Comment by tibbon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tibbon | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Apple product in 2002, because at the time they were absolutely better than Windows 2000 for my needs (mostly Protools, and eventually Logic 7). Windows at the time was a mess and poorly supported most pro hardware and vendors (specifically Avid) were slow to support releases.

It really felt like the best platform. I had a nice G4 tower, and eventually used a G5 and then Mac Pro tower. Things generally just worked, and you could expand things as needed.

Roll around to today, and it's a mess. Apple canceled a lot of their pro products. Aperture? Dead. Final Cut got nerfed pretty hard. Logic is still reasonably well maintained, but Ableton Live took over a lot for me.

The hardware options aren't that great right now for my needs. Last week, I sold my 2011 Macbook Pro to a friend and switched all my audio stuff to my old Windows gaming system. Picked up a Firewire PCI-E card for $20 and I was in business. It's fast, has a ton of ram and is easily expandable. Windows 10 drives me nuts, but eh...

I've still got three Macbook Pros for software development, and they are pretty great for that (minus the new keyboard, and that Tensorflow GPU has dropped OS X support). I don't think I'll be switching laptops anytime soon. But ugh, audio work on them just feels like an overpriced joke at this point.

I really never thought I'd be saying it, but for photography and audio stuff, Windows seems to be the place right now!

As someone who uses a MBP as a daily driver laptop: Windows has been a better platform for a lot of the photography software for over a decade. Photoshop and Lightroom just work a ton better on Windows and have since right before the CS days.

But the native terminal, etc, has won me over as a *Nix person for a long time. I don't like Linux desktop interfaces at all, and the new Windows linux/bash stuff hasn't been compelling or integrated enough for me to want to switch (ConEmu and all of the terminal stuff being garbage is a big issue). I'll be sticking with a MBP and OSX for my laptop and work related stuff, but I don't understand why anyone would still be using OSX for a photography workflow. It's just so much more polished on Windows.

> Lightroom just work[s] a ton better on Windows

That’s not my experience, at least with Classic.

Mine is a Mac house. My parents, though, are long-time Windows users; I only managed to get my parents to run a single iMac, which they gave away as soon as they could financially justify it.

I tell you that because that is where my cross-platform Lightroom experience comes from: almost all Mac, with occasional mentoring/support sessions under Windows at the parents’ house. With Lightroom on Windows, I’ve repeatedly observed:

1. Windows’ brain-dead default-mandatory file locking prevents perfectly reasonable operations, simply because Lightroom is busy working with one or more files in the background. Advisory locking as is default on POSIX type systems allows many things that Windows refuses to allow by default. (E.g. Rename a parent folder while a file in that folder is open for writing. Who cares, the FD is still valid!)

2. Lightroom can take a long time to shut down when it gets busy, as it too-frequently does. On the Mac, the app icon remains marked “running” while Lightroom grinds away, trying to figure out how to shut down, but on Windows, the app icon disappears from the task bar almost immediately, but Lightroom.exe remains running in the background, so that it is not obvious why reopening the program fails for minutes at a time.

(And why reopen? Because relaunching Lightroom often solves slowdown problems, and has for years upon years, which is a separate rant.)

3. Some plugins simply won’t run on Windows, at least not without dragging along a bunch of compatibility junk. Anything that depends on ExifTool, for example, requires dragging over a whole Perl environment just to run the plugin. If you have multiple plugins dependent on ExifTool, as I do, each one usually comes with its own Perl environment. Compare macOS, where at worst you have the CPAN module alone, and at best, it might simply require that you install ExifTool separately, that being a reasonable user requirement on an OS like macOS.

If your comment was referring to GPU acceleration and such, Adobe’s recent focus on that isn’t helping me anyway. Almost all of my problems with Lightroom’s speed are in the Library module, not the Develop module, where GPU acceleration doesn’t help much anyway.

> they are pretty great for that (minus the new keyboard, and that Tensorflow GPU has dropped OS X support).

If you're training a model on your laptop, instead of a server, does it really matter? It doesn't seem likely that you'd want to deploy a model trained locally.

Have you ever considered a hackintosh?

I think a big part of @tibbon's complaint is the lack of pro software (from Apple).

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