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Trying Arch on a ThinkPad, Ubuntu on a Dell, and Windows on a Surface Book made me appreciate my MacBook more. It's very tempting to realise you don't use any
by modernerd 8y ago
Trying Arch on a ThinkPad, Ubuntu on a Dell, and Windows on a Surface Book made me appreciate my MacBook more.
It's very tempting to realise you don't use any Apple apps, see how you're paying a lot for last year's hardware specs, throw up your arms and say “I'm done with Apple! I'll get a hacker's laptop!” But — if you've become accustomed to Apple hardware and macOS — the experience felt like a real downgrade to me.
I have a laundry list of Mac niggles, but they're generally in the category of, “I wish I could tweak that behaviour a little” (like fully removing OS-level UI animations beyond what “reduce motion” offers) rather than, “I can't work until this problem is solved”, which is what I saw much more of on Arch, Ubuntu, and Windows (redraw issues that rendered applications unusable, updates that broke critical deps and required rollbacks, and almost daily blue-screening on Windows).
Apple also gets a bunch of things right by default that you miss when you go elsewhere, like their trackpads, screens, and zero-config full-disk encryption.
The Touch Bar MacBook Pro I have now may be worse than the previous model in some ways (I do not like the keyboard or use the Touch Bar), but overall the experience hasn't declined enough to fall behind everything else that's on offer for me.
- ManFromUranus 8y ago"and almost daily blue-screening on Windows" Please just stop, that never happened, unless you're job is to write device drivers and then it's probably you're device driver that's causing it.
- modernerd 8y agoThis continues to be a well-documented and persistent issue for Surface Book owners. You can read about old accounts here (around the time I owned mine): https://forums.windowscentral.com/microsoft-surface-book/406240-2.htm https://forums.windowscentral.com/microsoft-surface-book/406... And more recent ones here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/7qtavp/surface_book_performance_base_blue_screen/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/7qtavp/surface_boo... Microsoft told me it was a driver issue but trying alternative drivers did not improve things for me. I have no desire to slander Microsoft and was only sharing my experience. I very much like other aspects of the Surface Book and would be tempted by a device of the same form factor if stability issues could be resolved.
- _Tev 8y agoThat is unfortunate, but ManFromUranus probably meant that this is very rare for today's Win users. BSOD is now more of once-in-a-year event. So claiming Windows is somehow inferior OS due to it is a bit misleading.