The state of switching to Windows from Mac in 2019

I just switched from Mac to Windows and had to move back. I cannot believe how miserable the Windows experience is. I mistakenly thought that since so much is browser-based, it&#x27;s not a big deal. But literally every single little thing is slightly-to-much worse on Windows. Even stupid things like changing scroll direction, saving the 5 second preference for notifications to disappear, finding a wifi password, arranging windows, remembering window positions after disconnects, saving screen shots, etc, etc, etc.<p>Not having a Unix shell is of course ludicrous.<p>Pretty fair article, though.

I have used all 3 major OS (Windows, Mac &amp; Linux) for at least a decade each, and I review my current choice every few months.<p>I have regained a lot of sanity by realizing computing happens within platforms, and regarding the OS as just plumbing. My platforms of choice are the web (for hypertext), elisp text applications (for interactive development, task management, email), and Unix.<p>I only need a browser (Firefox), a text editor (Emacs) and a terminal. I prefer to use a tiling window manager (StumpWM), but it&#x27;s not a big deal to use the WM provided by my current OS.<p>These 3 platforms (web, elisp and Unix) will be long-lived. Whereas native Windows, Mac and Linux applications tend to have much shorter lifecycles. Furthermore, they don&#x27;t tend to talk well to each other. They are little silos.<p>Also, since the lifecycles are so short, by the time I work out all inconveniences and learn all tricks, the platform is beyond its prime time. This has already happened to me several times. I was really happy with Gnome 2 circa 2005, but the whole ecosystem collapsed with the transition to Gnome 3. Same thing, to some extent, in OS X Tiger-Snow Leopard. A really nice ecosystem of indie applications that has slowly lost a lot of momentum to iOS.<p>That said, I prefer to use Linux because it&#x27;s so component-ized I can always replace frustrating things, and nothing gets pushed into me by a corporation. Plus code is open, and some userland things like Nix are so unique. And first-class centralized package management is great.

I tried switching to Windows in late 2016 for my every-day machine and I went back to macOS.<p>It wasn&#x27;t really a matter of familiarity. I&#x27;ve been using Windows since 3.1 and while I&#x27;ve been using mostly macOS since the Vista days, I&#x27;ve always had a Windows machine for gaming.<p>I was really surprised the problem for me was the Windows ecosystem.<p>Outside of the major players (Microsoft, Adobe, etc) most of the stuff you find are ugly Win32 apps that look straight from Windows 95, do not support scaling, etc. At the time even the Creative Cloud app from Adobe didn&#x27;t support scaling and looked super small on a 4K display. Heck, even Photoshop didn&#x27;t support Windows scaling, you only had a setting to change the UI size from 100% to 150% or something like that.<p>The other problem is that I couldn&#x27;t find good replacements for my most used productivity&#x2F;utility apps. For example Alfred, Karabiner, BetterTouchTool, or iStatMenus. There are some alternatives that solve some of the problems these apps solve, but none that are even half as good. A colleague which is 100% Windows told me that much like Android, Windows users are less likely to pay for quality software.<p>I also had a ton of hardware problems with the Surface Book 1 I bought and returned to Amazon.<p>The Mac hardware situation is a real problem though, that is certain. Hopefully Apple has already realized this and is slowly correcting course.

Meta:<p>I really wish that people would stick with writings things as &quot;from SOURCE to DESTINATION&quot; or &quot;from INITIAL to FINAL&quot;.<p>Perhaps it&#x27;s just me, but I find it reduces mental drag if you describe things in temporal progression instead of having to go &#x27;in reverse&#x27;.† It&#x27;s not a big deal, but I find it irksome.<p>† I am reminded of the bomb defusing joke: <i>Cut the blue wire</i> [snip] <i>...after cutting the red one.</i><p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;WireDilemma" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;WireDilemma</a> * <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;CueCardPause" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;CueCardPause</a>

Loving WSL and the windows of today. Many years ago I switched to Mac (away from MSFT&#x2F;Linux) to streamline my development of both client and server code. I continued to use MSFT at work (console and game development) while using Mac at home. About a year and a half ago, I switched to Linux and Windows fulltime both at work and at home after my second macbook keyboard failed and continued frustration with the state of graphics drivers on Mac and poorly documented APIs. Another huge issue was that both macbooks I tried (even with the latest updates) failed to support multi-monitors seamlessly (lots of glitching on plug-in and swapping). Needless to say, I feel &quot;in control&quot; of my workstation again and my productivity is up as a result.

&gt;I keep touching other people&#x27;s screens out of instinct.<p>Please, don’t do this. I get palpitations simply when people start getting their fingers, or worse, a pen, too close to my screen. I warn them. I try to be cute: “there’s this thing called cursor, you know? You can use many devices to control it”.<p>When they do, eventually and inevitably, accidentally touch it, I get visibly upset and make no effort to lighten the mood. High paying clients, I don’t care. I’ll get up, get a cleaning cloth and take my time until it is, hopefully, pristine again.<p>For all the amazing things that touchscreens brought to the world, it also made people who already loved smudging monitors suddenly feel even more authorized to do so.<p>It’s not the same with my phone, you could even drop it, I often do.<p>But do not touch my computer’s work screen.

I really don&#x27;t like Windows. There are justifiable reasons that I don&#x27;t like it but that doesn&#x27;t get to the root of it for me.<p>I just _don&#x27;t_ like it. Not only does it not evoke any kind of pleasant feeling in use, it&#x27;s so heavy and fumbly that I just cannot use it for any meaningful period of time without getting frustrated, lack of terminal not withstanding.<p>For context: I use a mac at work, I used a windows machine for 2 years before this, my personal machines are linux&#x2F;bsd based (i3&#x2F;sway)<p>The Mac experience hasn&#x27;t improved a lot, granted I&#x27;m using a 2013 Trashcan mac and that&#x27;s quite dated, but mac, like windows, is suffering from just kinda feeling bad these days, I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s mojave or that I&#x27;m becoming old and getting grumpy about my display manager not being able to be operated without a mouse... but I don&#x27;t like it.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong MacOS is still _miles_ ahead of Windows in my opinion, but their hardware these days is appalling, and really the hardware alone makes me want to move to a nice XPS13 with Linux for work.<p>My i3&#x2F;sway machines are &#x2F;nearly&#x2F; perfect, I can think of two things that make them kinda suck:<p>1) Hotswapping monitors on Sway is.. hit or miss.. I could hack my way to make this work better most likely but I shouldn&#x27;t have to.<p>2) I work in a Microsoft based company and tools like teams (which has a linux varient.. kinda), skype and outlook aren&#x27;t going to work, not to mention the UUNC SMB paths that get tossed around and the burning desire to use email as a version control system for Excel spreadsheets...<p>What I mean is that #2 is served by MacOS, but not linux. :\

I&#x27;m debating switching to Windows when my 2015 Macbook gives up unless Apple really have learned their lessons from the 2016 model.<p>I have two remaining major issues with Windows, which is down from the remarkably sizeable list that had me switch to Mac and OSX, which makes it easy to keep the Windows box as games only:<p>+ Extreme monochrome flatness. It&#x27;s obtuse and hides information, like the edges of icons, encouraging misclicks, and is quite frankly pig ugly. I quite liked aero glass and the UI as Windows 7 had it. The first Windows that &quot;looked right&quot;. If only they&#x27;d modernised and flattened that <i>a little...</i><p>+ Abusive view of the users: Tracking and telemetry you can&#x27;t easily disable. Knowing better than me when to reboot, to install, when to display ads.<p>There&#x27;s lots of minor issues, like 3 to 5 different incarnations of every feature from menus, to dialogues, to preferences. Or Explorer usability. Or how discoverable some things are. Or the whole mess of registry and installing. Or the 40GB of ever-growing Windows sub folders. All I can live with, but ugly and tracking? Much harder to tolerate.<p>So as ever I&#x27;ll end up with a mix, rebalanced a little. One day I&#x27;ll have a lovely seamless all-something world, but it hasn&#x27;t happened since the 80s when it was Amigas everywhere. :)

The writer is a journalist. For techies using Mac, there&#x27;s a bigger question of whether you want to just move from Mac to GNU&#x2F;Linux.

I used macOS for a 5 years, but switched to Windows, because Apple did not produce any Macs that I wanted to buy. While I would still prefer macOS because of better iPhone integration, I did not find any problems with Windows 10 and I&#x27;m using it every day without problems, it just works. And the fact that I don&#x27;t have to pay those 500% Apple margins makes me quite happy. I waited for Mac Pro announce to make a final decision what platform I would use, but now it&#x27;s a no-brainer, as Apple obviously does not consider me its target audiency, I&#x27;ll just stay on Windows.<p>Funny thing is, as I&#x27;m no longer attached to macOS, I&#x27;m considering switching from iPhone to Android. I&#x27;ll have much better synchronization for Google Chrome and newer iPhones are really weird (similar to Macs, LoL). And, again, no need to pay their crazy prices.

&gt; The list of major changes to Windows in just two years, for free, is impressive:<p>The idea that upgrades could even be qualified with &quot;for free&quot; is such a foreign idea that it gives me pause.

The first issue I found trying to switch from Apple&#x2F;Mac to Linux is the lack of a laptop with good touchpad. Second was the battery, 3rd was the lack of a nice mail app. I&#x27;m still on MBA 2018 (and a mini)

When people refer to the entire suite of Unix-like tools as “bash” I don’t quite know what to make of it. Interpreted uncharitably, it would seem to imply that they think all those nice tools like grep, awk, etc. are all shell builtins, which would be a huge red flag as it would mean they have very little idea of how a typical Unix-like OS works. Interpreted charitably, maybe they do know that those are all separate programs and know what a shell does, but they think the whole experience is called “bash” and not just the shell? Which I guess wouldn’t be as serious. Or maybe they know exactly what’s going on and are just using it as shorthand, sort of like how people use “the White House” to mean the entire US Federal Executive.<p>I honestly am not sure which it is.

~20yrs Windows user and die-hard anti-fanboy of Apple, I&#x27;m almost considering switching to a Mac as the next corpo laptop (if not for unergonomic Mac keyboard layout and different shortcuts for everything, I&#x27;d have done it already).<p>While I&#x27;m happy with my personal Thinkpad, being nearly the only front-end guy on Windows sucks (missing out on various tools, and regularly having to fix slightly broken scripts etc.).<p>But above all, my corpo Dell is a misery (current status: malfunctioning audio drivers hence all audio sounds like 32 kbps crap; issues with external monitors when replugging laptop to the docking station; cherry on a cake is laptop going berserk while presenting at a conference, due to loose RAM; there&#x27;s an issue like this every few weeks lately).<p>Current Dells have much better battery and are half as heavy as the previous generation, but I still wouldn&#x27;t buy a Dell for myself, and sadly those are still the default Windows corpo laptops.

I had to use a Windows laptop for about a week as my MacBook was getting the keyboard replaced.<p>I hated it. It is hard to articulate exactly why I disliked it so much but I would guess it is almost entirely a visual thing. The font rendering is so much better on MacOS. This was Surface Book 2 laptop so the display resolution was not a factor.<p>And I hate the amount of whitespace in Windows 10 user interface. There is a dropdown panel in start bar that shows common settings icons. God I hated that entire minimal design. It felt like something high school student might mockup for the Year 12 computer science project. Two colours, thin drawing that vaguely resembles a visual representation of the task and HUGE whitespace.<p>I was contemplating buying a Lenovo X1 Extreme Thinkpad because everyone raves about their keyboards but after using Windows 10 for a week.. nah.. nope... nyet... na-uh

An operating system with advertisements will never be my first choice.

I use Mac for work (MacBook Pro 2017) and windows for personal projects (HP Envy 2018) and posts like these makes me wonder: are we both using the same Windows? Because the windows that I am exposed to finds the most inconvenient time to install updates, slows down for no apparent reason and, as of late, turns on two keyboard cursors at the same time causing me to type in two different locations of a document at once. Why Windows?! WHY?!?!?

I&#x27;m not sure it makes sense to point to certain hardware flaws as a reason to avoid Macs.<p>These are bad things (especially the keyboard switch issue, which is greatly compounded by the issue of the keyboard being a very heavy-weight repair) but... where&#x27;s the manufacturer without problems?<p>I think what you&#x27;re looking for is a manufacturer with a relatively decent reliability record and a record of &quot;making things right&quot; when they do go wrong. I&#x27;m really not sure of the best way to measure that, though Apple seems to consistently do well on various user satisfaction and reliability surveys.

Everything on the “free updates I’ve gotten” and nearly everything on the “updates coming soon” lists are on MacOS (also free), and most have been for a while.<p>Not bashing Windows, I’ve had a pleasant history with msft, but when almost everything “new and exciting” listed here is old news for MacOS, it kinda dulls the argument.

&quot;Bash on Windows is maturing quickly.&quot; -- Hold my beer. Sorry, maturing quickly isn&#x27;t going to cut it if you&#x27;re a hardcore developer that works off the bash command line.

&gt; I&#x27;ll be honest: it wasn&#x27;t an easy switch at first, but as time went by it&#x27;s become clear it was the right choice.<p>Let&#x27;s stop pretending there&#x27;s a correct OS. We all have different needs and it depends on what you&#x27;re optimizing for.<p>I have a Macbook for work and run Windows 7 on my home desktop with Ubuntu on my home laptop. They all have their benefits and drawbacks.<p>And Windows 10 has been having plenty of problems of its own with recent vulnerabilities and a bug that could break VPN connections.

Off-topic(ish): I didn&#x27;t know about Microsoft UI Fabric until I read this, but found it to be really interesting, huge collection of components, well documented and for Web, iOS and Android. Anyone tried it out?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;fabric#&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;fabric#&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m planning on switching from macOS to Windows 10 in the fall, and could not be more excited. I specced out a pretty powerful workstation: 16 core&#x2F;32 thread AMD Ryzen CPU, 32 GB RAM, 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, and AMD&#x27;s newest graphics card. For the same price, the best MacBook I could get would be the 13in MacBook Pro with a quad-core CPU, 8GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, and integrated graphics. I&#x27;m really excited about the power switching away from macOS gives me. I initially thought about switching to Linux, but I didn&#x27;t want to give up nice things like biometric authentication and real desktop apps (I use Affinity Photo pretty often). Plus, with Samsung Flow, I get some pretty nice integration with my phone. The improvements Microsoft is making to Windows 10 give me a lot of confidence, way more so than Apple, who seems to be entirely focused on the iPad Pro.

I only bootcamp back in once in a while to play games but can&#x27;t help but notice that font rendering still doesn&#x27;t seem to have improved since the early 2000s. Anti-aliasing is all over the place and UWP, websites, installers, Java-anything, winforms all render at seemingly different &#x27;native resolutions&#x27;.

I work as a developer&#x2F;consultant&#x2F;system integrator and I consistently get a hard time for using macs. It’s antiquated thinking that began in the 90s. Usually the folks that are the most tribal about windows have little to no experience with Mac OS. Here’s the kicker- I use macOS and windows about equally. Each has its strong and weak points. I can’t hang who I am as a person on a bunch of bits. Prior to the butterfly keyboard debacle I found Mac hardware to be the best platform to run Windows, after getting my i9 MacBook Pro I am ready to sell it because of that garbage keyboard. Right now I’m looking for a decent cherry mx keyboard that will have the Mac layout and backlit keys. Anyone who knows of such a device please let me know. I would gladly pay 300 bucks for such a keyboard.

I was surprised by &quot;The list of major changes to Windows in just two years, for free&quot;, - impressive. Although er, every single one of them is also on OSX and also has been for the last couple of years.

At a certain point I gave up trying to fix various battery, keyboard and screen issues with my MacBook Pro and just started coding on a cheap netbook with Linux and realised I didn’t really experience much pain (spent a fair amount of time SSH’d into beefy servers, admittedly).<p>When I finally bought a fancy new machine I ended up getting a gaming laptop with a GPU I knew I could do CUDA stuff on. I’ve got one disk with Ubuntu and one with Windows and ultimately spend most of my time in Windows. I still use Cygwin because WSL annoyed me in various ways (mostly I just want Emacs to be able to call command line tools and work).<p>There is nothing to love about Windows, and plenty of aggravations (I’ve been logged into my son’s Microsoft account for months and Microsoft regularly send me screen time reports about myself, because I once tried to set up a network game of Minecraft). But honestly, I work in Emacs and Firefox and actually quite like having access to games. I can’t really imagine ever going back to a Mac. If battery life was better on Linux and GNOME would stop lobotomising itself with every release I imagine I’d drop Windows too, but it’s been so long since I felt genuinely thrilled by an OS.

My workflow (ios native &amp; unity development) is based on extensive use of multiple desktops<p>(using a plugin to get grid style desktop layout) with apps designated to open in their own<p>desktop, or to be available in all (finder, notes, mail, etc). I only use trackpad (with swipes to move between desktops) and no external monitors<p>I was interested to try windows 10 when they&#x27;d finally got to allowing multiple desktops a few years ago. That turned out to be a<p>disappointment though. Windows switches between desktops without any clear visual<p>indication of their relative positioning. You can&#x27;t designate apps to be available on any desktop, so I&#x27;d get a bunch of different instances of explorer on different desktops.<p>Swiping to move between the desktops was not nearly customisable enough either When (if) Microsoft gets multiple desktops to par with the implementation on Mac OS, and they or some other laptop producer manages to make a trackpad that at least comes close to the<p>macbook pro ones, I&#x27;ll consider giving it another go. For now, my feeling is that microsoft still can&#x27;t really get UX right

I was tempted in switching from my 2011 MacBook Pro 13&quot; to a Lenovo T490&#x2F;x390 with Windows. I got a used x230 for the Thinkpad&#x2F;Windows experience but didn&#x27;t like it. Having a double Program Files directory. The messy user directory that is spammed with directories from all kinds of applications. Not knowing where to find a setting in the three options you have. Typing &quot;Update&quot; in the search bar and not seeing a result, only to find out that I need to search for it and then go to the &quot;Apps&quot; tab of the search result. And the popup that my battery was dying every time I booted. Yes I know that already. It all looked messy and overcomplicated.<p>Ended up getting a Mid-2015 MacBook Pro 15&quot; Retina manufactured in 2017 with 14 battery cycles. Paid €900 for it two weeks ago, refurbished. The hardware is still very fast and the Retina screen is more than adequate for backend software development.

I&#x27;m a long time Windows, Linux, and macOS user (I use all 3). However, for productivity, I&#x27;m faster on Windows &amp; Linux than I am on macOS for most tasks - the reason for this is that macOS first-and-foremost treats you like a user, whereas Windows&#x2F;Linux treat you as a power user.

It&#x27;s just a personal preference, I guess, but I use an iMac + a gaming Windows 10 PC daily, and then a Linux laptop occasionally, and to me there is no comparison. The Mac and Linux systems are much preferable to Windows 10. I&#x27;m no fanboy, and generally dislike fanboyism in general. I have qualms with both Apple and Microsoft, and frustrations with Linux sometimes. But when the dust settles, I strongly prefer MacOS and Linux<p>I also think that Windows has worsened over time. Both 7 and 10 have their own pros and cons, but I feel 10 is just worse overall as an experience. There&#x27;s so much unnecessary extra bloat (apps, UI, settings in two different places, annoying notifications) and weird UI mismatches. At least 7 felt mostly internally &quot;consistent&quot;.

I prefer to use Ubuntu for development and Windows+WSL for home&#x2F;gaming. Somehow I don&#x27;t have the need for Mac in my life. If ever there will be iTerm2 style integration with tmux, I will be able to say that there&#x27;s nothing at all that holds me to Mac.

My environment requires mostly access to several Windows Remote Desktop Servers and VDIs.<p>Curiously I use a Mac to access them because the Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac has some niceties such as opening each RDP session in a new Mac Desktop and best of all I can very conveniently navigate from RDP session to RDP session with a Mac hotkey.<p>With Windows Microsoft Remote Desktop the whole RDP session switching experience is pretty cumbersome.<p>So I do all programming and LOB apps use on Windows RDP sessions.<p>On Mac only Internet browsing and RDP session management via Microsoft Remote Desktop.<p>So my iMacs are mostly thin clients.

I need the state of the art hardware so I can .... open a terminal.

Windows-as-a-Service is a terrible idea and it makes me sad to see people embracing one of the largest-scale thefts of control ever. We are so pathetically spoiled by convenience that all companies have to do is wave that around and they can do anything

I just run a Ubuntu in Virtual Box to make Windows 10 go away. It&#x27;s pretty seemless and I can also use tools like Vivaldi native to Win10. There&#x27;s no general need to use Windows specific tools nowadays, IMO.

Been an Apple user for 20 years and the switch came down to the absurd hardware cost of Apple. We have 5 desktops in the house (Large family), we do gaming, graphic design, video and audio production. Easily save $10K on upgrading all of our systems to modern hardware running Windows. The stability and experience of using Apple for graphics, audio and video use to be a big advantage 10 to 15 years ago. Now it&#x27;s the same if not better on Windows.

Just letting ya&#x27;ll know the best version of Windows 10 by miles is called &#x27;LTSB&#x27;. It doesnt come with any shit on it (windows store, xboxlive, cortana etc etc.) MS have also promised It will not receive any updates that change its functionality but <i>will</i> receive security updates, for 10 years. You can only get it if u buy in bulk tho. Or, u can just get it from tpb.. Considering MS are intentionally <i>not</i> selling by far the most user-respecting version of their OS to regular folks, it behooves us to pirate it.