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Out of curiosity, has Windows improved in any way from a low maintenance perspective? The reason I switched to Mac in 2006 was that I ended up using a friend's

Out of curiosity, has Windows improved in any way from a low maintenance perspective? The reason I switched to Mac in 2006 was that I ended up using a friend's Mac for a month while abroad so I could get some work done. When I got back to a place where I could get a new Viao at a reasonable price it occurred to me that I hadn't been fighting with the Mac a single time. Wifi always worked, everything I plugged into it just worked as well, the software I ended up installing just worked too, Apache and SVN ran fine, there was a good Terminal app out of the box, etc. This was in stark contrast with the decades long experience I had had with PCs until then. On any given week I had been invariably spending between a half-hour and a day fighting with Windows in some way or another. Which could mean trying to figure out why Wifi or some random printer didn't work, looking for drivers, reinstalling or reconfiguring some piece of software, and so forth. Has this improved materially since the past decade?

m_mueller 7y ago
It certainly has improved, but Mac still has the edge in that regard. This mainly comes down to one things: Superior config management (plist files vs Windows registry). This makes it much easier to maintain - you hardly ever have to reinstall a Mac, instead just clean up all the Library folders and you're fine. A Mac HD also boots on any supported Mac hardware, impossible with windows, which makes things like Migration assistant and full Time machine restore possible. Bundled apps to me are a wash. Preview >> Edge for PDFs and Terminal.app >> Cmd.exe, but explorer.exe >> Finder and Task Manager >> Activity Monitor. Another big plus for windows is everything to do with graphics drivers and GPU support if you're into this. I also find WSL overall now better than Mac's Darwin since you get up to date Linux packages which beats homebrew in my books. Performance of WSL is also pretty good, much better than running a VM. This is really what turned Windows around for me, making it a very viable alternative.

m_mueller 7y ago

It certainly has improved, but Mac still has the edge in that regard. This mainly comes down to one things: Superior config management (plist files vs Windows registry). This makes it much easier to maintain - you hardly ever have to reinstall a Mac, instead just clean up all the Library folders and you're fine. A Mac HD also boots on any supported Mac hardware, impossible with windows, which makes things like Migration assistant and full Time machine restore possible. Bundled apps to me are a wash. Preview >> Edge for PDFs and Terminal.app >> Cmd.exe, but explorer.exe >> Finder and Task Manager >> Activity Monitor. Another big plus for windows is everything to do with graphics drivers and GPU support if you're into this. I also find WSL overall now better than Mac's Darwin since you get up to date Linux packages which beats homebrew in my books. Performance of WSL is also pretty good, much better than running a VM. This is really what turned Windows around for me, making it a very viable alternative.