8 ms·

I feel the same way. I used to use my Windows machine for everything and didn't even own a Mac but working on a Mac has been a real joy comparatively, especiall

I feel the same way. I used to use my Windows machine for everything and didn't even own a Mac but working on a Mac has been a real joy comparatively, especially for dev work. Now, my Windows machine is relegated to just being a gaming rig and I'm 100% happy with that. When I heard that WSL was a thing, I went back to try and get that setup and, between trying to turn off Cortana, navigating the god-awful new Control Panel/Settings, and the terrible overall performance, I don't know how someone could subject themselves to that in a professional capacity. Windows to me is infuriating and I'm pretty technically proficient. I feel bad for the droves of users that end up on it and don't have a choice, especially those that aren't technically skilled. It's just bad now.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
> I don't know how someone could subject themselves to that in a professional capacity. Active Directory. Well, AD and a bunch of applications that are critical to the business only operating and supported on Windows. But the other OSs don't have anything as good for management of the environment as AD is.
- setquk 8y ago
  AD only works if all your clients are windows. In 2018, not all of them are. We're out of a monoculture now. Doing AD SSO on other platforms is a proper pain in the butt. For example when Microsoft deprecated some of the old protocols a few years back they broke RHEL entirely for 2 years. Not sure there is another solution though. OAuth and various cloud logins etc isn't, yet.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    > AD only works if all your clients are windows. Uh, yeah, that's kinda my point. Outside of SV, pretty much every client is, and for this reason.
    - dijit 8y ago
      This is increasingly not the case though.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        Not every country people can enjoy a quality level to afford Apple computers, even with IT salaries.
        dijit 8y ago
        Fair. But I was commenting more on the environments that historically were served well by AD (offices) are growing in use of Apple computers.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        [Citation Needed] I can believe that this is a true statement inside the reality distortion bubble around SV, but here in the real world I'll need to see some evidence.
        freeone3000 8y ago
        MICROSOFT went heterogeneous client for their AD. I'm sure others can.
        dijit 8y ago
        The problem is that you're assuming I'm in SV, I'm in a small Swedish city and I'm seeing our _very_ windows heavy company starting to adopt Apple computers. And when I think of the companies I worked for in London they were also increasing the Apple quotient of desktop/laptop machines. Yes, this is anecdatum but I really can't tell you how strongly integrated Windows is at my company and we're still seeing adoption of Apple computers. Regardless of that, Sysadmins and Developers tend to get to choose their OS at most sensible companies. (Every company I've worked for, barring the current, has allowed Linux; most even encouraged it)
  - tw04 8y ago
    >AD only works if all your clients are windows. In 2018, not all of them are. We're out of a monoculture now. Doing AD SSO on other platforms is a proper pain in the butt. That's simply untrue. Every large org I work with has unified auth with ad and a secondary package like centrify. It's trivial to get working. And that's ignoring all the linux appliances and embeded Linux flavors (think lights out management) that support AD out of the box.
- dpkonofa 8y ago
  While I think that's a good point, there are alternatives to AD at this point in time. Anyone using that as a crutch is just giving excuses for not wanting to update their infrastructure.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    And those alternatives would be...?
    - ghostly_s 8y ago
      MS is very slowly moving away from AD themselves to a "MDM" cloud-provisioning model more or less copied wholesale from what Apple did with iOS. They claim that binding machines and users to AD is optional these days, but the alternative workflow leaves a whooooole lotta gaps. Maybe in 5 years it will be a real alternative.
    - monocasa 8y ago
      Plug: I work out JumpCloud, a directory as a service company.
snarfy 8y ago
I use windows on my dev machine for one reason - visual studio.
- modeless 8y ago
  I recently tried setting up an alternative dev environment on Linux and it takes some work but I think Visual Studio can be matched on Linux now for C++ development. The combination of VSCode, cquery, and clangd can provide code completion and navigation that I think is finally on par with IntelliSense, and it scales to large projects. VSCode's GDB integration is tolerable for debugging. Linux has some definite advantages too. For one thing the filesystem is just blazing fast, which really helps with git. Various other things are faster too, like I'm writing an OpenGL app and creating a GL context is much faster on Linux. Also I've been trying out https://zapcc.com https://zapcc.com which made my builds five times faster, no joke. I'd almost move to Linux for that alone.
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    Just want to second this. Cquery can be finicky to get working, especially if your project involves precompiled headers (I've found that building cquery from source myself and ensuring that it's linked against the same version of libclang as the clang I'm using for compilation helps). But once it's working, cquery is an absolute game changer for C++ development. It feels like a completely different activity than it did before.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    VS is so much more than just code completion and navigation, even for C++.
    - modeless 8y ago
      Code completion, navigation, and debugging are the only VS features I miss on other platforms. What C++ features are you thinking of?
      - 8y ago
aasasd 8y ago
Oh boy, if they somehow made the control panel even worse than it was in Win7, I'll have to take a look at it myself. I've counted the different kinds of windows in Win7 control panel: there are ten of them. Ten distinct methods of organizing stuff in a window, all in the settings section of the OS, and that's not including third-party additions. There are navigational widgets that don't occur anywhere else in the OS (sidebars with links, iirc). Also, all the hours lost in wandering through the control panel due to its awful localization… These days, I'm pretty sure control panels can be used as a litmus test as to whether the GUI authors have a grip on UI design.
- freeone3000 8y ago
  Windows 10 added a separate settings menu which doesn't support CPL applets so they kept the old one too. So now all of your settings are in two different places, but phrased slightly differently and in two menu trees and with fewer or more options for each setting. Oh, and now all the windows are WPF in a SPA, so they look different too.
  - h1d 8y ago
    It feels the settings are in dozen different places on Windows to begin with when it could go down 5 levels or deeper to get to the option you're looking for. The "good old" control panel doesn't even look categorized well.
- m_mueller 8y ago
  ha! you’ll love windows 10 let me tell you...
pjmlp 8y ago
Apple wanting me to know all special keys by heart and not having ergonomic keyboards is one of the reasons that puts me off. Plus why do they have to have a microscopic return key on laptops?
- memco 8y ago
  One of my most favorite things on MacOS is that cod+? Opens the help search menu which you can use to type the name of a command you want to run but don’t know where to find or what combo it uses. It’s especially useful for menu items that don’t have a key map assigned.
- irrational 8y ago
  I use a MicroSoft ergonomic keyboard with my Mac Pro. It works just fine. I also have all of my keys mapped to the same as what I was used to when I used to use Windows (ironically the last time I used Windows was about 15 years ago, old habits die hard).
- aasasd 8y ago
  I'm using MS Natural 4000 with a Macbook. Alt and Win keys are remapped through the standard settings, the context menu key is remapped with Karabiner. Some extra keys can be mapped, only alas the numbered ones aren't seen even by USB Overdrive. (Of course, the Natural/Sculpt series barely scrapes the ‘ergonomics,’ what with the slanted key layout inherited from typewriters, the flat board made for extendable fingers instead of jointed ones, the too-low wrist pad.) As for the special keys, I'm not sure what that's about, since I'm using pretty much the same number of hotkeys as I did in Linux and a bit more than in Windows. I'm also using Alfred for many commands, which are made in English instead of obscure semi-random keys.
- dpkonofa 8y ago
  What? They don't want you to know them by heart that's why they're all listed in the menu next to every command that has them and they update live as you hold down the keys so you can see what modifiers are available. Also, you can use whatever keyboard you want. I don't see how this is an issue at all... And what microscopic return key are you referring to? The return key on my MacBook is nearly the same size (maybe a half-centimeter shorter) than my full-size desktop keyboard.
h1d 8y ago
I started doing web dev before 2000. Only Windows worked as a dev machine then and OS X came around but obviously lack of third party tools made it a no go. Now I can't think of going back to Windows because third party tools that I take as granted aren't even avaialable with same level of quality on Windows. 3 or so years ago, I tried to set up a dev environment on Windows just see how good it can be then but gave up in 1 hour knowing it'll just slow me down bad. I have no idea why most of people I know around still use Windows (and funnily 1 guy uses Linux)

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

> I don't know how someone could subject themselves to that in a professional capacity. Active Directory. Well, AD and a bunch of applications that are critical to the business only operating and supported on Windows. But the other OSs don't have anything as good for management of the environment as AD is.

setquk 8y ago
AD only works if all your clients are windows. In 2018, not all of them are. We're out of a monoculture now. Doing AD SSO on other platforms is a proper pain in the butt. For example when Microsoft deprecated some of the old protocols a few years back they broke RHEL entirely for 2 years. Not sure there is another solution though. OAuth and various cloud logins etc isn't, yet.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  > AD only works if all your clients are windows. Uh, yeah, that's kinda my point. Outside of SV, pretty much every client is, and for this reason.
  - dijit 8y ago
    This is increasingly not the case though.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Not every country people can enjoy a quality level to afford Apple computers, even with IT salaries.
      - dijit 8y ago
        Fair. But I was commenting more on the environments that historically were served well by AD (offices) are growing in use of Apple computers.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        [Citation Needed] I can believe that this is a true statement inside the reality distortion bubble around SV, but here in the real world I'll need to see some evidence.
        freeone3000 8y ago
        MICROSOFT went heterogeneous client for their AD. I'm sure others can.
        dijit 8y ago
        The problem is that you're assuming I'm in SV, I'm in a small Swedish city and I'm seeing our _very_ windows heavy company starting to adopt Apple computers. And when I think of the companies I worked for in London they were also increasing the Apple quotient of desktop/laptop machines. Yes, this is anecdatum but I really can't tell you how strongly integrated Windows is at my company and we're still seeing adoption of Apple computers. Regardless of that, Sysadmins and Developers tend to get to choose their OS at most sensible companies. (Every company I've worked for, barring the current, has allowed Linux; most even encouraged it)
- tw04 8y ago
  >AD only works if all your clients are windows. In 2018, not all of them are. We're out of a monoculture now. Doing AD SSO on other platforms is a proper pain in the butt. That's simply untrue. Every large org I work with has unified auth with ad and a secondary package like centrify. It's trivial to get working. And that's ignoring all the linux appliances and embeded Linux flavors (think lights out management) that support AD out of the box.
dpkonofa 8y ago
While I think that's a good point, there are alternatives to AD at this point in time. Anyone using that as a crutch is just giving excuses for not wanting to update their infrastructure.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  And those alternatives would be...?
  - ghostly_s 8y ago
    MS is very slowly moving away from AD themselves to a "MDM" cloud-provisioning model more or less copied wholesale from what Apple did with iOS. They claim that binding machines and users to AD is optional these days, but the alternative workflow leaves a whooooole lotta gaps. Maybe in 5 years it will be a real alternative.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    Plug: I work out JumpCloud, a directory as a service company.

snarfy 8y ago

I use windows on my dev machine for one reason - visual studio.

modeless 8y ago
I recently tried setting up an alternative dev environment on Linux and it takes some work but I think Visual Studio can be matched on Linux now for C++ development. The combination of VSCode, cquery, and clangd can provide code completion and navigation that I think is finally on par with IntelliSense, and it scales to large projects. VSCode's GDB integration is tolerable for debugging. Linux has some definite advantages too. For one thing the filesystem is just blazing fast, which really helps with git. Various other things are faster too, like I'm writing an OpenGL app and creating a GL context is much faster on Linux. Also I've been trying out https://zapcc.com https://zapcc.com which made my builds five times faster, no joke. I'd almost move to Linux for that alone.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  Just want to second this. Cquery can be finicky to get working, especially if your project involves precompiled headers (I've found that building cquery from source myself and ensuring that it's linked against the same version of libclang as the clang I'm using for compilation helps). But once it's working, cquery is an absolute game changer for C++ development. It feels like a completely different activity than it did before.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  VS is so much more than just code completion and navigation, even for C++.
  - modeless 8y ago
    Code completion, navigation, and debugging are the only VS features I miss on other platforms. What C++ features are you thinking of?
    - 8y ago

aasasd 8y ago

Oh boy, if they somehow made the control panel even worse than it was in Win7, I'll have to take a look at it myself. I've counted the different kinds of windows in Win7 control panel: there are ten of them. Ten distinct methods of organizing stuff in a window, all in the settings section of the OS, and that's not including third-party additions. There are navigational widgets that don't occur anywhere else in the OS (sidebars with links, iirc). Also, all the hours lost in wandering through the control panel due to its awful localization… These days, I'm pretty sure control panels can be used as a litmus test as to whether the GUI authors have a grip on UI design.

freeone3000 8y ago
Windows 10 added a separate settings menu which doesn't support CPL applets so they kept the old one too. So now all of your settings are in two different places, but phrased slightly differently and in two menu trees and with fewer or more options for each setting. Oh, and now all the windows are WPF in a SPA, so they look different too.
- h1d 8y ago
  It feels the settings are in dozen different places on Windows to begin with when it could go down 5 levels or deeper to get to the option you're looking for. The "good old" control panel doesn't even look categorized well.
m_mueller 8y ago
ha! you’ll love windows 10 let me tell you...

pjmlp 8y ago

Apple wanting me to know all special keys by heart and not having ergonomic keyboards is one of the reasons that puts me off. Plus why do they have to have a microscopic return key on laptops?

memco 8y ago
One of my most favorite things on MacOS is that cod+? Opens the help search menu which you can use to type the name of a command you want to run but don’t know where to find or what combo it uses. It’s especially useful for menu items that don’t have a key map assigned.
irrational 8y ago
I use a MicroSoft ergonomic keyboard with my Mac Pro. It works just fine. I also have all of my keys mapped to the same as what I was used to when I used to use Windows (ironically the last time I used Windows was about 15 years ago, old habits die hard).
aasasd 8y ago
I'm using MS Natural 4000 with a Macbook. Alt and Win keys are remapped through the standard settings, the context menu key is remapped with Karabiner. Some extra keys can be mapped, only alas the numbered ones aren't seen even by USB Overdrive. (Of course, the Natural/Sculpt series barely scrapes the ‘ergonomics,’ what with the slanted key layout inherited from typewriters, the flat board made for extendable fingers instead of jointed ones, the too-low wrist pad.) As for the special keys, I'm not sure what that's about, since I'm using pretty much the same number of hotkeys as I did in Linux and a bit more than in Windows. I'm also using Alfred for many commands, which are made in English instead of obscure semi-random keys.
dpkonofa 8y ago
What? They don't want you to know them by heart that's why they're all listed in the menu next to every command that has them and they update live as you hold down the keys so you can see what modifiers are available. Also, you can use whatever keyboard you want. I don't see how this is an issue at all... And what microscopic return key are you referring to? The return key on my MacBook is nearly the same size (maybe a half-centimeter shorter) than my full-size desktop keyboard.

h1d 8y ago

I started doing web dev before 2000. Only Windows worked as a dev machine then and OS X came around but obviously lack of third party tools made it a no go. Now I can't think of going back to Windows because third party tools that I take as granted aren't even avaialable with same level of quality on Windows. 3 or so years ago, I tried to set up a dev environment on Windows just see how good it can be then but gave up in 1 hour knowing it'll just slow me down bad. I have no idea why most of people I know around still use Windows (and funnily 1 guy uses Linux)