
Bruce Eckel on why he's moving back to Windows from Mac - johndcook
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=350864
======
mikeash
> Having “fn,” “control,” “alt,” “option,” “command,” and whatever the last
> one is, I call it “flower” but I think in the past it might have been open-
> apple

How did this fellow spend _six years_ using a Mac without ever realizing that
"command" is that flower-looking thing? And, of course, "alt" and "option" are
the same thing.

Sounds like he never really adjusted to the Mac and remained a Windows user at
heart, and is now going back to what he knows. Nothing wrong with that! And he
presents it as "what I had trouble with", not "what's wrong with the Mac",
which is commendable.

~~~
MBCook
> And he presents it as "what I had trouble with", not "what's wrong with the
> Mac", which is commendable.

I couldn't agree more. Whenever I see a title like this my immediate thought
is "here we go again", but I clicked through anyway and was pleasantly
surprised.

I've never used Windows 8 (or 7/Vista for more than a few minutes), but his
criticisms seemed well considered. Macs can be more expensive for the same
amount of CPU. I expected he was going to be talking about the Mac Pros (which
are based on what, 2010 hardware?) so I was a little surprised to see he was
talking about laptops.

The other thing that caught my attention was his note about trackpads. It
seems like every review I read about a non-Mac laptop (which, to be fair,
doesn't happen much) seems to mention how they are either terrible or just OK.
Considering how important the trackpad is on a laptop, it always surprises me
that this seems to continue to be an issue.

I remember years ago when Macs had 3" trackpads and PCs still had tiny 2"
models. My MacBook Pro has a 5" pad, but I've seen 17" desktop replacement
laptops with 3" pads.

Worse was that while Macs gained two finger scrolling (which was a great step
up), may PCs gained "scroll areas", so that you'd lose a large fraction of the
trackpad. The fact that part of it was horizontal scrolling (which is far less
common) was even worse.

Are trackpads in the non-Mac world really that far behind, or is it just
selection bias where the few laptop reviews I read only mention the trackpad
_because_ it's bad and the rest don't even discuss it.

~~~
Joeri
Windows laptop trackpads are indeed universally horrible. I've never come
across a non-mac laptop i could use all day without an external mouse. Apple
kust have some jealously guarded patents on trackpad tech.

~~~
phaus
Trackpads are universally horrible even on Apple computers. Apple's are far
superior to Windows trackpads, but nothing can make using a trackpad a
pleasant experience for me.

------
rufugee
Ha...good luck. I tired switching my wife and daughters back to Windows after
8 came out. They lasted around six weeks before switching back to Ubuntu. I
used it quite a bit during this time as well. The interface is so heavily
designed for a tablet, it ends up feeling very forced and clunky as a desktop.
Additionally, in that six week period, there were at least three times where I
would reboot the machine and get the dreaded "Preparing Automatic Repair"
endless loop of death, resulting in a re-install.

I really loved certain things about it...well, at least the design of certain
things. For example, the process monitor you accessed via ctrl+alt+delete was
beautiful and had some very nice features including cumulative resource usage
per app which I found very exciting. _However_ , I quickly found that most of
your running apps rarely showed in this panel. Combine this with the fact that
when a process went awry and you wanted to kill it, 95% of the time the
process monitor _wouldn't come up at all_ , it was next to useless. (I'll
mention here that this OS is the first Windows I've had since 98 which
wouldn't give you access to kill a process even with the system under heavy
load, unless it was completely frozen).

Windows 8 not so bad? Maybe in your experience, but in mine, it was a stinking
pile of crap. If Skyrim and certain other games would run reliably on Linux,
I'd be completely done with Windows. Come to think of it, games have been the
only reason I've kept Windows around for the past decade and it was the driver
to give 8 another shot (so my daughter wouldn't have to reboot to get to a few
of her favorite games). I suspect various games and Office will keep a lot of
folks on the platform, but there are MUCH better experiences to be had. I've
tried various Windows, OS X, and various *nixs, and Linux just seems to suit
my family (and me personally) the best. I couldn't say this five years ago (at
least for my wife and kids), but I'm happy that I can now.

~~~
hexonexxon
Ubuntu for desktop is most likely going to disappear. Seems they are moving to
tablets and android clones.

As for gaming they are now starting to release linux versions, well at least
Steam and Blizzard are.

~~~
w1ntermute
As long as you have the ability to install other DEs, like Xfce, "Ubuntu for
desktop" will never disappear. That's the difference between Linux and locked
down operating systems like Mac OS X.

I've never liked Unity, but that's totally irrelevant to me. I can just keep
using Xfce (or any of a dozen other WMs/DEs) with Ubuntu.

------
speg
As a developer I don't think I could go back. Unless I was working on a
Windows stack. Knowing you have *nix under the hood is just too comforting.

~~~
falcolas
Except... it's not '*nix' as everyone knows it (or more importantly as
deployed in production). Even while working on a mac I do all of my linux
development on a VM, because the differences are always such a stumbling block
for me. Half the utilities do not support long args, no real repos (resulting
in broken or missing tools), old versions of utilities... ugh.

I still use one, but I'm seriously considering dual booting centos on the
hardware.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Mac OS X is Unix. Real Unix. Not Linux.

~~~
65a
Trademark UNIX is like an expensive country club for vendor-proprietary
"extensions" of BSD & SysV sensibilities. I'm suprised Apple wasn't a member
sooner!

~~~
Turing_Machine
Expensive? Not at all.

<http://www.opensource.apple.com/>

They've been (real) Unix since OS X first came out, actually.

------
Samuel_Michon
_“Ultimately I needed to use Word, the Windows version, for page layout,
indexing, etc. Nothing else does the job (I’ve tried, and keep trying the
alternatives). The waterfall model of “first finish the book with one program,
then do layout with a different program” just doesn’t work”_

The entire publishing industry would beg to differ. While MS Word (but
preferably InCopy) is fine for copy, you won’t use it to lay out a cookbook
and directly send it to a printer. If you supply a Word file to a printer,
they will likely convert it to an InDesign file and charge you for it.

Source: I publish books for a living and have been since 1996.

 _“an equivalent-horsepower Mac is 3 times the cost of a Windows 8 machine”_

I thought OP was trolling, until I read the following passage:

 _“I also wanted something with at least 4 cores, in order to do more
concurrency programming experiments with languages like Scala and Go.”_

Not exactly typical use, but if the highest clock frequency and cores is what
the author wants, then sure, he can get more bang for his buck with a Windows
box than Apple’s offerings. Macs are made for small size, low weight, and
power preservation.

Many consumers won’t look at just clock frequency or the number of cores to
make their purchasing decision. I bought a new notebook 3 months a go, a
MacBook Air. It has a 512GB SSD, a fast CPU, and a decent GPU. I mainly use it
for image and video editing, but because of Apple’s choices, I get battery use
of 6-8 hours, while it’s not much larger than my tablet. That’s what I care
about. Ten years a go, to do the same work, I had to lug around a notebook
that weighed twice as much and had half as much battery life. With many
Windows notebooks, that’s still the case.

------
sharms
I know HN is a very pro Apple crowd, but I wanted to share that I have had a
very similar experience. Windows 8 is actually incredibly solid, fast, and has
a ton of great tools available.

SSH on Windows works just as well as OS X, and sleep / resume etc is a solved
problem, with the added bonus that you can run any game that comes out. For a
developer who wants to focus on getting things done, it isn't that Windows 8
is so much more compelling than OS X, but the price and compatibility make it
worth using.

------
Chris911
Switched from Windows 8 (early builds) to OSX a few months ago and at the
moment I don't see myself even going back to Windows for development. I'm
realizing how much I missed the command-line from my Ubuntu days and how much
you can develop in pretty much any language quite easily on a mac. It's the
perfect development machine.

------
eridius
It sounds like he never really embraced the Mac to begin with. And some of the
stuff he sounds is just plain strange:

> But in hindsight I realize there are a lot of things that never felt quite
> natural. [...] And more sophisticated things like any software installation
> that doesn’t come as a Mac installer.

Is he really saying that software that doesn't come packaged as an installer
is unnatural? Because the ability to simply drag & drop one "file" to install
(or delete) an application is generally considered a feature of OS X (and the
old Mac OS), not a negative.

------
pswenson
Bizarre. He used a mac for 6 years and didn't know about cmd-` to switch
windows within the same app?

Finder does suck compared to Windows Explorer (use Pathfinder). No snap
behavior for windows (use BetterTouch). Can't think of anything else to like
about windows really.

The command line is terrible on Windows. Even with cygwin, the terminal is
awful. Copy/Paste is awkward. Resize the window and the text doesn't follow.
No clear terminal keyboard shortcut. No searching in the console.

Locked files everywhere, makes dev difficult.

Installing apps is much more painful on windows. The apps spread throughout
the system, I love on a mac how you can just drag in an app and run it. No 5
mins to install. Uninstalling is just deleting the app, no horrible uninstall
process.

rm -rf type functionality must take 10x as long on windows.

No virus issues on mac.

------
ratsbane
I'm surprised he's not more of a command-line guy. So many things I would hate
to do without: vim, grep, ssh, rsync, git, tab completion, cron, .... I
suppose you could install all of those and a lot more on Windows but what a
lot of bother.

------
misnome
Interesting. I have a lot of respect for Bruce Eckel, and it's a well
considered article.

I'm a pretty avid mac user, and OSX has treated me well since I switched, but
I fully support using the best tool for the job - and it seems that is
windows, in his case.

------
ChuckMcM
Reminds me of the famous line from Steve Martin, "Those French, they have
their own word for _everything_!"

I expect Bruce will get a lot of page views, this sort of story pulls them
out, but his story is not very compelling. Basically he liked the Windows
experience better before and he has gone back to it. I didn't see a lot of
effort to figure out "meme" for MacOS (which is fine I didn't either until
circumstances made it my only laptop) and so returning to something more
familiar removes friction in his life. Good for him. But it doesn't inform on
the different choices between MacOS and Windows, only his comfort level with
them.

------
pswenson
Cost - yes. Windows laptops cost much less. But they suck much more. I guess
if you don't value the touchpad, mag safe, retina, display, thin-ness, long
lasting battery, and the aesthetics that much... I mean I use my computer a
lot, it's my career. Easily worth an extra grand every 3 years to have the
best.

------
benatkin
Here's a review on Amazon for a laptop with the same make and model as the one
he got from Costco. It's better than the three stars on Costco.
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B008482UHG>

------
moogly
What's weirdest is the Windows "bit rot" claim, that they finally fixed not
having to reboot once every so often by Windows 7. In my experience that was
fixed almost 14 years ago with Windows 2000.

------
ExpiredLink
Artima is still alive? The owner let the site rot for a long time.

------
camus
I think that what the main argument is, when one gets a Windowd laptop ,one
can get something really powerfull and cheap. Macs are not that powerfull and
not cheap at all. I bought my Mac a few years ago, I could have bought a x2
more powerfull Windows laptop at the same price. But i must say ( dont know if
it is still the case though) Apple has a better customer service than any
other computer brand out there. My keyboard went out of order 4 years after I
purchased my laptop ( it was my fault, i dropped it) , and Apple replaced it
for free.

------
yoster
I like both operating systems. iCloud on all my Apple devices makes life
easier. On the other hand, my Windows 7 and Xbox 360 have no type of
integration, but can run certain programs a lot better. They both have their
perks, and I will still use both types.

------
quattrofan
Agree with most of this article, had a Macbook Pro forced on me by a company a
few years ago, I tried really hard to switch but ultimately put Windows on it
and dual-booted.

I dont agree about Win8, its a disaster of epic proportions, staying with Win7
until Win9. I hear 8.1 is much of the same since Ballmer has his head up his
ass.

