?

Jaqua 9y ago
Hmm.. Not really..

pier25 9y ago

I tried to switch to Windows for work (for gaming it's the obvious choice) but I just couldn't. Windows 10 is IMO the best Windows ever, but I was surprised that the ecosystem was really poor compared to macOS. Most of the software you find online are outdated win32 apps with scaling problems. Even modern software from major companies still has scaling problems such as Adobe CC or even the mighty Photoshop. I also didn't find worthy replacements for my most used apps such as Alfred. Even something like iStatMenus doesn't have a replacement in Windows, all the alternatives are really poor in comparison.

agmcleod 9y ago
agreed. I have a gaming PC at home, as well as a separate gaming laptop that I use for events. I've tried coding on it, and it's just not as good. Little things like the apps you mentioned I miss. Soulver, text expander, proper twitter clients, spotlight, brew.
seanalltogether 9y ago
Oddly enough I think mac and windows switched professional users somehow. I don't know a single developer on a windows machine, however most people I know working in 3d, digital illustration or video work all use windows machines now.
- snuxoll 9y ago
  Apple lost a lot of the creative market with the trashcan Mac Pro. If I was doing heavy video editing or other work that demanded a high-end workstation I would immediately look at HP or Dell because I don't want to buy hardware that's obsolete out of the gate with no internal expansion support, or at least no STANDARD internal expansion support (proprietary GPU and SSD connections are stupid, why do you do this Apple). On the other hand, outside of ML it's not like many software developers need to upgrade to a new GPU every (other) year and current processor trends show very little performance uplift between generations to upgrade - once Apple finally gets 32GB of memory in the MBP most developers will be set for many years.
  - 9y ago

itodd 9y ago

I recently left my macbook with the TSA after a frantic sprint through security. I was stuck with a windows 7 PC for the week. Armed with Putty and a browser, I only missed the touchpad of my macbook. I do most of my work in Jupyter and in vim. It's rather liberating to realize you are not tied to one ecosystem. My point is I thought I would never be productive without my mac but that simply wasn't true. I suppose I am an edge case though as most of my work is performed on my headless linux workstation. For those wondering, TSA held on to my macbook which I retrieved over the weekend.

splintercell 9y ago
> I recently left my macbook with the TSA after a frantic sprint through security. I was stuck with a windows 7 PC for the week. Care to elaborate more on what really happened?
- kharms 9y ago
  Sounds like he forgot it after taking it out to be x-rayed,
  - splintercell 9y ago
    Oh I thought that TSA didn't let him continue with his Macbook.
  - itodd 9y ago
    Correct.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Good on the TSA!
- multibit 9y ago
  yes, good on the TSA for not stealing the laptop they confiscated/found.
9y ago

mbell 9y ago

That seems to depend on the task. The highest end CPU available, even the 15", is the i7-8650U which is a 1.9Ghz @ 15W part. This is also how they pull off 17hr battery life, they are putting an ultrabook processor in a 15" laptop. Current 15" MBP can be had with a i7-7920HQ, 3.1Ghz @ 45W which I would expect to be quite a bit faster for multi-core workloads.

MikusR 9y ago
Which they run at 20W
- mbell 9y ago
  i7-8650U is rated at 2.1Ghz @ 25W in it's TDP up config, so running it at 20W may get you 2.0Ghz instead of 1.9Ghz. But this doesn't tell the entire story either. Modern processors are constantly adjusting their frequencies across all cores to hit their power targets. e.g. if the thermal management can't sustain 20W in perpetuity in may actually run slower than it's rated speed. Unfortunately this isn't something that is easy to determine from most benchmarking tools. Things like geekbench will only tell you the system could maintain certain performance for the length of the test, which is usually only a couple minutes, you may find that doing longer running work will cause throttling. If you really want to know how it'll perform under heavy workloads, you probably want to hit it with prime95 or blender for 30+ minutes and monitor core frequencies to see where it ends up running at.
- jrs95 9y ago
  Do they really? Wow...fuck Apple. I have been using Mac for years but I don't want to pay that much for severely handicapped hardware. Especially when it's just in pursuit of thinness and aesthetics.
  - mbell 9y ago
    I assume that MikusR was talking about the i7-8650U. Apple doesn't down-TDP the processors in the MBP. I don't know where this idea even came from and it's trivial to prove it false.

ksec 9y ago

Gaming, the world has changed and this generation of Apple users has way more Gamers then what they had before. Why do they continue to ignore Gamers on the Mac Platform.

fhood 9y ago
They are working on it, but in typical apple fashion they will not capitulate to existing standards.
- mbel 9y ago
  Are you referring to any concrete facts/leaks/rumors when you say they are working on it? I can hardly see any movements from Apple in that direction.
  - fhood 9y ago
    No, just their pushing of metal and all the games demos they've been doing. Nothing concrete.
baldfat 9y ago
One HUGE Issue Hardware. While the build quality is awesome the muscle power of most Macs graphically is just abysmal. Also the lack of a native Right Click! There are plenty of Mac OS games and people don't play them.
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  Macs have supported right click out of the box for many years.
  - baldfat 9y ago
    With the Mac Mouse having a right click? No you buy an official apple mouse you have single click options only. Also the laptops are also single click.

d1egoaz 9y ago

I've been trying Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and it's a great idea, I can see my self moving to windows (from Linux) in the next months when they fix the slow IO. The combination would work great for me, a terminal with Linux tools + a nice windows 10 experience (nice fonts, devices support) .

dalacv 9y ago

My, how times have changed. I'm freaking old.

lmm 9y ago

I was a Linux diehard for years but I'm very happy with my Surface Book. With "Ubuntu on Windows" you can run the usual unix command line tools; if anything it's more comfortable than OSX since you get up-to-date GNU versions rather than older GNU tools.

baldfat 9y ago
I am also most comfortable with my OpenSUSE but Windows 10 is great and I have OpenSUSE Bash for Windows installed. It really is nice and it is case sensitive! Why is Mac OS OPTIONAL case sensitivity?
- snuxoll 9y ago
  > Why is Mac OS OPTIONAL case sensitivity? A relic from HFS of old, there's some notable applications that still fail hard on case-sensitive HFS+/APFS volumes so the default is insensitive (hey, Adobe, I'm looking at you - OS X/macOS 10 has been out for a decade and a half, get your shit together).
  - baldfat 9y ago
    I do contract work for Video/Audio production (Usually fix the crappy audio that they recorded UGH) I ran into that one a few times. Once all my work was over written because I capitalized the fixed files. The other time is we joined all our work into a pool and that crashed every Adobe application working on the job.
masklinn 9y ago
> if anything it's more comfortable than OSX since you get up-to-date GNU versions rather than older GNU tools. 1. By and large, OSX ships the BSD userland not GNU 2. You can trivially add up-to-date GNU tools to OSX: install homebrew, install whichever GNU stuff you want
- damnyou 9y ago
  I have better things to do with my life than prefix every command with a g.

avenoir 9y ago

I've been saying this about every model of XPS then I'd buy one and suffer through constant driver issues. The build quality is definitely there which was lacking before but the quality of drivers make me run for hills.

baldfat 9y ago

It certainly feels like Mac OS is stuck in in-between land with iOS and OS X and it just feels a mess if your on a desktop with no track pad. The scroll bars are not mouse friendly. Windows 10 seems so much more stable and modern to Mac OS for the last two years. One job I use a Macbook and the OS just drives me nuts. The lack of decent short cuts drives is mind boggling.

millstone 9y ago
You can use the Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad. Not sure what you mean by "last of decent short cuts," OS X is pretty keyboard friendly. Maybe just unfamiliarity?
- baldfat 9y ago
  I've search they are not there (Oh there are TWO different shortcuts based on your keyboard??????)) http://www.noproblemmac.com/blog/2015/05/21/how-to-always-get-to-your-macs-desktop/ http://www.noproblemmac.com/blog/2015/05/21/how-to-always-ge... Go to Desktop (This is stupid it is Fn + F11 OR Command F3 based on what keyboard you have) Also Win - D makes a lot more sense! It is a default motion on a track pad. File Manager - Windows (Win - E) Mac OS NOTHING I have never seen why Mac OS gets a pass by so many people when there are clear paper cuts in its interface and it gets worse and worse over the past 10 years.
  - millstone 9y ago
    That damn Windows key drives me nuts - press it accidentally during a game and it kicks you out! Anyways my usual way of going to the desktop is to just command-tab to Finder, and then command N to create a new Finder window, or any of the shortcuts in the Go menu. Nobody is claiming that the Mac UI is perfect, but it's been way more stable and unified than Windows. Of course there was Windows 8, but even Windows 10 still has things like both the new Settings and old Control Panel, and the old start menu next to the god-awful, ad-ridden Live Tiles. I recently tried to enable automatic login on my Windows 10 laptop and was told to run "netplwiz" in the Run dialog command line. It's a mess.
- 9y ago

untog 9y ago

I'm the same. I'm not at all interested in the new Macbook Pros with the touch bar and crappy keyboard, and the Surface Book 2 looks amazing. I don't even actually like macOS that much any more. And Windows has the Linux subsystem! But. I need to do iOS development from time to time. At the very least, I need to be able to test web pages in Mac browsers. I can run a Windows VM on a Mac very easily, but I can't run a Mac VM inside Windows very easily. Sigh.

kalleth 9y ago

You can absolutely use this for work. My windows workflow involves a Virtualbox VM, with ~/ in the guest mounted as Z: on the windows host. Use gvim installed direct on windows (so long as you don't need super complex plugins which shell out to utilities) to edit files in Z: which exist on the host, with PuTTy and tmux as your terminal. Done. The thing holding windows back right now is a terminal emulator to sit ontop of WSL, and WSL's ability to run background processes properly without closing them all when i close a terminal (and to have things autostart on boot). There are workarounds right now to solve this, though.

megy 9y ago

I used Microsoft OS from MS-Dos v3.3 right up until they launched Vista. I have to go back every now and again for work, and it is still horrible for me. The current work machine I have requires a reboot sometimes 3 times a day for updates. Surely this can not be the norm? Anyway, I agree with you. I have a pro at work, but recently got a plain macbook, and it is awesome. Great for even iPhone dev work.