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My 2012 Retina Macbook was on its last legs. I was deeply uninspired by both the regressive functionality and excessive price of the of the latest generation of
by nkoren 8y ago
My 2012 Retina Macbook was on its last legs. I was deeply uninspired by both the regressive functionality and excessive price of the of the latest generation of Macs. So after almost 15 years in the Mac ecosystem, I bid it adieu and got a Dell XPS 9560, with dual-boot Windows 10 and Ubuntu.
I'm regretting that now.
Ubuntu was a breeze for setting up development environments, but a nightmare in basically every other sense. Keyboard drivers misbehaving, randomly disabling system shortcuts in certain key applications (like Chrome). Mouse wheel working horribly and requiring many hours of hacking to fix. Fans spinning out of control in some kind of fight with the BIOS that I still haven't been able to win, after more than 20 hours of working on it. And you want to connect a second monitor with a different resolution than your primary? Fuck you, no. Just no. You absolutely, positively, cannot do that. I spent days following red herrings on forums before giving up.
On the Windows side of thing, it's much better. Most things Just Work -- except that getting the mouse wheel to work correctly is a 15-step registry-hacking process followed by a reboot[1], and this needs to be repeated each time Bluetooth forgets it knows this mouse -- which is every other day or so. Oh, and also, it's so difficult to set up as a development environment that my CTO has told me not to bother.
So, yeah, after a month, I'm having regrets. I still think that Apple is taking the piss, but after all the time and frustration I've sunk into Linux -- and, to a lesser extent, Windows -- the Apple Tax is beginning to look like relatively good value for money.
1: You think I'm exaggerating? Honestly I'm not: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-other_settings/reverse-the-scroll-of-mouse/334669c3-8a45-4600-830a-8df628d7415e https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...