
Guide to Leaving your Mac - gigasquid
http://gigasquidsoftware.com/blog/2013/12/26/guide-to-leaving-your-mac-laptop/
======
jmduke
I've got an iPhone, iPad, and MBA. In an abstract sense -- that is, all other
things equal -- I'd like to swap them out for non-Apple products. I dislike
Apple's software, their entire "magic/creative/yadda-yadda-yadda" branding,
and of course their price tag.

But the app ecosystem and hardware to me seem absolutely incomparable. I can't
see myself ever switching my phone or tablet because it seems as though iOS
apps are just unapproachably better than Android counterparts -- and there
aren't any laptops as functional and, yes, straight-up pretty as the MacBook
Air.

(The reason the author cited for switching from Apple was two failed laptops.
For what it's worth, my previous laptop -- a Dell -- broke every six months or
so. [I had four-year insurance, thankfully, and replaced it once the insurance
ran out.]

~~~
wyager
I would ditch Apple in a heartbeat if I felt that anyone could provide a
similar hardware experience. I'm not just talking about CPU/RAM/Graphics card
(yes, I know I can get a slightly better deal with non-Apple hardware), but
everything else as well. Apple displays are beautiful and completely free of
defects, Apple trackpads are incredible, the computers are ridiculously thin
(my new ThinkPad is twice as thick as my MBP), the battery life is incredible
(my early 2013 MBP gets 5-6 hours, new MBPs get 10-12 hours), etc. The
hardware is just great. I don't understand why no one else can make hardware
like this.

Re. failed laptops: I had to take my last MBP in for repair something like 8
times in 6 months. Totally unacceptable. Most of the time it was for something
they botched during the last repair. However, Apple gave me store credit for
the purchase price of the laptop and then some, so I'm happy. I do beat the
shit out of my laptops, so I'm sure someone who was more gentle would have
better luck.

~~~
usaphp
> I would ditch Apple in a heartbeat...

Why would you ditch it in a heartbeat if you think that:

\- Apple displays are beautiful and completely free of defects

\- Apple trackpads are incredible

\- Apple computers are ridiculously thin

\- The battery life is incredible

\- The hardware is just great

\---

It's like saying I would ditch my wife in a heartbeat, but her face is super
pretty, her body is perfect and her heart is a heart of angel...but I would
still ditch her in a heartbeat...

~~~
skj
Maybe you and your wife have fundamental differences in beliefs about how
people should live their lives?

------
jkelsey
The author was having hardware problems, so he switched his software? There's
nothing more open about Dell's hardware than Apple's and just because Dell
offers a laptop with Linux does that mean you're now in some sort of open-
source utopia where the open-source community comes together to solve every
single computer problem that users encounter.

Don't get me wrong, I think Linux is great and there's tons of awesome open-
source projects, but I don't think Ubuntu is one of them. If you've been
following Canonical's behavior with Ubuntu over the past few years, you should
be aware of what I'm talking about. And Dell? Well, their XPS laptops do seem
to be of higher quality than what most of the PC industry offers, but support?
I'm sorry, but I feel much more confidence in the Genius Bar.

Apple's not perfect, but the rest of the latop manufacturers are a joke.

~~~
tujv
I was hoping for a comparison between competing platforms and how they stack
up against iOS OSX.

But this article is free software evangelism ("I set myself free") not a
serious guide to moving away from Apple.

~~~
jkelsey
> But this article is free software evangelism ("I set myself free") [...]

That is what is so irritating about this type of rhetoric; _I switched from OS
X to Ubuntu and now I 'm free!_ Well, no, you just switched from one corporate
controlled Operating System to another. Ubuntu may be open-source, but it's
hardly free. Biggest example: You have to opt-out of Canonical's desktop
search results sharing relationship with Amazon. At least when I look for
files on a Mac, I don't get ads in my search results. If you like Ubuntu over
OS X, then that's fine, but please don't say it's because of "freedom".

If people are going to write about their holier-than-thou articles about how
they switched to free software, they better be running something like
Trisequel Linux on a Gluglug Laptop
([http://www.fsf.org/news/gluglug-x60-laptop-now-certified-
to-...](http://www.fsf.org/news/gluglug-x60-laptop-now-certified-to-respect-
your-freedom)) or perhaps they should think about something else to write
about.

~~~
smacktoward
_> I switched from OS X to Ubuntu and now I'm free! Well, no, you just
switched from one corporate controlled Operating System to another._

You're joking, right? Please tell me you're joking. Because there is an
obvious difference between the two that you're eliding: Ubuntu is forkable,
and OS X is not.

In other words, Canonical only "controls" Ubuntu in the sense that a community
of users and developers trust their stewardship of it. If they squander that
trust, that community can pick up Ubuntu and take it wherever they prefer it
to go.

This is not a theoretical freedom; people exercise it all the time. Look at
the diaspora from MySQL to products like MariaDB, for example, or the split
from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. These are both cases where the communities
around the products decided that the company stewarding those products
(Oracle, in both cases, as it happens) was failing in that role. So new
stewards stepped forward, and the communities followed them.

If you feel that Canonical's decision to include online search results in the
Unity dash is a deal-breaker for you, you are free to vote with your feet in
the same way. You could use Linux Mint, for example, which is basically Ubuntu
without Unity.

Here is how "corporate controlled" Ubuntu is -- so much so that a third party
is free to pick it up, strip out some features, and re-distribute it to users
who don't want those features! And those users are free to switch over to it,
if they wish; Canonical won't stop you. They _couldn 't_ stop you, even if
they wanted to. Which is kind of the point.

Now imagine what would happen to someone who decided that OS X would be better
if (say) Chrome were the default browser, and released their own re-spin of it
where that is the case. The flaws in your comparison become evident.

 _> If people are going to write about their holier-than-thou articles about
how they switched to free software, they better be running something like
Trisequel Linux on a Gluglug Laptop or perhaps they should think about
something else to write about._

So either you are 100% Pure, or you are 100% Impure. This would come as news
to (among others) the makers of Ivory soap, who famously advertised it for
decades as "99 44/100% Pure." I could understand an argument that this degree
of purity doesn't make it better or worse than other soap products. What I
could _not_ understand would be an argument that unless it is 100% pure, it is
_not soap._

~~~
jkelsey
False premise: something being forkable does not make it free. Perhaps the
derivative is free, but this article wasn't about running the derivative, was
it?

Also, your last paragraph pretty much backs up my original point: if you're
going to stand on your high horse of software-freedom and write about how
great it is, you better go all in. That Dell is running proprietary software;
at the firmware level in the least, but probably with binary blob drivers. Oh,
and the article doesn't mention (nor you) about how you have to opt-out of
third party sharing of your desktop search results with Amazon! __That 's not
freedom respecting __, so please don 't try to divert attention away from
these very valid points with arguments about how something is forkable.

~~~
runjake
Ubuntu is (almost all parts anyway) free in exactly the way the Free Software
Foundation defines the word. Ubuntu is created by a community and overseen by
a corporation, but you can take the Ubuntu source and do what you want with it
within the terms of Free Software. You cannot do this with OS X.

------
eddieroger
Every time I consider ditching my MacBook for a Linux machine, I come back to
wondering why I'd want to do that at all. If it's to appease my command-line-
junky insides, I can open up Terminal (or iTerm 2) and have instant UNIX. If
it's to run some LAMP-esque stack, I can fire up homebrew and have everything
I want. And if I don't really want to deal with the inner-workings of a
machine, I can spend time in Aqua and have access to some of the best designed
software in the game. Lastly, it plays with my ecosystem of gadgets - my
iPhone and iPad are first class citizens, and thanks to iCloud and quality
developers, things work seamlessly between all my tech, including my AppleTV
through mirroring or extended display in Mavericks. I realize that this last
bit makes me not the target audience for the article anymore, but it's worth
saying.

The author states his only reason for leaving is failed hardware. I've had
nothing but great experiences with Apple's hardware, and in the few rare
exceptions, Apple has gone above and beyond to make the situation right. Fixes
after warranty period, quick turnaround, etc, have kept my business with them.

------
w1ntermute
At least there's the option of leaving Macs for other brands. As a ThinkPad
user, I'm totally fucked because of Lenovo's decision to get rid of the
physical TrackPoint buttons[0]. First they got rid of the traditional keyboard
in favor an Apple-style chiclet keyboard (which, after using both extensively,
is a severe downgrade from the traditional ThinkPad keyboard). Now they're
getting rid of the TrackPoint buttons. Next is going to be the TrackPoint, all
in the name of copying Apple. There's no one else making a proper TrackPoint
(and HP and Dell are ditching what they did have), and using a trackpad is so
slow. It's sad to see Lenovo take a great laptop line and turn it into an
Apple clone.

0:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXa0XzNvuZU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXa0XzNvuZU)

~~~
limeblack
Have you actually tried and compared the physical buttons to the new ones?

I have a slightly older Thinkpad with the physical buttons. I am trying to
decide if I should buy one of the T530 from last year's models or just get the
newer version.

~~~
w1ntermute
> Have you actually tried and compared the physical buttons to the new ones?

No, not yet. However, I'm not holding out much hope, considering that the
change to the chiclet keyboard was also proclaimed as being an "improvement",
when in reality it was not. Also, as a Linux user, having to configure the
trackpad-based buttons is definitely going to introduce driver headaches,
something else that I have been able to avoid so far by sticking to the
TrackPoint.

~~~
limeblack
I am holding out hope.

I have used the 4 trackpoints on the market. I own an HP Elitebook and the
trackpoints aren't as nice as the ones on the Thinkpads, but are the closest I
have found to the Thinkpad pointing sticks. If I have to leave Thinkpad/Lenovo
I might go to an Elitebook. HP quality control is terrible, but it might be
the only option if the new buttons are really that bad. HP at least has
buttons.

They should have kept the mousepad as an option.

Charge extra for it, just don't blatantly remove it. Maybe either Lenovo or
someone else entirely different will figure out a way to install the old
keyboards on the new computers.

~~~
w1ntermute
As mentioned in the video I linked, I've got an extended warranty for my X1
Carbon, so I will just hold out and see what happens. Maybe I'll buy a couple
of T420s's (the last of the T line with the proper keyboard) and make them run
for another 5 or 6 years after that. I definitely don't need the latest
hardware, given the sort of dev I'm doing on my laptop.

------
zacinbusiness
I really want to like Linux. I've spent hours, here and there, hacking away
with various distributions of Linux and on different hardware (I was part of
the group that finally got CompizFusion working on the HP Mininote 2133). But
when it comes down to it I don't want to have to be elbow deep in source code
just to fix a sound card problem or similar.

I love Linux as an idea, and that it's free has done wonders for the world as
far as opening access to the internet and its knowledge. But I just don't see
it as a viable day-to-day OS __for me __.

At the same time, I have and will continue to tinker around with Linux (I
learned about Lua because of Conky!) because I don't think that there's any
harm in learning new things. And I've found that I learn best by breaking
things and then trying to fix what I broke - and that's a nearly weekly
experience for me when I try to use anything but Unbuntu.

------
msluyter
The article doesn't address what for me are the major sticking points: iTunes
and iPhoto. I have years of music & photos stored in both, and to switch to
linux I'd need an relatively painless migration strategy. Anyone have any
suggestions?

~~~
sliverstorm
For iTunes, Google Music provided a pretty darn seamless transition. You
download their client software, it scans your iTunes library, and registers
the songs you have with Google Play. Songs it doesn't recognize, it uploads.

This is a double-feature because Google Music is both platform-agnostic, and
integrates with Android.

Google Music itself is not necessarily the most amazing user experience, and
someone with a bajillion music files may be upset with it, but for me the high
quality (all purchased & "recognized" music is 320kbps) and general platform-
and client-agnostic nature trumps music management "power".

------
busterarm
I have a mid-2011 Mac Mini and for a while considered an rMBP almost
necessary. Instead of shelling out for one, I stuck a $40 SSD in a Lenovo
x100e I had sitting around and installed Arch on it (after a decade or so of
being a Slackware user). Best computing decision I ever made.

For one, I prefer the smaller form factor, trackpoint and much superior
keyboard (even if it's still chiclet). Secondly, I hardly ever use X. I get so
much more work done on this laptop than I can on any other computer and it's
relatively distraction-free (I added a couple roguelikes and dwarf fortress).
Just log in and tmux is ready to go with what I need to start working.

The one downside is that, on the occasions that I do use X, the fonts aren't
very good. I wouldn't even begin to know how to approach making typography
more Mac-like, but I'm okay with that. I spend 99% of my time in the console.

In fact, going forward I see myself using a VPS or running a dedicated server
somewhere and then it doesn't really matter what laptop I use.

~~~
astrodust
That's the problem. Apple's typography is well ahead of anything in the Linux
world, and even Linux is still ahead of what Windows has.

The "Retina" screens make this even harder to match.

~~~
busterarm
For sure, but I'm not such a typography nerd that what's on Linux is
unacceptable to me. Ultimately I'm going to get my work done however is most
efficient; that just tends to be Linux. My Mac (which I'm using now) is great
for web browsing and reading articles. I'd sooner use my Kindle for that than
my Linux laptop though and often I do.

Once Apple makes a retina iPad around 10 inches and lets me use my own USB
keyboard, I'll never use anything else. If that iPad Pro rumor pans out, it'd
better have USB.

~~~
astrodust
I've been impressed that typography on Linux isn't as bad as Windows, but it's
still got a long way to go to measure up to Apple. It's not just clarity and
accuracy of the typefaces themselves, but subtle details like how the
ligatures (things like how "fi" and "ff" are rendered) are properly applied.

Typography is one of those things that, once you've seen it, you can't un-see
it. You can only try to not care.

Apple's not interested in adding USB to the iPad since Bluetooth already does
anything USB can do and more, at least from the perspective of a consumer. If
you want a portable USB-capable tablet, maybe you want a Surface Pro. That
thing would be pretty awesome if someone can Linux it.

In any case, you can already use pretty much any Bluetooth keyboard you want,
and there are a large number of third party ones to pick from.

~~~
busterarm
Indeed. See my comment here though.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6973619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6973619)

Much like typography can't be unseen, once you use good keyboards, anything
but is maddening. The same goes for good UI.

------
derengel
Is sad but the MBA really has no rival, quality/hardware wise.

~~~
jonemo
Mac hardware doesn't break, but when you purchase the four year warranty on a
Dell (which will get you a total near the price of an equivalent Macbook) it
will break a few times during the four years, but each time you get it fixed
or replaced next day at home.

~~~
dima55
I've never seen an apple laptop that didn't break after a few (<= 2) years.
YMMV.

~~~
ljoshua
I've yet to have any of the Apple laptops that I've owned (or desktops for
that matter) that have broken in that timeframe. In fact I'm using an MBP
that's going on it's fifth year here, and the only thing that's changed is I
popped in a new battery after about four years. Excellent track record for me.
(Of course, YMMV.)

------
wandermatt
Would be more useful to hear a retrospective after six months.

~~~
jjoonathan
I left apple a bit over a year ago because I wanted to get a laptop with some
serious GPU power (I was doing lots of sequence alignments that took hours to
do on my old laptop and hours to upload to / download from my university's
compute cluster). The computer performed fabulously at this task, but my
experience with the Microsoft ecosystem has been absolutely dreadful. Now that
I no longer need the GPU power, I will gladly pay a few hundred dollar premium
to get a mac laptop for my next computer. I would probably pay a 2x premium if
Apple asked it.

\-------- OS Installation: The Horror Story --------

* Reinstalling the OS is a 4-5 hour manual slog through serial numbers and a dozen drivers that must be manually installed in the correct order, not a 1-hour fire-and-forget process like in the Mac ecosystem. (hours of my time vs minutes of my time).

* The bundled "backup solution" works neither for imaging nor for incremental document recovery. "Time Machine" this is not.

* MSE antivirus was dreadfully slow (Just downloaded an installer? It'll wait 30 seconds before launching 5 copies of the .exe corresponding to the 5 times you clicked on it).

* I got a 30gb SSD as a boot volume and put Windows on it, then linked ("junctioned") the "Program Files" directory to my HDD (I'd done similar on my mac without trouble). Big mistake, none of the applications would launch. They didn't launch after I copied them back either (yes, I looked up permission-resetting instructions and followed them to the letter). I had to reinstall.

* I looked up a Microsoft support document explaining how to properly put programs on a different HD (and also that it was unsupported). It involved registry edits and DOS-fu from the system restore disk. The next time Windows Update ran, it broke my system so that no program would launch (DLL error every time). Rolling back the updates didn't work, of course. I had to reinstall. Gave up on the 30gb SSD.

* I tried to upgrade my Win7 install to Win8. Big mistake. The installer took 2 hours to give me an unhelpful generic error message. After hours of searching through forums I found out that it scans your installed Win7 drivers+programs one by one and barfs if any of them aren't compatible (but it doesn't tell you that, of course).

* I tried a fresh install of Win8 on a new 250gb SSD I got on black friday. It froze every time I woke from sleep. Oh, and it would boot to an I/O error bluescreen unless I booted into Win7 first, touched a file on the SSD, and rebooted (yes, touching a file was necessary). Two firmware updates and a handful of driver updates later and I had the same symptoms.

* On a hunch, I switched the SSD from SATA slot 2 to 0. This broke the bootloader, and Microsoft's instructions to fix it didn't work, giving a generic error message that many people on the support forum seemed to experience but that nobody had a fix for. There were 2 Microsoft employees with unhelpful non-fix "solutions," though.

* I nuked the Win7 HDD install and reinstalled Win8 afresh on the SSD (now slot 0). It seems to be stable so far.

* There was a 4-month period where Dell's GPU drivers had broken OpenCL compatibility and the manufacturer drivers would silently fail to install unless I ran a 3rd-party sketchware wiping program first and disabled signature enforcement on every boot.

* Audio drivers occasionally fail to wake from sleep (no audio till reboot). No, updating them to the manufacturer version didn't help. No, reinstalling Dell's recommended drivers didn't help either.

\-------- Small Gripes --------

* No decent UNIX command line. Cygwin starts slowly and is poorly integrated with the system.

* I can't get decent 2-finger scroll without a 3rd party program that is occasionally broken by system updates.

* I can't remap capslock without downloading a 3rd-party program to perform registry edits.

* I can't shut off the screen without installing a 3rd party program to do so.

* In Win7, all allowed keyboard layout switching shortcuts were combinations of modifiers that conflicted with productivity apps like Illustrator. Also, the layout would occasionally become "stuck" and failed to respect the GUI switcher. In Win8, they added a no-conflict key combination for switching layouts but it doesn't work in fullscreen apps.

* Metro. It looks slick, but it doesn't have any of the options you regularly need to access. Fortunately the old menagerie of Windows utilities is still there, just moved around.

* No standard install system that lets you inspect the installer's logs, scripts, or contents.

* The intimate connection between my computer account and Microsoft cloud account creeps me out.

* The full-screen force-quit mechanism is insane (ctrl-alt-del, open Task Manager, press Windows to reveal the Launch Bar, click on the arrow to see all system tray icons, right-click the tiny Task Manager icon (a gray box), enable "Always on Top", highlight the program in the task manager, hit "End Task", wait, hit "End Task" on the dialog box that pops up, and finally decline to send a bug report to Microsoft)

* I can't use the keyboard to navigate directories that contain a mixture of files and folders because in Mircrosoft-Land "Alphabetical Order" means "Sort folders first, then files."

* The sub-HD preloaded desktop backgrounds (yes, really).

\-------- Small Victories --------

* Cheaper, better hardware (not remotely cost effective, given the hassle)

* I can manually tweak virtual memory settings (not that I should _have_ to tweak it, which I do, but I think it's terribly cool that I _can_ and that there's a GUI for it)

* Compatibility

* The super-handy "superuser menu" (Win-X)

* The ability to roll-back updates. It has never worked when I needed it to, but I like the idea.

\-------- Concluding Remarks --------

I've had better UX with linux, which is saying something, since I had
previously considered linux UX to be fairly poor, or rather great -- until a
mission-critical piece of it inevitably broke. Turns out the same thing
applies Windows, except worse. Sadly, it sees that there is tremendous value
in having a non-fragmented ecosystem.

My next computer will be a mac.

\-------- My Plea to You --------

If you know how to fix any of my gripes, please speak up. I'm still a newbie.
Maybe these are just growing pains. I don't think so, but I can hope.

~~~
busterarm
My last Windows OS will be Windows 7 because of many similar problems and
reasoning.

This has spawned a change in career because I currently make my living working
in the Windows space. I'm throwing away 15 years of experience and a deep
knowledge of Windows' internals. Also, work has slowed down tremendously since
the year or so leading up to through the release of Windows 8. I don't see my
current job existing in two years or other people as capable remaining where
they are.

I can only address one of your gripes, but not really. Powershell isn't that
bad. It's not good, but it's not that bad. It can do some things, but probably
not the ones you really want.

~~~
jjoonathan
Yeah, I need to check out powershell. I've heard that it has some pretty neat
tricks up its sleeve regarding typed output. I won't expect more than "two
steps back, one step forward" wrt the UNIX command line, but I should check it
out.

Anything on my new "gripes" list that you have advice for?

\---------- More Misc Gripes --------

* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in GUI text fields

* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in DOS

* Copy+paste is broken and/or inconsistent in terminal windows

* Can't jump to a document's location from the document's GUI

* The 2nd type of file open/save dialog (you know, the one makes you start from root, makes you scroll through every folder, and doesn't support copy+paste of paths, favorites, or any other civilized feature?)

* No equivalent of "Spin Control.app" (now spindump, Instruments.app) that automatically traces hung apps

* Can't take time profiles (function call trees weighted by # hits over a 5s interval) from the built-in process viewer

* NTFS wants to spend 8 hours (I let it go and timed it once) checking the disk after every crash, which amounts to every other time I restart.

* No "screenshot region to clipboard" shortcut. I have to printscreen and crop in paint every time.

* No "look up the word under the mouse in a dictionary" shortcut

\---------- More Misc Small Victories --------

* The utility that profiles startup times and identifies boot-slowing apps is awesome

~~~
bane
* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in GUI text fields

* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in DOS

You will definitely not find emacs-like anything in Windows-land. It's pretty
much an anathema in the ecosystem.

* Copy+paste is broken and/or inconsistent in terminal windows

Copy+paste in cmd.exe works weird (not to mention that cmd.exe is far inferior
to even basic terminals in the x-nix world).

1) Click the upper left icon/button in cmd

2) Click edit/Mark

3) With you mouse select what you want to copy

4) Hit enter

5) It's now in your clipboard and can be ctrl-V'd anywhere else This works
100% of the time and is consistent even if it's weird. I suspect they couldn't
get ctrl+<key> deconflicted for dos compatibility and it just sort of stuck
around

to paste into cmd:

1) Have something in your clipboard

2) click the upper left icon/button in cmd

3) Click edit/paste

4) Stuff pastes. This also works 100% of the time as expected.

* Can't jump to a document's location from the document's GUI

What do you mean? Pg-up/down doesn't work? Or you need to ctrl+f find?

* The 2nd type of file open/save dialog (you know, the one makes you start from root, makes you scroll through every folder, and doesn't support copy+paste of paths, favorites, or any other civilized feature?)

No idea, some oddball java/cross platform gui toolkits screw up the
conventions but I just checked all the apps I typically use and I can click in
the path at the top of the dialog and type/paste/etc. my path.

* No equivalent of "Spin Control.app" (now spindump, Instruments.app) that automatically traces hung apps

True, you probably need a third party util. They're likely dozens and they'll
likely all be free.

* Can't take time profiles (function call trees weighted by # hits over a 5s interval) from the built-in process viewer

True, the process lister is no ps.

* NTFS wants to spend 8 hours (I let it go and timed it once) checking the disk after every crash, which amounts to every other time I restart.

One of my pet peeves is that Microsoft really needs to get a modern file
system. NTFS is "ok" for all the permissions stuff, but it's a lousy file
system w/r to putting files in sane places on the disk. Defragging should be a
rare thing and checking for disk errors should be much faster.

That being said, why is your machine crashing that much? My uptime in Windows
is usually measured in months and outside of bad hardware they don't crash --
ever. My last Windows desktop ran without a crash for 3 years then 3 more
years (it crashed because of PSU issues, pop in a new PSU and it was up and
running fine). My brand new machine is a month old and I haven't had it crash
yet and it's been up and running continuously.

My Mac crashes or beachballs every couple of weeks in comparison. Either that
or the system will just start behaving weird and I'll have to restart.

* No "screenshot region to clipboard" shortcut. I have to printscreen and crop in paint every time.

1) Use the snipping tool.

2) Be glad you have paint. I've needed to do some cropping on my mac and the
lack of a basic paint program is forehead slapping.

* No "look up the word under the mouse in a dictionary" shortcut

This is very app dependent some like Office have better support for this sort
of thing. But I agree, it would be nice. I usually just define:<word> in
chrome and use google for it.

------
cgtyoder
It's unfortunate that your Apple hardware experience was so poor, but you're
really not going to have better luck elsewhere - all the major hw
manufacturers have a fairly similar failure rate [1] (Apple apparently is one
of the better ones). You just got unlucky.

[1]
[http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliab...](http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf)
[http://www.statisticbrain.com/laptop-malfunction-
rates/](http://www.statisticbrain.com/laptop-malfunction-rates/)

------
mmanfrin
I recently switched my Windows desktop to Ubuntu, with the intention of making
myself an at-home desktop dev environment. I still use my Macbook for work,
and my MBA for personal dev.

My thoughts have been positive, Ubuntu is much nicer than I remember previous
brushes with Linux being. A lot of things required slight configuration, but
Ubuntu and Linux have hit that critical mass that most of my problems can be
solved with a simple search. However, there are a few persistent problems that
have lots of different solutions that dont all seem to work; and I feel there
are lots of lacking areas in the app ecosystem. For instance, there does not
seem to be a single well-designed SQL gui for linux. Everything looks out of
Windows-ME-era-enterprise. For Macs, you have Sequel Pro amongst a lot of
strong competition. Additionally, homebrew is a lot easier/more robust than
apt-get; no repositories to deal with.

I think this all points to something about me, specifically: I want software
to make _some_ assumptions for me. Brew does this, apt-get doesnt. This is
both the strength of Mac and the strength of Linux -- they cater to the level
of assumption that their camps want. I, unfortunately, want more assumption.

Also, as a small side note, I can't get League of Legends to work on WINE, so
I am unable to play with excoworkers -- that was the main way we kept in touch
and it's pushing me to a point that I might put Windows back on my desktop, if
only to have that connection back -- a little juvenile, but oh well.

~~~
pimeys
> Additionally, homebrew is a lot easier/more robust than apt-get; no
> repositories to deal with.

Until I can do stuff like `brew install safari` in OSX, e.g. keeping your
whole system up to date with one tool, I find it inferior to the Linux package
managers. Although I find pacman and emerge better than apt, them being much
easier to configure and use.

~~~
busterarm
Right. Homebrew is okay, but pacman is _amazing_. I actually have completely
avoided setting up Homebrew on my Mac and the only Mac dev environment I have
set up is in an Mountain Lion VM running on my Mac. I don't want to screw some
strange thing up and then have to resort to using a Time Machine backup to fix
it...

...Reasoning behind that one is that documentation floating around for solving
Mac problems is quite terrible. A lot of information isn't well categorized
and results for very old versions typically come up first. Fixes for problems
I've had (getting CLANG to work in a VM under virtualbox, getting virtualbox
to work after a restart because they stupidly use OSX features that were
phased out) often only came up after digging quite hard to find the correct
fix. Support and Documentation are what I do for a living, so I have a better
shot finding the right fix than most.

Arch documentation and the forums are like the gold freakin' standard. It
actually blows my mind how well organized and thorough it all is. I've yet to
find a situation in Arch that didn't have a document to get me out of it...and
often I use their documentation to fix problems in OSX and other Linux
distros.

------
pimeys
For me the real breakthrough was to get rid of Ubuntu and install Arch and
configure everything by myself for my laptop. It was super fun, learning to
use systemd and making everything to work. Having xmonad, with pretty fonts,
automatic suspend, wifi, vpn and all that working. And it was not at all that
hard and took me one night and a couple of beers to get everything done.

I might be different than most of computer users, but I really do enjoy doing
everything by myself. Now I know exactly what's wrong if something breaks. And
Arch (or Funtoo, my work distro) are much easier to configure with a text
editor compared to Ubuntu (or if we go this path, to OSX). I like systemd much
more than upstart or launchd. I like the idea of a rolling release, so I don't
have the nerve breaking massive updates every now and then.

But if just switching from OSX to a Unity distro, for me that wouldn't be
enough to switch.

------
kevinchen
I wouldn't take OS X vs Linux advice from a person who calls her computer a
"Mac Air"

~~~
jambo
That's cheap and hardly warrants a reply. "Mac Air" may not be the trade name
of the computer, but it's not ambiguous and has no bearing on the substance of
the article.

------
prg318
This article mentions that there is no native 1Password client for Linux and
recommends some kind of dropbox workaround. While this probably true at the
time of writing, Icculus recently wrote a native Linux client [1]. There's
more details about it in this G+ post if you are interested:

\-
[https://plus.google.com/+RyanGordon/posts/ZFyb9TQS9zB](https://plus.google.com/+RyanGordon/posts/ZFyb9TQS9zB)

[1] [https://icculus.org/1pass/](https://icculus.org/1pass/)

~~~
adinb
With the exception of using the browser plugins, 1password works great in
wine—I pointed it to my Dropbox folder and was able to read and write
passwords.

------
latch
I looked at getting a Sputnik 3, but it's available only in select countries
and 16GB isn't an option (nor is it for MBA, but it is for the relatively
light rMBP).

And I hate the Dell logo. In fact, I hate all text logos. It's ridiculous.
150" TVs in shopping malls with a huge "SAMSUNG" or "SONY" at the bottom. If
you have to do something, use some image (an apple, the ubuntu reactor thing,
windows 4 squares...)

------
bane
I currently split time between a 15" rMBP and a few Windows 7 machines and to
be honest, I prefer the time on my Windows 7 machines despite many downsides.

Every few years I'll have a go at going Mac (this is try #3) and they'll all
sort of peter out and I'll end up back in Windows.

I think this current go around has been the most successful, I _love_ my rMBP
hardware. And the work that Apple has put into making touchpads actually
useful (both with hardware and software) is miraculous. The keyboards are nice
typing experiences (I'm more mixed on the magic mouse). It's also an awesome
portable virtualization platform that I've had 4 or 5 Linux VMs all up and
running like a champ on it. Multiple workspaces are usually awesome, I keep
several workspaces for different semantic parts of my day and the flow is
really nice. Airdrop is magic.

For the _most_ part things just work.

To try and make it really stick, I went cold turkey for the better part of 9
months and didn't touch a Windows machine.

But then, small frustrations and irritations finally built up and I recently
just built myself a new Windows 7 computer and pretty much use it for all of
my day-to-day with my Mac sitting in a travel bag for when I need to go on the
road. What is it that keeps pushing me back? I've spent a _lot_ of time
thinking about why this is and sorta have it narrowed down to a few user
scenarios: Here's 1 line of reasoning:

1\. When I'm using my Mac, I find I try and avoid actually interacting with OS
X as much as possible. I spend all of my time in Office, a web browser, a
console window or a virtualized linux machine and that gets me through 95% of
my day.

2\. Digging in deeper and I find that OS X, while having some nice bits here
and there (as discussed above), is so full of so many clumsy frustrations that
I've never really been able to get over the feeling of reduced productivity
when I'm dealing with it. I've realized that I deal with this by simply
avoiding doing the things that frustrate or irritate me. Some of this probably
stems from me not wanting to do things the prescribed "Apple way" and wanting
to do it my own way. But it's irritating enough that I want to get away from
the entire system after any extended interaction with the OS bits.

3\. By and large this is focused on Finder (there's other issues, but Finder
is the biggest problem I have), which is probably the single worst file
manager I've used in 30 years of computing, and no amount of "getting used to
it" seems to alleviate the simple fact that it sucks. I've tried a couple
replacements, but they all seem to scratch some small itch and nothing really
comes close to the magical file management wonderland that is the Windows 7
Explorer. It's so bad that even after a solid year with my Mac I still can't
reliably predict where a new folder is going to be created. I know this makes
me sound impossibly dumb, but these kinds of simple file management interface
problems have been _solved_ everywhere else. Even the various Linux file
managers work better and more reliably. I would be so much more interested in
staying on my Mac if I knew I could manage files without feeling like I was
poking around a dark damp hole trying to sort through and pick up grains of
rice with my elbows. I could go on for pages ranting about the abortion of
ideas that is Finder, but let's just conclude that I hate it.

4\. I realized that one of the reasons I spend so much time in a terminal then
is because managing files form the command line is better! (the other reason
I'm in the command line is so I can ssh into my linux VMs)

5\. so if most of what I'm doing is Chrome, Office, ssh and Linux via
VirtualBox, which are essentially equivalent experiences in OS X or Windows,
and then doing OS things like moving files around works better in Windows, why
should I still use my Mac?

I've come up with other lines of reasoning:

\- all of the media production tools I personally work with have emphasized
Windows development over Mac development for a while or no Mac equivalent
exists at all.

\- retrocomputing and retrogaming, which I have a deep personal interest in,
has a far richer ecosystem under Windows and the tools that have version for
both OSs tend to work better in Windows. Also moving around and organizing
tens of thousands of files related to this hobby is much better under Windows

\- another hobby, photography, I shoot thousands upon thousands of photos and
haven't met an photo organizing tool I like, so I manage everything on the
filesystem, which again means I'm avoiding finder

\- Until Mavericks, multi-monitor support with full-screen apps was broken,
and there's no excuse for it. None. Maximize was solved in Windows 3.0. _23
years ago_

\- OS X seems to keep growing interface hair, meaning what started as simple
elegant design slowly accumulated feature cruft until the design is no longer
simple or elegant and the design wasn't really flexible enough to accommodate
this growing interface hair. Witness the madness around the resizing window
buttons in OS X. But all the various crap that shows up in my menubar vs.
sometimes in my dock vs. sometimes nowhere but ps, etc. Or the haphazard
combinations of modifier hotkey combinations that don't really carryover
between apps, a legacy of the one-button mouse movement which is now just
vestigial, but now means I have to keep track of which combination of shift,
fn, control, option and command to use in _some_ combination _before_ I even
think about what button I need to push to modify some other key to do some
menial task that's standard and two buttons in Windows.

\- Even after taking hundreds of screen shots over the last year, I _still_
have to lookup the madness of screen capture in OS X every single time I sit
down to take more screen shots. Here's a 3 page article on it.
[http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/13/print-screen-
mac/](http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/13/print-screen-mac/) Sure I don't get a
"prt scr" key on the keyboard, but I get half a dozen key modifier keys and an
eject key. I'll sometimes just put off the task till I get home and just do it
in Windows it's so irritating.

\- There's no paint program that ships with OS X. Boggles the mind.

\- Having to buy and install tons of little apps to "fix" some broken or
poorly designed behavior in the default apps that ship with the OS. This isn't
like buying photoshop because it fixed paint. Photoshop is a different level
entirely to paint. This is like iTerm2 which is _almost_ exactly like, but
just fixes a few things and adds a couple things to iTerm. And this kind of
drop-in replacement cancer permeates the entire Mac experience. There's entire
ecosystems of slightly different replacements for the default apps, and it's
entirely expected that setting up a new mac will involve hunting these down
and installing them to replace the broken stuff that the OS ships with. I'm
really just exhausted of both this process and the attitude that this is a
perfectly normal and sane thing to do. It's not, the OS is shipped broken and
Apple needs to fix this stuff.

\- Video performance is noticeably better in Windows. I'm not sure what it is,
but I find my Mac has lots of little screen-tearing issues, and watching full-
screen video on it just isn't as snappy (using VLC on both) as it was on my 6
year old Windows box (before I built my current one).

\- Things usually _just_ work in OS X. But when they don't you enter a world
of mystery that goes as deep as a computer science degree can take you. In
Windows, these days things also more or less _just_ work, but when they don't,
there's a kind of expectation in the design that you're likely to have an
issue so there's all sorts of good error reporting and resolution paths to try
and exhaust before even having to start searching forums for advice.

\- I need to read NTFS volumes frequently and OS X's default NTFS
compatibility sucks and the fixes are out of date and don't work very well
either. In contrast, I've never had to read an HFS (or whatever Apple
journaled blah blah file system) volume.

\- no dedicated page up/down home or end keys. I use those keys _all_ the
time. Why are they gone? It's irritating having to hunt down a modifier key
and an arrow and hope that you figured out the magic combination that's
"home".

\- I can't multi-tab drag in Chrome. I drag groups of tabs around in Windows
all the time. Doesn't work in OS X.

\- minimized windows are a pain to bring up. Therefore I don't minimize in OS
X. The dock (especially when auto-hid) is flaky and won't show up half the
time. The delay for when it _does_ feel like popping up when my mouse is down
at the bottom of the screen feels entirely random.

\- I don't like any of the text editors I've tried. I just end up in vi in
iterm. But I really want a good text editor.

\- VNC is not a suitable remote desktop solution compared to RDP. It's just
not. I Remote into half a dozen machines over the course of a day and wish I
had a decent way to remote into my Mac that wasn't VNC.

\- and more and more and more

I'm sure there are built in solutions I'm overlooking, or some app I can
install that fixes this or modifies that, or some setting that makes something
behave better than the default. But the point is that outside of applications
that exist on both platforms equally, I'm avoiding or annoyed with everything
else on the platform. I'm committed to sticking it out and have even resolved
to spend more time on my mac - especially post-Mavericks. But it's just not a
better computing experience for me. It's interesting and it's different, and
it makes me yearn for certain things that windows doesn't have (multiple
workspaces), but when the equivalent functions work better in Windows I'm
forced to choose the easier and less frustrating environment to spend time in.

~~~
jjoonathan
It's funny because you seem to be in exactly my situation, but in reverse (I'm
going mac->windows). We have similar types of gripes, maybe we can help each
other out.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6973925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6973925)

A few suggestions:

* Use QuickTime and avoid VLC if possible. QuickTime on mac is awesome. VLC is often worse and seldom better.

* Command+Shift+4 is the only screenshot shortcut you need (toss in ctrl if you want it clipboarded, not in a file). Waaay faster than printscr+paint+paste+crop.

* OSX respects a subset of emacs keyboard movement and editing shortcuts. Ctrl+ae replace home/end. I usually remap capslock to ctrl to make them ergonomic. I like them better (no need to move hands), any way to get them on windows?

* On OSX, the universal installer app lets you list the files installed and view a textual install log. Install scripts are bash scripts. Console.app helps with both system problems and application problems (that's where stdout goes by default). Go there to start your debug journey. Haven't found the equivalent in windows.

* You can debug hangs with a time profile from Activity Monitor (yep, time profile built into the gui) or spindump. Any way to do this on Windows?

* I'm in the opposite situation wrt HFS+ and NTFS but I've had great luck with the commercial solution "Paragon" ($20, worth it). WTF is up with the whole thing where NTFS wants to spend 8 hours checking the disk every time the computer crashes? Apple figured this shit out 16 years ago.

* Command-Shift-T puts TextEdit.app in plain text mode. Hey, it's better than Notepad. What's the killer text editor that's windows only?

How 'bout you list some of those little nitpicky features you like so much
from Windows. I've already written my list of things I miss from the mac side
(see link, Small Gripes and More Minor Gripes sections). While I'm stuck here
I might as well enjoy what it has to offer. Ditto for you, of course.

~~~
teek
What's good about windows:

* Explorer is better than Finder.

* Right click that works

* Start menu + Win7 taskbar is better than OSX Dock/Launchpad (can't comment on Win8 metro but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like it)

* Maximize

* clicking the clock gives you a calendar

I'm not exactly pro-windows but I believe the GP's point is that OSX is not
flawless (neither is windows by far) but there's a lot of dumb things in OSX
that should've been fixed but weren't because MS did it therefore it is not
elegant by definition.

I've been able to _make_ OSX work for me only because I get my real work done
on the command line. Finder is nothing but a source of frustration. Also I
ought to be able to right-click the volume icon on the menu bar and get the
same menu as option-click but I don't...probably because that would be too
windows-like.

~~~
jjoonathan
Hey, I'm not trying to say OSX is flawless. That would be silly. What we're
both saying is that we feel like we have to _make_ the opposite OS work and
that it's an unsatisfying exercise in frustration whichever way you go. It's
about the pain of learning different conventions and the unwillingness of OS
vendors (both of them) to copy each other's good bits.

Neat about the calendar. I have to disagree about the dock because it can
force quit things, the Windows taskbar won't auto-hide, and some of the
ugliest UI hacks in Windows all live in the tray (2 finger scroll, task
manager, etc).

I disagree about explorer, mostly because I can't figure out how to get it to
sort in alphabetical order (instead of folders and files sorted separately), a
feature that's crucial for keyboard navigation and extracting files after
download without scrolling through the entire downloads folder.

------
shalalala
I happen to like the hardware a bit more than when I first got the MBPr, but
would LOVE to have a good Debian install guide for this puppy. Heck, I might
even settle for Ubuntu in the meantime.

~~~
kevinchen
Run a live cd and double click the installer icon?

------
7stark7
My experience:

Broken motherboard AND screen on my Macbook air.

Apple replaced both for free, with no AppleCare.

I have a few other stories just like this one.

------
greatsuccess
I don't need a guide to leaving the best computer currently made. If I had to
use a PC I don't know if I would bother with computers at all except for my
job. PC laptops have the reputation they deserve and I think they not only
tarnished personal/mobile computing as a general concept (only to be rescued
by Apple), PC laptops should be the first category of the PC family to die out
completely and save people the misery and disillusionment that when you buy
such a thing, that you think you actually bought something.

And Im not even saying Windows laptops, this is a commodity hardware issue
combined with fantastically disappointing software (Windows or Ubuntu), but I
wouldn't want one running OS X either.

It's time for the PC industry to take out its own trash.

~~~
busterarm
The OEMs have been quite terrible for a long time. Even Lenovo is a barely-
trustworthy brand to me anymore -- and it's the only brand and they don't
currently have anything in their product lineup that I'd be happy to use. Dell
and HP have become especially crap. Toshiba, which used to be crap is now
somehow the better mass-market OEM out there. I wouldn't spend my own money on
anything from Asus; every single Asus product I've ever come across has failed
in under 3 years.

What I really want is for Apple to make an iPad that will let me use a USB
keyboard. Safari and SSH are all I need.

~~~
greglindahl
There are many nice bluetooth keyboards that work fine with iPads.

~~~
busterarm
I use a Realforce 87U as my primary keyboard and my secondary keyboards all
have Cherry MX Red or Blue switches. I have purchased custom-manufactured
aluminum cases for my KBC Pokers. I also hate Alps switches. It's almost a
guarantee that there is nothing on the market that I will find suitable for
getting real work done. There's the KBTalking Pro, but it's fullsize and not
good for travel. The Neo 87 has poor build quality and the wireless barely
works. It'd have to be at least a TKL but a 60% or HHKB would be better.

The best I've seen is a bluetooth mod that's far too battery-hungry for prime-
time. I want something with a wire. Bluetooth keyboard pairing and the
typically-horrendous bluetooth stacks border on nightmarish.

