
A month after switching to Macs - jaequery
http://jaequery.com/blog/2013/02/09/a-month-after-switching-to-macs/
======
kjackson2012
I switched over from Windows to Mac hardcore for 3 months as well. I did all
my development on Mac and used Mac tools for everything.

I simply didn't enjoy the change, so I switched back. It's just personal
preference, but I didn't like switching keys, or having to do finger-Twister
in order to get certain things to work. I found that most of the programs were
at best equal to Windows-equivalents, and most were much poorer.

It's just personal preference, I'm not trying to incite a religious war. I can
adequately still use the Mac, and my wife had no such problems switching to
the Mac, but I personally prefer Windows. The one thing I really despise,
though, is Finder. I believe Windows Explorer is clearly superior to Finder in
that sense, but then again, I think Windows 7 Explorer is a downgrade from
Windows XP Explorer, by an order of magnitude.

~~~
panacea
I switched to Mac almost exclusively about a decade ago. I still miss Windows
Explorer. The Finder is a piece of shit. FTFF.

~~~
tr4656
What do you dislike about Finder?

~~~
visarga
No Cut&Paste. Column mode is brain dead and doesn't auto-size columns even
when I have ample screen space. I have to fix the columns by hand. Difficult
to compute the total size of the selected files and folders.

A drawback that I have with Mac OS in general is that in some dialogue boxes
it's impossible to keyboard navigate from OK to Cancel, you have to select by
mouse. At least in the default setting.

------
Xion
Looks like at least half of his alleged Mac benefits actually stem from
ditching Windows and switching to Unix-based OS.

~~~
rschmitty
We went from Windows -> Mac -> Debian/Ubuntu

Most of the time macs "just work" however once you start digging deep and
needing custom stuff (beyond `rails new HelloWorld`) things start to come
apart.

You have to rely on brew/ports or hope someone provided instructions for
compiling on mac. Normally brew or ports do work and their authors do keep
things up to date, but not always.

We've just been down too many rabbit holes when we needed something custom.

On top of that our production machines don't run OSX either so we would have
to keep 2 sets of instructions for making sure all libraries are installed.

Sure there is vagrant, but then you lose (or fight extremely hard to keep)
your ability to debug in the IDE of your choice since it all has to happen
remotely

Life has been so much better running Ubuntu. Here everything "Just works" from
a programming point of view.

Games I still dual boot into Win7 however (tho I did that with OSX anyways
since all games arent supported or you take a performance hit)

~~~
martinced
I'm pretty sure that of the many devs who've switched from Windows to OS X
(it's really fascinating to see how many) we're going to see at one point
quite some switching, like you, to Linux.

Stuff that I can't stand on OS X: no great firewalling. Sure, I can have an
"easy" firewall, but not a great one.

By great I mean that on Linux I can do stuff like: _"Block every single packet
that is not part of an established and only allow user whose user ID is xxx to
contact port 80/443 and only allow user whose user ID is yyyy to connect to
port 22"_.

But to me the biggest showstopper under OS X is that you can't have
simultaneously several graphical sessions. A browser, for example, is
something that begs to be run in its own user account (for example a throwaway
user account or one severly crippled using quota + specific firewall rules
only allowing _that user_ to browse the web and that's it, no login shells,
etc.). Then you can either have that user run it's own graphical session (even
at a different screen size if you want) or have that user run its browser in
the graphical session of another user (not the same safest, but still way more
secure than simply browsing with your main user account -- which has to be the
one most insecure thing most devs are doing).

Linux makes all that super easy and as a developer --and for anyone that is a
bit concerned about security-- it is great.

You can't do that on OS X. There are limits once you want to "get fancy".

And when the exodus shall start, I'm sure quite a lot will realize that Linux
is actually amazing and that they did actually miss a lot.

And I'm no sysadmin: just a dev. But of course it helps when your server are
also running Linux (or another Un _x) and it also helps when you have to talk
to the sysadmin guy (say because your app is ruining its servers' perfs) and
that he sees that you know a tiny bit of Un_ x work ; )

~~~
marios
Regarding the firewall issue - doesn't OS X include OpenBSD's PF ? If it's the
case, then you get great and easy firewalling. Provided you can actually
configure it with $EDITOR + /etc/pf.conf. Having a GUI for PF doesn't make
much sense when you have a rules syntax that is as expressive as PF's. There
may be some edge cases where netfilter can do things that would require a work
around in PF but in my eyes the latter wins when you look at the features +
tooling + configuring package. Also there are some things PF can do that
netfilter can't.

------
kenjackson
_Mac’s apps are just so much better and nicer._

This is one of those things that just varies widely between users. I don't use
IRC (actually is it still popular at all?), so I couldn't comment about mIRC
or Textual.

But I still find VS better than Xcode. OneNote is still the best note taking
app I know of. Word on Windows is better than the Mac version, and still
probably my favorite collab word processor. And there's no Excel equivalent
(it's olap, in-memory, and pivot table support across those two are still w/o
peer).

And if you throw on the browser -- that probably covers 95% of the class of
apps I spend my time in.

~~~
koralatov
Believe it or not, the single Windows application I still miss after almost 7
years of using a Mac is Microsoft Paint. It's laughably basic, but I used it
for so long, and it worked so well for what I needed, that it felt `just
right'. I've yet to find -- and probably never will find -- an ideal
replacement.

~~~
nwh
Sounds like you haven't discovered Pixen [1] yet.

[1]: <http://pixenapp.com/>

------
brianwillis
_No easy way to maximize window and full screen mode weirded me out. On
Windows, I’d just double click on the window title. But on Macs, I had to
carefully hit the green plus button._

I'm a Windows refugee who made the switch in 2006 and I'm very happy with my
Mac, but I still can't wrap my head around the behavior of this button. There
doesn't seem to be any method to its madness. Clicking it consistently results
in the window's size being altered somehow, but I've never really understood
how OS X decides what dimensions to resize to.

~~~
thetabyte
When I switched to Macs, I abandoned the concept of toggling maximization
state altogether. Each window gets a workspace, and four fingers in a
direction takes me back and forth, or shows me all windows. No toggling, no
alt-tabbing, etc. I find this excessively more convenient, but as usual, YMMV.

P.S. I do agree the + button has absolutely inane behavior. I just like the
workspace method more than I ever liked toggling maximization state, moving
windows, and alt-tabbing.

~~~
bane
I kind of feel like this is where OS X is almost at a moment of brilliance,
but hasn't quite reach there yet (and is hampered a bit by legacy
considerations)...on just a single screen, full-screen mode works almost
exactly like you describe and is a joy to use.

------
r0s
My last job was a mac shop, and I got put on a mini doing web development.

I immediately got a keyboard and mouse that was large and comfortable, and
didn't need batteries. Then I remapped some of the more familiar shortcuts on
the keyboard like Delete.

Other than that, I take pride in the fact that I can work productively on any
platform. My boss and co-workers would bitch endlessly if they had to touch a
windows box, and I came to realize it was because they didn't know how to use
it. This was especially salient when certain corporate clients had their own
development environment on a VM for required for us to use.

The major selling point of a PC, for me, is the open hardware ecosystem. If
you're not micro-managing the hardware yourself, than all OEM's are the same
in my eyes. Even great design like apple does is mostly window dressing for
casual users.

------
archagon
For me, aside from Terminal, the biggest productivity boost in OSX is probably
Spaces. I tried a few virtual desktop applications in Windows and all of them
kind of sucked in comparison. I also love using the help search (Cmd+?, I
think) to find menu items in more complex applications. Really miss that
feature in Windows!

------
Zarel
> Basically the problem is, in order to extend your monitor, you need to hook
> them from your mini displayport to the monitor. But Macbook airs only have a
> single mini-displayport and from my research, there aren’t any mini-dp hubs
> as you’d have with usbs (i know some exists but they sell for $300+).

Modern Macs use Thunderbolt instead of Mini-DisplayPort, which Wikipedia says
can be connected to a hub or daisy chained with up to six devices. I can't
find any hubs or daisy-chainable adapters online, though. :/

~~~
huslage
You can daisy-chain two Thunderbolt monitors together (depending on what the
host machine can support).

~~~
jaequery
how do you daisy chain thunderbolt?

~~~
nwh
Just like with Firewire, the screen has both an input and an output. Not
unlike a daisy chain, you just plug one into the other. There's security
implications, but it is fairly efficient.

------
rickyc091
"1. No easy way to maximize window."

\- Of course there's a way. You have to go to System Preferences >> Keyboard
>> Keyboard Shortcuts >> Application Shortcuts >> \+ >> (Application) All
Applications, (Menu Title) Zoom (<http://cl.ly/image/1k462h342I28>)

"2. Sometimes, my window would get minimized and when I cmd+tab back into it,
I don’t see anything."

\- Yep, you have to hold alt/option when you let go of cmd +tab for hidden
windows.

"3. On Windows, I’d just start+e and just start typing to get to any
folders/files on my PC. On Mac, closest I’ve come across was to just locate
finder from cmd+tab, or launch finder via an app called Alfred."

\- Alfred is amazing, but you can also bring up spotlight with cmd + spacebar.

"4. No Zend Studio 5.5. This was almost a deal breaker right on the spot."

\- Can't help you there since I'm a vim user, but it seems like you've found
an IDE you like.

"5. Mac keyboards aren’t too friendly for emacs user. Hitting that option
button for meta is quite an excercise in itself."

\- Also can't help you here since I haven't really used emacs enough, but I'm
pretty sure you can remap the key to the windows counterpart.

\---

For a GitHub app, I recommend you trying out <http://mac.github.com/>. I'm a
fan of SequelPro (free) for MySQL <http://www.sequelpro.com/>

------
msbarnett
The emacs option-as-meta experience is terrible. Luckily, it's easy to change:

    
    
        (setq mac-option-key-is-meta nil)
    
        (setq mac-command-key-is-meta t)
    
        (setq mac-command-modifier 'meta)
    
        (setq mac-option-modifier nil)

~~~
__david__
Actually, those are the old Carbon Emacs settings. The new Cocoa ones are like
this:

    
    
        (setq ns-alternate-modifier 'meta)
        (setq ns-command-modifier 'super)
        (setq ns-control-modifier 'control)
    

Better yet, use the customization interface to configure them: "M-x customize-
group RET ns RET"

~~~
msbarnett
Huh, interestingly the old Carbon settings still seem to function, although
the Cocoa versions certainly look cleaner.

> Better yet, use the customization interface to configure them: "M-x
> customize-group RET ns RET"

Ugh. I can't be the only person that hates the Custom interface with the firey
passion of a thousand suns, can I? Far better to just define things cleanly in
your init.el than to do it all in that obtuse UI and create enormous ;DO NOT
TOUCH custom-set-variable forms.

~~~
__david__
I actually like the customize interface. That's not to say it couldn't be
better. Something about it is very..... ugly. I think native widgets would go
a long way to making it look like someone other than a programmer designed it.
That being said, it fits the Emacs cross platform philosophy and it's a
uniform way to look at settings, change them and get help on them and save
them in your .emacs.

At some point I went and changed all my random "setq"s in my .emacs (built up
over 10 or so years) to the equivalent customize versions and as a result was
able to speed up my Emacs boot time by a significant amount (like 8ish seconds
down to 2ish). The nice thing about customized variables is that you don't
have to load in a mode to set it's variables (loading a bunch of modes during
boot was what the slow part was).

------
ditados
The OP obviously never read this: <http://the.taoofmac.com/space/HOWTO/Switch>

(Covers all his gripes and a few more - the bit about Alt-Tab and some of the
Quicksilver tips are amazing)

------
CD1212
I have found there to be positives of each although I love my mac for 99.9% of
daily usage.

The straw that broke the camel's back in my switch was Rails development,
which I just found impossible on windows. I had a mess of msys, msysgit,
cygwin, and the default ruby installed which meant a simple bundle install
took more than 3 mins.

You have to be open minded when switching to be able to fully appreciate the
differences.

~~~
chaz
This was my change agent, too. I could finally stop diagnosing install issues
and focus on development. Cygwin was great for me from ~2003-2006, but with
Intel chips + VMware or Parallels, I could get the right development and not
give up Windows Excel or Windows Outlook (even today, the Mac versions of
those both pale in comparison), which were still essential for me.

------
superuser2
The start button + app name equivalent is Cmd-Space, which opens the spotlight
bar in the upper right had corner. I launch Chrome with Cmd-Space-c-h-enter.

~~~
angkec
Sometimes I know exactly what app I wanted to launch, I could envision its app
logo, the exact look of the app itself, but I would have a hard time
remembering what the app is called. Is it called digital something or picture
something then after some agonizing minutes trying to fuzzy match the app name
in Spotlight I'll have to dig through the application folder and find the app
I was looking is called ImageCapture. Anyone else have this problem?

~~~
fredsted
You could add the Applications folder to the dock.
<http://i.imgur.com/qb7DB7u.jpg>

------
alimoeeny
If I wanted to choose one app that I miss from Windows, it is Visual Studio,
XCode even the most recent version 4.5? does not even come close.

------
adrianmn
You should check out Alfred for quickly launching apps and many other useful
things. Probably the most used app by many mac users.

~~~
dublinben
The windows equivalent is Launchy. It's quite excellent.

------
magicmarc
You can also do cmd-tab and hold alt before letting go of the cmd. Let go of
alt last and the minimised window comes back.

------
idont
Honestly Apple and Windows are really complementary. All the weak points of
one are the strongness of the other. I dream to see the products that a love
affair between these 2 companies would produce.

------
bane
I had a 2006 MBP that I loathed, shitty fragile hardware, every piece of
software I used on it was somehow inferior to what I'd been using in Windows-
land, probably one of the worst $3000 consumer electronics purchases I've ever
made. I went Windows more or less since then and was pretty happy with
whatever I had since then.

A few months ago my work got me a MBPr (much to my chagrin at the time)
running Mountain Lion, and you know what? It ain't bad. My boss insisted that
I give it a shot for a few months and if I still didn't like it they'd call up
dell and get me whatever I wanted there.

Most of the initial problems I patiently chalked up to re-familiarizing myself
with the OS, especially in the ways it's subtly changed since 2006.

Off the top of my head

The good: I don't think I can get a better system for spinning up 2 or 3
simultaneous VMs eating 3-4 gig of RAM a piece and having the whole system
still run blindingly fast.

CMD+Space to find stuff works pretty brilliantly most of the time.

Searching for help is usually more helpful than I was expecting. I've almost
always gotten help from the OS in clever and useful ways. The control panel
search for example, is far superior to Windows.

When SSDs were first introduced I was skeptical, expensive and the space
seemed far to small to be productive. I still wish I had about a TB of space
like my old Dell had, but I'm just a bit more judicious about what I jam on
there. SSDs were definitely the right way to go. I feel like I'm working on a
$300,000 piece of server equipment.

The high DPI, bright screen is really nice to look at all day. I don't really
think non-retina art looks like shit the way lots of pundits make it out to
be, and overall looking at stuff is great.

There's some cool OS X only stuff out there where there's not really a good
Windows variant. My favorite has to be Cathode. But there's lots of
interesting looking writing and creativity software as well.

The trackpad really is that good. The barely functional PoS on my 2006 MBP had
me tricked that any old trackpad on any old laptop was more or less the same.
But I actually prefer to use the trackpad on my MBPr to a mouse. It's really
more a size than a texture thing, but there's some slick software backing it
up, movements are precise and the cursor goes more or less where I want it.
Gestures are cool even if I only use 3 or 4 of them and they function _much_
better than their Windows equivalents. I really do like two finger scrolling
much better.

Multiple desktops work really well. I keep work stuff on one desktop, and
personal/break stuff on another and fine transitioning really easy and helpful
in compartmentalizing my day.

Notifications are better than in Windows. I'm actually usually pleased to
receive a notification in OS X, whereas in Windows it seems like such an
annoyance. Icons in the toolbar jumping up and down is also helpful. I don't
autohide or zoom my toolbar, but I like it in general.

The physical hardware is awesome. It slips away into my backback so nicely I
have to double check that it's actually in there.

A decent number of connectors for peripherals.

It does relatively smart things when connecting up extra monitors.

The keyboard is quiet, but really comfortable to type on.

The bad: I spend 90% of my time in terminal window or a web browser, things
for which most of the good things above are entirely superfluous. Plus Chrome
has some annoying hard edges that make it work worse in OS X than in Windows.
I could literally get along just fine with my Android tablet and a keyboard
for what I spend almost all day doing.

Window management is in general, worse than in Windows. Complaints include:
tiny, over precise click targets, buttons on the top of windows which have
unpredictable behavior, closing all open windows doesn't close the app
(leaving zombie apps open and pissing me off 6 or 7 times a day), the menu bar
is detached from the app window and with the poor maximization behavior makes
knowing what application I'm in a confusing mess that bits me at least 3 times
a day, unbelievably small and frigidity scroll bar target. Coming from
windows, I never really got why Fitt's law was such a big deal to Mac users,
now banging around this clumsy environment I finally get it. It's almost
impossible to accurately and easily move things about your workspace. Better
to just open the app and let it be and then get to work and just deal with
whatever the window is doing.

Mouses suck in OS X. After some serious consideration I think it's that the OS
has been subtly optimized for the trackpad. But it's subtly an inferior
experience to mousing about in Windows (while the inverse is also true,
Trackpads are inferior in Windows). Acceleration curve is never quite right,
mouse wheels track in less predictable ways, and for legacy reasons right
mouse button is very much an afterthought.

I find I'm often surprised at what _isn't_ in the OS and results in getting
nickle and dimed by the ecosystem to "complete the OS". Really no basic paint
program?

Why, oh why, do I have to play finger twister all day with keyboard shortcuts?
Really? Some of this shit is unbelievable. CMD+CTRL+SHIFT+4, Space, click and
yay! I've taken a screenshot of a window! You have got to be kidding me. Far
far too much is buried in the OS, and undiscoverable, behind layers of program
altering button combinations...it's so bad that even lists of common shortcuts
don't work half the time!

Office on windows is a hair better. There's lots of nice touches in Office, so
it's not punishment to use it. But the Ribbon/menus just work better in
Windows...no surprise.

It's more unstable that Windows (at least since XP). Sorry, it just is. I have
to reboot my Mac at least twice a week and all I really do on it is use
Chrome, terminal, ssh and run a few VMs. My creaky 5 year old home machine
running 7 hasn't been rebooted in a couple months and generally doesn't flake
out. I've heard this is a recent Mountain Lionish issue from the rest of the
folks in my shop, but still.

The ugly: Finder is an absolute abortion of a file management tool. I could go
on for pages and pages, but virtually every single thing in Finder is done
wrong. From the default behavior for Enter to just simply knowing where the
fuck you are in the file system. Explorer is light years better. I feel like
I'm constantly stuck in an emulator showing me the worst of early 1990s file
management tools from an Amiga.

Multi-monitor support is just...broken. It feels like such an afterthought,
and other than turning things on and moving windows around smartly, almost
every other activity after that feels subtly broken. It's hard to explain, but
the best and most notable example is Mountain lions full-screen mode...which
works brilliantly on the laptop by itself, but fails entirely in multi-monitor
mode. This something windows hasn't had a problem with for something nearing
20 years. It's not that hard. It's also in multi-monitor mode that the failure
of ideas that the menubar is starts to become rapidly apparent. Having to pad
on my trackpad across two monitors to click a menu, then pad all they way back
to where I was is a distracting waste of my time.

There's an uncountable number of ways to switch between applications and
programs, yet none of them are as simple or reliable as windows. cmd-tab
switches programs, but I spend half my day hunting around for the window I
thought I had open, only for it to be minimized or behind another window.
Moving to the toolbar means taking my hands off the keyboard, and on and on
and on. CMD+` doesn't work in every application reliably.

I have _yet_ to conceive of even the slightest use for the Dashboard.

I have other, smaller praises and gripes, but none of them rise to the level
of daily notice like the above do. But overall, I feel generally happy in my
computing experience during my work day. I don't feel like I'm in a penalty
box when I fire up my work laptop and being able to my work without too much
fuss is decent.

Some of the nice things in the OS make me feel like windows is a bit clunky in
appearance when I go back to my home machine. OS X overall definitely _feels_
smoother in most respects. Even simple things, like a built in SSH client are
huge.

But once I adjust back to Windows, and realize I can stop fighting with basic
file management issues and other OS X complaints I have, I find I still
personally prefer Windows for my personal use. Most of the stuff I want to do
in my off-time is Windows only (or the Windows version is simply better), and
so that's that. I just don't see me buying a Mac for personal use as none of
the things that are offered by the software ecosystem appeal to me in a
holistic way. There are spotlight of brilliance that's for sure, but on the
whole I still think Windows offers a better, more diversified and more vibrant
ecosystem overall.

~~~
jaequery
almost exactly like my experience, I agree with most of the things you pointed
out. my transition only happened after i learned to accept that mac indeed has
a lot of pitfalls, only then was i able to appreciate the other things mac had
to offer.

~~~
bane
yeah, your experience and mine sound very similar.

I'm actually pretty happy using it, but I've had to get two notions out of my
head.

1) Problems with OS X doesn't mean it sucks. I could make a similar list of
complaints about Windows. Likewise things that OS X does better does not mean
Windows sucks.

2) Apple is not the pinnacle of design and usability, they're just a company.
It's just software. Apple is just as confused and misguided as anybody else is
in figuring out how to make perfect software.

In the end, I'm going to spend the majority of my day either way in a console
and a browser (and hey, I'm not paying for it, my company is). I can just
simply adapt a little and get over myself and get productive.

