18 ms·

Switching to Windows

119 points by bengtan 6y ago

ojnabieoot 6y ago
> As far as I can tell, 7-zip is more widely recommended amongst Windows users, but what do they know? PeaZip has a very clean UI, and nice green icons, so it’s very obviously the better choice. I appreciated the pithy joke, but I was curious about an actual comparison since I always use 7-Zip. This short article seems like a useful rundown of the (very minor) differences if anyone else is interested: https://en.softonic.com/articles/head-to-head-peazip-vs-7-zip https://en.softonic.com/articles/head-to-head-peazip-vs-7-zi...
mrtksn 6y ago
What’s the typical uptime for a Windows machine in daily use? On MacOS that’s usually in a few months scale because that’s how often an update that needs a restart is released. I usually have 5-10 workspaces, and despite that macOS will restore most of it after a restart, I still feel unease restarting. My main issue with Window was that it required quite a lot involvement into the upkeep of the machine, like frequent restarts due to OS and driver updates. Is that a thing of the past now?
- hfjtktmtmt 6y ago
  My machine needs to be online 24/7, so I reboot it just once a week, on Sunday. I'm not forced to do that, I just like the idea of a "fresh start" since I don't have ECC memory and I do detect a bit flip (through CRC checks) every 2 months or so. You can keep pushing update required reboots forward as much as you want, one week at a time, so I just push it past the Sunday reboot.
- dagw 6y ago
  Updates that require a reboot are 1 a month at most, and you can put off doing the reboot/upgrade for as long as you want (unless it's a work computer, in which case the company can set a policy which forces a reboot within a certain number of hours of the update)
- cecilpl2 6y ago
  I generally restart only when necessary for updates and multiple months of uptime is pretty standard for me.
- zigzag312 6y ago
  After about one month of uptime I need to restart my Windows machine as it usually starts to behave weirdly. It might be because I put it into hibernation every night. Waking up from hibernation used to be problematic, because some devices/drivers didn't wake up and restore properly, but it's much better now. Windows, by default, would forcibly restart itself way before one month of uptime. I have had unsaved work lost because of it. Now I have automatic restarting permanently disabled. Even worse offender is Windows automatic wake up. Once it woke up my old laptop form hibernation while riding in a car and caused bad sectors on the hard drive (HDD was in perfect condition before that ride).
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    >Once it woke up my old laptop form hibernation while riding in a car and caused bad sectors on the hard drive Had the exact same thing in college, my Lenovo laptop woke up inside my bag on my way to class and the HDD got damaged.
    - copperx 6y ago
      That’s why I always used SSDs back in college. Reliability and speed are much more important than drive capacity in a laptop.
      - renata 6y ago
        Some of us aren't young enough for that :)
- krylon 6y ago
  Normally, one wants to restart Windows after installing updates, i.e. about once a month. > I still feel unease restarting Oh yes, I know that unease all too well. Simply booting the system is usually the least problem, but starting all my applications, placing the windows across the different workspaces, ssh'ing into various machines, etc. is always such a hassle. However, this problem is pretty much constant across different operating systems, at least to me.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    MacOS restores everything, most apps have state saving and they also get restored exactly the way I left them, not just re-open. Only stuff like the terminal will need to re-init the scripts and sessions manually. I like that, it's good enough but I would prefer 0 restarts, of course.
- nickjj 6y ago
  I haven't been keeping track anymore with Windows 10 but it feels like at least once a month the system forcefully reboots. It's mostly hands free in terms of the update process but it is very disruptive. Back in the day with Windows 7 and not being forced to update I've had 6 month+ uptimes and things ran very well.
  - zigzag312 6y ago
    Try Reboot blocker https://udse.de/reboot-blocker/ https://udse.de/reboot-blocker/
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  I don't bother with updates anymore, as they usually cause more trouble than they are worth these days. Consequently I pretty much never restart my computer unless I really really think I want an update. Current uptime on my home machine is >6 months.
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  >What’s the typical uptime for a Windows machine in daily use? Only rebooted once in 2021 and that was me turning it off for electrical work. Definitely been in the 2 month+ numbers at times with extremely heavy use like dual GPUs running 100% for 12+ hour periods at a time. Honestly been very impressed with Windows recently as a place for where I get my high end work done. I still use a Macbook for browsing/writing sometimes.
- fphhotchips 6y ago
  Hahahaha what? I have to remember to reboot my Mac every couple days or it becomes unbearably slow. Not only that, but once a month there's a security update released that, you guessed it, requires an update. If there's some magic to not requiring an update for those please let me know, because I'm sick of waiting 30 minutes every time I install an update.
MrRiddle 6y ago
As much as I would like to love macOS, Windows has absolutely perfect mouse acceleration. I can’t for the life of me tune the mouse experience on a mac to match windows. I always come back to my trusty PC after couple hours on a mac. So much snappier experience.
- zspitzer 6y ago
  agreed, especially with a couple of 4k monitors, it's a long mouse journey on macOS
- vlindhol 6y ago
  Funnily enough these "small" things are probably the biggest barrier for switching. I'm a long-time mac user and I asked for a Surface laptop at my new job to give me some variation. Luckily I was able to switch to a Macbook Pro after a year or so, not because of the mouse but because of Windows' awful font rendering. I know, I know, some people prefer the Windows way of rendering, but I just get sad :) Great system otherwise, especially with WSL!
  - goalieca 6y ago
    Windows font rendering is just awful. It still feels so like 20 years ago with XP running cleartype on a low dpi monitor
    - trinix912 6y ago
      It's mostly a personal taste thing, but I find the macOS (and even Linux) font rendering superior to Windows, even on low-dpi panels below Full HD. On Windows, the letters are thin, have sharp edges etc. I've tried using the ClearType tuning utility but the results honestly aren't much better. The macOS system font also seems nicer.
  - krakatau1 6y ago
    I actually hate macos font rendering...Windows has way better fonts on 27" 2560x1440 or 24" 1920X1200 monitors With work issued macbook pro I have 2 4k 24" monitors to get that retina clarity instead and they keep fans on all the time.
skrebbel 6y ago
I warmly recommend adding Everything to that list. It's an instant-results file search tool that indexes your entire hard drive. It lets you find any file instantly. https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/ EDIT: for some extra context, this tool changed the way I name and store files. I hardly ever navigate to a file anymore. I search Everything for, well, everything. After a while, I found myself caring less where I store a file, and more what I name it. I now add any word to a filename that I think I might search it by. Effectively it's a bunch of tags right there in the filename. This removes the need for a separate tagging program like the author suggests.
- Traubenfuchs 6y ago
  "Everything" is one of the most amazing pieces of software for window. I literally use it every day to find "lost" files.
- xurukefi 6y ago
  Probably the first tool I install on every Windows machine. It's beyond me how Microsoft has not incorporated something similar into Windows to replace its ridiculous native search.
  - criddell 6y ago
    Isn't that what Cortana / indexing service is supposed to be?
    - iggldiggl 6y ago
      "Supposed to" unfortunately being the key word here.
  - EdwinLarkin 6y ago
    Because the native search searches also inside the files.Everything only shows you what files are indexed in the NTFS. This is not a bug it's just hilarious that Microsoft thinks its search that is not communicating clearly what it does is better.
helipad 6y ago
I went back to Winwdows after a long hiatus for my 'personal' laptop. The OS definitely doesn't have as much polish but I've been quietly impressed. I'm not a developer, but I am developer-adjacent, and I really struggled to get set up with WSL. Even using some guides like this: https://char.gd/blog/2017/how-to-set-up-the-perfect-modern-dev-environment-on-windows https://char.gd/blog/2017/how-to-set-up-the-perfect-modern-d... I'll probably have to start it again from afresh, I just found setting up WSL unintuitive and the relationship between WSL and Windows confusing. I believe the situation was previously much worse so forward progress I suppose. Things I like about Windows: - Windows take up more space on the screen. When maximized, there's no title bar and sizing icons taking up space like on MacOS. For example, Chrome tabs are right up to the top of the screen without going full screen. - There's a program for everything. I've been able to play games I used to from 20 years ago and where they don't work out of the box (some do), someone has made a utility to make it all work. I'd forgotten the advantage of Windows having so many more users.
hellojason 6y ago
Avid Windows user here. I had to explain myself so many times to coworkers that I wrote this list [0] to point out differences that users may not be aware of. This list is 4 years old a this point, so a few of the items are no longer true, but overall it still holds water. I've been forced to use Mac for work for several years now, and I still feel jailed in my productivity compared to Windows. The biggest, most crucial difference that Mac users don't seem to know they're missing is how every single Windows dialog box acts like a complete version of Windows Explorer. The Mac's save and open dialog boxes are absolutely infuriating. Also, why can't I just create a markdown file in a folder, double click it so it opens in vscode, then start typing? Window management on Mac is nonexistent, how come window snapping isn't a native feature? Mission Control is like playing hide-and-seek, not managing windows. [0] https://hellojason.net/blog/nitpicky-differences-between-windows-and-os-x/ https://hellojason.net/blog/nitpicky-differences-between-win...
- fuball63 6y ago
  The lack of window snapping is mind boggling to me. My home computer has lxde on it, which includes the feature.
  - latexr 6y ago
    Window snapping has been a native feature on macOS for years: https://osxdaily.com/2016/12/06/use-window-snapping-mac/ https://osxdaily.com/2016/12/06/use-window-snapping-mac/
    - falcolas 6y ago
      Different snapping, at least to what I’m used to. The snapping Windows offers is half and full screen windows with a keypress (or dragging against a wall). Mac does offer something similar, but only for full screen/split-full-screen mode.
      - aggrrrh 6y ago
        You can open a menu with option-click and hold on expand icon and snap window to the side of the screen
KayL 6y ago
PeaZip has many good features, eg smart new folder. But the UI is pretty slow.
- hulitu 6y ago
  And also the compression is slow. I tried to compress some VMs and peazip was much slower than 7zip for 7z compression.
fbelzile 6y ago
> Make the Start Menu Full-Screen I'm surprised by this one. I couldn't stand Windows 8 because of the full screen start menu. Maybe it was because it was too animated. But I think it was more because I didn't like getting kicked out from my desktop and losing context of what I was doing. I much prefer pressing the Windows key and typing the first few letters of the app I want. Seeing a full screen of apps is way too distracting to me, especially with live tiles.
- AlanYx 6y ago
  That one surprised me too. Lukas is usually pretty insightful on UI/UX issues, but I couldn't disagree more with him here. Interface behaviors that temporarily take over the whole screen, or large parts of it, leave me disoriented and distracted. The "File" menu in recent versions of Microsoft Office for Windows has the same problem. It takes over the whole window, and after I'm finished doing whatever I was doing from that menu, it sometimes takes 10-20 seconds for me to reorient myself... where was I? What was I working on? The default behavior of "Aero Peek" on Windows has the same issue too. At least I'm glad they reversed the full-screen-by-default Start menu after Windows 8.
- DigitallyFidget 6y ago
  The problem I had with the Windows 8 full screen start menu was that it was a disorganized cluttered mess of nearly indecipherable navigation that was so aggressively altered of an experience and change from prior versions. I hated having to open applications from it. I still hate the Vista+ version of the start menu as well, because it turned a manageable fan-out of applications I could just edit into sub-categories into a compact vomit of every application in a list, and Windows 10 only improved it by making it more presentable with spacing and abundant size on screen. The one good thing is that I can just tap the Win key and type what I'm looking for and hit enter, which is almost always faster than trying to navigate it via mouse. I just don't care for the pinned tiles, I don't know if it's still a thing, but major updates were loading tons of useless icons and stupid junk I didn't want there and it was always a fight to reclaim it, so I just opted to get rid of it. I want it to just do its job and be a location to open things, not tell me the weather and stock market info.
sam0x17 6y ago
> PeaZip has a very clean UI, and nice green icons, so it’s very obviously the better choice. If you're "opening" an archive directly you're doing it wrong. The beauty of 7-Zip is the shell integration where you can just right click an archive and do "Extract to [folder name]" or right click a folder and do "Create archive...". I have not had a need for the UI that appears when you double click on an archive in any archive program in 20 years.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  I use the archive tool in KDE ("ark") fairly often, although only for reading. I regularly need to look at one or two metadata files within an archive, but not the gigabytes of data. On the command line, I'll "unzip -p archive.zip metadata.xml" (with tab-completion for the archive entries), but if I've retrieved the file with a web browser I'll let it open in ark and open the entry files from there.
- smlckz 6y ago
  Same with Vim for Windows. Right click and edit using gvim, regardless of the file type.
- timw4mail 6y ago
  PeaZip also has similar functionality.
- jbarrs 6y ago
  My only gripe with this is that I'm never sure what the structure inside an archive is like until I inspect it. It's not a massive inconvenience but I don't like extracting to a new directory just to find it empty save for another directory with the same name.
cecilpl2 6y ago
WizTree is better and far faster than WinDirStat (think seconds instead of minutes to scan your whole system).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
marcodiego 6y ago
Interesinting that some of the tools he installed to "improve" default windows are open-source and also available on linux. Anecdata: about a decade ago I asked a few colleagues if a mac user would feel more at home using windows or Ubuntu. Answer were almost unanimous: Ubuntu. It is a shame that market needs (hardware, services and software) still makes people need windows.
- jvzr 6y ago
  I've been a Mac user since 2004. I switched my main computer to Windows right when Windows 10 released, mostly for gaming. Late last year, I've switched to Linux (Manjaro then straight Arch) with a heavily customized, simplified Gnome desktop (to fit my exact needs). In my opinion, for what I need, Linux & Gnome is so much better than Windows 10. And better than Big Sur, I must regretfully add. UX has gone abysmally low with macOS 11, sadly.
  - krylon 6y ago
    I have had a similar experience, I got a Mac in 2013, switched back to Linux in 2017. There is one thing I miss - the emacs-keybindings in the system text input widget, that one was awesome. But otherwise, I feel much more at home on Linux with Mate.
- lycopodiopsida 6y ago
  I was a Linux/FreeBSD user for a decade, before I switched to mac(have it been 8 years already?) and my preference is still mac > FreeBSD > Linux > Windows, fwiw. Working on something which is not *nix seems odd to me and I've always found windows being extremely complicated under the hood.
- fomine3 6y ago
  GNOME developer loves macOS so the result isn't surprising.
- dartharva 6y ago
  As a long-time Windows user I clean-installed Ubuntu (Pop!_OS) on my laptop and forced myself to work with it for three days. Had to revert back to Windows yesterday in exasperation: things still looked way too glitchy, it took two entire minutes in general to boot up (Windows takes ~30s), apps like the Brave web browser took another minute to open, GNOME felt actually less customizable than Windows explorer (where you can at least natively move the panel to wherever you want), Bluetooth headphones connected but gave terrible audio quality, Colors on screen got too bright at one instance then too dim at the next, Battery barely lasted an hour, some frustrating apt bug just refused to let me install the software (even from .deb setup files) I wanted, CPU fans ran on full throttle all the time ... I even had to manually download and compile some obscure unmaintained software to create a Windows bootable USB. Windows is universally hated as a meme, but its industry dominance isn't really undeserved. With WSL2 there's much less reason to shift to Linux now.
trinix912 6y ago
> Since Windows’ window management works much better than what OS X’s does I find this interesting because to me, it just seems that macOS does this way better, especially on MacBooks with the gestures (some of which work on windows). I really miss Mission Control whenever I have to use Windows.
- reportgunner 6y ago
  I don't know what Mission Control is, but seeing from the screenshots it seems to be something like what you get on windows after pressing Win+Tab ? Honestly I never understood the appeal of gestures as I use my OS not only on laptops but on desktops too where there is no touchpad.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Apple's bluetooth touchpad is pretty nice.
  - trinix912 6y ago
    It's pretty similar but it's more clunky (literally just a full-screen Alt-Tab), often requires scrolling, clutters the space with useless "past activities" and so on. Mission Control does one thing and does it well. > Honestly I never understood the appeal of gestures as I use my OS not only on laptops but on desktops too where there is no touchpad. Apple's mice and trackpads (which are sold for desktops as well) support them.
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  Yeah but Mac OS needs more windows to function. Windows Explorer is definitely superior to Finder, it has a lot more features.
  - norman784 6y ago
    IHMO the Explorer from Windows XP (this is the last Windows I used before Windows 10) was better, did the job and was simple, now it seems bloated for me and too mouse dependent, I like to use the keyboard whenever possible, other big feature missing in windows and built in in mac is the file preview, you just hit space and you can see most common file formats without opening them, maybe Windows has this but I'm not aware of it. In general I think Mac has better UX out of the box, Windows surely has a lot of features but not very easy to use, other thing that I miss about Windows is that before with one right click and a left click I could change my network settings (LAN), now I need a few clicks to get to it (but I never remember which menu I need to click it). Some linux distros are now easier to configure than windows, mac is the king in this regard (but there are some advanced configurations that you need the terminal for, so this is a cons, but most of them are rarely used)
tomp 6y ago
Uh, a Windows-loving thread on a hacker forum! Let me try to make myself useful, and add an important addition that's missing from the original thread: stop Windows 10 from restarting automatically https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wake-timers-from-waking-windows-10-desktop/973029#973029 https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wak... In particular, step 2... my Windows Surface Go hasn't auto-restarted in months... and this is plain vanilla Windows 10 Home version 2004 (not a fancy Professional or Ultimate).
- gruez 6y ago
  You probably should restart every month or so, otherwise you're not getting the monthly security patches.
  - tomp 6y ago
    Obviously. The beautiful part of this approach is that it doesn’t disable the icon in the taskbar that alerts you of updates... but it won’t restart automatically.
- namero999 6y ago
  Thanks, random internet stranger. This literally bit me this morning.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  Sorry, but it's bonkers that you need to follow 6 complex steps (or use a 3rd party software to do it), in order to stop your OS from doing something it shouldn't be doing in the first place. A computer should never decide on its own to turn itself off. I'm not going to let Mac off the hook either. You have to deliberately choose to not have it "automatically update" itself, and it keeps begging you to turn that function on.
- newscracker 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. I've been going crazy with the Windows 10 machine starting up by itself at random times. I searched online, and I think I did disable the wake timers, but I certainly didn't do it on all the power management profiles. I'll have to check this one out again. If there's one thing I've seen with Windows, it's consistent in how annoying it can be in every release.
_a1_ 6y ago
> When I hit the start menu, it’s because I want to launch an application. I don’t need to see the rest of the desktop. So why is the Start menu by default only occupying a small portion of the screen, and wasting the remaining space? Hilarious. I mean, I fully agree with the author on that. But since the author is not tied to a Windows ecosystem, he doesn't know that a full-screen start menu actually happened on Windows 8, and it was nearly boycotted by Windows userbase because of the fact that it occupies full screen space. Users demanded to have a Windows95-style start menu, and MS had to redesign it. Why it's so important for Windows users to have a Windows95-style menu, is beyond me. There you have it :D
- hadrien01 6y ago
  He does, he links to the following footnote: "Windows 8 was the best version of Windows. And that’s just a fact."
  - _a1_ 6y ago
    You're right, I missed that.
- CivBase 6y ago
  I run many applications on my computer at once and I often find myself opening the start menu to launch an application while keeping an eye on another window in the background. The hierarchical organization and text-with-icons style of the classic start menu also feels less overwhelming to me than the flat organization and icons-with-text style of the Windows 8 menu. But I also think these are minor issues and the backlash against the menu in Windows 8 was over-the-top. At the end of the day, I think the real reason people were mad is that it just looked very different from previous menus, which made casual users uncomfortable. Which is kind of funny seeing as it's very similar to the app menus used by macOS, iOS, and Android.
- benplumley 6y ago
  My complaint with the Windows 8 start menu wasn't that it took up the whole screen, it was that it took up the whole screen to show _the same number of items_ or fewer than the 95-style start menu. And half of them were ads. A full-screen start menu with the same information density as the 95-style start menu, possibly with a pane for programs and a pane for explorer, is something I'd happily try out.
TonyTrapp 6y ago
TIL: Win-Shift-S. Very useful to know that Windows has a built-in tool for cropping screenshots before they even end up in the clipboard.
- jccalhoun 6y ago
  I teach college. I did an assignment where I had students do a little tutorial and submit a screenshot as proof. After so many submitted pics of their screen they took with their phone, I told them about the built in snipping tool in windows (and there's one in macos, too). It blew the minds of many of them.
  - TonyTrapp 6y ago
    I'm not a teacher but I totally feel you. Everytime I see someone take a screenshot using their phone, I cringe. Especially when it's a developer who should know better. And especially when they could have simply copied the source code as text, which would have enabled me to copy and run it instantly.
- _Microft 6y ago
  Win+Print automatically saves a screenshot to the "Pictures\Screenshots" folder by the way.
  - TonyTrapp 6y ago
    Funnily enough I was aware of that one. :) But Win+Shift+S is a perfect replacement for what I have been doing for a long while, pressing PrintScreen (without Win key), pasting into some graphics application and then copying a selection of the screenshot, just to paste into yet another application.
    - superdisk 6y ago
      Another nice tip is Alt+PrtScr which copies just an image of the focused window.
- 6y ago
0xTJ 6y ago
I've found over the last few years, as much as I hate to say this, that Windows has been a decent experience for me. It's not perfect, but the combination of the right programs (Directory Opus 12, X display server, SSH client) plus WSL makes it a usable experience. VS Code is also now my IDE of choice. I look forward to the day I can switch to Linux full-time (probably Arch), but for now I need good OneDrive integration.
- da_big_ghey 6y ago
  For when you do, abraunegg's OneDrive is useful: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive Office 365 in wine is still hit-or-miss, I will admit. I got it working but only with a great deal of pain, and apparently setup is broken for a lot of people right now. (I use arch btw)
- e12e 6y ago
  Don't forget windows now has a ssh server too! I run Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) - but certain proprietary vpn clients just don't work right, so on occasion I'll boot a VirtualBox vm, login to VPN there, then use the vm as a ssh jump box to the network on the far side. I'd prefer not having to deal with crappy, propiatary vpn gateways - but at least this way it works. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/openssh/openssh_install_firstuse https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrati...
whalesalad 6y ago
I keep meaning to try this out. Every time I boot a fresh Windows 10 install I am traumatized enough to walk away and not try again, though. The install process is pretty bad - the same ancient UI that came from Longhorn. Towards the end you go through about 20 differnt checkboxes to un-toggle all the various annoying settings you don't want like tracking and advertisements on the login screen. Creating an account is also a headache - MSFT is really pushing the online signin stuff now. Everything also feels sluggish to me, but perhaps that is due to the machine I am using (i7-3770k, 16gb ram, but kinda old in general) and there just feels like an abundance of noise and crap everywhere (Windows explorer is like a junk drawer that wont close) I ended up using it for one thing - I managed to pay Titanfall 2 through the entire campaign on an Xbox controller. That was a pretty fun experience. Recently I wiped the box to start giving Fedora a shot as a sidekick box. I cannot quit macOS though. It is just too good at staying out of your way and not being annoying (I am on Mojave) - and the muscle memory is strong. DHH's take resonates with me: https://m.signalvnoise.com/back-to-windows-after-twenty-years/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/back-to-windows-after-twenty-year...
- timw4mail 6y ago
  Windows and Mac both have this issue of terrible defaults.
hankchinaski 6y ago
i was tempted to switch back to windows but i am worried i won't find the same build quality/durability from non-apple machines. anyone can recommend good/durable windows machines?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rodelrod 6y ago
  I have almost 2 decades of Thinkpad X series stockpiled around the house and none ever broke. (Granted, I don't run Windows on them).
- drewzero1 6y ago
  I've had some good Thinkpads and HP business-class desktop computers. Apple build quality is amazing if you compare it to consumer-class hardware, but once you step up to business machines it's pretty standard imo. I find Apple's designs tend to be more elegant than a lot of them though.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Microsoft's own Surface line is meant to be of comparable quality (though reviews/individual experiences may differ in some cases) and certainly of comparable aesthetics at least to Apple machines. Obviously Surface hardware comes at a bit of a premium to most other OEMs. I'd second the recommendation to look at business hardware over consumer hardware (again, at a cost premium), but beware that isn't universally true. Some of the business lines are "churn-centric". For instance, a lot of companies have big HP or Dell contracts (as two examples) that they lease so many machines per year with quick turnaround "no or few questions asked" replacement strategies. Those companies treat the devices as "disposable", they ship old ones back every year or three and get newer models back. Those "disposable" business lines don't have a huge incentive to build quality/durability if the laptops are going to be replaced in 3-year or less cycles anyway. You might also explore some of the "prosumer" segments. Some of the OEMs have a "Media Creation" line of one sort or another that often ups build quality. Most OEMs have a "Gaming" segment. Even if you aren't a "gamer" or play many games, sometimes you find good premium options among those lines that go toward build quality/durability. The trouble there is determining model to model whether with that model you are paying a premium for 1) useless bells and whistles like RGB lighting all the things, 2) build quality/durability, or 3) bleeding edge hardware that is the opposite of quality/durable. Manufacturers vary in which of those 3 is their priority for "Gaming" and even within some of those Manufacturers they might have sub-sections that vary the position on that triangular space defined by those three extremes. A heuristic I've used in the past is pulling out the business line pages and "Gaming" pages of an OEM and trying to spot the most similar models that might imply one is just a rebadging of the other, that intersection may indicate the quality/durable sub-line, and then decide between the two based on price difference (surprisingly sometimes it is the "Gaming" line that is still cheaper), and whether or not the other bells and whistles of the "Gaming" line seem amusing enough.
michaelcampbell 6y ago
I don't mind Windows; there are some apps that are VASTLY superior to anything I could find on Mac or Linux. Nor Mac, for a different set of apps. I don't think I would ever spend the Apple tax on one though; as long as work provides me with one that's fine. I tend to do my "real work" in a unixy context, but WSL, VMs, and `brew install coreutils` gets me close enough to run my dev tools of choice.
simmons 6y ago
Whenever I get Windows-curious, the one thing holding me back is all the telemetry and privacy compromises I hear about on forums like HN. One thing I'd love to see in a "switch to Windows" list is a simple list of steps to harden the privacy characteristics of a fresh Windows 10 installation. I occasionally see automated solutions for this, but it's hard for me to judge the reliability and trustworthiness of such tools. A simple, clear list would be great.
- meowster 6y ago
  The problem is such lists become obsolete after the next update when Microsoft introduces a new privacy-invading feature or they revert some of the settings that you previously changed. The only winning move is not to play.
- Yoofie 6y ago
  What you probably want is Windows 10 LTSC. It's barebones Windows 10 but without all extra crap that comes installed with all the other versions of Windows. I have been running it for a while now and its great.
  - namero999 6y ago
    Do you need a specific key for it, or would my 10 Pro license work?
    - jftuga 6y ago
      LTSC is definitely the best Windows 10 version for office / dev work. You need an Enterprise license as a Pro license will not work. Also, LTSC can be hard to come by. See /r/Windows10LTSC for Q&A.
mcovalt 6y ago
I use Windows at work for its killer feature I rarely see mentioned: text antialiasing and rendering. I believe (?) Freetype came very close to Cleartype in Linux land, but MS holds patents on the extra bit that makes Cleartype just a bit better. I assume text antialiasing will be unnecessary in 10 years due to the rising ubiquity of high resolution monitors, but that day is not here yet. I’ve noticed that macOS has just completely bailed on text antialiasing. Hooking up my MacBook Air M1 to my 109 DPI monitor is a truly awful experience. On the other hand, text on the Retina screen is holy grail. However, holy grail is unattainable for me at the moment. LG Ultrafine monitors are too expensive. Due to DirectWrite, it’s very easy to get an end-to-end best-in-class GPU accelerated text rendering experience on Windows.
- copperx 6y ago
  Mac and Linux antialiasing are light years ahead of Windows, unless you are using 20 year old 100 DPI or lower monitors. Now that 4K is standard on laptops, and 5k on desktops, Cleartype is an artifact of antiquity.
  - mcovalt 6y ago
    Is 5K standard on desktops? Where can I get a ~200 DPI 5K monitor for less than $1,299.95?
  - iggldiggl 6y ago
    Firefox user data shows 4K at roughly 2 % and "other" resolutions (only part of which will be high DPI) at slightly less than 7 %.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Now that 4K is standard on laptops, and 5k on desktops, Neither of those are “standard”, they are both high end. On laptops FHD is still dominant. Desktop displays are more diverse, with beyond-FHD being more common than on laptops but split between 1080p-but-ultrawide, 1440p, 4K, and the rarer 5K+.
zigzag312 6y ago
> There’s no OmniDiskSweeper on Windows, but there is WinDirStat, which does the same thing WizTree is much faster than WinDirStat as it directly reads NTFS's Master File Table. It's not open source, but it is free for personal use.
ROARosen 6y ago
> Windows has built-in screen sharing, but only if you have a Pro license Actually windows has built-in screen-sharing on all versions for free. It is not well-known. It is called Quick Assist and is preinstalled on every Windows 10, though it is not as robust as other screen-sharing programs. Windows Remote Desktop is only avail with pro but it is not really screen-sharing as it takes over the session completely (it logs you out from the local session). Sure, you can always use AnyDesk but we're talking here about built-in.
EdwinLarkin 6y ago
I cant use Windows as my main for its terrible tendency to allow programs to just pollute the filesystem anywhere and everywhere. I need a way to keep my system tidy and any installation can possibly mean 1) infection with whatever *ware (even legitimate software acts like one 2) polluting the whole system with files you will not be able to easily find and delete (or registry or whatever else)
- fbelzile 6y ago
  No, macOS just makes it seem like apps can't add files anywhere. They only recently made it a requirement to ask to write to certain locations like your Documents, Downloads folder, etc.
- dartharva 6y ago
  Just use scoop: https://scoop.sh/ https://scoop.sh/ Another way I prevent such pollution is use portable versions of software and store them in a singular Software directory. And to cleanly remove such "polluting" software, use Revo Uninstaller: https://www.revouninstaller.com/products/revo-uninstaller-pro/ https://www.revouninstaller.com/products/revo-uninstaller-pr...
TrianguloY 6y ago
I don't like the full screen start menu, but I always expand it to allow three columns (and with the 'show more per group' setting). And I have all app shortcuts there, as small icons and grouped into categories, because that's what makes more sense to me, always available at the click of a button, and not in the desktop. In fact, and all those who see me working always asks, I have my desktop configured as follow: * No shortcuts, only the recycle bin and the files I'm currently using. * The desktop is the default folder for firefox downloads. * The icons are HUGE, and I mean that, press control and use the mouse wheel until the icons's height is a third of the desktop height more or less. My desktop is my workplace, all the temporary items I need are there, until I move them to their proper folder into Documents, Images, or where necessary. I rarely have more than 5 files, and those who are there have my total attention. And, since the icons are huge, it's extremely easy to see the previsualization for images, pdf, videos, etc.
marcodiego 6y ago
There is a windows phenomenon that I don't know if happens with everybody, but it happens with most of my acquaintances: Every time someone buys a windows computer I get impressed about how fast the computer is. Six months later, same computer, I get impressed about how slow it gets. This experience has been like this for decades. Never seen anything like that on linux or mac.
- spery 6y ago
  If your machine is low on RAM and you keep installing services to it, it will slow down. OS has nothing to do with it.
  - craftyguy 6y ago
    All of that 'telemetry' collection isn't free. OS choice definitely matters, some OS vendors will insist on default sevices and 'require' the ability to arbitarily enable more for you as they see fit over time. You don't own your PC running windows, microsoft does.
  - marcodiego 6y ago
    I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying that windows users love installing services?
    - zeroc8 6y ago
      Yes, especially Virus services.
    - spery 6y ago
      I'm not saying windows users love installing services. I meant, maybe your acquaintances aren't that tech savvy and don't understand the implications. My parents we're the same before I've taught them not to install stuff before consulting with either me or my brother.
bitslayer 6y ago
For work I use a Mac and I remote into Windows, and I have so much trouble making my brain swap the keys for copy/paste. Ctrl-C Command-V is so painful.
nickjj 6y ago
If anyone prefers video, a while back I put together a similar type of post / video going over and demoing a bunch of apps / tools that I use on Windows to have what I feel like is a decent development environment focused on web development using Docker, WSL 2 and heavy terminal usage. That's at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-linux-dev-environment-on-windows-with-wsl-2-docker-desktop-and-more https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-linux-dev-environment-on-wi... Been using the set up for years now with slight changes over the years (WSL 1 to WSL 2, etc.), it's solid.
tuananh 6y ago
windows is getting a lot better but there's no decent tiling window manager. on macos, yabai is quite ok. on linux, it's a the best. just take your pick
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Have you had a chance to play with Fancy Zones yet on Windows? (It's in the PowerToys.) It's not quite as full featured as some of the options on other platforms, but I'm finding it scratches the itch for me a lot more than I expected it would at first glance, especially when you allow it to take over the "Aero Snap" keys (Win+Arrow Key). They've been adding and polishing features at a decent pace, and it's worth checking out (again) if you haven't recently.
  - tuananh 6y ago
    yes, fancy zones is what i ended up using but i still miss tiling wm.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      Yeah, but I find it interesting how much of the itch it already scratches. I've been somewhat keeping an eye on the GitHub issues as you can tell Fancy Zones is very much still a "minimal viable project" to prove interest/demand and there's definitely enough Tiling WM loving developers on the project that they've got some sense of direction towards it, even if they are still more concerned of finding the "Windows way" toward it than going beeline for i3wm or xmonad features.
      - tuananh 6y ago
        if microsoft can pull that off, windows can really shine as a developer friendly OS
        WorldMaker 6y ago
        One of the things I loved about Windows 8.1 was that it had a Tiling Window Manager getting some real love out of the box. The Window Manager for the "modern" ("metro"/UWP) Windows apps was a tiling WM. It was limited to only vertical splits at the time, and you had to upgrade to the modern apps to get the most benefit from it (the entire Win32 desktop was just a single tile to that WM). At points in 8.1 I'd have a dozen or so tiles across 2 screens on my desktop. It was lovely, for that brief time it existed and there were enough apps to make use of it. When they inverted things back in 10 and put all the modern apps in traditional overlapping Windows, that tiling WM got crippled and relegated back to only support two tiles at a time and then only in Tablet Mode (though it got slightly smarter about semi-maximizing Win32 apps). Windows 1.x itself had only a tiling WM. (Not a great one, mind you.) There's a lot of tiling WM DNA in Windows development history. Like I said the impression I have from GitHub Issues at least is that there are an interesting number of developers of Windows (even if that's a small overall percentage of the huge Windows organization at Microsoft) interested in pursuing good tiling WM tools on Windows. I hope Fancy Zones does continue to be a good playground for exploring that.
jjice 6y ago
Is there a good AutoHotKey equivalent for Linux?
- rodelrod 6y ago
  You don't need it nearly as much. Most of the things I used to use AutoHotKey for on Windows are better dealt with by changing a config file somewhere. For the odd case where GUI automation is really needed, you have xdotool, which is not nearly as nice as AutoHotKey, but does the job. In short, I was a heavy user on Windows but don't miss it at all on Linux.
Shadonototro 6y ago
> Around 2015, I started to realize that I was no longer part of Apple’s target audience. 2015 was also in the era of the big CPU stagnation when Intel refused to make bigger steps forward in order to maximize profits it put Apple in weird spot because they depend on 3rd party for their hardware, they can't play the same cards as Intel, obviously, it's Apple now that they released their own silicon, it is pretty clear what happened in the past, and what was their exact goal, to not depend on intel anymore or any 3rd party, so developers can experience fast machines again, and how things are changing today.. in a very good way don't be this closed minded about "apple don't understand developers", because that's not true at all And that's pretty weird, because today Windows 10 is doing exactly what you though Apple was doing to you ;) without investing in their own silicon, without improving their OS, and without improving their filesystem worse, 1 icon at a time!
- drewzero1 6y ago
  The processor stagnation was the least of Apple's issues in 2015. The MBP redesign sacrificed durability, expandability, and repairability for a slightly thinner envelope. The newly reintroduced MacBook line hinted at a future where Apple computers would be more like iPads with glued-together hardware and only 1 port. The Mac "Pro" had not seen a real update in two years since abandoning a tried-and-true form factor for a beautiful mess. I had already figured out that I was no longer in Apple's target audience at the introduction of the Retina MBP and soldered-down RAM modules, so I'll just be content as long as I can keep my 2011 iMac and my 2012 MBP running. After having used those fine machines, there are very few options on the PC side that I find anything near satisfactory.
  - Shadonototro 6y ago
    the future is wireless the everything soldered together makes sense, not only for portability, but also for energy efficiency, also help save costs reparability is a non issue, since you sacrifice everything above as a result, better focus on making the "board" as cheap as possible to produce, and recyclable
    - 6y ago
kelvie 6y ago
So I haven't used Windows in a while, but the thing that kicks me back to Linux (1st choice) or OS X (2nd choice) every single time was file locking. I think the majority of windows software opens files with an exclusive lock, making it really annoying to use, e.g. you can't delete a dir if anything in its subdir is open for whatever reason. With the amount of software running on a system nowadays, and things like windows update, nothing bothers me more than having files locked in Windows for whatever reason and forcing me to update. I've also never had a good experience with Windows Update (it fails all the time)
NoPicklez 6y ago
I started using MacOS in around 2009 and I don't see any problems between the two that aren't simply "Okay this is just different, but not necessarily wrong". The only big problem I have is that MacOS doesn't have a proper native maximise option which doesn't make the window fullscreen. With regards to the recommendations in the article, Windows actually shifted to a start menu that was full screen and was hated by the majority of Windows users (including me). Atleast they give you the option now. Either way, I think this is a good genuine article. Its rare that I see people describing what its like to use Windows after being such MacOS enthusiasts, rather than the other way.
antback 6y ago
Nobody talk about doskey. When I started working in windows I missed my aliases that I had in linux. Doskey is a great tool to mimic the functionality. Some example of my aliases: edit="%EDITOR%" $\* kbs=ag $\* --file-search-regex "\.md$" "C:\Users\my\Dropbox\MyNotes" pg_start="C:\My Program Files\Scoop\apps\postgresql\current\bin\pg_ctl" start -D "C:\My Program Files\Scoop\apps\postgresql\current\data" I load the file with the aliases like this: doskey /macrofile=C:\Users\me\doskey.cmd
h00l00bebe 6y ago
There are several references to WSL (Windows System for Linux) in this thread, but I think this shall be posted as a separate WSL-related comment. I switched to Windows after almost 10 years on a Linux Desktop (mostly Ubuntu) when WSL was in version 1. It was slow and buggy. However, as of today, WSL 2 is a very strong reason to use a Windows machine as a dev machine. Windows Terminal is fast, snappy and modern. It looks like and behaves like a regular *nix shell with all the bells and whistles. VSCode works both with the Windows filesystem and with the WSL. You can even run `code .` and it will open a proper Windows VSCode instance in a Linux directory. I have been developing and running (with/without Docker) Python, Ruby, Java, Node, Elixir on a WSL-enabled machine for quite some time and the experience is good. From a smooth development process point of view, I don't see any reason to use a Linux machine anymore.

119 points by bengtan 6y ago

> As far as I can tell, 7-zip is more widely recommended amongst Windows users, but what do they know? PeaZip has a very clean UI, and nice green icons, so it’s very obviously the better choice. I appreciated the pithy joke, but I was curious about an actual comparison since I always use 7-Zip. This short article seems like a useful rundown of the (very minor) differences if anyone else is interested: https://en.softonic.com/articles/head-to-head-peazip-vs-7-zip https://en.softonic.com/articles/head-to-head-peazip-vs-7-zi...

mrtksn 6y ago

What’s the typical uptime for a Windows machine in daily use? On MacOS that’s usually in a few months scale because that’s how often an update that needs a restart is released. I usually have 5-10 workspaces, and despite that macOS will restore most of it after a restart, I still feel unease restarting. My main issue with Window was that it required quite a lot involvement into the upkeep of the machine, like frequent restarts due to OS and driver updates. Is that a thing of the past now?

hfjtktmtmt 6y ago
My machine needs to be online 24/7, so I reboot it just once a week, on Sunday. I'm not forced to do that, I just like the idea of a "fresh start" since I don't have ECC memory and I do detect a bit flip (through CRC checks) every 2 months or so. You can keep pushing update required reboots forward as much as you want, one week at a time, so I just push it past the Sunday reboot.
dagw 6y ago
Updates that require a reboot are 1 a month at most, and you can put off doing the reboot/upgrade for as long as you want (unless it's a work computer, in which case the company can set a policy which forces a reboot within a certain number of hours of the update)
cecilpl2 6y ago
I generally restart only when necessary for updates and multiple months of uptime is pretty standard for me.
zigzag312 6y ago
After about one month of uptime I need to restart my Windows machine as it usually starts to behave weirdly. It might be because I put it into hibernation every night. Waking up from hibernation used to be problematic, because some devices/drivers didn't wake up and restore properly, but it's much better now. Windows, by default, would forcibly restart itself way before one month of uptime. I have had unsaved work lost because of it. Now I have automatic restarting permanently disabled. Even worse offender is Windows automatic wake up. Once it woke up my old laptop form hibernation while riding in a car and caused bad sectors on the hard drive (HDD was in perfect condition before that ride).
- mrtksn 6y ago
  >Once it woke up my old laptop form hibernation while riding in a car and caused bad sectors on the hard drive Had the exact same thing in college, my Lenovo laptop woke up inside my bag on my way to class and the HDD got damaged.
  - copperx 6y ago
    That’s why I always used SSDs back in college. Reliability and speed are much more important than drive capacity in a laptop.
    - renata 6y ago
      Some of us aren't young enough for that :)
krylon 6y ago
Normally, one wants to restart Windows after installing updates, i.e. about once a month. > I still feel unease restarting Oh yes, I know that unease all too well. Simply booting the system is usually the least problem, but starting all my applications, placing the windows across the different workspaces, ssh'ing into various machines, etc. is always such a hassle. However, this problem is pretty much constant across different operating systems, at least to me.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  MacOS restores everything, most apps have state saving and they also get restored exactly the way I left them, not just re-open. Only stuff like the terminal will need to re-init the scripts and sessions manually. I like that, it's good enough but I would prefer 0 restarts, of course.
nickjj 6y ago
I haven't been keeping track anymore with Windows 10 but it feels like at least once a month the system forcefully reboots. It's mostly hands free in terms of the update process but it is very disruptive. Back in the day with Windows 7 and not being forced to update I've had 6 month+ uptimes and things ran very well.
- zigzag312 6y ago
  Try Reboot blocker https://udse.de/reboot-blocker/ https://udse.de/reboot-blocker/
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
I don't bother with updates anymore, as they usually cause more trouble than they are worth these days. Consequently I pretty much never restart my computer unless I really really think I want an update. Current uptime on my home machine is >6 months.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
>What’s the typical uptime for a Windows machine in daily use? Only rebooted once in 2021 and that was me turning it off for electrical work. Definitely been in the 2 month+ numbers at times with extremely heavy use like dual GPUs running 100% for 12+ hour periods at a time. Honestly been very impressed with Windows recently as a place for where I get my high end work done. I still use a Macbook for browsing/writing sometimes.
fphhotchips 6y ago
Hahahaha what? I have to remember to reboot my Mac every couple days or it becomes unbearably slow. Not only that, but once a month there's a security update released that, you guessed it, requires an update. If there's some magic to not requiring an update for those please let me know, because I'm sick of waiting 30 minutes every time I install an update.

MrRiddle 6y ago

As much as I would like to love macOS, Windows has absolutely perfect mouse acceleration. I can’t for the life of me tune the mouse experience on a mac to match windows. I always come back to my trusty PC after couple hours on a mac. So much snappier experience.

zspitzer 6y ago
agreed, especially with a couple of 4k monitors, it's a long mouse journey on macOS
vlindhol 6y ago
Funnily enough these "small" things are probably the biggest barrier for switching. I'm a long-time mac user and I asked for a Surface laptop at my new job to give me some variation. Luckily I was able to switch to a Macbook Pro after a year or so, not because of the mouse but because of Windows' awful font rendering. I know, I know, some people prefer the Windows way of rendering, but I just get sad :) Great system otherwise, especially with WSL!
- goalieca 6y ago
  Windows font rendering is just awful. It still feels so like 20 years ago with XP running cleartype on a low dpi monitor
  - trinix912 6y ago
    It's mostly a personal taste thing, but I find the macOS (and even Linux) font rendering superior to Windows, even on low-dpi panels below Full HD. On Windows, the letters are thin, have sharp edges etc. I've tried using the ClearType tuning utility but the results honestly aren't much better. The macOS system font also seems nicer.
- krakatau1 6y ago
  I actually hate macos font rendering...Windows has way better fonts on 27" 2560x1440 or 24" 1920X1200 monitors With work issued macbook pro I have 2 4k 24" monitors to get that retina clarity instead and they keep fans on all the time.

skrebbel 6y ago

I warmly recommend adding Everything to that list. It's an instant-results file search tool that indexes your entire hard drive. It lets you find any file instantly. https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/ EDIT: for some extra context, this tool changed the way I name and store files. I hardly ever navigate to a file anymore. I search Everything for, well, everything. After a while, I found myself caring less where I store a file, and more what I name it. I now add any word to a filename that I think I might search it by. Effectively it's a bunch of tags right there in the filename. This removes the need for a separate tagging program like the author suggests.

Traubenfuchs 6y ago
"Everything" is one of the most amazing pieces of software for window. I literally use it every day to find "lost" files.
xurukefi 6y ago
Probably the first tool I install on every Windows machine. It's beyond me how Microsoft has not incorporated something similar into Windows to replace its ridiculous native search.
- criddell 6y ago
  Isn't that what Cortana / indexing service is supposed to be?
  - iggldiggl 6y ago
    "Supposed to" unfortunately being the key word here.
- EdwinLarkin 6y ago
  Because the native search searches also inside the files.Everything only shows you what files are indexed in the NTFS. This is not a bug it's just hilarious that Microsoft thinks its search that is not communicating clearly what it does is better.

helipad 6y ago

I went back to Winwdows after a long hiatus for my 'personal' laptop. The OS definitely doesn't have as much polish but I've been quietly impressed. I'm not a developer, but I am developer-adjacent, and I really struggled to get set up with WSL. Even using some guides like this: https://char.gd/blog/2017/how-to-set-up-the-perfect-modern-dev-environment-on-windows https://char.gd/blog/2017/how-to-set-up-the-perfect-modern-d... I'll probably have to start it again from afresh, I just found setting up WSL unintuitive and the relationship between WSL and Windows confusing. I believe the situation was previously much worse so forward progress I suppose. Things I like about Windows: - Windows take up more space on the screen. When maximized, there's no title bar and sizing icons taking up space like on MacOS. For example, Chrome tabs are right up to the top of the screen without going full screen. - There's a program for everything. I've been able to play games I used to from 20 years ago and where they don't work out of the box (some do), someone has made a utility to make it all work. I'd forgotten the advantage of Windows having so many more users.

hellojason 6y ago

Avid Windows user here. I had to explain myself so many times to coworkers that I wrote this list [0] to point out differences that users may not be aware of. This list is 4 years old a this point, so a few of the items are no longer true, but overall it still holds water. I've been forced to use Mac for work for several years now, and I still feel jailed in my productivity compared to Windows. The biggest, most crucial difference that Mac users don't seem to know they're missing is how every single Windows dialog box acts like a complete version of Windows Explorer. The Mac's save and open dialog boxes are absolutely infuriating. Also, why can't I just create a markdown file in a folder, double click it so it opens in vscode, then start typing? Window management on Mac is nonexistent, how come window snapping isn't a native feature? Mission Control is like playing hide-and-seek, not managing windows. [0] https://hellojason.net/blog/nitpicky-differences-between-windows-and-os-x/ https://hellojason.net/blog/nitpicky-differences-between-win...

fuball63 6y ago
The lack of window snapping is mind boggling to me. My home computer has lxde on it, which includes the feature.
- latexr 6y ago
  Window snapping has been a native feature on macOS for years: https://osxdaily.com/2016/12/06/use-window-snapping-mac/ https://osxdaily.com/2016/12/06/use-window-snapping-mac/
  - falcolas 6y ago
    Different snapping, at least to what I’m used to. The snapping Windows offers is half and full screen windows with a keypress (or dragging against a wall). Mac does offer something similar, but only for full screen/split-full-screen mode.
    - aggrrrh 6y ago
      You can open a menu with option-click and hold on expand icon and snap window to the side of the screen

KayL 6y ago

PeaZip has many good features, eg smart new folder. But the UI is pretty slow.

hulitu 6y ago
And also the compression is slow. I tried to compress some VMs and peazip was much slower than 7zip for 7z compression.

fbelzile 6y ago

> Make the Start Menu Full-Screen I'm surprised by this one. I couldn't stand Windows 8 because of the full screen start menu. Maybe it was because it was too animated. But I think it was more because I didn't like getting kicked out from my desktop and losing context of what I was doing. I much prefer pressing the Windows key and typing the first few letters of the app I want. Seeing a full screen of apps is way too distracting to me, especially with live tiles.

AlanYx 6y ago
That one surprised me too. Lukas is usually pretty insightful on UI/UX issues, but I couldn't disagree more with him here. Interface behaviors that temporarily take over the whole screen, or large parts of it, leave me disoriented and distracted. The "File" menu in recent versions of Microsoft Office for Windows has the same problem. It takes over the whole window, and after I'm finished doing whatever I was doing from that menu, it sometimes takes 10-20 seconds for me to reorient myself... where was I? What was I working on? The default behavior of "Aero Peek" on Windows has the same issue too. At least I'm glad they reversed the full-screen-by-default Start menu after Windows 8.
DigitallyFidget 6y ago
The problem I had with the Windows 8 full screen start menu was that it was a disorganized cluttered mess of nearly indecipherable navigation that was so aggressively altered of an experience and change from prior versions. I hated having to open applications from it. I still hate the Vista+ version of the start menu as well, because it turned a manageable fan-out of applications I could just edit into sub-categories into a compact vomit of every application in a list, and Windows 10 only improved it by making it more presentable with spacing and abundant size on screen. The one good thing is that I can just tap the Win key and type what I'm looking for and hit enter, which is almost always faster than trying to navigate it via mouse. I just don't care for the pinned tiles, I don't know if it's still a thing, but major updates were loading tons of useless icons and stupid junk I didn't want there and it was always a fight to reclaim it, so I just opted to get rid of it. I want it to just do its job and be a location to open things, not tell me the weather and stock market info.

sam0x17 6y ago

> PeaZip has a very clean UI, and nice green icons, so it’s very obviously the better choice. If you're "opening" an archive directly you're doing it wrong. The beauty of 7-Zip is the shell integration where you can just right click an archive and do "Extract to [folder name]" or right click a folder and do "Create archive...". I have not had a need for the UI that appears when you double click on an archive in any archive program in 20 years.

Symbiote 6y ago
I use the archive tool in KDE ("ark") fairly often, although only for reading. I regularly need to look at one or two metadata files within an archive, but not the gigabytes of data. On the command line, I'll "unzip -p archive.zip metadata.xml" (with tab-completion for the archive entries), but if I've retrieved the file with a web browser I'll let it open in ark and open the entry files from there.
smlckz 6y ago
Same with Vim for Windows. Right click and edit using gvim, regardless of the file type.
timw4mail 6y ago
PeaZip also has similar functionality.
jbarrs 6y ago
My only gripe with this is that I'm never sure what the structure inside an archive is like until I inspect it. It's not a massive inconvenience but I don't like extracting to a new directory just to find it empty save for another directory with the same name.

cecilpl2 6y ago

WizTree is better and far faster than WinDirStat (think seconds instead of minutes to scan your whole system).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

marcodiego 6y ago

Interesinting that some of the tools he installed to "improve" default windows are open-source and also available on linux. Anecdata: about a decade ago I asked a few colleagues if a mac user would feel more at home using windows or Ubuntu. Answer were almost unanimous: Ubuntu. It is a shame that market needs (hardware, services and software) still makes people need windows.

jvzr 6y ago
I've been a Mac user since 2004. I switched my main computer to Windows right when Windows 10 released, mostly for gaming. Late last year, I've switched to Linux (Manjaro then straight Arch) with a heavily customized, simplified Gnome desktop (to fit my exact needs). In my opinion, for what I need, Linux & Gnome is so much better than Windows 10. And better than Big Sur, I must regretfully add. UX has gone abysmally low with macOS 11, sadly.
- krylon 6y ago
  I have had a similar experience, I got a Mac in 2013, switched back to Linux in 2017. There is one thing I miss - the emacs-keybindings in the system text input widget, that one was awesome. But otherwise, I feel much more at home on Linux with Mate.
lycopodiopsida 6y ago
I was a Linux/FreeBSD user for a decade, before I switched to mac(have it been 8 years already?) and my preference is still mac > FreeBSD > Linux > Windows, fwiw. Working on something which is not *nix seems odd to me and I've always found windows being extremely complicated under the hood.
fomine3 6y ago
GNOME developer loves macOS so the result isn't surprising.
dartharva 6y ago
As a long-time Windows user I clean-installed Ubuntu (Pop!_OS) on my laptop and forced myself to work with it for three days. Had to revert back to Windows yesterday in exasperation: things still looked way too glitchy, it took two entire minutes in general to boot up (Windows takes ~30s), apps like the Brave web browser took another minute to open, GNOME felt actually less customizable than Windows explorer (where you can at least natively move the panel to wherever you want), Bluetooth headphones connected but gave terrible audio quality, Colors on screen got too bright at one instance then too dim at the next, Battery barely lasted an hour, some frustrating apt bug just refused to let me install the software (even from .deb setup files) I wanted, CPU fans ran on full throttle all the time ... I even had to manually download and compile some obscure unmaintained software to create a Windows bootable USB. Windows is universally hated as a meme, but its industry dominance isn't really undeserved. With WSL2 there's much less reason to shift to Linux now.

trinix912 6y ago

> Since Windows’ window management works much better than what OS X’s does I find this interesting because to me, it just seems that macOS does this way better, especially on MacBooks with the gestures (some of which work on windows). I really miss Mission Control whenever I have to use Windows.

reportgunner 6y ago
I don't know what Mission Control is, but seeing from the screenshots it seems to be something like what you get on windows after pressing Win+Tab ? Honestly I never understood the appeal of gestures as I use my OS not only on laptops but on desktops too where there is no touchpad.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Apple's bluetooth touchpad is pretty nice.
- trinix912 6y ago
  It's pretty similar but it's more clunky (literally just a full-screen Alt-Tab), often requires scrolling, clutters the space with useless "past activities" and so on. Mission Control does one thing and does it well. > Honestly I never understood the appeal of gestures as I use my OS not only on laptops but on desktops too where there is no touchpad. Apple's mice and trackpads (which are sold for desktops as well) support them.
Synaesthesia 6y ago
Yeah but Mac OS needs more windows to function. Windows Explorer is definitely superior to Finder, it has a lot more features.
- norman784 6y ago
  IHMO the Explorer from Windows XP (this is the last Windows I used before Windows 10) was better, did the job and was simple, now it seems bloated for me and too mouse dependent, I like to use the keyboard whenever possible, other big feature missing in windows and built in in mac is the file preview, you just hit space and you can see most common file formats without opening them, maybe Windows has this but I'm not aware of it. In general I think Mac has better UX out of the box, Windows surely has a lot of features but not very easy to use, other thing that I miss about Windows is that before with one right click and a left click I could change my network settings (LAN), now I need a few clicks to get to it (but I never remember which menu I need to click it). Some linux distros are now easier to configure than windows, mac is the king in this regard (but there are some advanced configurations that you need the terminal for, so this is a cons, but most of them are rarely used)

tomp 6y ago

Uh, a Windows-loving thread on a hacker forum! Let me try to make myself useful, and add an important addition that's missing from the original thread: stop Windows 10 from restarting automatically https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wake-timers-from-waking-windows-10-desktop/973029#973029 https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wak... In particular, step 2... my Windows Surface Go hasn't auto-restarted in months... and this is plain vanilla Windows 10 Home version 2004 (not a fancy Professional or Ultimate).

gruez 6y ago
You probably should restart every month or so, otherwise you're not getting the monthly security patches.
- tomp 6y ago
  Obviously. The beautiful part of this approach is that it doesn’t disable the icon in the taskbar that alerts you of updates... but it won’t restart automatically.
namero999 6y ago
Thanks, random internet stranger. This literally bit me this morning.
ryandrake 6y ago
Sorry, but it's bonkers that you need to follow 6 complex steps (or use a 3rd party software to do it), in order to stop your OS from doing something it shouldn't be doing in the first place. A computer should never decide on its own to turn itself off. I'm not going to let Mac off the hook either. You have to deliberately choose to not have it "automatically update" itself, and it keeps begging you to turn that function on.
newscracker 6y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I've been going crazy with the Windows 10 machine starting up by itself at random times. I searched online, and I think I did disable the wake timers, but I certainly didn't do it on all the power management profiles. I'll have to check this one out again. If there's one thing I've seen with Windows, it's consistent in how annoying it can be in every release.

_a1_ 6y ago

> When I hit the start menu, it’s because I want to launch an application. I don’t need to see the rest of the desktop. So why is the Start menu by default only occupying a small portion of the screen, and wasting the remaining space? Hilarious. I mean, I fully agree with the author on that. But since the author is not tied to a Windows ecosystem, he doesn't know that a full-screen start menu actually happened on Windows 8, and it was nearly boycotted by Windows userbase because of the fact that it occupies full screen space. Users demanded to have a Windows95-style start menu, and MS had to redesign it. Why it's so important for Windows users to have a Windows95-style menu, is beyond me. There you have it :D

hadrien01 6y ago
He does, he links to the following footnote: "Windows 8 was the best version of Windows. And that’s just a fact."
- _a1_ 6y ago
  You're right, I missed that.
CivBase 6y ago
I run many applications on my computer at once and I often find myself opening the start menu to launch an application while keeping an eye on another window in the background. The hierarchical organization and text-with-icons style of the classic start menu also feels less overwhelming to me than the flat organization and icons-with-text style of the Windows 8 menu. But I also think these are minor issues and the backlash against the menu in Windows 8 was over-the-top. At the end of the day, I think the real reason people were mad is that it just looked very different from previous menus, which made casual users uncomfortable. Which is kind of funny seeing as it's very similar to the app menus used by macOS, iOS, and Android.
benplumley 6y ago
My complaint with the Windows 8 start menu wasn't that it took up the whole screen, it was that it took up the whole screen to show _the same number of items_ or fewer than the 95-style start menu. And half of them were ads. A full-screen start menu with the same information density as the 95-style start menu, possibly with a pane for programs and a pane for explorer, is something I'd happily try out.

TonyTrapp 6y ago

TIL: Win-Shift-S. Very useful to know that Windows has a built-in tool for cropping screenshots before they even end up in the clipboard.

jccalhoun 6y ago
I teach college. I did an assignment where I had students do a little tutorial and submit a screenshot as proof. After so many submitted pics of their screen they took with their phone, I told them about the built in snipping tool in windows (and there's one in macos, too). It blew the minds of many of them.
- TonyTrapp 6y ago
  I'm not a teacher but I totally feel you. Everytime I see someone take a screenshot using their phone, I cringe. Especially when it's a developer who should know better. And especially when they could have simply copied the source code as text, which would have enabled me to copy and run it instantly.
_Microft 6y ago
Win+Print automatically saves a screenshot to the "Pictures\Screenshots" folder by the way.
- TonyTrapp 6y ago
  Funnily enough I was aware of that one. :) But Win+Shift+S is a perfect replacement for what I have been doing for a long while, pressing PrintScreen (without Win key), pasting into some graphics application and then copying a selection of the screenshot, just to paste into yet another application.
  - superdisk 6y ago
    Another nice tip is Alt+PrtScr which copies just an image of the focused window.
6y ago

0xTJ 6y ago

I've found over the last few years, as much as I hate to say this, that Windows has been a decent experience for me. It's not perfect, but the combination of the right programs (Directory Opus 12, X display server, SSH client) plus WSL makes it a usable experience. VS Code is also now my IDE of choice. I look forward to the day I can switch to Linux full-time (probably Arch), but for now I need good OneDrive integration.

da_big_ghey 6y ago
For when you do, abraunegg's OneDrive is useful: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive Office 365 in wine is still hit-or-miss, I will admit. I got it working but only with a great deal of pain, and apparently setup is broken for a lot of people right now. (I use arch btw)
e12e 6y ago
Don't forget windows now has a ssh server too! I run Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) - but certain proprietary vpn clients just don't work right, so on occasion I'll boot a VirtualBox vm, login to VPN there, then use the vm as a ssh jump box to the network on the far side. I'd prefer not having to deal with crappy, propiatary vpn gateways - but at least this way it works. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/openssh/openssh_install_firstuse https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrati...

whalesalad 6y ago

I keep meaning to try this out. Every time I boot a fresh Windows 10 install I am traumatized enough to walk away and not try again, though. The install process is pretty bad - the same ancient UI that came from Longhorn. Towards the end you go through about 20 differnt checkboxes to un-toggle all the various annoying settings you don't want like tracking and advertisements on the login screen. Creating an account is also a headache - MSFT is really pushing the online signin stuff now. Everything also feels sluggish to me, but perhaps that is due to the machine I am using (i7-3770k, 16gb ram, but kinda old in general) and there just feels like an abundance of noise and crap everywhere (Windows explorer is like a junk drawer that wont close) I ended up using it for one thing - I managed to pay Titanfall 2 through the entire campaign on an Xbox controller. That was a pretty fun experience. Recently I wiped the box to start giving Fedora a shot as a sidekick box. I cannot quit macOS though. It is just too good at staying out of your way and not being annoying (I am on Mojave) - and the muscle memory is strong. DHH's take resonates with me: https://m.signalvnoise.com/back-to-windows-after-twenty-years/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/back-to-windows-after-twenty-year...

timw4mail 6y ago
Windows and Mac both have this issue of terrible defaults.

hankchinaski 6y ago

i was tempted to switch back to windows but i am worried i won't find the same build quality/durability from non-apple machines. anyone can recommend good/durable windows machines?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rodelrod 6y ago
I have almost 2 decades of Thinkpad X series stockpiled around the house and none ever broke. (Granted, I don't run Windows on them).
drewzero1 6y ago
I've had some good Thinkpads and HP business-class desktop computers. Apple build quality is amazing if you compare it to consumer-class hardware, but once you step up to business machines it's pretty standard imo. I find Apple's designs tend to be more elegant than a lot of them though.
WorldMaker 6y ago
Microsoft's own Surface line is meant to be of comparable quality (though reviews/individual experiences may differ in some cases) and certainly of comparable aesthetics at least to Apple machines. Obviously Surface hardware comes at a bit of a premium to most other OEMs. I'd second the recommendation to look at business hardware over consumer hardware (again, at a cost premium), but beware that isn't universally true. Some of the business lines are "churn-centric". For instance, a lot of companies have big HP or Dell contracts (as two examples) that they lease so many machines per year with quick turnaround "no or few questions asked" replacement strategies. Those companies treat the devices as "disposable", they ship old ones back every year or three and get newer models back. Those "disposable" business lines don't have a huge incentive to build quality/durability if the laptops are going to be replaced in 3-year or less cycles anyway. You might also explore some of the "prosumer" segments. Some of the OEMs have a "Media Creation" line of one sort or another that often ups build quality. Most OEMs have a "Gaming" segment. Even if you aren't a "gamer" or play many games, sometimes you find good premium options among those lines that go toward build quality/durability. The trouble there is determining model to model whether with that model you are paying a premium for 1) useless bells and whistles like RGB lighting all the things, 2) build quality/durability, or 3) bleeding edge hardware that is the opposite of quality/durable. Manufacturers vary in which of those 3 is their priority for "Gaming" and even within some of those Manufacturers they might have sub-sections that vary the position on that triangular space defined by those three extremes. A heuristic I've used in the past is pulling out the business line pages and "Gaming" pages of an OEM and trying to spot the most similar models that might imply one is just a rebadging of the other, that intersection may indicate the quality/durable sub-line, and then decide between the two based on price difference (surprisingly sometimes it is the "Gaming" line that is still cheaper), and whether or not the other bells and whistles of the "Gaming" line seem amusing enough.

michaelcampbell 6y ago

I don't mind Windows; there are some apps that are VASTLY superior to anything I could find on Mac or Linux. Nor Mac, for a different set of apps. I don't think I would ever spend the Apple tax on one though; as long as work provides me with one that's fine. I tend to do my "real work" in a unixy context, but WSL, VMs, and `brew install coreutils` gets me close enough to run my dev tools of choice.

simmons 6y ago

Whenever I get Windows-curious, the one thing holding me back is all the telemetry and privacy compromises I hear about on forums like HN. One thing I'd love to see in a "switch to Windows" list is a simple list of steps to harden the privacy characteristics of a fresh Windows 10 installation. I occasionally see automated solutions for this, but it's hard for me to judge the reliability and trustworthiness of such tools. A simple, clear list would be great.

meowster 6y ago
The problem is such lists become obsolete after the next update when Microsoft introduces a new privacy-invading feature or they revert some of the settings that you previously changed. The only winning move is not to play.
Yoofie 6y ago
What you probably want is Windows 10 LTSC. It's barebones Windows 10 but without all extra crap that comes installed with all the other versions of Windows. I have been running it for a while now and its great.
- namero999 6y ago
  Do you need a specific key for it, or would my 10 Pro license work?
  - jftuga 6y ago
    LTSC is definitely the best Windows 10 version for office / dev work. You need an Enterprise license as a Pro license will not work. Also, LTSC can be hard to come by. See /r/Windows10LTSC for Q&A.

mcovalt 6y ago

I use Windows at work for its killer feature I rarely see mentioned: text antialiasing and rendering. I believe (?) Freetype came very close to Cleartype in Linux land, but MS holds patents on the extra bit that makes Cleartype just a bit better. I assume text antialiasing will be unnecessary in 10 years due to the rising ubiquity of high resolution monitors, but that day is not here yet. I’ve noticed that macOS has just completely bailed on text antialiasing. Hooking up my MacBook Air M1 to my 109 DPI monitor is a truly awful experience. On the other hand, text on the Retina screen is holy grail. However, holy grail is unattainable for me at the moment. LG Ultrafine monitors are too expensive. Due to DirectWrite, it’s very easy to get an end-to-end best-in-class GPU accelerated text rendering experience on Windows.

copperx 6y ago
Mac and Linux antialiasing are light years ahead of Windows, unless you are using 20 year old 100 DPI or lower monitors. Now that 4K is standard on laptops, and 5k on desktops, Cleartype is an artifact of antiquity.
- mcovalt 6y ago
  Is 5K standard on desktops? Where can I get a ~200 DPI 5K monitor for less than $1,299.95?
- iggldiggl 6y ago
  Firefox user data shows 4K at roughly 2 % and "other" resolutions (only part of which will be high DPI) at slightly less than 7 %.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Now that 4K is standard on laptops, and 5k on desktops, Neither of those are “standard”, they are both high end. On laptops FHD is still dominant. Desktop displays are more diverse, with beyond-FHD being more common than on laptops but split between 1080p-but-ultrawide, 1440p, 4K, and the rarer 5K+.

zigzag312 6y ago

> There’s no OmniDiskSweeper on Windows, but there is WinDirStat, which does the same thing WizTree is much faster than WinDirStat as it directly reads NTFS's Master File Table. It's not open source, but it is free for personal use.

ROARosen 6y ago

> Windows has built-in screen sharing, but only if you have a Pro license Actually windows has built-in screen-sharing on all versions for free. It is not well-known. It is called Quick Assist and is preinstalled on every Windows 10, though it is not as robust as other screen-sharing programs. Windows Remote Desktop is only avail with pro but it is not really screen-sharing as it takes over the session completely (it logs you out from the local session). Sure, you can always use AnyDesk but we're talking here about built-in.

EdwinLarkin 6y ago

I cant use Windows as my main for its terrible tendency to allow programs to just pollute the filesystem anywhere and everywhere. I need a way to keep my system tidy and any installation can possibly mean 1) infection with whatever *ware (even legitimate software acts like one 2) polluting the whole system with files you will not be able to easily find and delete (or registry or whatever else)

fbelzile 6y ago
No, macOS just makes it seem like apps can't add files anywhere. They only recently made it a requirement to ask to write to certain locations like your Documents, Downloads folder, etc.
dartharva 6y ago
Just use scoop: https://scoop.sh/ https://scoop.sh/ Another way I prevent such pollution is use portable versions of software and store them in a singular Software directory. And to cleanly remove such "polluting" software, use Revo Uninstaller: https://www.revouninstaller.com/products/revo-uninstaller-pro/ https://www.revouninstaller.com/products/revo-uninstaller-pr...

TrianguloY 6y ago

I don't like the full screen start menu, but I always expand it to allow three columns (and with the 'show more per group' setting). And I have all app shortcuts there, as small icons and grouped into categories, because that's what makes more sense to me, always available at the click of a button, and not in the desktop. In fact, and all those who see me working always asks, I have my desktop configured as follow: * No shortcuts, only the recycle bin and the files I'm currently using. * The desktop is the default folder for firefox downloads. * The icons are HUGE, and I mean that, press control and use the mouse wheel until the icons's height is a third of the desktop height more or less. My desktop is my workplace, all the temporary items I need are there, until I move them to their proper folder into Documents, Images, or where necessary. I rarely have more than 5 files, and those who are there have my total attention. And, since the icons are huge, it's extremely easy to see the previsualization for images, pdf, videos, etc.

marcodiego 6y ago

There is a windows phenomenon that I don't know if happens with everybody, but it happens with most of my acquaintances: Every time someone buys a windows computer I get impressed about how fast the computer is. Six months later, same computer, I get impressed about how slow it gets. This experience has been like this for decades. Never seen anything like that on linux or mac.

spery 6y ago
If your machine is low on RAM and you keep installing services to it, it will slow down. OS has nothing to do with it.
- craftyguy 6y ago
  All of that 'telemetry' collection isn't free. OS choice definitely matters, some OS vendors will insist on default sevices and 'require' the ability to arbitarily enable more for you as they see fit over time. You don't own your PC running windows, microsoft does.
- marcodiego 6y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying that windows users love installing services?
  - zeroc8 6y ago
    Yes, especially Virus services.
  - spery 6y ago
    I'm not saying windows users love installing services. I meant, maybe your acquaintances aren't that tech savvy and don't understand the implications. My parents we're the same before I've taught them not to install stuff before consulting with either me or my brother.

bitslayer 6y ago

For work I use a Mac and I remote into Windows, and I have so much trouble making my brain swap the keys for copy/paste. Ctrl-C Command-V is so painful.

nickjj 6y ago

If anyone prefers video, a while back I put together a similar type of post / video going over and demoing a bunch of apps / tools that I use on Windows to have what I feel like is a decent development environment focused on web development using Docker, WSL 2 and heavy terminal usage. That's at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-linux-dev-environment-on-windows-with-wsl-2-docker-desktop-and-more https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-linux-dev-environment-on-wi... Been using the set up for years now with slight changes over the years (WSL 1 to WSL 2, etc.), it's solid.

tuananh 6y ago

windows is getting a lot better but there's no decent tiling window manager. on macos, yabai is quite ok. on linux, it's a the best. just take your pick

WorldMaker 6y ago
Have you had a chance to play with Fancy Zones yet on Windows? (It's in the PowerToys.) It's not quite as full featured as some of the options on other platforms, but I'm finding it scratches the itch for me a lot more than I expected it would at first glance, especially when you allow it to take over the "Aero Snap" keys (Win+Arrow Key). They've been adding and polishing features at a decent pace, and it's worth checking out (again) if you haven't recently.
- tuananh 6y ago
  yes, fancy zones is what i ended up using but i still miss tiling wm.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Yeah, but I find it interesting how much of the itch it already scratches. I've been somewhat keeping an eye on the GitHub issues as you can tell Fancy Zones is very much still a "minimal viable project" to prove interest/demand and there's definitely enough Tiling WM loving developers on the project that they've got some sense of direction towards it, even if they are still more concerned of finding the "Windows way" toward it than going beeline for i3wm or xmonad features.
    - tuananh 6y ago
      if microsoft can pull that off, windows can really shine as a developer friendly OS
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        One of the things I loved about Windows 8.1 was that it had a Tiling Window Manager getting some real love out of the box. The Window Manager for the "modern" ("metro"/UWP) Windows apps was a tiling WM. It was limited to only vertical splits at the time, and you had to upgrade to the modern apps to get the most benefit from it (the entire Win32 desktop was just a single tile to that WM). At points in 8.1 I'd have a dozen or so tiles across 2 screens on my desktop. It was lovely, for that brief time it existed and there were enough apps to make use of it. When they inverted things back in 10 and put all the modern apps in traditional overlapping Windows, that tiling WM got crippled and relegated back to only support two tiles at a time and then only in Tablet Mode (though it got slightly smarter about semi-maximizing Win32 apps). Windows 1.x itself had only a tiling WM. (Not a great one, mind you.) There's a lot of tiling WM DNA in Windows development history. Like I said the impression I have from GitHub Issues at least is that there are an interesting number of developers of Windows (even if that's a small overall percentage of the huge Windows organization at Microsoft) interested in pursuing good tiling WM tools on Windows. I hope Fancy Zones does continue to be a good playground for exploring that.

jjice 6y ago

Is there a good AutoHotKey equivalent for Linux?

rodelrod 6y ago
You don't need it nearly as much. Most of the things I used to use AutoHotKey for on Windows are better dealt with by changing a config file somewhere. For the odd case where GUI automation is really needed, you have xdotool, which is not nearly as nice as AutoHotKey, but does the job. In short, I was a heavy user on Windows but don't miss it at all on Linux.

Shadonototro 6y ago

> Around 2015, I started to realize that I was no longer part of Apple’s target audience. 2015 was also in the era of the big CPU stagnation when Intel refused to make bigger steps forward in order to maximize profits it put Apple in weird spot because they depend on 3rd party for their hardware, they can't play the same cards as Intel, obviously, it's Apple now that they released their own silicon, it is pretty clear what happened in the past, and what was their exact goal, to not depend on intel anymore or any 3rd party, so developers can experience fast machines again, and how things are changing today.. in a very good way don't be this closed minded about "apple don't understand developers", because that's not true at all And that's pretty weird, because today Windows 10 is doing exactly what you though Apple was doing to you ;) without investing in their own silicon, without improving their OS, and without improving their filesystem worse, 1 icon at a time!

drewzero1 6y ago
The processor stagnation was the least of Apple's issues in 2015. The MBP redesign sacrificed durability, expandability, and repairability for a slightly thinner envelope. The newly reintroduced MacBook line hinted at a future where Apple computers would be more like iPads with glued-together hardware and only 1 port. The Mac "Pro" had not seen a real update in two years since abandoning a tried-and-true form factor for a beautiful mess. I had already figured out that I was no longer in Apple's target audience at the introduction of the Retina MBP and soldered-down RAM modules, so I'll just be content as long as I can keep my 2011 iMac and my 2012 MBP running. After having used those fine machines, there are very few options on the PC side that I find anything near satisfactory.
- Shadonototro 6y ago
  the future is wireless the everything soldered together makes sense, not only for portability, but also for energy efficiency, also help save costs reparability is a non issue, since you sacrifice everything above as a result, better focus on making the "board" as cheap as possible to produce, and recyclable
  - 6y ago

kelvie 6y ago

So I haven't used Windows in a while, but the thing that kicks me back to Linux (1st choice) or OS X (2nd choice) every single time was file locking. I think the majority of windows software opens files with an exclusive lock, making it really annoying to use, e.g. you can't delete a dir if anything in its subdir is open for whatever reason. With the amount of software running on a system nowadays, and things like windows update, nothing bothers me more than having files locked in Windows for whatever reason and forcing me to update. I've also never had a good experience with Windows Update (it fails all the time)

NoPicklez 6y ago

I started using MacOS in around 2009 and I don't see any problems between the two that aren't simply "Okay this is just different, but not necessarily wrong". The only big problem I have is that MacOS doesn't have a proper native maximise option which doesn't make the window fullscreen. With regards to the recommendations in the article, Windows actually shifted to a start menu that was full screen and was hated by the majority of Windows users (including me). Atleast they give you the option now. Either way, I think this is a good genuine article. Its rare that I see people describing what its like to use Windows after being such MacOS enthusiasts, rather than the other way.

antback 6y ago

Nobody talk about doskey. When I started working in windows I missed my aliases that I had in linux. Doskey is a great tool to mimic the functionality. Some example of my aliases: edit="%EDITOR%" $\* kbs=ag $\* --file-search-regex "\.md$" "C:\Users\my\Dropbox\MyNotes" pg_start="C:\My Program Files\Scoop\apps\postgresql\current\bin\pg_ctl" start -D "C:\My Program Files\Scoop\apps\postgresql\current\data" I load the file with the aliases like this: doskey /macrofile=C:\Users\me\doskey.cmd

h00l00bebe 6y ago

There are several references to WSL (Windows System for Linux) in this thread, but I think this shall be posted as a separate WSL-related comment. I switched to Windows after almost 10 years on a Linux Desktop (mostly Ubuntu) when WSL was in version 1. It was slow and buggy. However, as of today, WSL 2 is a very strong reason to use a Windows machine as a dev machine. Windows Terminal is fast, snappy and modern. It looks like and behaves like a regular *nix shell with all the bells and whistles. VSCode works both with the Windows filesystem and with the WSL. You can even run `code .` and it will open a proper Windows VSCode instance in a Linux directory. I have been developing and running (with/without Docker) Python, Ruby, Java, Node, Elixir on a WSL-enabled machine for quite some time and the experience is good. From a smooth development process point of view, I don't see any reason to use a Linux machine anymore.