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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Lots of salt in this thread. I have a Mac because I enjoy it the most for software development. It's not a status symbol because, well, almost everyone here has a Mac. The alternatives are Windows-based laptops - who often lag behind software development support (e.g. ports), or Linux which is still just not good enough for desktop use. I use Windows at home for not-development and have used both Windows and Linux for software development so this isn't a biased opinion.

The hardware budget from my employer also helps.

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I have been using linux desktops for almost 10 years as my primary environments. When I occasionally return to windows, I find that it is less usable for how I utilize my computer.

Funny I look at Linux on the desktop as less and less usable as things like systemd and KDE 4 and whatever version of Gnome that's equally broken.

> Linux which is still just not good enough for desktop use.

For you perhaps. I've used desktop/laptop linux for nearly 20 years and it works just fine, millions of others do too.

After the windows 10 blunders lately I decided to give Linux on the desktop another shot. Decided to go with Ubuntu since it's the most popular distro so there's more likely to be support for it.

Developer tooling is really damn nice and using the command line is a joy. With proton on steam I can play a lot of the games I like.

But no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get sound to work properly. I'm using a FiiO E10K and a pair of Sennheiser HD650 and no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get it to sound right. I tried editing whatever configuration file I could find and I still couldn't get it to sound not choppy. Eventually I gave up and went back on windows. Maybe when I'll change my amp I'll give it another try.

I'm glad it's working for you though.

Windows is not a serious alternative. It is pretty unbelievable that MS did not learn a single thing from Apple over 20 years. The result of this ignorance shows. Their software is complicated, bloated has 100000 features when people use 3 most of the time. Apple got this right with the mandatory app menu where the most used things are the same (like CMD+P). I think for developers Linux is a better alternative today than Windows (if somebody does not like MacOS).

> bloated has 100000 features when people use 3 most of the time

And here's your MP3 player, iTunes...

Please have a look to the default screen of Outlook and iTunes. Which has more functionality showed into your face that you never use.

Windows hasn't learned from the Mac, because user experience was never a key selling point for Windows. Windows dominance was the result of selling large quantities of Windows licences to IT managers who were not chiefly concerned with user experience, but rather with easy management of a large number of machines, integration with other Microsoft products (Office etc), and backwards compatibility so they could continue running the software that their businesses depended on.

The Mac user experience is great in part because Apple is willing to compromise on backwards compatibility. This allows them to innovate in the user interface (which Microsoft also does) while at the same time keeping it relatively consistent, which is what Microsoft is prevented from doing.

Also, since Apple relies on selling directly to consumers, they really have to prioritise the user experience.

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