8 ms·

I switched from Mac to Windows a few years ago and I have to say, I’m always excited to see their latest announcements and OS updates. When was the last time m

by jclay 7y ago

I switched from Mac to Windows a few years ago and I have to say, I’m always excited to see their latest announcements and OS updates. When was the last time macOS had an update that was exciting for developers? They’re phasing out OpenGL, and there is no CUDA support for Mojave. Docker support was pretty frustrating the last time I tried it as well. No big features in the last few macOS releases. All the latest features increase lock-in and don’t exist outside of the mac ecosystem (looking at you Handoff and iMessage) Microsoft now has: - VS code - A new terminal announced today (a very welcome change) - Ability to natively run any linux distro, with GUI! (WSL w/ X11 server) - Hyper-V powered docker containers (and they’re fast) - Great CUDA support - One click to install and run Ubuntu desktop in Hyper-V - Chocolatey has grown on me and is an effective brew replacement. Overall, i’m very satisfied with the development experience on Windows, and the pace at which it is improving makes me very confident that it will continue to attract more devs. I also like that they make their products available on other platforms. I know that if I switch back to MacOS my OneNote, word docs, and C# code can be brought over without issue. The same equivalents for macOS don’t provide any cross platform equivalents. I’m still holding out for tabbed windows in the file explorer, though :/

dangoor 7y ago
This year's macOS update is expected to include a framework which makes it easy to port iOS apps. That will likely be exciting for developers, because there are _a lot_ more iOS developers than Mac developers. The Mac is already a unix, so a lot of the things you list aren't necessarily things that Mac developers are clamoring for. WSL was a big deal because it brought the unix-like ecosystem to Windows, but Macs already had the ability to natively run a lot of unix utilities.
- pavlov 7y ago
  "iOS developers who want to sell their product on the Mac App Store" is a rather small subset of developers. I suppose it's nice that they're getting a bit of extra dividend on their existing iOS efforts, but that's pretty much it. Marzipan does nothing for the Mac. Notably left out from Apple's current direction are existing Mac developers and web developers, whom Apple has been taking for granted for years.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >iOS developers who want to sell their product on the Mac App Store" is a rather small subset of developers You'd be surprised. There's absolutely no reason to be a "small subset" if it makes men easy money for quick recompile + some small GUI adaptation.
    - pavlov 7y ago
      People with iOS apps on the App Store are a small subset of developers. That's the reality now. Marzipan isn't going to grow that number.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Well, seeing that all of the games that will be part of Apple’s games subscriptions will also be on the Mac and some iOS developers have already said they wanted to have a port ready “day one”....
      - coldtea 7y ago
        >People with iOS apps on the App Store are a small subset of developers. That's the reality now. Marzipan isn't going to grow that number. Of course it is. In fact, that's the main purpose behind its development.
        pavlov 7y ago
        You think someone who wouldn’t previously have developed an UIKit app is now going to do it because of Marzipan? What’s the incentive?
        coldtea 7y ago
        No, I think people who have developed a UIKit app are going to port them to OS X because of Marzipan. The incentive is easy port easy reach of a new, even if smaller, potential market. To make the idea even clearer, if "porting iOS to OSX with Marzipan" was just a true/false toggle on XCode, almost everybody would toggle it and sell their iOS apps on the Mac App Store -- since it would take no time to do it, and it will reach a few dozens of millions on untapped potential customers (desktop mac users). Well, it's the same situation, but now with Marzipan instead of trivially easy, like with the imaginary XCode toggle, porting an iOS app will be just "much easier" as opposed to "considerable effort" that it was before. Also, I understood your comment "People with iOS apps on the App Store are a small subset of developers. That's the reality now." as meaning, "people with iOS on the MAC App Store are a small subset of developers" -- and responded to that. If you meant: "People with iOS apps on the _iOS_ App Store are a small subset of developers" then that's crazy talk. They are hundreds of thousands of people making iOS apps -- and 1.5 or more million such apps.
- jclay 7y ago
  I still appreciate the WSL approach quite a bit more. I use them as “containers” (though to be clear they don’t support running Linux containers) If I need to test that my C++ project will compile and run on Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch, it is pretty trivial to do that using WSL. I also avoid the issue of the differences between macOS unix tools like grep, where there are certain flags that differ from those on linux as I recall. This is of course resolved with using a port, but they’re still community maintained ports and under no guarantee to work the same on macOS and Linux.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    > though to be clear they don’t support running Linux containers I think this needs a 'yet', since supposedly it'll be changing with WSL 2 later this year.
  - ridiculous_fish 7y ago
    That seems quite risky. There are important differences between WSL and the real Linux kernel, and running on either is not adequate testing for the other.
zeusk 7y ago
> I also like that they make their products available on other platforms. I know that if I switch back to MacOS my OneNote, word docs, and C# code can be brought over without issue. The same equivalents for macOS don’t provide any cross platform equivalents. This is what essentially kept me off from adopting Apple's walled garden or Google's web only systems (except for Google Photos and YouTube). I've had devices from either of these firms but I always restrain myself from investing into their platforms because one day I'll find something better but they'll hold my data as a ransom. Google will let me "export" the data, but in that form it is almost useless to me. I also game a lot, so no other platform comes even close and now Windows has shipping support for: - Mixed Reality / VR - Raytracing (not just a tech demo) which no other platform at the moment does.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  You’d be surprised how easily you can export pretty much all your Apple-app data using AppleScript on a Mac. There’s almost nothing inaccessible via apps’ APIs
  - panpanna 7y ago
    But can he run iMessage on Windows? Sure, he might be able to export his data but what use is that??
    - evo_9 7y ago
      You can't, this is why I run Windows 10 in a VM. I keep all my personal stuff like email, messaging, browsing on Mac where privacy is higher and easier to maintain. I do all my dev on Windows for the most part, along with my corporate Outlook account (which I use in a tab in Chrome, not even installed on Win10), that's basically how I do things. This also allows me to make snapshots of Win10 whenever I'm considering installing something that might f-up my machine (aka test out some alpha release of dotnet core etc).
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
The million dollar question: Will Microsoft's developer tools draw in more business? (In my mind, the play is, if Microsoft is more friendly to developers, and developers sometimes hold the keys to what vendors to work with, new business could come in). For example: I use VSCode, but I'm not sure I'd pay for Azure. In prior threads on HN, I recall reading some displeasure without service outages and availability issues. Unless Microsoft had some other motive for caring about developer tools after a long period of not doing so. Regardless, their contributions to the open source community are welcome.
- Keyframe 7y ago
  What do you mean by not caring about dev tools for a long period? Their tools were always industry-leading. It's what brought platform dominance to them in the first place. One might even hear a faint chant from the past: developers, developers, developers!
  - snowAbstraction 7y ago
    Maybe in some categories but when I think of Visual Studio for C++, MS didn't really try until a few years ago.
    - k0dede 7y ago
      Vs has been the best c++ ide for a while. the debug is way better
      - stochastic_monk 7y ago
        snowAbstraction may be thinking about VS’s infamously poor relationship with the C++ standard.
        snowAbstraction 7y ago
        * I think before 2015 some things were working better or faster in other IDEs. * I am happy with with the big improvements in VS starting around 2015. But the fact, that the C++ support was so bad in earlier versions (even if it was better in some ways than other IDEs) that it makes me upset that people had to put up with inferior older versions for over decade. * It was not my original point but yes MS does not follow the standard very well, at least before. I even found a compiler bug myself back in VS2015 (the last version I used before moving linux server dev.)
lenkite 7y ago
And Windows will soon come with a tabbed terminal! Finally! Looking to get the Surface Book 3 at the end of the year and dropping my 2017 Macbook whose keyboard I replaced 3 times.
moogly 7y ago
> I’m still holding out for tabbed windows in the file explorer, though :/ Give Directory Opus a go https://www.gpsoft.com.au/ https://www.gpsoft.com.au/ Friends don't let friends use Explorer.
coldtea 7y ago
>When was the last time macOS had an update that was exciting for developers? Swing 5 just a few months ago?
RenierZA 7y ago
> I’m still holding out for tabbed windows in the file explorer, though :/ I've you're willing to look at 3rd party software, I've been a happy user of Directory Opus for many years.
dawnerd 7y ago
I find it amusing you claim docker on mac was frustrating when it's damn near useless on Windows. File change notifications still don't work right (as of about a month ago). Edit: I'd love to use Windows as my daily BTW, it's just not there yet for me. I don't want to have to jump through hoops to make my current workflow, work.
- pknopf 7y ago
  With the new WSL2, you can run Docker natively!
  - tracer4201 7y ago
    How is performance? I used Windows subsystem for Linux a year or so ago. Using a package manager to pull down some dependencies, which should take on the order of tens of seconds took several minutes to complete. It was painfully slow.
    - pknopf 7y ago
      WSL2 now uses VM technology, so the performance is now a lot better.
      - scruple 7y ago
        Wow, that's a welcomed change for me. I was trying every 3-4 months to get WSL working as a suitable development environment. There was always _something_. Excited to try this out again when I have a free day on a weekend.
      - panpanna 7y ago
        WSL performance problems were mostly due to slow I/O. How does virtualization fix that?
        pknopf 7y ago
        Translating syscalls to the NT kernel is slower than running Linux with a virtual filesystem.
draw_down 7y ago
Do you mean to say that Mac OS is boring? I thought we liked boring tech around here!
alexeldeib 7y ago
Any chance you've looked at scoop over Chocolatey? I depended heavily on Choco but scoop doesn't require Admin shell/UAC, and has a good selection of my favorite stuff (extras bucket is a must).
- EpicBlackCrayon 7y ago
  Scoop is much better than Chocolatey IMO, definitely recommend.
oliyoung 7y ago
Same. A year or two ago when I needed a MBP replacement after a decade of OS X, I jumped to a Surface Book 2 and haven't looked back. Satya's Microsoft is almost doing everything right.
sjellis 7y ago
Microsoft have been very good at figuring out which features they need to add for developers, but the actual experience of using Windows is not great. Part of the problem is that they are adding stuff without taking anything away. My Windows development machine manages to be both overstuffed with multiple shells, run-times etc., and have quirks or issues with almost everything that I care about. I just want a Bash shell, Python, SSH and a package manager that all work.
- acct1771 7y ago
  Of course they are, their PR department reads HN and others now.
uxcolumbo 7y ago
>> I’m still holding out for tabbed windows in the file explorer Try these: Total Commander: https://www.ghisler.com/ https://www.ghisler.com/ fman: https://fman.io/ https://fman.io/
- mherrmann 7y ago
  fman author here, thanks for the mention! Unfortunately, fman does not yet support tabs. It's pretty awesome otherwise though ;)
- NikkiA 7y ago
  Or xyplorer, or xplorer² or any number of other explorer replacements. The 'tabbed windows on explorer' thing is well done, and I dunno, MS has always seemed less willing to copy a 3rd party app and kill its market than Apple are. That's one of the reasons why the 'better terminal' surprised me, conhost is very long in the tooth, but again plenty of 3rd party options.

by jclay 7y ago

dangoor 7y ago

This year's macOS update is expected to include a framework which makes it easy to port iOS apps. That will likely be exciting for developers, because there are _a lot_ more iOS developers than Mac developers. The Mac is already a unix, so a lot of the things you list aren't necessarily things that Mac developers are clamoring for. WSL was a big deal because it brought the unix-like ecosystem to Windows, but Macs already had the ability to natively run a lot of unix utilities.

pavlov 7y ago
"iOS developers who want to sell their product on the Mac App Store" is a rather small subset of developers. I suppose it's nice that they're getting a bit of extra dividend on their existing iOS efforts, but that's pretty much it. Marzipan does nothing for the Mac. Notably left out from Apple's current direction are existing Mac developers and web developers, whom Apple has been taking for granted for years.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >iOS developers who want to sell their product on the Mac App Store" is a rather small subset of developers You'd be surprised. There's absolutely no reason to be a "small subset" if it makes men easy money for quick recompile + some small GUI adaptation.
  - pavlov 7y ago
    People with iOS apps on the App Store are a small subset of developers. That's the reality now. Marzipan isn't going to grow that number.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Well, seeing that all of the games that will be part of Apple’s games subscriptions will also be on the Mac and some iOS developers have already said they wanted to have a port ready “day one”....
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >People with iOS apps on the App Store are a small subset of developers. That's the reality now. Marzipan isn't going to grow that number. Of course it is. In fact, that's the main purpose behind its development.
      - pavlov 7y ago
        You think someone who wouldn’t previously have developed an UIKit app is now going to do it because of Marzipan? What’s the incentive?
        coldtea 7y ago
        No, I think people who have developed a UIKit app are going to port them to OS X because of Marzipan. The incentive is easy port easy reach of a new, even if smaller, potential market. To make the idea even clearer, if "porting iOS to OSX with Marzipan" was just a true/false toggle on XCode, almost everybody would toggle it and sell their iOS apps on the Mac App Store -- since it would take no time to do it, and it will reach a few dozens of millions on untapped potential customers (desktop mac users). Well, it's the same situation, but now with Marzipan instead of trivially easy, like with the imaginary XCode toggle, porting an iOS app will be just "much easier" as opposed to "considerable effort" that it was before. Also, I understood your comment "People with iOS apps on the App Store are a small subset of developers. That's the reality now." as meaning, "people with iOS on the MAC App Store are a small subset of developers" -- and responded to that. If you meant: "People with iOS apps on the _iOS_ App Store are a small subset of developers" then that's crazy talk. They are hundreds of thousands of people making iOS apps -- and 1.5 or more million such apps.
jclay 7y ago
I still appreciate the WSL approach quite a bit more. I use them as “containers” (though to be clear they don’t support running Linux containers) If I need to test that my C++ project will compile and run on Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch, it is pretty trivial to do that using WSL. I also avoid the issue of the differences between macOS unix tools like grep, where there are certain flags that differ from those on linux as I recall. This is of course resolved with using a port, but they’re still community maintained ports and under no guarantee to work the same on macOS and Linux.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  > though to be clear they don’t support running Linux containers I think this needs a 'yet', since supposedly it'll be changing with WSL 2 later this year.
- ridiculous_fish 7y ago
  That seems quite risky. There are important differences between WSL and the real Linux kernel, and running on either is not adequate testing for the other.

zeusk 7y ago

> I also like that they make their products available on other platforms. I know that if I switch back to MacOS my OneNote, word docs, and C# code can be brought over without issue. The same equivalents for macOS don’t provide any cross platform equivalents. This is what essentially kept me off from adopting Apple's walled garden or Google's web only systems (except for Google Photos and YouTube). I've had devices from either of these firms but I always restrain myself from investing into their platforms because one day I'll find something better but they'll hold my data as a ransom. Google will let me "export" the data, but in that form it is almost useless to me. I also game a lot, so no other platform comes even close and now Windows has shipping support for: - Mixed Reality / VR - Raytracing (not just a tech demo) which no other platform at the moment does.

bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
You’d be surprised how easily you can export pretty much all your Apple-app data using AppleScript on a Mac. There’s almost nothing inaccessible via apps’ APIs
- panpanna 7y ago
  But can he run iMessage on Windows? Sure, he might be able to export his data but what use is that??
  - evo_9 7y ago
    You can't, this is why I run Windows 10 in a VM. I keep all my personal stuff like email, messaging, browsing on Mac where privacy is higher and easier to maintain. I do all my dev on Windows for the most part, along with my corporate Outlook account (which I use in a tab in Chrome, not even installed on Win10), that's basically how I do things. This also allows me to make snapshots of Win10 whenever I'm considering installing something that might f-up my machine (aka test out some alpha release of dotnet core etc).

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

The million dollar question: Will Microsoft's developer tools draw in more business? (In my mind, the play is, if Microsoft is more friendly to developers, and developers sometimes hold the keys to what vendors to work with, new business could come in). For example: I use VSCode, but I'm not sure I'd pay for Azure. In prior threads on HN, I recall reading some displeasure without service outages and availability issues. Unless Microsoft had some other motive for caring about developer tools after a long period of not doing so. Regardless, their contributions to the open source community are welcome.

Keyframe 7y ago
What do you mean by not caring about dev tools for a long period? Their tools were always industry-leading. It's what brought platform dominance to them in the first place. One might even hear a faint chant from the past: developers, developers, developers!
- snowAbstraction 7y ago
  Maybe in some categories but when I think of Visual Studio for C++, MS didn't really try until a few years ago.
  - k0dede 7y ago
    Vs has been the best c++ ide for a while. the debug is way better
    - stochastic_monk 7y ago
      snowAbstraction may be thinking about VS’s infamously poor relationship with the C++ standard.
      - snowAbstraction 7y ago
        * I think before 2015 some things were working better or faster in other IDEs. * I am happy with with the big improvements in VS starting around 2015. But the fact, that the C++ support was so bad in earlier versions (even if it was better in some ways than other IDEs) that it makes me upset that people had to put up with inferior older versions for over decade. * It was not my original point but yes MS does not follow the standard very well, at least before. I even found a compiler bug myself back in VS2015 (the last version I used before moving linux server dev.)

lenkite 7y ago

And Windows will soon come with a tabbed terminal! Finally! Looking to get the Surface Book 3 at the end of the year and dropping my 2017 Macbook whose keyboard I replaced 3 times.

moogly 7y ago

> I’m still holding out for tabbed windows in the file explorer, though :/ Give Directory Opus a go https://www.gpsoft.com.au/ https://www.gpsoft.com.au/ Friends don't let friends use Explorer.

coldtea 7y ago

>When was the last time macOS had an update that was exciting for developers? Swing 5 just a few months ago?

RenierZA 7y ago

> I’m still holding out for tabbed windows in the file explorer, though :/ I've you're willing to look at 3rd party software, I've been a happy user of Directory Opus for many years.

dawnerd 7y ago

I find it amusing you claim docker on mac was frustrating when it's damn near useless on Windows. File change notifications still don't work right (as of about a month ago). Edit: I'd love to use Windows as my daily BTW, it's just not there yet for me. I don't want to have to jump through hoops to make my current workflow, work.

pknopf 7y ago
With the new WSL2, you can run Docker natively!
- tracer4201 7y ago
  How is performance? I used Windows subsystem for Linux a year or so ago. Using a package manager to pull down some dependencies, which should take on the order of tens of seconds took several minutes to complete. It was painfully slow.
  - pknopf 7y ago
    WSL2 now uses VM technology, so the performance is now a lot better.
    - scruple 7y ago
      Wow, that's a welcomed change for me. I was trying every 3-4 months to get WSL working as a suitable development environment. There was always _something_. Excited to try this out again when I have a free day on a weekend.
    - panpanna 7y ago
      WSL performance problems were mostly due to slow I/O. How does virtualization fix that?
      - pknopf 7y ago
        Translating syscalls to the NT kernel is slower than running Linux with a virtual filesystem.

draw_down 7y ago

Do you mean to say that Mac OS is boring? I thought we liked boring tech around here!

alexeldeib 7y ago

Any chance you've looked at scoop over Chocolatey? I depended heavily on Choco but scoop doesn't require Admin shell/UAC, and has a good selection of my favorite stuff (extras bucket is a must).

EpicBlackCrayon 7y ago
Scoop is much better than Chocolatey IMO, definitely recommend.

oliyoung 7y ago

Same. A year or two ago when I needed a MBP replacement after a decade of OS X, I jumped to a Surface Book 2 and haven't looked back. Satya's Microsoft is almost doing everything right.

sjellis 7y ago

Microsoft have been very good at figuring out which features they need to add for developers, but the actual experience of using Windows is not great. Part of the problem is that they are adding stuff without taking anything away. My Windows development machine manages to be both overstuffed with multiple shells, run-times etc., and have quirks or issues with almost everything that I care about. I just want a Bash shell, Python, SSH and a package manager that all work.

acct1771 7y ago
Of course they are, their PR department reads HN and others now.

uxcolumbo 7y ago

>> I’m still holding out for tabbed windows in the file explorer Try these: Total Commander: https://www.ghisler.com/ https://www.ghisler.com/ fman: https://fman.io/ https://fman.io/

mherrmann 7y ago
fman author here, thanks for the mention! Unfortunately, fman does not yet support tabs. It's pretty awesome otherwise though ;)
NikkiA 7y ago
Or xyplorer, or xplorer² or any number of other explorer replacements. The 'tabbed windows on explorer' thing is well done, and I dunno, MS has always seemed less willing to copy a 3rd party app and kill its market than Apple are. That's one of the reasons why the 'better terminal' surprised me, conhost is very long in the tooth, but again plenty of 3rd party options.