4 ms·

Definitely agree, a Mac you get Mac OS, Ubuntu you get Ubuntu, Windows you get some Frankenstein of the OS, Mcafee, Dell, and various other companies applicatio

Definitely agree, a Mac you get Mac OS, Ubuntu you get Ubuntu, Windows you get some Frankenstein of the OS, Mcafee, Dell, and various other companies applications all stitched together.

3np 6y ago
Those parts are easily removed by doing a vanilla install the first thing you do. Windows (esp 10) still had some built-in things you don't get away from though. And also all the dialogues from self-updating software and plugins.
- grishka 6y ago
  It is possible to disable or uninstall all the user-hostile components like Windows Update, telemetry, and the app store, but it takes some effort and manual registry editing. The bigger problem, though, is all the legacy that's holding it back in the name of backwards compatibility. The WinAPI is older than myself. You can still run Windows 95 programs on your new Windows 10 PC. While useful to some, I'll never understand why exactly is it done this way. Apple keeps dropping old APIs to make their OSes better and simpler internally. I've never used anything that came before OS X, but I did read a lot that it was terrible and unstable, just like Windows at the time. Except modern macOS is stable and robust, while Windows still feels extremely fragile and unreliable after all these years. Yes, I understand that Microsoft is hellbent that modern Windows versions need to be able to run 25-year-old binaries unmodified. But they could've achieved the exact same thing by putting genuine Windows 95 into a VM and seamlessly integrating it with the desktop.
  - ziml77 6y ago
    Seems they should even be able to piggyback off what they've already put in place for WSL.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > You can still run Windows 95 programs on your new Windows 10 PC. While useful to some, I'll never understand why exactly is it done this way. Because they make a lot of money on enterprise customers. The only way to convince them to upgrade is to guarantee the new OS version won't break their legacy software. But even on consumer market, in the 90s and 2000s it was important old videogames work on new versions of Windows, or otherwise people would not upgrade. This comes from before the days of web applications and everything as a Service. Software vendors had to work hard to get people to pay them again.
    - grishka 6y ago
      So... why upgrade in the first place then, to solve what? Something I learned as a software developer is that if a piece of code is working properly, the best thing you can do is to leave it alone.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Exactly! And that's what both the corporate executives and your parents are thinking! So Microsoft has always had to work hard to convince people to upgrade. New features were the natural way of doing that. But not maintaining backward compatibility, in a world where almost all software was an one-time purchase, would be a deal breaker. Why upgrade if it's going to cost $20M to make our ERP suite compatible with the new Windows? Why upgrade if all the software I spent $1000 on over the past few years will no longer work? Hence backwards compatibility with existing software was a top priority (to the point that Windows has a lot of fixes to badly coded third-party software built in).
  - moogly 6y ago
    > Apple keeps dropping old APIs to make their OSes better and simpler internally. Hand on heart, do you really feel OS X/macOS is improving much?
    - grishka 6y ago
      Honestly, beyond around 10.9, it's been pretty pointless from the end user perspective. Technically, they rewrote the window server to use Metal instead of OpenGL in 10.13 and that did bring performance improvements (and surfaced many bugs in the nvidia driver that they fixed in 10.14 which I'm currently on), but there were no noticeable improvements to anything since. 10.15 aka catalina just brings more restrictions on what you can run. 11.0 aka big sur is a pointless UI redesign. Apparently, when they run out of technical things to improve and stupid code signing policies to enforce, they redesign the UI because it's a law that if you're making a popular OS it absolutely has to have a major update once a year, no matter what.
      - jchb 6y ago
        Well, macOS 10.15 has a user-space network stack. 11.0 can run on ARM as well on x86. So there are a bunch of things going on under the hood
    - kalleboo 6y ago
      CoW filesystem, stronger sandboxing, user-mode drivers (that can be emulated on ARM!), fully 64-bit, ARM support - yeah I do
  - Impossible 6y ago
    Legacy support and continued backwards compatibility is one of the biggest strengths of Windows. I can still run weird games I made 15-20 years ago without issue. As a regular users of both MacOS and Windows, I don't agree that MacOS feels more stable, recently it's felt less stable than Windows, but obviously that's anecdotal and depends on usage.
    - buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
      I don't see the problem with GP's suggestion. Couldn't you still run your 15-20 year old games if Windows 10 shipped with a Windows XP VM that integrated seamlessly with the Desktop?
      - Impossible 6y ago
        It's possible that performance would be an issue with some use cases, startup times, etc. Eventually this will probably be a reality, in the same way you can't run DOS binaries without an emulator or VM

Definitely agree, a Mac you get Mac OS, Ubuntu you get Ubuntu, Windows you get some Frankenstein of the OS, Mcafee, Dell, and various other companies applications all stitched together.

3np 6y ago

Those parts are easily removed by doing a vanilla install the first thing you do. Windows (esp 10) still had some built-in things you don't get away from though. And also all the dialogues from self-updating software and plugins.

grishka 6y ago
It is possible to disable or uninstall all the user-hostile components like Windows Update, telemetry, and the app store, but it takes some effort and manual registry editing. The bigger problem, though, is all the legacy that's holding it back in the name of backwards compatibility. The WinAPI is older than myself. You can still run Windows 95 programs on your new Windows 10 PC. While useful to some, I'll never understand why exactly is it done this way. Apple keeps dropping old APIs to make their OSes better and simpler internally. I've never used anything that came before OS X, but I did read a lot that it was terrible and unstable, just like Windows at the time. Except modern macOS is stable and robust, while Windows still feels extremely fragile and unreliable after all these years. Yes, I understand that Microsoft is hellbent that modern Windows versions need to be able to run 25-year-old binaries unmodified. But they could've achieved the exact same thing by putting genuine Windows 95 into a VM and seamlessly integrating it with the desktop.
- ziml77 6y ago
  Seems they should even be able to piggyback off what they've already put in place for WSL.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > You can still run Windows 95 programs on your new Windows 10 PC. While useful to some, I'll never understand why exactly is it done this way. Because they make a lot of money on enterprise customers. The only way to convince them to upgrade is to guarantee the new OS version won't break their legacy software. But even on consumer market, in the 90s and 2000s it was important old videogames work on new versions of Windows, or otherwise people would not upgrade. This comes from before the days of web applications and everything as a Service. Software vendors had to work hard to get people to pay them again.
  - grishka 6y ago
    So... why upgrade in the first place then, to solve what? Something I learned as a software developer is that if a piece of code is working properly, the best thing you can do is to leave it alone.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Exactly! And that's what both the corporate executives and your parents are thinking! So Microsoft has always had to work hard to convince people to upgrade. New features were the natural way of doing that. But not maintaining backward compatibility, in a world where almost all software was an one-time purchase, would be a deal breaker. Why upgrade if it's going to cost $20M to make our ERP suite compatible with the new Windows? Why upgrade if all the software I spent $1000 on over the past few years will no longer work? Hence backwards compatibility with existing software was a top priority (to the point that Windows has a lot of fixes to badly coded third-party software built in).
- moogly 6y ago
  > Apple keeps dropping old APIs to make their OSes better and simpler internally. Hand on heart, do you really feel OS X/macOS is improving much?
  - grishka 6y ago
    Honestly, beyond around 10.9, it's been pretty pointless from the end user perspective. Technically, they rewrote the window server to use Metal instead of OpenGL in 10.13 and that did bring performance improvements (and surfaced many bugs in the nvidia driver that they fixed in 10.14 which I'm currently on), but there were no noticeable improvements to anything since. 10.15 aka catalina just brings more restrictions on what you can run. 11.0 aka big sur is a pointless UI redesign. Apparently, when they run out of technical things to improve and stupid code signing policies to enforce, they redesign the UI because it's a law that if you're making a popular OS it absolutely has to have a major update once a year, no matter what.
    - jchb 6y ago
      Well, macOS 10.15 has a user-space network stack. 11.0 can run on ARM as well on x86. So there are a bunch of things going on under the hood
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    CoW filesystem, stronger sandboxing, user-mode drivers (that can be emulated on ARM!), fully 64-bit, ARM support - yeah I do
- Impossible 6y ago
  Legacy support and continued backwards compatibility is one of the biggest strengths of Windows. I can still run weird games I made 15-20 years ago without issue. As a regular users of both MacOS and Windows, I don't agree that MacOS feels more stable, recently it's felt less stable than Windows, but obviously that's anecdotal and depends on usage.
  - buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
    I don't see the problem with GP's suggestion. Couldn't you still run your 15-20 year old games if Windows 10 shipped with a Windows XP VM that integrated seamlessly with the Desktop?
    - Impossible 6y ago
      It's possible that performance would be an issue with some use cases, startup times, etc. Eventually this will probably be a reality, in the same way you can't run DOS binaries without an emulator or VM