Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

What about wireless charging? I see magsafe as deprecated and only Macbook air has it now.

Check this out: https://griffintechnology.com/us/breaksafe-magnetic-usb-c-po...

I still think their rMBP 15s are the all around the best you can buy. I haven't tried the track bar version yet though. Also, OS X (or whatever) on a rMBP is still great for surfing the web. The zoom with the trackpad is flawless.

Not a big deal nowadays, my mid-2014 Thinkpad has a similar connection (it won't ever drag the laptop when pulled), I'd think most laptops should have such connectors by now, "mag-safe" or other?

Also, what PC alternative has a MagSafe equivalent?

Apple laptops are still successful as for now, they sold wagons of the latest Macbook Pro, but it is not going to last if they don't fix the OS ASAP.

>Now they are a phone company who presides over the death throws of an amazing operating system that is going to be killed off to make it more like a phone. The new "features" every cycle are more "lets put this phone feature on the desktop"

I don't know much about this area, other than the little I have read, but didn't MS do somewhat the same thing - "lets put this phone feature on the desktop" - with Windows 8? Not sure if they reversed that in Windows 10. Interested to know.

You missed the most important stages in between: when they became a company that made cute, candy-colored computers that would match your Volkswagen New Beetle, then when they made a totally awesome mp3 player you could get to match it.

For the majority of the population in developed countries, and almost all of the population of developing countries, smartphones are the only computer people have or need.

I agree that Apple have shifted focus away from "making tools for people to create things and solve problems" towards consumption-oriented mobile devices. But those devices are still computers, and they're wildly successful.

If Apple devoted their focus to products in proportion to their revenue, then they would be putting 12x as much effort into the iPhone than they would for the entire Mac lineup.

What is it missing? It's been a while since I really wanted a feature in the desktop OS. All of the 'phone' features (besides launchpad) have made my life a lot easier (continuity, handoff, notification centre, even Siri from time to time).

You're describing the changing world we're living in. Apple is merely reflecting it.

it's death throes.

I don't think Cook is hardheaded. I think he has no idea how to run a product company. Pretty much everyone from the average HN user to Larry Ellison predicted this outcome. Cook is logistics / supply chain etc, Ballmer was sales, neither had any business at the top of their respective companies. Jobs did it on purpose, in my opinion, because he believed the single most important function initially was to keep Apple running smoothly and to complete the iPhone boom (ie the big product for the next decade was already in place). The only question is how long Apple will stay in the Cook era before getting a product leader replacement.

OTOH, ALL Apple hardware that I have bought (multiple iPads, iPhones, iPods, Macbook Pros, iMacs) still works as advertised and is in good shape (I always buy and use Apple Care). I have just recently begun to use my Linux desktop more because my 2009 MBP is starting to feel a bit sluggish.

People can whine all they want about Apple (I personally will not buy the new MBPs, wait until next year's model). The truth is they've set the bar so high that anything less than perfection (which IMO is mostly what they gave us during the last decade) is seen as unacceptable. The same cannot be said of Windows - at least according to my experience since Windows 95. I recently bought a brand new SSD and a license for Windows 10. One day after installation, Windows crashed and had to "repair" itself. To be fair, it has been running flawlessly since.

I think we can be sure that under Jobs, they would not be in a situation where you cannot charge the current iPhone model with the current MacBook without a dongle. "Oh, it's not a dongle, it's just a cable." -> Get out of my face.

Do Windows laptops have it, or you're going to use a 2014 MacBook Air forever..?

Moving to USB-C was the right choice. Charge cable goes bad? Buy another one for $15.

Everything else is spot on. Apple quality is fast going downhill.

After half a day of conversations, as we left the building, my very first words to my team were: "Apple Computer is no more. This is a marketing company. They might as well stick their logo on washing machines, microwaves and refrigerators. They know how to market them to be cool and they'll sell millions of them"

Then came the iPhone.

And, yeah, they could have filled homes with Apple appliances. Not sure why they didn't go there. So easy. Not saying it would have been right, but they had the opening and the mindless following to make every home "Apple Cool".

They are though. Consumers will pay for hardware with batteries that die after a year and a half. They'll pay for vendor-lock in and to be locked into the walled garden experience. They'll pay for hardware that will be locked out of the walled garden and unsupported by vendor updates after 4-5 years. They'll pay extra for accessories that give basic functionality to their electronics. They'll pay a massive premium for accessories that are subpar for their asking price if they're endorsed by celebrities.

I'm not a fan of newer Apple hardware and software, but we're in the minority.

Byproduct of Apple's work on mobile.

> Or a full new filesystem (AFS)?

Byproduct of Apple's work on mobile.

> Siri on the desktop?

Byproduct of mobile again! (By the way, ask Siri on Mac to set an alarm or interact with homekit!)

But, I take your point. I tried to mostly detail Apple's lack of attention for developers, but perhaps missed the emphasis on that there in the post. Microsoft is really trying with developers and it's readily apparent.

I think it is a question of emphasis. You've focused on the OS, but not all the innovation was in the OS itself. Remember when they added iLife? That was a big deal. Software you had to pay for on Windows was bundled free, and it was good. Everyone used iPhoto, iMovie was nice, GarageBand was awesome, although probably not everyone needed it.

(Good lord, just checked, iLife debuted (minus GarageBand) on 10.1. Evidently, I've been using MacBooks longer than I realized.)

The sense that they have an exciting vision and plan for the future of how people use and relate to the computer is gone. That sort of vision and the innovation that goes with it is reserved for the mobile space now.

They are still fine computers, particularly the notebooks, but the mobile products are driving the process now. I do think that is a shame.

In short, Apple is spending a lot of effort making features that I, as a professional developer and 20 year Mac user, don't want.

True, there probably isn't much the average user would like to change in OSX. But it would be okay if stuff was broken was fixed and stuff that was wonky got improved.

This was done extremely poorly, though. Among the big sync providers (Dropbox, Sync, Box, Google), iCloud Drive is easily the worst.

The iOS app looks like something an intern cooked up. Hardly any iOS apps can read or write from the drive. There's no way to share anything in your drive. There's no way to share anything into your drive, either.

While Apple introduced the ability for your Documents folder to be stored in iCloud, macOS has completely lost control of the Documents folder in a very Microsofty way: Mine has turned into a rubbish heap of various application data that I didn't ask for. Savegames, virtual machines, "My Music", "Microsoft User Data", etc. — it's so unusable that I ended up hiding the entire folder and creating a new one that I could use for, you know, documents.

The iCloud services that are hidden away from the user seem pretty great, but the way Apple decide to expose the Drive is terrible. It's almost like they don't want users to actually use the drive.

I agree 100% with your point. If you want pointless changes to the OS that means you have to relearn a lot just to keep doing what you were doing, then yes, Microsoft is what you want.

If you want small incremental improvements that don't move around common functions for no reason, then stick with Mac OS.

>So, you're merely 3 years of the platform, but have an opinion on how Apple "pivoted its attention" regarding OS released based on just a couple of OSes? Because I've been here since 10.2 and most releases weren't about breakthrough features, but refinement and minor changes (often regressions).

Exactly. Sigh. Kids these days. That is like the complain about Webkit being the new IE, without actually experiencing Web Development during the IE era, and falsely claiming IE era means IE 7+, then later acknowledged he wasn't even doing Web Development in IE7! time. Anyway......

There are lots of new fans into the Apple Ecosystem since iPhone. And without the RDF from Steve they quickly lose sight of Apple's greatest strength. Apple is the master of iteration! Very rarely will you see a completely new product CAT being introduced. They just continue to iterate. Sometimes taking two steps forward and one step back.

I agree Apple have spend less time with Mac and specially Desktop in General, but most of the point in article were not convincing.

Install (only) MS Word - - another cycle of updates. Restart, check updates, more updates!!! It's just insane. Why does it download Outlook spam filter update, 100mb?I don't have Outlook installed, I only wanted freaking MS Word.

Exactly. Honestly it's linkbate nonsense. Sucks you in like a car crash on the side of the road or a hockey fight.

Granted, Windows has a usable file manager (Explorer) and Finder is an embarrassment, but theres always Path Finder.

Comments like this make it hard to take any side of the discussion seriously.

/Neither/ of the OSes are "Escher'esque nightmare[s]." My elderly mother can kludge her way through both of them, more or less reliably - admittedly, with more trouble than using her phone, but not a lot more.

Nothing that a tech-illiterate can reasonably use on a day-to-day basis qualifies as a "nightmare." Can we please stop pitching hyperbole-for-effect until it nullifies the entire discussion?

Apple's notebooks are excellent, no argument there.

Totally disagree. I hopped from OS to OS for over a decade every other year or 3 (Win, OSX, Linuxes with various DMs/WMs) and it's always, always an adjustment period from "WTF is this" to "totally productive with this now", usually a matter of 1-2 weeks. Happy with Fedora/Gnome right now but have to say just Explorer itself beats Finder and Nautilus (rebranded as "Gnome Files" apparently now) for keyboard users when it comes to out-of-box file managers.

The weird new tiles/metro UI stuff they tried pushing from Win 8 is of course a pretty bad attempt to Microsoftify the "secondary desktop layer" concept that has been prevalent on the other OSes for longer, and better. It sucks, but also useless and thus not used for many/most power users I'd guess.

The rest of the "UI" question is in the hands of individual independent app developers, as it properly should be.

Uh... no. No, you can't do that.

WiFi configuration was annoying. Lots of clicking. No consistency to the UI. And for a relatively new laptop, it was slow. OSX in comparison was simple, relatively straightforward, and responsive.

Certificates were a joke. We could import certificates and CAs. But once imported, they didn't do anything. Access to the corporate intranet was still blocked with "unknown CA". When we went back to see if the certs had been imported... nope. No certificates. OK, import them again? Nope, still no certificates on the machine.

We gave up and let him use a spare Mac Mini.

I hate where Apple has been going with OSX: Slow strangulation by oxygen deprivation. But until it becomes entirely unusable, it's still better than Windows for me.

The cost of Mac or Windows is cumulatively huge for me: on both I regularly sit wondering when some incidental operation will end.

> I get the slickest hardware, great battery life, the best touchpad and keyboard, and a hi-resolution screen that doesn't have battery life, flicker, tint, or scaling issues.

None of these things are universal among Windows machines. I can't remember which model, but a Verge review recently said that a Windows laptop had surpassed the best Mac (in terms of hardware quality).

> display scaling is a joke

It's fine. Everything works and looks good. Sometimes you use legacy apps (which is a feature of Windows -- legacy apps still work) that don't handle scaling well, but the OS helps resolve those issues.

> Performance is terrible

Reviewers, people on this thread, and I have all reported Windows being much snappier than OS X. I actually switched to Windows for performance alone. I hate not having a bash terminal, but it's better than using buggy, slow OS X.

A bit of a rant ahead, but I am really tired of people still treating Linux like it's 1997 or expecting it to work like their old OS did and then running into silly problems that none of us, who actually spend our day in Linux, run into.

These problems sound more like inexperience in using Linux to me than anything else. fsck works automatically after a power failure, configuration doesn't override itself and installing a package from the web, while not a great way of doing things, definitely does not prevent you from installing other packages, unless you somehow broke a whole lot of other stuff by deleting dependencies without really understanding what you were doing.

I have no problems with scaling with a combination of 4k, 1080p and 2736x1824 monitors. (It's working great, though it's true it didn't work like that a year ago)

With a surface book you get hardware that's even better quality than any Apple laptop, and actually has a detachable screen I can write on (this isn't a gimmick, I'm using it daily as a software developer).

No idea what you mean with saying "Windows is still a mess", maybe give an argument for that?

Even though there are some things that are annoying or in a bad shape, all in alle macOS and the ecosystem makes me more productive than Windows or Linux.

As a developer, I also notice that a lot of tools don't work well on Windows. Even things like Docker.

This is so far removed from my world as a daily Linux user. I put Fedora 25 onto a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition and everything worked perfectly out of the box. The OS looks gorgeus, and I now have the tooling so perfected to my workflow that I would be absolutely gutted if I had to change OS. In fact, I would likely turn down a job if it meant having to use Windows as a daily driver. MacOS I could likely get on with ok, but would miss the customizations I have on my linux machine.

I agree, but why do this? Has it ever led to anything in your experience that was not a pointless and tiresome flame war?

The only problem I've had with this desktop has been the occasional hissyfit of compiling the Nvidia driver against a modern kernel. Thats a story for another post, but the Linux systems I've built and used for my day-to-day work are and have been rock solid. Without me sitting there struggling to make things work.

On the laptops, I've not had an issue in like 5 or 6 years, apart from a single Wifi driver ... which also didn't work in windows. So I added a simple Panda nub and off to the races I went.

Really, from my own personal experience, the OSX interface is a pain in terms of how it maps against keyboards, and the lack of a sloppy focus equivalence in OSX.

From a programming scenario, the toolchain is maddening (I am looking at you Xcode ... every (&(&^&^&* update, you have to reapply the click-this-license-button) on OSX. I use homebrew (having left macports in the dust), as I want stuff to work. And then along comes an update which just breaks everything.

And then the SMB stack in OSX. Yeah, the SMB stack. Using a lowest common denominator for our office meant using crappy file system technology, but thanks to either licensing issues or a NIH mentality, OSX has an almost completely neutered SMB implementation. It is awful. Painfully slow even over fast connections.

Then there is the desktop experience. Many of the customers of my previous employer are creative types whom used to use Mac for their video bits. Most are migrating to Linux, some back to windows. They are done fighting the battles (don't shoot the messenger, this is what they tell me).

I know the article was clickbait, and had a number of issues. But blasting Linux, which is a perfectly good, and very functional OS for many by rehashing issues from 10 years ago ... might not be the best approach for advocating your view.

FWIW: I run windows. In a window. Having had the joyful experience of self-destructing windows installations on wife/offspring's laptops, I've sworn to never again allow a windows OS to run installed on bare metal. I've taken wife/offspring's old laptops, virtualized them, and they can run their old stuff in a VM. They use Macs now, and I won't try to force them to change, because they just work for their use case.

Linux is a great OS for desktops (ignore the haters). Linux Mint is definitely one of the best user experiences I've had on a system so far, for day to day use.

Not really. It may not be suitable for all use-cases, but it has certainly much improved in the last years.

To make a concrete example, I'm running ArchLinux + bspmw on an Asus Zenbook UX305UA. Thanks to ArchLinux I don't have all the bloat that I don't need, putting me at 10 hours of battery life. The tiling WM allows me to be extremely efficient with desktop and window managing. This is why I find it really obnoxious to use both Windows and OS X when I have to.

If you don't need proprietary software that doesn't run on Linux I seriously suggest you give it a try.

macOS has never been more stable or developer friendly

The OS is fine, although largely in maintenance mode. The hardware value is poor and has gotten significantly worse in the last few years. I'm typing this on a retina iMac that I'm very happy with, but if I had to replace it there's no Mac that I would consider now that Windows has decent high-DPI support.

    > where macOS has come from since the days of OS8.

I care a lot about a consistent Finder UI, about the Clipboard and Dragboard. Those became a little less logical when OS X 10 was introduced. As you know, many other features became much more powerful, so overall it was easily forgivable.

Unfortunately, since Tim has been in charge, the lack of logic and consistency has become a real problem. Nobody at Apple seems to care about their own "Human Interface Guidelines" anymore.

It's like Apple compares Mac with iOS, and decides that mystery meat navigation, and inconsistent UI, are no big deal. As long as it's no worse on the Mac than on iOS, Apple is fine with things.

* I have to turn off gatekeeper to run unsigned apps.

* I can't write into /bin or /usr on my own machine without flipping some magic option

* I can't run gdb without some complicated signing dance I have to do every time I update it.

* I can't run dtrace without rebooting and switching some secret flag off. I have to tell other people to turn they same thing off so they can dtrace applications.

That's just straight off the top of my head. The dtrace and gdb things are particularly annoying, as it makes life harder for me to get other users to do simple debugging tasks, and there is no simple workaround, just complicated instructions.

even OSX 10.3, which was when OS X started to get really good, was released in late 2003, almost 14 YEARS AGO .

I know people who have been on Macs for 20 years, since OS8 or 9 days, who have bought non-Mac hardware and won't get another MacBook - that is significant and Apple should be paying attention to that.

Apple is not gated by their software costs - they clearly make a lot of money from their desktop, mini, and laptop sales.

So why not produce something truly excellent instead of merely adequate?

If Apple just stopped doing those things, I'd consider running OSX, but they won't so it seems like an entirely pointless exercise.

It's the same iOS vs Android debate, Apple charge a premium but promise things will be significantly better, if they are only marginally better then it becomes harder to justify their premium and lock in.

I think the recent spate of articles are more about the fact that the gap has been narrowing significantly, partly due to Apple's neglect, partly due to Microsoft doing better, so the balance is changing for people on the margins.

Safety, performance, stability, easier UI (for the average user).

Yeah, none of these things feature well in tv advertisements, but compared to its predecessors Windows 10 actually does excel in all of those. Heck, i installed 10 on my parents' cheapo PC and with the same programs and such installed it actually is more responsive.

> It stills sucks majorly at giving you a proper estimate of the time it will take to copy a file.

That's not a software problem, that's a hardware problem. Particularly on SSDs you have to deal with deletions being surprisingly slow, and in the copying process itself you often have a very fast phase at the beginning when it's just slurping the file into ram; and then it drops off when it runs into the write limit of the target medium and/or runs out of ram to use cache. If you're copying to the same medium you get an even stronger drop due to read/write happening on the same thing.

Predicting this is HARD.

The only way to get reliable predictions out of the copy dialog would be to disable memory caching while copying, and uh, you kinda don't want that. It would just be predictably slow.

For what it's worth, I think this will be addressed by the switch to AFS.

After that, it depends on what you are doing. I develop using a PC, macbook (for iOS builds usually) and a Linux machine (running mint).

Linux is best for Node/JS heavy development, IMO, largely because of the long filenames in Nodeland and the general linux-first documentation and help. Recently I have found its also pretty good for Dotnet Core development. The OS is nice as well as in that sort of bare-metal coding, it kind of gets out of the way.

Windows, either with VS or VS Code, is for things that require a lot of power or are huge (usually related): Docker stuff is easier, solutions with hundreds of projects, etc. When I want to throw code against a tiny god, the PC is my go to.

Quarrel over operating systems is pretty pointless, if it doesn't run natively, slap a hypervisor on it and run whatever you like in a VM; for me that'd be a Linux or BSD, I'm not really opinionated there (although certain things run faster in Linux due to experience).

(Obviously I don't grok the laptop lifestyle, I don't understand the "work everywhere" mentality, in fact, I don't want it at all. It's called work place for a reason - at least for me. I do have a laptop (or half a dozen, who has time to keep record?), the mainly used one is a Getac unit with a carrying handle that weights ~3 kilos or so; at least it's silent, has a superbright screen and a battery that's larger than most ultrabooks by volume ;)

I do machine learning development. It is very helpful to have a CUDA-compliant GPU (read: NVIDIA) on your local machine so you can develop and run things quickly. Yes, you can use AWS, but that is costly, you need to push your data into the cloud, and you definitely cannot do it w/ sensitive data such as health records/medical images with localization clauses. None of the major machine learning platforms work well on non-CUDA compliant GPUs, most are barely functional outside NVIDIA cards.

I waited over a year for the new MBP and was disappointed to see no NIVIDA GPU on them. I love the MBP, it is an absolute pleasure to use. But the new line had barely any horsepower improvements. It was almost a step back from the 2014 MBP I already owned. Further, the cost was obscene for the value/improvements I was getting.

I'm not happy about it, but I purchased an Alienware w/ a hefty NVIDIA card and 32GB RAM. It is a beast, but it meets my work needs. I do miss the agility of a MBP (e.g., carrying it in one hand to a cafe or onto a plane), but ultimately horsepower is needed more.

But, it might be better to say HN is a tech bubble, because everywhere in the world that I've been people who work on web tech use macs, for most of us the job would be almost impossible without a *nix OS.

And this post was written (somewhat regretfully) from a Mac in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where non mac laptops are somewhat rare in the tech community (and are then usually Linux rather than Windows).

I can't believe how much worse Windows 10 is than 7. And all the good features of 10 could easily be integrated with the 7 UI.

It's very frustrating that there isn't another player in this space. I don't mind fooling around with linux but sometimes you just want to buy a laptop and go without all the extra crap and most of the consumer space won't go through that anyway.

- Dashboard is still there and can be enabled as a space or an overlay (System Preferences > Mission Control).

- You still can zoom in on anything. I use ctrl+scroll (System Preferences > Accessibility > Zoom).

- The invert colors shortcut (cmd-opt-ctrl-8) is still there. (System Preferences > Keyboard > Accessibility).

Another feature I love that used to be easy to find but got buried in settings is the three-finger drag (now found in System Preferences > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad Options...).

I question some of the changes in default settings too, but then I realize the defaults are most important for the non-power-users who can't or won't change them. I would also never want to store my Documents or Desktop contents in iCloud, but I can see why someone who doesn't understand the file system might.

I've been running an Ubuntu server VM for ages to get bits and pieces done, it's so nice to _just be there_.

Pretty cool stuff!

For instance, if you are developing a game with Sprite Kit, you will find that around 95% of the code is IDENTICAL on Mac and iOS. Sprite Kit itself works the same on both. Sister frameworks like AVFoundation are mostly the same and they have peanut-buttered some #define values to allow “different” classes like UIColor and NSColor to be SKColor, etc. to make it easier to have code that does not needlessly vary. You end up having to clearly think about UI differences between the two but that is true anyway between desktop and mobile.

On the other hand, sure, a utility-style application is not that similar between iOS and macOS once you get past the likes of NSString and NSArray. Yet, utility applications often look and work quite differently between desktop and mobile so this may make sense. And if you rely on the cloud to implement part of the functionality (and share it between the two), you may find that again you are dealing with mainly a lot of UI-centered differences on the two platforms that would have been different anyway.

The iPad is the weird one. Here, Apple probably needs a middle API that really can use exactly the same constructs between mobile and desktop where they actually do end up looking or even working the same.

Which is why I'm voicing my objections to the way that Apple is treating their Mac lineup by leaving iOS. I sold my iPhone and iPads (I had 2) and moved to Android.

I'm still a Mac user who will happily spend thousands when they offer compelling reasons to upgrade. But if their belief is that there is more money in iOS, I'm making damn sure that I'm not part of that equation.

Switching to Android also has the pleasant side effect of being far cheaper. I was able to get a brand new Nexus 5X for net-$20 after trading in my old iPhone 6, which barely held a charge anymore. And Google Fi is so much cheaper for my use case (I use about a half gig per month and do a lot of travel in other countries) that I'm saving around $20/mo and getting better service.

For those of you wanting Apple to focus more product development resources on macOS and Macs, abandoning that platform will only confirm Apple's decision to focus on iOS. We need to abandon that platform if we want more focus on macOS.

Or maybe they can, judging by the last MBP release. Hopefully they turn it around.

Because they actually update the hardware...

I don't need to sell this in 1.5 years, probably not in 3-4 years. After 5 years, it'll certainly worth >$1000.

Not at 50% of the original price, but still...

They are more expensive to buy, not really “great” over their predecessors, and there is no doubt that some future-generation Touch Bar 2 with a feedback engine, etc. will be far superior to use (kind of like buying an iPad 1 with not enough memory, being too heavy, etc. and iPad 2 blowing it out of the water, not to mention Apple unceremoniously ending OS support for iPad 1). These first-generation Touch Bar laptops will really age poorly I think, I doubt they will resell as well as Macs typically have.

I don't care about this whole windows/mac debate, as I run linux, but my 4 year old Asus gaming machine is still quite a powerful machine and hasn't been updated outside of SSDs. It would fetch a few hundred bucks, probably 40% of its original price, and it doesn't have a cult following willing to pay a premium for...whatever it is.

Used Macs remind me of used Jeeps.

- Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

- I got a Google Home and finally understand the future of computing

- Apple just told the world it has no idea who the Mac is for

- The reason I keep going back to Apple might surprise you

- Google's software is putting Apple to shame

- Google buying Twitter would be the best result for everyone

- iOS 10: the beginning of the end for apps as you know them

This is the profile of the newsletter editor (http://char.gd/announcements/welcome-to-the-new-charged/):

Owen was previously Editor at The Next Web and now runs digital at VanMoof in Amsterdam. He created Charged newsletter, and is probably far too obsessed with keeping up with everything in tech.

What's BeOS like?

Most of mine is audio mixing for live and live-to-tape video, so I could move to Ableton, but it'll be a lot of reworking stuff that already works.

How does it feel to belong to the Blackberry of Apple? Do they get laughed at during lunch breaks?

The old "640k should be enough for everyone" argument. I'm amazed after decades of continuous performance improvement in computing people are still making this argument.

On Windows there's ConEmu, Bash on Windows and Powershell.

On Linux, there's a bazillion shells like zsh & fish and emulators like Terminator & terminix

Also, Finder is probably the least featured file manager out there and you could replace its features with pretty much anything else.

And it's ubuntu, so you can apt-get install build-essential & whatever else you need. It doesn't do upstart or /etc/init.d services (like if you wanted to run mongo as a service) but it runs mongo instances fine for me while I develop locally.

I spent my first full day developing on a win10 box this weekend & it went fine. But since I've switched to webstorm for most of my development what o/s I'm running hardly matters outside of keyboard shortcuts.

For anyone considering switching, I'd recommend buying the "pro" version as you can use the services feature to turn off things like cortana or the automatically-restarting windows defender. It would like to do a whole lot of spying by default, more than I'm surprised people are comfortable with.

But as many in this discussion have said, please give linux (and especially gnome 3 a shot). It's a pleasure to work with, and if I could stream legal tv services and run photoshop there's no question it's what I'd run.

It is not very user friendly and requires manual work to set up unlike, say, ubuntu