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I like this writeup but I sort of expected it to contain a "Windows 10 Review from a lifelong macos user" embedded in it. I was surprised that this was just abo

I like this writeup but I sort of expected it to contain a "Windows 10 Review from a lifelong macos user" embedded in it. I was surprised that this was just about the hardware. As a happy lifelong Windows user, surrounded by programmers who call me insane (or an idiot, even) for liking it, I was curious to learn more about what a developer who's used to Mac thinks about the Windows 10 dev experience. (notably for a more honest impression of what I might be missing)

yulaow 8y ago
I always had very little sympathy for those who express very strong opinion _against_ other OSes and their users, professionals or not. In 2018 every one of the main OSes can be used efficiently for programming purposes, windows10 too especially now that it has the WLS
- abrookins 8y ago
  I've been hearing this about WSL for a while now. However, I just spent a ton of time (like weeks) actually trying Windows 10 and the Windows Subsystem for Linux (for those who don't know what WSL is), coming from a Mac, and I gotta say, WSL isn't there yet for the code I work with. Specifically, it worked fine for some Python stuff, it built some Go code decently, I figured something out for Docker, but then it blew up on the Rails apps I use (a missing syscall implementation breaks unicorn). Aside from the potential to run into show-stopping problems like that, you may run into "big company" problems if you work for one, like I do. That is, VPN support within WSL only half-works, and because it's Windows you may be forced to follow domain policies that require Windows Defender to run, which slows down WSL, and blocks you from Insider builds that could fix WSL problems. You can run a Linux VM on Windows instead of WSL. Which has its own set of problems and is overall a worse experience than developing on macOS, in my opinion. So currently while, as a Mac user, I actually prefer the Windows 10 UI, the hardware competition, the keyboards, etc., I can't use WSL. Side-projects that you can adapt to WSL's limitations are one thing, but making it work as your development environment for a wide-range of professional projects is another. I saw all this with some actual sadness because I'm tired of investing in Apple when they've basically abandoned macOS and are making so many hardware choices I disagree with, that affect me (keyboard, touch bar).
  - gecko 8y ago
    Would I be correct that you tried WSL in late summer/fall last year? I'm asking because WSL got a pile of new syscalls, a couple of which (if I recall correctly) fixed the unicorn issue you hit. Likewise, there are now standard GPOs you can distribute that exempt WSL from Defender. I 100% agree that running a Linux VM can sometimes be a lot better (and it's not exactly hard, given that Hyper-V has been in Windows for forever and has strong command-line support), but I find that I can use WSL for virtually everything these days compared to even six months ago.
    - abrookins 8y ago
      Actually, it was as recently as this very week! Running with all the latest updates on a new Surface Book 2, I ran into a variation of this open issue: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/1982 https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/1982. That was only the last and final blocking issue I ran into, after a series of minor (or at least, not serious) problems that I powered through during too many late nights. Couple of things: - Hyper-V. Was excited for this and tried it, since I had already set up Docker for Windows and pointed the CLI tools in WSL at it. However, Hyper-V didn't appear to have any support for the "shared folder" concept that VMWare and VirtualBox do. Is your only option here to set up Windows share and use Samba? - I dislike running VMs generally, but would have gone that route if I could have gotten a setup I liked. However, after reconfiguring everything to use VirtualBox (including Docker) and creating a single VM there to do Docker and Linux stuff on, it seemed to tax the machine too much (i5 8GB SB2). With a beefy machine that would have worked better, but Windows 10 isn't that appealing if I have to buy the highest-spec machines and run VMs... that's exactly where it was 5-10 years ago. I have a lot more to say about WSL and Windows 10, and it probably deserves a blog post. I haven't returned the Surface yet because I'm kinda in love with it, but also if I can't do all my work on it, then it's not something I need to own.
      - gecko 8y ago
        Actually, it was as recently as this very week! Running with all the latest updates on a new Surface Book 2, I ran into a variation of this open issue: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/1982. Well that stinks. I'd swear I hit this and it got resolved with the inotify-related patches, but clearly I misremembered. Might be thinking of uwsgi or something. Re. Hyper-V: yeah, I do a Samba mount. This in my experience actually performs a ton better than VirtualBox shared folders, but it's been a long time. I have no idea how it compares to VMware's implementation. (VMware and VirtualBox also have the ability to cleanly virtualize a graphics-accelerated Linux desktop, which is not something I need or care about, but might be a show-stopper for both WSL and Hyper-V if you do.)
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  I found that all I need is git for Windows and its bash and Unix commands, plus ConEmu for terminals. I'm completely at ease with developing on Windows now, and I've "done Linux" since 1994, worked long for one of the major Linux vendors and even contributed a bit to the Linux kernel (networking and firewall), but if I had to do system administration I might have a stronger opinion (simply because I'M so sued to Unix ways in general). It is like this Monty Python scene https://youtu.be/WboggjN_G-4?t=69 https://youtu.be/WboggjN_G-4?t=69 when people start arguing about their operating system. For the last couple of years I looked at how nature (biology) "computes", not just neurons, the entire bio-chemistry with its machinery. Now that is something different - while everything people put on their computers works on pretty much the exact same principles unless you zoom all the way in to nanometer scale (figuratively speaking).
- NightlyDev 8y ago
  Not completely true. Apple sucks, and as a result of that iOS development is clearly more convenient on Mac OS. I would also clearly prefer windows for projects supposed to run on windows servers, and Linux for projects supposed to run on Linux. Mac OS Server is utter crap and completely useless, so Apple doesn't have that going for it.
- VirtualAirwaves 8y ago
  I develop on Windows 10, in CUDA/C++, Erlang, and F#. And I never use WSL, even though we deploy on Centos. Windows is best if you use it as Windows! Take the time to learn Powershell, and use the Powershell console, not "cygwin" or bash in WSL.
wepple 8y ago
I agree it would be really nice to hear this users opinion on Win10, but I’m not surprised it wasn’t included. They mention that they also use an iPad and other setups, which suggests they’re doing rather platform-agnostic dev work. Once you shell into a box in the cloud, only the keyboard and screen are any different.
- geerlingguy 8y ago
  Exactly; for 90% of my work, I just need a CLI with SSH, a text editor (I use Sublime, so it works the same on Windows as Mac) a filesystem somewhere, git, and a good keyboard. I stick to my Mac exclusively for photo and video work, but I can get most things done on Windows as needed (though a few workflows are a little more annoying than I'd like in the absence of Spotlight, Automator, and a few Mac-only niche apps I love to use).
jboy55 8y ago
What I'd like most from a Laptop Win 10 review is a 2 year later review. We use a macbook air at home, it still runs just as good as when we got it. I've always had issues with Windows where the out of the box experience is incredible, but 2 years later, I'm waiting 5 minutes after start for, 'things to finish' before the computer begins to feel fast again. Whenever I look at replacing the Air, I get nearly to the end of the checkout with a new macbook pro 13" (what I use for work), when I get a sick feeling that I shouldn't be spending $2k for our house 'in front of the tv' laptop.
- blinkingled 8y ago
  I think it depends a lot on the specifics of the hardware and your usage - I choose my Win 10 boxen to be good quality - HP or Dell or Lenovo business gear. I even ran Win 10 for long time on 15" MBP. Never had issues anywhere except with the 1803 update killing sleep on my Z230 which required rollback to fix. I also don't install and delete random stuff on those boxes. Macs for the most part in the house are trouble free too. But suddenly apps not launching or just beachballing is not uncommon after high number of suspend/resume cycles without reboot. Truth be told it's amazing in OS land right now - Fedora/Ubuntu, W10, macOS all do a number of things right without a sweat. One thing that Win10 on my X1C6 has macOS beat is speed to the desktop after suspend. I don't know about TouchID MBPs but connected standby + Fingerprint logon on Windows 10 makes the resume to desktop experience blazing fast.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  "S Mode" and forcing more of your Windows 10 application installs to use the Microsoft Store is a big one. A lot of the biggest culprits for the start time "things to finish" were ad hoc updaters from various terrible vendors. Everyone: don't install Flash (built in to IE/Edge, if you need it, and you likely don't), don't install Java as much as you can avoid it (find alternatives or standalone installs), and install iTunes only from the Microsoft Store if you want it (goodbye Apple Updater, you will not be missed). Those recommendations alone take care of so much startup gunk. Power Users: check Startup applications and Services in Task Manager's Advanced/Details view from time to time. Task Manager in Windows 10 lets you disable Startup applications directly without needing any other tool. Many third party services you can switch from Automatic to Automatic (Delayed Start) and lose no functionality, but get out of the Windows startup "hot path". I have backup software that absolutely needed to be (Delayed Start), not just because it was slowing Windows startup but also because it was trying to access system/network resources before Windows was ready for them anyway, yet the installer did not default it to be (Delayed Start) up until just recently. (If you build Windows Services, consider defaulting your service installers for Delayed Start or Trigger Start. You don't need to be in the startup hot path, you are more likely to be getting in the way.)
gervase 8y ago
I'm happy to share my thoughts. I developed on Macs for 8 years, then switched to Windows 10 for 2 years (inclusive of Insider builds). In some ways, the transition was pretty painless. I mainly use JetBrains products, so there was very little pain in the switch there. I expected that, which is one of the reasons why I decided to switch in the first place. However, what I hadn't predicted was how few of the quality-of-life tweaks I was using had equivalents on Windows. For example, I was using the clipboard history feature extensively on Alfred when I was using Mac, and Ditto is barely a replacement for Windows. Recording screencasts with Screenflow on Mac is painless, and Windows (at the time) didn't have a comparable equivalent. The built-in functionality for window management in Windows is not bad, but it doesn't compare to Spectacle for flexibility. Those are just a few examples, but collectively, these ended up adding a surprisingly painful amount of friction to my development process, even when the IDE was exactly the same. I finally ended up admitting defeat and switching back to MacOS. I might conclude that if you're using the out-of-the-box, platform default environment, Visual Studio and Windows 10 are probably going to give a better experience than XCode + vanilla MacOS. Then again, if you're the kind of person whose .vimrc has decades of tweaks, you'll probably be happier in Linux. Basically, my view is to just let everyone do what they want and what they feel comfortable with, coexist with them, and don't try to convert/proselytize in general, which I believe is a pretty non-controversial stance.
- com2kid 8y ago
  > For example, I was using the clipboard history feature extensively on Alfred when I was using Mac, and Ditto is barely a replacement for Windows. Good news! That is being fixed in the next release of Windows 10: http://clipdiary.com/clipboard-articles/view-windows-clipboard-history.php http://clipdiary.com/clipboard-articles/view-windows-clipboa... > The built-in functionality for window management in Windows is not bad, but it doesn't compare to Spectacle for flexibility. You can actually download extra utilities for this. I like switcher (lets me search open windows by name), but there are quite a few others. The entire Windows shell is replaceable if you want to go that far. I've never had a problem recording screen casts, lots of software options have always existed there, and they only keep getting better. To get the full feature set of ScreenFlow, multiple apps would be needed though, I haven't seen any single app that does it all, although one may exist. Also what Window Management features does Windows not have? I generally use the hotkeys for everything, without issue. I wish it was easier to do things like splitting my display into 3, but again lots of 3rd party utilities exist to expand the functionality out. > Then again, if you're the kind of person whose .vimrc has decades of tweaks, you'll probably be happier in Linux. This is how I feel about Windows, my path environments, custom aliases, and utility scripts laying around. :)
modzu 8y ago
win aint bad on a desktop. its the laptops that mac does beautifully (here i am working on a couch) tho win 10's default privacy settings leave a lot to be desired :(
SyneRyder 8y ago
Mac user since 2006 here, who often tries switching back to Windows. The biggest deal breaker for me has been the Windows 10 update system, where it will sometimes start installing updates when you shut down your computer and tell you "don't turn off your computer". There's been times when I've been stuck at a cafe for 45 minutes & nearly missed a train home because Windows was still sitting there saying "Don't Turn Off Your Computer". With the Mac, I can close the lid and it will always go into sleep mode straight away (with its excellent snooze light to indicate sleep mode), or shutdown and have everything off in seconds. There's also a Mac program called SuperDuper! that makes bootable copies of drives, so I can clone my internal drive to an external USB, and if/when my internal drive fails, I can actually boot directly from the cloned USB drive, just by plugging it in during the Mac startup sequence. It has saved my bacon several times. I don't think there's a Windows equivalent, unless that has changed.
- oarsinsync 8y ago
  The Mac has a snooze light? Where? I’ve been using a MacBook Air since 2010 and MacBook Pro since 2015 and haven’t seen anything resembling a snooze light. Would love to discover this!
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    Sadly, abandoned as of (I think) the rMBP.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    You missed it: it was only present on MacBooks and non-Retina MacBook Pros.
  - SyneRyder 8y ago
    Oh no, did they remove it on later models? I'm still using a 2012 MBP (bought new in 2015), that I upgraded to 16GB and 2TB and is still covered by AppleCare. My 2006 & 2007 MacBooks had the light too. Here's a video of the sleep / snooze light in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT6siXyIjvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT6siXyIjvQ Aside from it being cool/delightful, it's also useful. When you close the lid, the light initially stays fully on, until the system has actually entered sleep mode. If it stays fully lit (and doesn't start 'breathing'), it's a hint that the machine hasn't actually gone to sleep. Do not put a non-sleeping MacBook in a backpack, or it will get insanely hot to touch...
arh68 8y ago
I think it's worse. I'm not going to say it's pretty bad, but it's not quite up to par with Macintosh. - You get three clipboards in OS X. Windows gives you 1 - all of the UNIX utilities work (find, grep, xargs, they're all there), all the syscalls work. Because it really is UNIX - readline shortcuts are available everywhere out of the box. Windows confines me to Cygwin and Emacs - Cygwin is okay ($PATH versus %PATH% annoys me), but it's not even close to Homebrew - Visual Studio is a disaster most of the time I use it. YMMV - a lot of stuff does not run on Windows (most memorably, Swift) whereas almost everything runs on Debian and most things run on OS X I have a Windows laptop and I've resorted to running Debian on VMware and ssh'ing in with Putty/Xming. I'm surrounded by programmers who openly mock OS X ("you can't develop on a mac!") and tend to stick to Microsoft Approved Software Component Framework -type stuff. To be fair, I haven't tried WSL. I tried to install Docker, but I was told my top-o'-the-line PC needed another $140 to play that game. Crappy DLC is all it is to me.
- aetherspawn 8y ago
  I run Visual Studio on my Mac and full proper VS Ultimate on Windows and both are fine. For C++ it works well.. IMO a lot better than XCode IDE, Code::Blocks, Eclipse or any other out-of-box that I’ve tried. Interested to know why you say that VS is a disaster?
  - arh68 8y ago
    I'm doing C#. It's better than Eclipse, sure, but the gold standard imo is IntelliJ. - I can hit C-F and count to 2 before Find in All Files opens - "9 build errors. Build successful" [0] - random pain points [1] - intellisense is often not what I want (though sometimes it is) so I alternate between Esc & Tab - you can't make this stuff up [2] Maybe I just need to reinstall. The window/panel layout is great, I will say. It's easy to use. It's familiar for a lot of people. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17703004/visual-studio-displaying-errors-even-if-projects-build https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17703004/visual-studio-d... [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24468370/linker-cannot-open-file-nafxcwd-lib https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24468370/linker-cannot-o... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=visual+studio+has+stopped+working https://www.google.com/search?q=visual+studio+has+stopped+wo...

yulaow 8y ago

I always had very little sympathy for those who express very strong opinion _against_ other OSes and their users, professionals or not. In 2018 every one of the main OSes can be used efficiently for programming purposes, windows10 too especially now that it has the WLS

abrookins 8y ago
I've been hearing this about WSL for a while now. However, I just spent a ton of time (like weeks) actually trying Windows 10 and the Windows Subsystem for Linux (for those who don't know what WSL is), coming from a Mac, and I gotta say, WSL isn't there yet for the code I work with. Specifically, it worked fine for some Python stuff, it built some Go code decently, I figured something out for Docker, but then it blew up on the Rails apps I use (a missing syscall implementation breaks unicorn). Aside from the potential to run into show-stopping problems like that, you may run into "big company" problems if you work for one, like I do. That is, VPN support within WSL only half-works, and because it's Windows you may be forced to follow domain policies that require Windows Defender to run, which slows down WSL, and blocks you from Insider builds that could fix WSL problems. You can run a Linux VM on Windows instead of WSL. Which has its own set of problems and is overall a worse experience than developing on macOS, in my opinion. So currently while, as a Mac user, I actually prefer the Windows 10 UI, the hardware competition, the keyboards, etc., I can't use WSL. Side-projects that you can adapt to WSL's limitations are one thing, but making it work as your development environment for a wide-range of professional projects is another. I saw all this with some actual sadness because I'm tired of investing in Apple when they've basically abandoned macOS and are making so many hardware choices I disagree with, that affect me (keyboard, touch bar).
- gecko 8y ago
  Would I be correct that you tried WSL in late summer/fall last year? I'm asking because WSL got a pile of new syscalls, a couple of which (if I recall correctly) fixed the unicorn issue you hit. Likewise, there are now standard GPOs you can distribute that exempt WSL from Defender. I 100% agree that running a Linux VM can sometimes be a lot better (and it's not exactly hard, given that Hyper-V has been in Windows for forever and has strong command-line support), but I find that I can use WSL for virtually everything these days compared to even six months ago.
  - abrookins 8y ago
    Actually, it was as recently as this very week! Running with all the latest updates on a new Surface Book 2, I ran into a variation of this open issue: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/1982 https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/1982. That was only the last and final blocking issue I ran into, after a series of minor (or at least, not serious) problems that I powered through during too many late nights. Couple of things: - Hyper-V. Was excited for this and tried it, since I had already set up Docker for Windows and pointed the CLI tools in WSL at it. However, Hyper-V didn't appear to have any support for the "shared folder" concept that VMWare and VirtualBox do. Is your only option here to set up Windows share and use Samba? - I dislike running VMs generally, but would have gone that route if I could have gotten a setup I liked. However, after reconfiguring everything to use VirtualBox (including Docker) and creating a single VM there to do Docker and Linux stuff on, it seemed to tax the machine too much (i5 8GB SB2). With a beefy machine that would have worked better, but Windows 10 isn't that appealing if I have to buy the highest-spec machines and run VMs... that's exactly where it was 5-10 years ago. I have a lot more to say about WSL and Windows 10, and it probably deserves a blog post. I haven't returned the Surface yet because I'm kinda in love with it, but also if I can't do all my work on it, then it's not something I need to own.
    - gecko 8y ago
      Actually, it was as recently as this very week! Running with all the latest updates on a new Surface Book 2, I ran into a variation of this open issue: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/1982. Well that stinks. I'd swear I hit this and it got resolved with the inotify-related patches, but clearly I misremembered. Might be thinking of uwsgi or something. Re. Hyper-V: yeah, I do a Samba mount. This in my experience actually performs a ton better than VirtualBox shared folders, but it's been a long time. I have no idea how it compares to VMware's implementation. (VMware and VirtualBox also have the ability to cleanly virtualize a graphics-accelerated Linux desktop, which is not something I need or care about, but might be a show-stopper for both WSL and Hyper-V if you do.)
ItsMe000001 8y ago
I found that all I need is git for Windows and its bash and Unix commands, plus ConEmu for terminals. I'm completely at ease with developing on Windows now, and I've "done Linux" since 1994, worked long for one of the major Linux vendors and even contributed a bit to the Linux kernel (networking and firewall), but if I had to do system administration I might have a stronger opinion (simply because I'M so sued to Unix ways in general). It is like this Monty Python scene https://youtu.be/WboggjN_G-4?t=69 https://youtu.be/WboggjN_G-4?t=69 when people start arguing about their operating system. For the last couple of years I looked at how nature (biology) "computes", not just neurons, the entire bio-chemistry with its machinery. Now that is something different - while everything people put on their computers works on pretty much the exact same principles unless you zoom all the way in to nanometer scale (figuratively speaking).
NightlyDev 8y ago
Not completely true. Apple sucks, and as a result of that iOS development is clearly more convenient on Mac OS. I would also clearly prefer windows for projects supposed to run on windows servers, and Linux for projects supposed to run on Linux. Mac OS Server is utter crap and completely useless, so Apple doesn't have that going for it.
VirtualAirwaves 8y ago
I develop on Windows 10, in CUDA/C++, Erlang, and F#. And I never use WSL, even though we deploy on Centos. Windows is best if you use it as Windows! Take the time to learn Powershell, and use the Powershell console, not "cygwin" or bash in WSL.

wepple 8y ago

I agree it would be really nice to hear this users opinion on Win10, but I’m not surprised it wasn’t included. They mention that they also use an iPad and other setups, which suggests they’re doing rather platform-agnostic dev work. Once you shell into a box in the cloud, only the keyboard and screen are any different.

geerlingguy 8y ago
Exactly; for 90% of my work, I just need a CLI with SSH, a text editor (I use Sublime, so it works the same on Windows as Mac) a filesystem somewhere, git, and a good keyboard. I stick to my Mac exclusively for photo and video work, but I can get most things done on Windows as needed (though a few workflows are a little more annoying than I'd like in the absence of Spotlight, Automator, and a few Mac-only niche apps I love to use).

jboy55 8y ago

What I'd like most from a Laptop Win 10 review is a 2 year later review. We use a macbook air at home, it still runs just as good as when we got it. I've always had issues with Windows where the out of the box experience is incredible, but 2 years later, I'm waiting 5 minutes after start for, 'things to finish' before the computer begins to feel fast again. Whenever I look at replacing the Air, I get nearly to the end of the checkout with a new macbook pro 13" (what I use for work), when I get a sick feeling that I shouldn't be spending $2k for our house 'in front of the tv' laptop.

blinkingled 8y ago
I think it depends a lot on the specifics of the hardware and your usage - I choose my Win 10 boxen to be good quality - HP or Dell or Lenovo business gear. I even ran Win 10 for long time on 15" MBP. Never had issues anywhere except with the 1803 update killing sleep on my Z230 which required rollback to fix. I also don't install and delete random stuff on those boxes. Macs for the most part in the house are trouble free too. But suddenly apps not launching or just beachballing is not uncommon after high number of suspend/resume cycles without reboot. Truth be told it's amazing in OS land right now - Fedora/Ubuntu, W10, macOS all do a number of things right without a sweat. One thing that Win10 on my X1C6 has macOS beat is speed to the desktop after suspend. I don't know about TouchID MBPs but connected standby + Fingerprint logon on Windows 10 makes the resume to desktop experience blazing fast.
WorldMaker 8y ago
"S Mode" and forcing more of your Windows 10 application installs to use the Microsoft Store is a big one. A lot of the biggest culprits for the start time "things to finish" were ad hoc updaters from various terrible vendors. Everyone: don't install Flash (built in to IE/Edge, if you need it, and you likely don't), don't install Java as much as you can avoid it (find alternatives or standalone installs), and install iTunes only from the Microsoft Store if you want it (goodbye Apple Updater, you will not be missed). Those recommendations alone take care of so much startup gunk. Power Users: check Startup applications and Services in Task Manager's Advanced/Details view from time to time. Task Manager in Windows 10 lets you disable Startup applications directly without needing any other tool. Many third party services you can switch from Automatic to Automatic (Delayed Start) and lose no functionality, but get out of the Windows startup "hot path". I have backup software that absolutely needed to be (Delayed Start), not just because it was slowing Windows startup but also because it was trying to access system/network resources before Windows was ready for them anyway, yet the installer did not default it to be (Delayed Start) up until just recently. (If you build Windows Services, consider defaulting your service installers for Delayed Start or Trigger Start. You don't need to be in the startup hot path, you are more likely to be getting in the way.)

gervase 8y ago

I'm happy to share my thoughts. I developed on Macs for 8 years, then switched to Windows 10 for 2 years (inclusive of Insider builds). In some ways, the transition was pretty painless. I mainly use JetBrains products, so there was very little pain in the switch there. I expected that, which is one of the reasons why I decided to switch in the first place. However, what I hadn't predicted was how few of the quality-of-life tweaks I was using had equivalents on Windows. For example, I was using the clipboard history feature extensively on Alfred when I was using Mac, and Ditto is barely a replacement for Windows. Recording screencasts with Screenflow on Mac is painless, and Windows (at the time) didn't have a comparable equivalent. The built-in functionality for window management in Windows is not bad, but it doesn't compare to Spectacle for flexibility. Those are just a few examples, but collectively, these ended up adding a surprisingly painful amount of friction to my development process, even when the IDE was exactly the same. I finally ended up admitting defeat and switching back to MacOS. I might conclude that if you're using the out-of-the-box, platform default environment, Visual Studio and Windows 10 are probably going to give a better experience than XCode + vanilla MacOS. Then again, if you're the kind of person whose .vimrc has decades of tweaks, you'll probably be happier in Linux. Basically, my view is to just let everyone do what they want and what they feel comfortable with, coexist with them, and don't try to convert/proselytize in general, which I believe is a pretty non-controversial stance.

com2kid 8y ago
> For example, I was using the clipboard history feature extensively on Alfred when I was using Mac, and Ditto is barely a replacement for Windows. Good news! That is being fixed in the next release of Windows 10: http://clipdiary.com/clipboard-articles/view-windows-clipboard-history.php http://clipdiary.com/clipboard-articles/view-windows-clipboa... > The built-in functionality for window management in Windows is not bad, but it doesn't compare to Spectacle for flexibility. You can actually download extra utilities for this. I like switcher (lets me search open windows by name), but there are quite a few others. The entire Windows shell is replaceable if you want to go that far. I've never had a problem recording screen casts, lots of software options have always existed there, and they only keep getting better. To get the full feature set of ScreenFlow, multiple apps would be needed though, I haven't seen any single app that does it all, although one may exist. Also what Window Management features does Windows not have? I generally use the hotkeys for everything, without issue. I wish it was easier to do things like splitting my display into 3, but again lots of 3rd party utilities exist to expand the functionality out. > Then again, if you're the kind of person whose .vimrc has decades of tweaks, you'll probably be happier in Linux. This is how I feel about Windows, my path environments, custom aliases, and utility scripts laying around. :)

modzu 8y ago

win aint bad on a desktop. its the laptops that mac does beautifully (here i am working on a couch) tho win 10's default privacy settings leave a lot to be desired :(

SyneRyder 8y ago

Mac user since 2006 here, who often tries switching back to Windows. The biggest deal breaker for me has been the Windows 10 update system, where it will sometimes start installing updates when you shut down your computer and tell you "don't turn off your computer". There's been times when I've been stuck at a cafe for 45 minutes & nearly missed a train home because Windows was still sitting there saying "Don't Turn Off Your Computer". With the Mac, I can close the lid and it will always go into sleep mode straight away (with its excellent snooze light to indicate sleep mode), or shutdown and have everything off in seconds. There's also a Mac program called SuperDuper! that makes bootable copies of drives, so I can clone my internal drive to an external USB, and if/when my internal drive fails, I can actually boot directly from the cloned USB drive, just by plugging it in during the Mac startup sequence. It has saved my bacon several times. I don't think there's a Windows equivalent, unless that has changed.

oarsinsync 8y ago
The Mac has a snooze light? Where? I’ve been using a MacBook Air since 2010 and MacBook Pro since 2015 and haven’t seen anything resembling a snooze light. Would love to discover this!
- rsynnott 8y ago
  Sadly, abandoned as of (I think) the rMBP.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  You missed it: it was only present on MacBooks and non-Retina MacBook Pros.
- SyneRyder 8y ago
  Oh no, did they remove it on later models? I'm still using a 2012 MBP (bought new in 2015), that I upgraded to 16GB and 2TB and is still covered by AppleCare. My 2006 & 2007 MacBooks had the light too. Here's a video of the sleep / snooze light in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT6siXyIjvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT6siXyIjvQ Aside from it being cool/delightful, it's also useful. When you close the lid, the light initially stays fully on, until the system has actually entered sleep mode. If it stays fully lit (and doesn't start 'breathing'), it's a hint that the machine hasn't actually gone to sleep. Do not put a non-sleeping MacBook in a backpack, or it will get insanely hot to touch...

arh68 8y ago

I think it's worse. I'm not going to say it's pretty bad, but it's not quite up to par with Macintosh. - You get three clipboards in OS X. Windows gives you 1 - all of the UNIX utilities work (find, grep, xargs, they're all there), all the syscalls work. Because it really is UNIX - readline shortcuts are available everywhere out of the box. Windows confines me to Cygwin and Emacs - Cygwin is okay ($PATH versus %PATH% annoys me), but it's not even close to Homebrew - Visual Studio is a disaster most of the time I use it. YMMV - a lot of stuff does not run on Windows (most memorably, Swift) whereas almost everything runs on Debian and most things run on OS X I have a Windows laptop and I've resorted to running Debian on VMware and ssh'ing in with Putty/Xming. I'm surrounded by programmers who openly mock OS X ("you can't develop on a mac!") and tend to stick to Microsoft Approved Software Component Framework -type stuff. To be fair, I haven't tried WSL. I tried to install Docker, but I was told my top-o'-the-line PC needed another $140 to play that game. Crappy DLC is all it is to me.

aetherspawn 8y ago
I run Visual Studio on my Mac and full proper VS Ultimate on Windows and both are fine. For C++ it works well.. IMO a lot better than XCode IDE, Code::Blocks, Eclipse or any other out-of-box that I’ve tried. Interested to know why you say that VS is a disaster?
- arh68 8y ago
  I'm doing C#. It's better than Eclipse, sure, but the gold standard imo is IntelliJ. - I can hit C-F and count to 2 before Find in All Files opens - "9 build errors. Build successful" [0] - random pain points [1] - intellisense is often not what I want (though sometimes it is) so I alternate between Esc & Tab - you can't make this stuff up [2] Maybe I just need to reinstall. The window/panel layout is great, I will say. It's easy to use. It's familiar for a lot of people. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17703004/visual-studio-displaying-errors-even-if-projects-build https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17703004/visual-studio-d... [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24468370/linker-cannot-open-file-nafxcwd-lib https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24468370/linker-cannot-o... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=visual+studio+has+stopped+working https://www.google.com/search?q=visual+studio+has+stopped+wo...