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I abandoned Windows 15 years ago; I switched over to Linux for about 7 years and then OS/X for 8 after that. I only returned to Windows this year, as it was re

I abandoned Windows 15 years ago; I switched over to Linux for about 7 years and then OS/X for 8 after that. I only returned to Windows this year, as it was required for a new job. Trust me: no, Windows is still as awful as it ever was.

mgkimsal 9y ago
for what sort of workload? I'm primarily in text editors, IDEs, browsers and command line. jetbrains stuff is cross-platform, and I'm assuming runs well on windows. the surfacebook world looks enticing, and my macbook is ... well, i'm getting enticed by the surface world. What sort of problems do you encounter?
robbyt 9y ago
I believe you, but I'm curious if you're using Windows 10? Also, what specifically is bad. (I'm a Linux desktop user since '99, MacOS since 08)
- mr_toad 9y ago
  It’s still a major PITA to install & maintain many open source tools, like curl, Ffmpeg, wget etc. The tool chain is hit and miss. Recompiling Ffmpeg with h265 support is one command on MacOS. I just recently had to recompile a R package that depended on some fairly obscure third party libraries. No problem, just a couple of brew install commands. I’d hate to think how much manual work it would have taken to line up all the dependencies for that in Windows. Likely I’d have just given up.
- commandlinefan 9y ago
  It takes _ages_ to start up, for one thing. Debian, on the exact same hardware, starts up in seconds - Windows 7 takes minutes. You might argue that Windows is offering more functionality, but OS/X also starts orders of magnitude faster. There's no visibility on what the hell it's doing or how you can tune it. Wifi is hit-and-miss, and again, there's no way to peek into the internals and figure out what's going wrong. Configuration options are scattered everywhere; sometimes they're in control panel, sometimes they're in some random .msc file, sometimes they're just somewhere else for no reason. Linux is persnickety, but open - it takes some dedication to get things working, but you have the tools you need to do so. OS/X is closed, but "just works". Windows is persnickety, closed, and only sometimes works - you get the worst of Linux with the worst of OS/X and none of the good.
basementcat 9y ago
I think it depends on what you're doing. If you stay in the Linux subsystem, it is very similar to an actual Linux userland. I find many of my struggles with Windows is the result of trying to solve a problem in the Windows subsystem in a "Unix-like" way instead of a "Windows-like" way.

mgkimsal 9y ago

for what sort of workload? I'm primarily in text editors, IDEs, browsers and command line. jetbrains stuff is cross-platform, and I'm assuming runs well on windows. the surfacebook world looks enticing, and my macbook is ... well, i'm getting enticed by the surface world. What sort of problems do you encounter?

robbyt 9y ago

I believe you, but I'm curious if you're using Windows 10? Also, what specifically is bad. (I'm a Linux desktop user since '99, MacOS since 08)

mr_toad 9y ago
It’s still a major PITA to install & maintain many open source tools, like curl, Ffmpeg, wget etc. The tool chain is hit and miss. Recompiling Ffmpeg with h265 support is one command on MacOS. I just recently had to recompile a R package that depended on some fairly obscure third party libraries. No problem, just a couple of brew install commands. I’d hate to think how much manual work it would have taken to line up all the dependencies for that in Windows. Likely I’d have just given up.
commandlinefan 9y ago
It takes _ages_ to start up, for one thing. Debian, on the exact same hardware, starts up in seconds - Windows 7 takes minutes. You might argue that Windows is offering more functionality, but OS/X also starts orders of magnitude faster. There's no visibility on what the hell it's doing or how you can tune it. Wifi is hit-and-miss, and again, there's no way to peek into the internals and figure out what's going wrong. Configuration options are scattered everywhere; sometimes they're in control panel, sometimes they're in some random .msc file, sometimes they're just somewhere else for no reason. Linux is persnickety, but open - it takes some dedication to get things working, but you have the tools you need to do so. OS/X is closed, but "just works". Windows is persnickety, closed, and only sometimes works - you get the worst of Linux with the worst of OS/X and none of the good.

basementcat 9y ago

I think it depends on what you're doing. If you stay in the Linux subsystem, it is very similar to an actual Linux userland. I find many of my struggles with Windows is the result of trying to solve a problem in the Windows subsystem in a "Unix-like" way instead of a "Windows-like" way.