Comment by pico303
10 months ago
As someone forced to use a Windows laptop for work with the new job, I've stopped complaining about my Mac. It's so much worse on the other side of the fence...
Working on Windows makes me appreciate the Mac ecosystem so, so, so very much.
I know the feeling. I'm forced to use a Mac laptop for work, and it's really made me appreciate Linux.
Linux is better than Windows on most counts for sure, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to use it full-time without making significant concessions on preferences about how desktop environment stuff works. If you’re someone who grew up on Macs there’s almost nothing in the Linux desktop space that tries to replicate that set of patterns… it’s all Win9X-type taskbar setups, mobile-type setups (GNOME, Pantheon), old niche *nix setups (e.g. WindowMaker), and of course minimal tiling WMs. There’s no clones of Mac OS of any flavor.
I’m proficient with more or less every modern desktop and can get by on any of any of them if I have to, but being happy doing so is another matter.
> If you’re someone who grew up on Macs there’s almost nothing in the Linux desktop space that tries to replicate that set of patterns… it’s all Win9X-type taskbar setups, mobile-type setups (GNOME, Pantheon), old niche *nix setups (e.g. WindowMaker), and of course minimal tiling WMs. There’s no clones of Mac OS of any flavor.
Have you seen https://hyprland.org?
6 replies →
It's the other way around for me, it's all the concessions I have to make on Mac that make it so annoying. All the defaults I don't like, and the inability to change them or find alternatives like I can on Linux.
I "grew up" (from college, before then didn't use computer much) on Linux and I use a Mac at work, it's pretty easy to switch back and forth for me. Just need my tiling WM, my always on screen. I do miss that you could close the laptop lid on Linux without it sleeping. But otherwise, not much complaints either way.
3 replies →
> preferences about how desktop environment stuff works
Having used KDE plasma, I am convinced that there is no other DE that has more knobs to make things exactly how you want it. Though I never liked the global constantly changing bar on the top in Macs anyway so can't comment on whether KDE can be made to do that.
1 reply →
I went from daily driving mac and being very used to the desktop environment, and i am really hating everything i've tried in Linux.
Why is there no macOS clone for Linux? Since there is not, maybe now would be a good time for a project to start.
6 replies →
Gnome is not that different from Mac. You have your Mac-style status bar at the top, dock for apps which you can float or hide, typical window management, etc.
7 replies →
The funniest thing for me is that on a Mac you can use EMacs-style motion commands (^A, ^E, ^K, etc) just about anywhere you enter text. No suck luck on Linux which requires using Windows's braindead Home/End buttons outside of the terminal.
2 replies →
I agree, but my M1 MacBook work laptop is by far the fastest dev machine I've ever laid hands on. It struggles a bit from the UX standpoint, two things:
1. I have the same desktop layout every time, from left to right: slack desktop app, a two column wide emacs window, a 90col wide terminal. I also have two chrome windows--1 which is the same width as the slack window and overlays it, and another the same width as the emacs window which overlays that one. The problem is every single time I wake my laptop from sleep the terminal window has shrunk to fewer columns and I have to drag it back to full width.
2. Sometimes the external monitor support bugs out. I don't know if that's my hub ("pluggable" something or other) or the OS or both.
Then of course there's all the warts of homebrew, and the fact that it's not easy to build some software..
However, the performance of the Apple silicon is nothing short of astonishing. I'm curious about the AMD chips that ship in the new Framework as I look towards an upgrade to my personal laptop, but it's basically between that and a new M4 Max Macbook. Never thought I'd see the day.. will probably wait a year or so before deciding but it's interesting that Apple is even a contender.
For the 1st point, I struggled with the same, then a short applescript thanks to claude, attached to a keyboard shortcut on karabiner solved the painpoint. There's also an app called Stay which should do something similar with a ui, but my solution is good enough for me at this point.
6 replies →
My favorite is how when I close my macbook with an external display plugged in, the laptop screen remains on (and lit up!) with seemingly no way to configure this behavior. Sometimes a window will end up on that (non-visible) screen which can be very confusing.
3 replies →
I'm curious about your dock/hub. There's a good chance I just ordered the same one as I try to build a more sophisticated home station. Which one and how does it bug out?
2 replies →
Try Prompt from Panic for your terminal emulator
Agreed. The hardware is excellent, but the customizability, and overall snappiness of the UI are far inferior to my XFCE setup.
What are you guys running when you are writing code?
I run IntelliJ and a browser, and mostly call it a day.
3 replies →
Which distro do you use? I've run a mac and Linux laptop and the Linux setup keeps sending me back to Mac.
It's more about the DE than the distro in my experience. Gnome is budget Mac, but KDE and XFCE are chefs kiss
Please try a distro [0] maintained by a company making their own Linux laptops.
[0] https://pop.system76.com/
I set up Mint for a friend a few years ago and it took me about an hour never having done it before. What did you find difficult about it?
NixOS, for me. I deal with a lot of wild development environments, so flakes + direnv has probably saved me hundreds of hours and a few system reinstalls.
Nix is also availible for Mac, but I'll warn you that it may ruin Macports and brew for you forever.
1 reply →
I run Fedora these days. Ubuntu is the worst.
3 replies →
I have a windows for work, Mac as a laptop and Linux on my workstation desktop. Windows is by far the worst, I don’t think Linux is vastly superior to Mac, they both have some things they do better than the other. My main issue is arm vs x86.
Arm is worse or better, in your eyes? I've only used it on servers and aside from build annoyances and slower than x86, it is indistinguishable.
4 replies →
It is really wild that all these little community groups manage to consistently outperform massive corporations.
I was forced to use a Linux laptop for a work once. It actually managed to make me appreciate Windows!
You have to pay me to run Windows bare metal. The user experience is terrible and of the lowest quality compared to Mac OS and Linux. Even Windows OS 11 IoT LTSC requires work around to not create a Microsoft account, and this is their embedded solution.
Last week I spent a whole day trying to resurrect a Windows 10 IoT LTSC because of a corrupt WMI repository. It crashed out software and to the client it looks like our software is bad where it is the OS that is bad. Client's automation was down until a replacement was sent out and installed.
I've had to implement number of software changes because of buggy Windows drivers. From Intel NICs to touch screen HID messaging. Microsoft talks about backwards capability but it is subjective and only truly bound to the most used applications. Enabling tablet mode on Windows will break their API.
There has never been a Linux system I couldn't resurrect and keep working. With Windows, it is always re-install the OS and all applications. Even the laptop I'm writing this on is the same OS installation that has passed between 4 different computers. You cannot get that quality of OS installation from Microsoft.
Took me a month to convince IT to reinstall Windows on my work laptop. Microsoft's update broke the QA VM environment and would freeze with an infinite loop. Uninstalling the update nor repairing the OS did anything to fix their issues.
Even today I experienced Ctrl+X is broken and does not work in Visual Studio for the git comment text box entry.
1 reply →
Ha. I have to use Linux (Arch) sometimes, and it's made me appreciate OpenBSD :)
Corp IT recently banned my Indy with IRIX 6.5.32 daily driver from the network for some bureaucratic reason. I feel your pain.
4 replies →
can't agree more, to the point i ask if the new job mandates mac,if yes i will end the process right away.
even windows is better due to wsl.
There are many issues with using Linux for a corporate workstation. For instance, if the organization uses a proxy, setting it up is a PITA, as many Linux applications don't respect the http[s]_proxy environment variables. Some only accept upper-case, others only lower-case, while many have their own configuration settings for using a proxy.
Additionally, in certain industries Linux support is non-existent, with many applications developed exclusively for Windows and no viable alternatives available. Running a VM is another PITA due to driver issues. Wine ditto.
In the end, I found that running WSL2 provided a more manageable experience. I feel that Microsoft really hit the nail with WSL for productivity. Apparently, you can even run graphical applications from WSL although I don't have a lot of experience with that.
? How is this possible? I have zero issues on my Macbook, while Linux is consistently a PITA for me.
For me the biggest gripe is that I cannot configure it as I want and that it assumes I'm computer-illiterate. On top of that a lot of the approaches chosen by Apple regarding e.g. the UI are simply counterintuitive to me.
I still prefer it to Windows but (at least for me) it is inferior to a properly setup Linux box with stuff like a titling WM. But if I would to recommend someone a computer just for browsing, email, etc. then a Mac would be my top choice.
Linux makes you use the terminal and read manuals and edit configs to accomplish the most basic tasks. At least neither Windows nor macOS need that. Linux is fine for servers, but I can't fathom using that on my actual computer.
I prefer config files a lot to settings GUIs. Two most important points that come to mind:
1. I can manage them in Git 2. GUIs change all the time. With configs you have a much higher probability that some solution you googled will still work even when it is a couple of years old.
6 replies →
Windows makes you open Registry Editor and tweak completely inscrutable key/value for those.
That's a... like 20 years old talking point by now?
I mean, you can probably find _a_ Linux that's like what you say, but top Linux distros are nowhere like that.
As someone who works on both I don't notice a difference. Mac sucks just as much as Windows (or visa versa). There's things each does better and things each does worse.
Once people start saying "forced to use [...] for work" you've got to analyse platforms from a different angle.
Namely: How good is this platform after Corporate IT cheaps out on hardware, and loads as much 'security' crapware as possible?
On Windows, there are incredibly cheap laptops available, and corporate IT has loads of crapware like antivirus and crowdstrike and profiles and enterprise endpoint management to slow it down.
On Mac, there aren't any cheap hardware options, and there's a medium amount of "security" crapware.
On Linux, corporate IT let you manage it yourself, because they don't know how to. They can't develop the skills either, because anyone who can manage Linux gets promoted out the set-up-new-users-laptops department.
Or at some point, corporate IT bans desktop Linux because they can’t manage it.
1 reply →
Great point. I use both Mac and windows. Love my windows pc, but I have certainly used corporate windows laptops that make me want to throw them out the window - minutes to boot, minutes to open anything, etc. between Mac and windows, they've each got their pros and cons but nothing that would make me choose one over the other.
The answer with any discussion of this nature is to immediately disregard any and all answer that doesn't come in, unprompted, with an explanation.
Which is about 90% of the comments here. Not a joke. I have counted 18 and see only 2 with specific gripes. Worthless comment section. (Sorry, but I did include yours too)
I was 16 when I first met the first big "Mac is better than Windows" argument in person. I asked why, and they mentioned a number of things that didn't feel relevant to the people at the table, but the one that stood out was a particular feature that was indeed quite useful. Well, I didn't know how to respond at the time, but as soon as I got home, I checked with windows and the feature was right there.
I don't think they were wrong for their preference. In fact, back then there was a lot of major differences in the workflow for these OS that isn't as big nowadays, specially if you're someone who can actually use google for more than 20 seconds. But the interaction proved to me the importance of being able to back your stance, because, if you don't, you may as well be just another 16 year old idiot with 0 technical or practical knowledge of the stuff that dictated your preference. They don't learn how to resolve their problems with them either, if they hide the reasons from others. So, again, worthless - take up screen space that could have better comments, while informing nothing and helping no one.
You alluded to this but I wanted to emphasize that a lot of this is just legacy baggage in terms of reputation that windows will have to carry for a long time
I think that when people talk about how shitty windows is compared to Mac/apple they are talking about stuff that was probably true at some point
For many, memories of using windows include blue screens of death, programs crashing often and windows itself crashing often. On top of that, windows was a cesspool for a hot minute while Microsoft got its act together and put better security in place to address malware as the internet got popular.
These are obviously not the same, not nearly as bad as they were back then
I mostly enjoyed windows, and to a lesser degree Linux until a few years ago when an employer made me switch to Mac - which for the sake of my brain’s plasticity I readily embraced
The main differences I noticed at the time were: a much better window manager, a much saner way of installing applications, an overall hard to explain smoothness along with the ability to bring over some of my favorite little Linux tools
Fast forward to today and it’s really just a matter of preference. Mac helped Linux a ton, but nowadays they are all so customizable that you can more or less achieve what you’re trying to do most of the time on any of them
Today, I use all three out of necessity - Mac and Linux for work, windows for gaming, but I can surely tell you that overall my best decision was to just not get involved in holy wars lol
2 replies →
Damn you're worked up. Some of my gripes with Windows come down to peripherals, where I'll spend a lot of time troubleshooting why my bluetooth device or speakers or mic don't work. There also seems to be no way to bypass using a password or PIN on startup without changing the registry. I'd like my computer to just stay on at all times so I can remotely connect to it, but what do you know, a forced update caused it to restart, and because it requires a passeord to get to the desktop I have no way of getting Parsec to connect. Yeah I tried to disable automatic updates but nothing seems to stick. Why is the mic on my PS5 controller connecting and disconnecting ten times a second. Ok let me just try to unpair the controller, oh it just... won't unpair.
1 reply →
I'll somewhat echo this. I think simply switching puts the new OS at a huge disadvantage, because not being used to something can make it seem bad.
They are totally different.
Macs come working. When something breaks, it is impossible to fix, because they didn’t include a button to fix it. But it comes working!
Windows PCs come broken out of the box, but the user adapts and eventually gains a pile of workarounds, which is sort of like the windows equivalent of a UX.
Until fairly recently, I would have agreed, but Microsoft is actively enshittifying Windows now by pushing things like cloud-only logins and ads in Start while simultaneously removing configurability (e.g. vertical taskbar was removed in Win11). I'm not a fan of macOS, but at least Apple is not all in on ads the way Microsoft seems to be these days.
I don't have a cloud login. I log into windows with a windows user account. I don't have ads in start, and i can make my taskbar vertical.
literally everything you said was false, but i can only disprove a majority of it with a single screenshot
https://i.imgur.com/XR1aj5b.png
not only no ads in start, no ads anywhere, ffs
8 replies →
There's more than 2 sides to the fence. Desktop Linux is actually awesome, even better if you are even remotely technical.
I'm forced to use Apple and Microsoft products at work regularly. They're all so much worse than desktop Linux that it's not even funny.
This is exactly what happens to me. I get the company laptop, think "maybe Linux isn't that great anymore... how is modern FAANG handling things?"
Then the ads come in, and any of my doubts evaporate instantly. The home PC runs NixOS, it's been that way for 6 years now and it will probably remain that way until the advertising glut is satiated. Even then, it won't be easy getting me to switch away from desktop Linux.
Linux is nice if, like nixos users, you want to spend hundreds of hours over several years writing every QoL feature totally custom for your unique use case.
For me, Mac is 99% of what I liked about Linux, and there is ALWAYS an existing QoL solution—usually reasonably polished—for everything it lacks.
Windows has none of the benefits ofLinux, none of Homebrew or even the AUR, a tiny fraction of the QoL third party features from Mac (usually unpolished)—to say nothing of the first party QoL features—plus the hardware is comically bad. Diving board trackpads are normal on $3k windows machines in 2025, 500nits displays, whistling fans on about 17 high-end laptops I tried in the past 6 months. Truly the worst experience imaginable. Abominable, even.
1 reply →
[flagged]
Presumably their experience.
1 reply →
I just spin up a ubuntu server vm and use it as my dev machine. VScode remote is pretty solid these days.
I use my mac as a on the go computer for work (it's really light, and proprietary software works always), but I have a linux VM that I sync the needed project on it before I go out. If I have to use containers for extra services (DB,...) I may as well use a VM I can configure as I like.
Yeah. Apple doesn't have to run faster than the bear. It only needs to run faster than the next guy. Which, as it turns out, is not that hard to do.
I work at a 90% Windows shop. Obviously major benefits to being on the "main platform".
I tried using a Windows laptop for my first two months.
I couldn't do it.
With official linux support on Windows, I really love developing on Windows, it's the best of both worlds. Mac on the other hand feels like a second hand citizen to both linux and windows depending on what you're doing.
I've had the same experience. MacOS had lots of features intended to make it friendly for casual users, which made it a pain when you wanted to modify it, but if you wanted to modify something, you generally could; it just took some extra steps compared to Windows 7. By contrast, I spent an hour figuring out how to uninstall Edge on Windows 10 this afternoon, and I suspect it's going to reinstall after the next update like all of the other bloatware did.
Compare the median sale price of a Windows laptop vs Mac. The qualify bar should be significantly higher for anything with an Apple logo on it just to justify the price tag.
Any system you have deep knowledge and experience with makes all the others look like garbage, because you don't know the right menus, can't intuit what you are trying to do and don't know the right workarounds/what the designers intended. As someone who uses MacOS, Windows and Linux on the regular, let me just say, uh... man, Solaris is pretty bad!
I helped my little brother put together a gaming PC a few years ago. Before that, I hadn’t even touched a windows computer in a very long time.
I was blown away by how difficult and opaque everything was. I’m sure a lot of it was just unfamiliarity, but a lot of it definitely was not. I actually could not believe how hard of a time I had
100% ever since I switched to design and no longer using windows, I forgot what blue screen of death looks like :D
None are actually better than any other, they're al great but fir different types of users and what they value.
What exactly did you find so much worse in windows?
The built-in bloatware (LinkedIn, TikTok, Clipchamp, etc.), the constant nagging (like full-screen reminders to buy Office 365 to "protect" your PC), Edge is basically forced on you. MSVC has insane licensing terms — you can’t use it outside of Visual Studio or VS Code, not to mention it's lacking support for C. Windows seems actively user and developer hostile.
Beyond that, Windows' architecture is a mess, I hate it (There's a reason Microsoft has to ship WSL2). macOS runs all of my tools fine, just like Linux does.
I hate Win11. It is horrible, but the first few points don't really make sense. I use it in 2 environments. - enterprise version: no bloatware, no ads, and edge is there but never has to be used for anything - professional version: bloatware is uninstalled in like 2min after OS install, another 2min later all ads are disabled. And it usually stays like that after updates too. Edge is never used at all.
Windows architecture is great. the WinAPI is better documented and more comprehensive than anything on Linux or Mac.
There are so many other issues. - The file explorer gets slower and more broken with each update. context menus randomly don't show, or take literally 30 seconds to load. - The renderer crashes randomly once a week (it's not a huge issue, but the screen goes black for 10 seconds or so) - the settings dialog is bad. goes through like 5 different layers of Windows generations and recently makes the old dialogs hard to find but doesn't offer adequate replacements (looking at network and sound) - and much more...
1 reply →
Why use MSVC at all? You can hook up alternative compilers to both VS and VSC with ease.
1 reply →
With every Windows release since 8, it feels more and more like the OS is actively antagonistic towards the user. This has come to a peak with Windows 11.
Not too long ago I booted up an old laptop and put a fresh install of Windows 7 on it for kicks. Amazing how much of a breath of fresh air that was.
Not the OP, but one thing I've run into is that I've had three or four Windows installs (both Windows 11 and Windows 10) just fail to upgrade - one of them new upgrades just stopped showing up, I had to install an 'enablement package' and that fixed it but there was literally no warning or instructions of what to do, I just had to Google it when I noticed I wasn't getting updates.
The others just failed with random hexadecimal error codes, again I had to Google to try and work out what was going on.
With one of them I had to use the command line and diskpart etc. to expand the recovery partition because apparently the default size when I'd made that Windows 10 install was no longer big enough, and Windows Update couldn't work this out (the error code from the failure was nondescript, took ages to find out what was actually wrong) and couldn't fix it. Had to do it manually in Powershell.
Another one I think might have fixed by running sfc and dism recovery commands in the command line, again it would be nice if Windows could work this out itself!
To be fair, macOS isn't much better in this regard, the error codes can be quite cryptic, for example what is a -2003F.
For some reason, a game I play called DCS can be buggy and I've been told by the support to sfc /scannow and dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth. For some reason on every install of Windows 11 I've ever done, it always picks up tons of broken files. This is installing using the latest at the time Microsoft ISO. I've had this issue on multiple different systems, a modern gaming pc, a Mac with bootcamp, an older Lenovo M93p and when installing inside VMWare or KVM.
I do get less application and operating system crashes on a Mac though.
Ironically, I have the reverse opinion.
As someone who wants to be productive at work, I chose Windows over Mac and Linux. Thankfully I had a choice.
Windows is great. Windows laptops are universally garbage.
They become a lot better when you install Linux.
Well, except for battery life.
Hardware support also varies from laptop to laptop. If you want one to run Linux without a hassle, you have to shop around for that specifically.
As someone who makes video games in C++ I’m going to have to disrespectfully disagree.
But I will admit that SteamDeck is great. It’s deeply ironic that the best API for Linux gaming is Win32.
10 replies →
What? The only 'great' Windows since 7 is LTSC.
Win10/Win11 with O&O Shutup are perfectly fine.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
4 replies →
That's not true and your opinion is subjective. Windows 11 is a great developer platform.
> That's not true and your opinion is subjective.
I think everyone who comments on an OS war thread should see this banner in big red letters underneath the comment box
How can their opinion be both “not true” and subjective? Windows 11 might be an ok developer platform though (does Cygwin still work?)
Use WSL2 so you get best of both worlds.
Windows, an OS that's compatible with almost all hardware and devices.
Linux on WSL2, an OS which is probably the best for most work.
1 reply →
It's not true, because it's subjective.
For many years, Windows has had WSL and now it's the second generation WSL2 and you can run graphical Linux even without a VM. It has a decent package manager out of the box, a great open-source terminal. Containers and VMs are also available out of the box. Windows also has a developers' hub, which allows you to install toolchains easily, including IDEs such as VS Code.
Meanwhile, macOS comes with its own version of CLI tools such as find, which have quite different parameters than Linux, it doesn't have a package manager, when I install an app on my iPhone, it somehow decides that I want to install it on my macOS, too, etc. And I won't even mention how poor the menubar is! I have at least 10 apps I need to install to make macOS usable - PopClip, Moom, Bartender, etc., while the Windows equivalent for things like Dock and menubar are working pretty well, including notifications - I've accidentally have clicked so many times on notification banners, covering my scroll bar or window controls. Not to mention that so many times I'm typing something in window, which has my input focus, then another window pops up, steals my input focus, and I end up trying parts of my password in the wrong window due to that!
There are so many things wrong with macOS, Apple doesn't really care to improve it, and the System Settings is growing out of control! Windows' settings are much better organized!
And, yes, macOS freezes and crashes not less frequently than Windows. In fact, I haven't had any such issues with a heavily constrained Windows 11, running in VMware Fusion!
Also, Windows now has a free equivalent of the paid CleanMyMac app, and it works pretty well. Not to mention the free security software. But even with CleanMyMac, uninstalling software leads to tons of junk all over the place.
6 replies →
Not all developers are UNIX people, there is a world outside UNIX that also requires software development.