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Comment by dialupmodem | Hacker News Reader

After being a windows jerk for 20 years I fully switched over about a year ago. My only remaining attachment to Microsoft is an old version of office I have running in CrossOver.

I think what did it for me was the hardware, but the forced updates and telemetry completely sabotaged trust and closed the deal. It was a tough move, but my new found hatred for Microsoft fueled the whole journey adequately. Just what are they thinking?

This survey is making me think I may start packing my things and moving to Linux. With great numbers come all the nasty viruses. No thanks!

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yeah, interesting that the survey doesn't report the numbers of dissatisfied Mac users who plan on switching to GNU/Linux. I suspect they were never given this as an option.

Anecdata would suggest that the desire to move to something else is more prevalent amongst devs and techies. The MacBook is becoming a consumer device.

>doesn't report the numbers of dissatisfied Mac users who plan on switching to GNU/Linux

It's the year of the Linux desktop, at last! Maybe it really will happen before I start drawing my pension after all.

> The MacBook is becoming a consumer device.

I think it always has been. The "pro" has been aimed more at artists than techies, and even there thing have been sagging as of late.

That Macbooks ran unix was a legacy of Next, and there in turn i was a convenient choice for rapidly bringing up a usable OS.

The BSD side of OSX/MacOS have been largely stagnant since the first release, afaik.

> the forced updates and telemetry completely sabotaged trust and closed the deal.

It's a factor in the opposite direction too. I'd love to switch away from Mac, and I work in my Windows 10 VM much more often lately. But I've had Windows force a major update just as I arrived at the coworking space, wasting 2 hours of productive time. The whole time I'm praying it finishes before I had to run for my train home, when I'd have to shut it down even though it says "Don't Turn Off Your Computer". I've had other issues too, like updates failing in endless loops & burning through my tethering data.

Microsoft has to fix updating, it's one area where Apple is significantly better.

I see it said quite often that the Windows virus situation should be blamed on the sheer size of their userbase. I'm not convinced - I think a lot of it is down to Windows users traditionally running with Administrator/root privs the whole time. Historically due to Microsoft's fanaticism with backwards compatibility - nothing but root in MSDOS. It certainly isn't that way with my Macbook or Linux machines, although I am sometimes a little tempted to go passwordless in sudoers before sense prevails.

I hope you know that you have a false sense of security regarding Linux and viruses.

I have became a windows user from linux user, and I don't regret it. I can still use linux on my servers, but on desktop it didn't suite my needs.

So in the past you were a "windows jerk" but now you dropped Windows?

Seems like things haven't changed much.

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