
Ask HN: What's it like coming back to Windows from OS X? - brightball
I&#x27;m at the point where I&#x27;m ready to retire from Apple. I happily switched years ago but recently realized that I&#x27;d dived in so hard to the ecosystem that disentangling is going to be really hard. I&#x27;ve learned looked at Linux laptops but it seems like an iffy decision unless I shell out for System76. I&#x27;ve been thinking more lately about coming back to Windows thanks to the Ubuntu integration.<p>What are your experiences here? Looking to get the experiences and suggestions of other people who&#x27;ve successfully gotten away from Apple.
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peller
If you haven't run Linux on a laptop recently, I suspect you'll be pleasantly
surprised. As long as you're not buying a really cheap consumer-grade machine,
or a bleeding-edge high-end machine, the chances it works out of the box are
very high. Furthermore, the level of software support has improved drastically
from even a few years ago.

Look at it this way. You're going to wipe and reinstall anyway, right? Might
as well give running a real *nix a shot before you settle for less.

~~~
themoat
That is my suggestion as well. I can't go back to Windows, it just doesn't do
it for me. I have been lucky to have my company buy laptops for me for the
past bunch of years, but on my personal machine, the only reason I have
Windows at all is for gaming.

For anything else I'm using some flavor of Linux. No question.

~~~
solarsavior
I recently installed Linux Mint to an external SSD and boot into it for gaming
in Linux. Steam and many games work just fine in Linux. (I pretty much just
play TF2.) I've used Linux on and off through the years, but don't use it
daily in my work. I was very pleasantly surprised at how for the most part
Linux Mint just works.

My current personal machine is a MacBook Air, but given the the direction
Apple is headed with laptops, I won't be buying an Apple when I need to
replace it. I don't want to use Microsoft spyware. So, I will likely use Linux
for a new personal machine when my MBA is too old.

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dman
Ive been enjoying windows a fair amount recently. With the Linux subsystem it
has turned into a surprisingly great experience. All the familiar unix tools
are here now and Windows 10 is pretty tasteful as an OS. Only request I have
from Microsoft is to add a feature to disable file notification hooks from
file created in the unix subsystem. Creating a lot of small files has always
been slow on windows because it pounds the antivirus. I was hoping that the
unix sandbox would be exempt from this however I see the Anti virus works hard
even when I do IO in the unix subsystem.

Also Hyper-V being built in and free means that you can have test VMs with
snapshot capabilities built right in the OS which is nice since it allows you
to avoid the VMWare/Parallels tax.

~~~
dmarlow
Can you exclude the directory from the AV's real-time scan?

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brudgers
I've never bought into Apple. I think Windows 10 is great, but I love tiling
window managers. So I run Linux.

Windows 10 provides a polished, efficient, well designed interface. You have
to get pretty far out on the edge of hardware before stuff doesn't just run
[e.g. my eight year old Dell Precision configured as RAID 1 on via proprietary
third party BIOS on the mother board interfering with the Windows 10 automatic
upgrade until I turned it off and disconnected the disks until the upgrade had
completed].

On the other hand, Linux provides a deeply documented operating system with
text configuration files. It affords ample opportunities to hone one's RTFM
skills, e.g. a 2016 kernel upgrade that borked Synaptics drivers made
configuring my new Dell an exercise in understanding X11, systemd, libinput,
and mouse configuration. Getting a 4k display well sorted is still underway
(thanks for being the exception to deeply documented Unity!).

The downside of Windows for me is that most free software is untrustworthy and
Microsoft has not quite come around to a good package manager system for
native applications. By which I mean, there's lots of read the news apps in
the Store, but not MIT-Scheme or little utilities like nmap. What I would say
is that when Linux sucks, it sucks very consistently in a particular way:
there's a fix that I am left to find myself and it might involve patching and
recompiling the kernel (though it usually does not).

Anyway, Dell Precisions and some XPS laptops, can be ordered with Linux
installed (at least in the US). So it's not just System 76. Also, there's
generally a good Linux story with Thinkpads.

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seanwilson
I'd reconsider Linux. As long as you make sure the laptop is supported Linux
is great if you're a developer.

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bgrohman
I'm in the process of switching back from osx on a Mac mini to a laptop dual
booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu. I've been using Ubuntu almost exclusively.
There are very few things I miss, actually. In fact, I'm struggling to think
of any now that I think about it.

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Ezra
I moved from OSX to Linux-only laptop in 2012. I'd intended to dual-boot, but
re-installing Windows[1], even by itself, was much, much more pain than I
expected; I eventually gave up on it. Go figure.

Linux having poor compatibility with laptops is, in my experience, a myth.
Ubuntu worked fine, but I've since moved to Fedora, and extremely happy with
it. Everything "just works". I can't really see my self going back at this
point.

For me at least, the Mac's original value-proposition being a no-hassle Linux-
like machine. Now that the real thing is hassle free[2], there is no point in
anything else.

Finally, I've heard that it's gotten much better lately, with the "new"
Microsoft (which I applaud) but, as a developer who did so for a few months
this year talking about "just works", the amount of friction involved in
building anything outside the narrowest "MSFT-only" niches on Windows is
crazy. I'm not a ragey guy, but it got to me, and not in a good way.

[1]: The then-new Windows 8 installer had a forever-grey "next" button at one
point in the install-wizard that no amount of hair-pulling seemed to fix.

[2]: I would still recommend spending a few minutes online looking for red
flags when choosing a model to use.

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rpeden
I haven't left Apple completely, but I've gone from having just a Macbook to
also having a Thinkpad X220 running Win10 and Linux, an Asus Zenbook running
Win10, and a beefy desktop running Win10 and Linux.

My goal has been to make it so that I can do most of my development work on
any of the OSes, on any of the computers. Before the Win10 Linux subsystem, it
was a little bit painful on Windows, but now it mostly just works. Node.js and
Ruby native extensions have so far worked perfectly in WSL once I apt-get
installed build-essential.

So far, I've only run into a couple of issues:

\- A few ruby gems with native extensions have given me some trouble on OS X,
but were fine on Linux and Win10 (using the Linux subsystem).

\- Last time I tried React Native (a few months ago), there was a bug that
prevented the build system from working on Windows. I found a fix had been
added to the master branch, but hadn't yet made it into a release. I added the
fix on my machine by hand and everything worked after that.

I mostly use VSCode and Atom for editing, so my editing experience is pretty
consistent across operating systems. I've done a bit of F# in Visual Studio on
Windows, and was able to load the project up unmodified in Xamarin Studio in
OSX. I imagine it'd be the same now in VS for Mac.

I only use Photoshop occasionally, and it seems to perform a little bit better
in Windows.

Other thoughts:

\- Ultraportable, high DPI laptops are a much better value outside of Apple
land. I picked up an Asus Zenbook with a hidpi IPS touch screen, and pretty
well exactly the same specs as the current Core M Macbook for $649CDN on sale.
The Macbook sells for $1549.

\- Consider a previous generation Thinkpad if you'd like to run Linux. I
picked up my X220 for $300CDN earlier this year. It was technically
'refurbished', but they refurb'ed it so well it looked like new. It had a
crappy TN display, but I picked up an inexpensive IPS panel for it on eBay,
and it was super easy to install. The Core i5 it in still performs well. A bit
slow clock-for-clock than the newest i5s, but still lots of power for most
tasks I've thrown at it. I'd say that Win10 and Linux Mint perform equally
well on it.

\- Lots of Thinkpads make good Hackintoshes in case you ever want to try that.

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kosherbeefcake
I switched from Windows to OSX about 7 years ago. I recently gave my MacBook
Pro to my partner, I was interested in a new laptop, and looked at the market
offerings. I was very impressed with what had been released in the Windows
ecosystem; so much that I bought a Surface 4. Windows 10 is significantly more
polished than the windows that I left. The Ubuntu subsystem also satisfies my
requirements for Bash. All-in-all, I am impressed with how much Microsoft has
improved.

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Koshkin
For me, switching between the two is painful - mostly due to difference in
keybindings, and the only reason to keep a Mac around is the need to use it
for projects targeting Apple's mobile platform. Windows seems to be a better
PC-based gaming platform than either Mac or Linux, but overall Linux is what
makes most sense for me - as a Unix and as a platform to get important and
interesting stuff done.

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ttflee
Ctrl vs CMD, again.

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DanBC
having ads baked into the OS so deeply just feels weird to me. The lock
screen[1] has ads, the start menu has ads[1].

there's a frustrating bug on 1511/10586.678 where all my carefully created
file associations keep getting reclaimed.

[1] I'm not sure what they're actually called. :/

