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Comment by president | Hacker News Reader

If you are a Mac power-user and have gotten used to all the conventions (e.g. window behavior, shortcuts, UI interactions), you won't be able to last 5 minutes on Windows. Every once in a while I have to logon to a Windows computer for work and just fiddling with the Start Menu frustrates me. To me, the Windows UX experience is horrible enough to keep me on Mac despite all the growing issues with Macbook hardware.

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I've been switching back and forth between Windows and OS X since 10.2 and honestly, I really like the Windows 10 UX as a pretty keyboard friendly UX out of the box, hell I even prefer it to the Mac these days. Launching my pinned apps are bound to win+[1-9], All my setting and systems menus are under win+X, win+arrow keys for tiling windows, win+ctrl+left/right arrow switches virtual desktops, and for everything else I just hit the win key and start typing whatever I'm searching for.

My only real complaint is that the file explorer hasn't really been updated in ages and isn't exactly great.

I've been using a Surface Go after failing to get use from an iPad Pro. I find I use the Surface more than any of my other machines. Nearly perfect. Makes me plan on getting the next gen Surface Pro instead of a MacBook where the only hard requirement was for Xcode which can be relegated to any other old machine.

I used to use a Macbook, in fact I had two of them. I used the as my daily driver from 2008-2014.

I have also used Linux on my workstation, (development machine) that doubled as a Windows gaming workstation and on my servers.

When it came to buying a new laptop I decided to go with a XPS 13" 9370. Hardware support has been great. The touchpad (Elantech) is also excellent and very similar to what I had on my Macbook.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_(9370)

Looking back now, I always preferred open source software, vim, firefox, libreoffice, LaTeX, etc regardless of platform.

If I was to compare my efficiency with either Windows or MacOS, I'd have to say I prefer a tiling window manager now (I use i3wm https://i3wm.org) and am really looking forward to the drop-in replacement https://swaywm.org for Wayland.

Wanting to use Wayland will certainly influence me to buy one of the upcoming AMD Navi GPUs, due to be released soon over a NVIDIA one.

PS: btw i use arch, I do also use Debian too in some cases.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that.

- Hitting the windows key on the keyboard gets you to a search that is similar enough to spotlight that you don't have to even mess with the start menu. - Once you understand windows are document, not application based, switching becomes easier.

I'm not sure what other interactions you would have trouble with. For the most part, it's just the difference between the button you hit on the keyboard for everything.

The reverse is also true: On windows i do everything on keyboard (i usually work with desktop / external kbd & mouse). It's possible to navigate everything in windows with the kbd, while that s not true in macs, which frustrates me about them. They have crippled the start menu with spam, that is true, but all you need is win key and start searching just like spotlight.

> while that s not true in macs

If you're talking about Alt-Tab vs Command-Tab, you can rotate through windows within a single app using Command-Backquote. It took me forever to figure that out but it made a world of difference.

Thanks for the comment, I've been using macs since 10.2 and didn't know that. I guess today is my lucky day.

You can also create new bindings to arbitrary menu items. I used to bind maximize to Cmd + Ñ.

For me, in Ubuntu, I used multiple workspaces. Moving applications between the workspaces was a breeze and was keyboard only. Mac requires a mouse to move between workspaces. Now that I'm on a Mac, I had to abandon multiple workspaces.

I use both, usually Windows during the day at the client site and macos at home and for side projects. I use the same tools, like vscode with vim keybindings, and work almost entirely from the keyboard, using the win key or cmd-spbr for app launching. Switching isn't much of a problem when you are writing software.

I used only Windows until ~5 years ago, and I still have a Windows desktop at home for gaming/casual computing, so I'm not really averse to Windows on UX grounds (especially since it's improved window management so much recently).

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