4 ms·
I switched to Windows after uh, I don't know how many years, but a lot. The last version of Windows I used on my personal machine was 3.11 for Workgroups, I thi
by partdavid 7y ago
I switched to Windows after uh, I don't know how many years, but a lot. The last version of Windows I used on my personal machine was 3.11 for Workgroups, I think, and since then I used various Linux distributions and OpenBSD, then ultimately MacOS because everyone else did and I lost my taste for swimming up that particular stream. I still use a company-issued Mac laptop at work.
Like DHH, I was "seduced" by the hardware; the Surface Pro just made sense to me as a personal machine and I was also "seduced" by the apparent ease of WSL+Ubuntu. I started down the path DHH did and was frustrated by some of the same issues.
At some point I realized that (just like with every other technology I've used) when you fight your tools, you're just giving yourself heartache. At this point I decided to start trying to do things the "Windows" way, or at least, the geeky Windows way. It's just not Unix.
I discovered Chocolatey and started to familiarize myself with the environment and--here's the major one--started making an actual effort to appreciate powershell. Once I started grokking that, I realized I needed to switch, so I switched from bash to powershell on all my machines (including the MacOS machine I use for work).
I'm going to geek out about different things than another user, but I haven't had a hard time starting with choco's ruby packages for ruby development. I'm an emacs and shell kind of person, and they both work great for me. I have had trouble building some native gems but these tend to be due to unnecessary problems in the gems, like finding libraries via shell commands.
As for fonts and the other things people are complaining about--well, it looks fine to me. I'll grant that this isn't something I'm deep into. Neither is VS Code, which I've played with a tiny bit and still don't really get.
There have been pleasant surprises like how nicely accessible the detailed system performance data is.
One thing I'll say is that a lot of why someone thinks things "just work" in MacOS (or there other platform of choice) is due to familiarity and luck. I've run into my share of things that don't, on every platform.