Switching to Windows | Hacker News Reader

Switching to Windows

ignorethecode.net

119 pointsbengtan227 comments

Avid Windows user here. I had to explain myself so many times to coworkers that I wrote this list [0] to point out differences that users may not be aware of. This list is 4 years old a this point, so a few of the items are no longer true, but overall it still holds water.

I've been forced to use Mac for work for several years now, and I still feel jailed in my productivity compared to Windows. The biggest, most crucial difference that Mac users don't seem to know they're missing is how every single Windows dialog box acts like a complete version of Windows Explorer. The Mac's save and open dialog boxes are absolutely infuriating. Also, why can't I just create a markdown file in a folder, double click it so it opens in vscode, then start typing? Window management on Mac is nonexistent, how come window snapping isn't a native feature? Mission Control is like playing hide-and-seek, not managing windows.

[0] https://hellojason.net/blog/nitpicky-differences-between-win...

The lack of window snapping is mind boggling to me. My home computer has lxde on it, which includes the feature.

Window snapping has been a native feature on macOS for years: https://osxdaily.com/2016/12/06/use-window-snapping-mac/

Different snapping, at least to what I’m used to. The snapping Windows offers is half and full screen windows with a keypress (or dragging against a wall). Mac does offer something similar, but only for full screen/split-full-screen mode.

You can open a menu with option-click and hold on expand icon and snap window to the side of the screen

TIL. Still less functional (no hotkeys) but good to know, regardless.

Discoverability could use some work.

> Different snapping, at least to what I’m used to.

Be that as it may, the post I responded to was commenting on the absence of a feature that isn’t absent. Wether you like or are accustomed to its behaviour is a different matter.

If the feature is significantly different (windows snapping into positions on the screen versus remaining within certain constraints), then the feature might as well not exist. That they're named the same is irrelevant.

Thanks falcolas, yeah, I definitely meant "window snapping" in the way that almost every other desktop environment, including LXDE and Windows, means it. Keyboard shortcuts to resize and reposition windows without changing display mode. Windows has the drag to edge which I like too (although I don't use Windows much anymore).

The fact that OSX would have a feature called "window snapping" that isn't really the same is similarly mind boggling.

By that logic, one could argue Windows doesn’t have window snapping (it has, but it’s significantly different from what some people are used to on the Mac, so it “might as well not exist”)

(Not making any claims about the usefulness of either feature)

The original context of this conversation was window snapping on Windows not being available on the mac. Given that context, I stand by my earlier statement.

Yeah that's not what OP is talking about. Windows lets you half-width maximize windows next to each other, then drag the border in between to resize both [0]. What you've provided is, essentially, a way to make it easy to line up the edges of your windows, which is a feature I largely consider unnecessary.

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/snap-your-window...

> Windows lets you half-width maximize windows next to each other, then drag the border in between to resize both

So does macOS[1] (and iPadOS).

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948

FWIW, that's full screen mode only. I can't do that on option-Plus button sized screens.

You lose the menu bar and dock to full screen mode (they're hidden, more specifically).

Yupp. Magnet is the best alternative.

Also wtf does pressing the maximise button go full screen? Can't we have two buttons, one for maximise and one for fullscreen?

Check out Rectangle. It meets 90% of my use cases as someone that prefers the way Windows handles windows.

https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

Your list isn't great. Some of the items are out of date. Some were just not knowing how to do things, like dragging something to achieve your goal, rather than right-clicking. I'd like to help you out and explain in detail, but I'm on mobile. But even if I was a Windows guy, it's not a list to show off.

Edit: One example: "Explorer shows you the path tree to the current directory, and it lets you copy that path to the clipboard."

In Finder, press Command-Option-P to show and hide the path. And instead of using the clipboard, which might have something else in it you need, in Finder you drag the filename from the path to where you need it - a file dialog, the terminal, a document, wherever.

Also, you can drag individual parts of the path, so instead of being limited to copying the entire path, you can copy just the bits that you want.

And if you Option-drag one of those items into a terminal, it actually changes the directory to that location.

Again, it's just about not being familiar with how things work. That's not entirely your fault, since some options are hidden. But that's less common these days. Almost everything is exposed in the menu bar, with its keyboard shortcut.

Dragging selected items to copy/paste them is pretty universal. I know I’ve done that in Windows as well. Ironically, it’s not available in every Mac app - many won’t let you drag text or images out of them.

Dragging selected items to copy/paste them is pretty universal

Exactly. So I don't know why the parent is making an issue of what is clearly operator error. Or at least a lack of operator know-how.

Something I often forget when using Mac OS is that you can just drag the folder icon from the titlebar of the finder window directly to the terminal (or wherever you need the path). It's a neat trick that's saved me a lot of typing or copy/pasting, when I remember it's there.

Unfortunately, that has gotten more difficult in Big Sur8s Preview. It show the icon until you click the file name.

TexEdit keeps the old-style, as does Numbers, so I’m not sure what the preferred way is, nowadays, but I tend to move downloaded PDFs that way, so for me, it feels like it’s worse everywhere.

(Aside: looked at https://www.apple.com/macos/big-sur/ to see whether Preview’s new way is copied anywhere. That page clearly shows document based applications are becoming an endangered species)

That drove me nuts, but you can turn it off with a defaults setting. I don’t have it at hand but it’s easily googleable

I never used Mac but I recently heard from a friend that on Mac you can't press enter to open a file, instead, you need to use Ctrl+O. Like what the hell?

(I'm not saying it has to be Enter, but a two-key shortcut seems very bad for an operation that is used so often, especially considering you can't even press them with left hand!)

Same goes to Delete.

Cmd-enter is the standard way. Hitting enter edits the file name. It’s definitely a weird choice.

Enter to rename is the most logical choice for the Finder, an app that manages files.

Wow, hard disagree. From a discoverability perspective, enter has the dictionary definition of "to go in to something" as in to enter a building for example, or in this instance to "enter" a file. Furthermore, single key shortcuts should be reserved for more frequent actions, eg enter vs Cmd-O. Enter as rename is not only unintuitive, but it's also an action which is performed less often than opening files.

The traditional interaction model of the Mac is that you select a file, and then choose a menu command to operate on it. Cmd-O is the keyboard shortcut for "Open".

Note that you can also use Cmd-down_arrow, because Cmd-up_arrow and Cmd-down_arrow can be used to navigate up and down the folder hierarchy, and the latter also works if you have a file selected rather than a folder.

Edit: Cmd-Delete will delete a file. I think the philosophy is that Cmd is used for commands, and Delete by itself is meant for text editing. One thing I like is that Cmd-Shift-Delete will empty the trash. I'm unaware of a keyboard shortcut for emptying the Recycle Bin on Windows, or any way to avoid the confirmation dialog when doing so.

>the latter also works if you have a file selected rather than a folder

Wait, how do you "navigate down the folder hierarchy" if you don't select a folder? There is no deeper hierarchy.

You do select a folder. I'm saying that Cmd-down means "go down into this selected folder", but it also works if the selected item is a file.

BTW, I didn't even know about Cmd-Enter until aidos mentioned it; so that makes 3 different shortcuts to open a file. Convenient! :-)

Ah, I understand now.

Windows is similar but with alt: Alt+up=up, Enter=down (or open). And there are also alt+left and alt+right as back and forward.

If we Mac users want to go through a bunch of files in a directory quickly, we usually press spacebar in Finder on the first file and use up/down arrow keys to navigate. Spotlight will open up each file in a read-only view and will handle basically anything - STLs can be viewed and rotated, CSVs will show in a spreadsheet format even if you don't have Excel or Numbers installed, MP3s will open in a mini player, C header files will appear with colored formatting. It's so handy.

Yeah I have seen the preview function, it definitely is pretty handy!

>I never used Mac but I recently heard from a friend

If you have to start your post this way, maybe reconsider if you're going to add anything.

From what I learned from other replies, there is indeed no way to open a file with one key so I guess the point stands, regardless.

(It’s Cmd-O, or Cmd-down-arrow.)

Hitting “enter” to open a file makes it too easy to do it accidentally. What if I didn’t mean to start up a huge app like a pro video editor or something, which takes five-ten seconds to start up?

Cmd-down-arrow is pretty darn easy to invoke from the keyboard, but not so easy that you risk opening a file you didn’t mean to.

15 years ago people could not believe I used Mac as a development machine. At work I wasn’t allowed to connect to the network and I was mocked endlessly by my colleagues.

I used to tell them “one day, one day you’ll see!” We have well and truly arrived.

15 years ago people could not believe I used Mac as a development machine.

Are you sure it wasn't more than 15 years ago? Because the way I recall it, after 10.2 was released most devs seemed to concede that Macs could at the very least serve as a passable way of getting Unix on a laptop, and once Xserve RAID came out even some greybreads where at least considering the idea of putting Apple hardware in their server room (even though very few eventually did).

Positive. This is in the UK. At that stage even younger less corporate developers couldn’t understand it at all.

counter-point: I started seeing more and more developers carrying (personal) Macs in London in 2005 in pubs and at events and by 2007 99% of those I knew were using a Mac.

By 2007 many had a Mac laptop provided by their empoyers (myself included).

Of course, agree it wasn't the absolute majority (it;'s not the absolute majority today either) but far from rare depending on your circles

The term "window snapping" must have some precise definition that I'm unaware of, because the Mac does have behaviors that I would call "window snapping":

- On the Mac, when you drag a window to a side or bottom edge of the screen, it will "catch" on the edge, making it easy to avoid dragging it partially off of the screen. In Windows, when I want to move a window to the edge of a screen, I have to be very slow and careful to get it just up to the edge without going over.

- Likewise on the Mac, windows will "catch" on the edges of other windows, making it easy to put windows up against each other with no overlap or intervening space

- If you click and hold the Maximize button, you get a menu that gives you the option to tile the window to the left or right half of the screen

So, what exactly is this "window snapping" feature that Windows has that the Mac doesn't? I'm genuinely clueless and curious.

The problem is that these features are not discoverable. Who would ever think of dragging a window by the maximize button?

Win-Left Arrow moves the window to the left hand side of the screen. If you have multiple screens, it will move it to the next screen with your next press. Ditto Win-Right. Win-Up maximizes, Win-down un-maximizes, then minimizes.

You can also drag windows against any edge, and get half-windows, maximized windows, etc. by default. And you’re not placed in full screen mode, losing the menu bar. I purchased an app to get similar (but still inferior) behavior in Mac.

Windows’ window management is, IMO, simply superior to Macs.

It's an awful feature to have on by default though. Whenever I'm in Windows, I can't seem to drag a window anywhere without Windows just deciding that I actually want to anchor it on the side and re-size it. NO! I just want to move the window a little. Jeez! There's probably a way to turn it off, but why on earth is that the default behavior? Fortunately I only use windows once a month or so, so I haven't been bothered to figure out how to disable this.

Also, I seem to recall if you "shake" a window while dragging it, it does something else unexpected. Great, now I need to have a surgeon's hands just to move my window around. Can you just let me drag my window in peace, Microsoft?

Yes I feel your pain in that one. There’s a way to turn this off in the settings... one of the first things I do with any new Windows setup.

Another major peeve of mine: Windows lets you drag a window so that its top edge goes outside the bounds of your display. It should stop when the top edge “bumps into” the upper bound of the display: I prefer to have most windows full-height, and I have to be extremely finicky and careful when dragging documents around in Windows. On Mac this is not an issue: I can “slide” full-height windows from side to side by dragging them slightly upwards as I drag them horizontally.

Snapping in Windows lets you drag a window against an edge of the screen to make it tile left/right/top (and bottom I think). I’m not sure how well it works on the “inside” edges of a multi-monitor desktop though.

The click-and-hold of OSX is relatively new, and there’s several apps that add the functionality anyway so no big deal.

What I don’t like of tiled windows on OSX is how the active one raises on the z-axis, and click-and-hold tends to be annoying when you’re in a hurry... on the other hand on Windows I often accidentally activate the tile shortcut and that’s also a hassle. But I’m just a fussy lad

> I’m not sure how well it works on the “inside” edges of a multi-monitor desktop though.

Like you would expect + some gripping when reaching the edge before passing over so it's easy to know if you're snapping or moving over the other screen.

> Snapping in Windows lets you drag a window against an edge of the screen to make it tile left/right/top (and bottom I think).

Corners too, I use it a lot on my 4k 40" to have 4x20" windows.

> I’m not sure how well it works on the “inside” edges of a multi-monitor desktop though.

"Some" pixels grace zone before escaping to another screen.

yes, but on mac it will make both apps in separate desktops and in windows is just simple window tiling

That list is a bit silly. One item is basically "Finder has a better preview feature, but you can get a better-better one in Windows with <third-party app>". At that point, pretty much all other items become invalid, since you can find Mac apps that will give you the required features in ways that are superior to anything Windows ships with. It's also slightly ignorant of MacOS features (like Zoomed windows). The only item I agree with is the window-management icons being too small and hard to reach - sadly the truth is that they don't want you to use them really, in modern macos you're largely supposed to jockey between fullscreen apps.

I'm no fanboy (in fact, I think I'll move off macos in the next year or so), and there is a lot to like in modern Windows, but that list doesn't really hack it.

> why can't I just create a markdown file in a folder,

Because you're "reasoning it wrong" (eh): you don't really want to "create a markdown file"! You want to write something and then store it as markdown. So you open a writing program then save the output as markdown. I'm not trying to attack you or persuade you of anything, I'm just explaining the different approach in terms of usability, the rationale behind the implementation choice.

I also agree that the stock save-dialogs in macos are somewhat less powerful than the Windows implementation, but they compensate with a more consistent handling of global shortcuts (what will appear on the left bar in Windows dialogs is something of a lottery).

Do you still find the save dismiss less powerful after they are expanded with Ctrl+g

you mean cmd-shift-g?

ctrl-g doesn't do anything for me (Mojave).

On Mac I always install Shift it for window management. However, it works via keyboard only. I prefer to still be able to move windows to the edge of the screen without them getting tiled immediately.

Magnet is pretty good one too. It has key commands and sticky areas.

- https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/ or https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12

Spectacle is also pretty nice. I've used it for as long as I have been developing on macOS.

Spectacle is unmaintained. https://rectangleapp.com/ is a fork with active development.

I had no idea, thanks!

It has a replacement called Rectangle.

press `~` on open/save dialogs on a mac (also supports tab auto completion). It's a game changer. Also Windows is missing out natively... like space bar for preview on open/save.

Also ctrl+g turns the dialog into a larger dialog that's more like finder.

not for me...

Sorry. That should have been CMD+shift+g. Hard to recall from muscle memory when you can't try it in that moment.

> The biggest, most crucial difference that Mac users don't seem to know they're missing is how every single Windows dialog box acts like a complete version of Windows Explorer. The Mac's save and open dialog boxes are absolutely infuriating.

Consider the alternative that while it is infuriating to you, macOS users aren’t “missing” anything because we prefer it this way.

A common action on save and open dialog boxes is to drag a directory or file from somewhere else on top of them, which will switch the dialog to that selection. Some years ago, on a macOS beta, they changed this behaviour and it would instead move the path (i.e. the dialog acted like a regular Finder window) and power users hated it. By the final version it again behaved like it used to, and I’m glad.

> Consider the alternative that while it is infuriating to you, macOS users aren’t “missing” anything because we prefer it this way.

LOL!

> drag a directory or file from somewhere else on top of them, which will switch the dialog to that selection. Some years ago, on a macOS beta, they changed this behaviour and it would instead move the path...power users hated it.

Huh? Dragging and dropping things into modal dialogs sounds like a terrible way to do anything.

The limitation of the macOS file dialogs have nothing to do with dragging or dropping to or from external sources. The functionality that's missing from them are things like: Not being able to rename, move or delete a folder that you mistakenly created through the dialog.

Power users typically prefer having a function over not having it. I doubt any power user would lament being able to do these things I've mentioned.

1. Dragging and dropping is by far the easiest way to navigate to an already-open file or a file that you already have selected in another window. 2. You can delete and rename files and folders in the save dialog, no problem there.

This is the single most annoying thing about Windows. How do users cope? I copy the path of an already opened dialog and paste it, which is atrocious compared to dragging and dropping.

> Huh? Dragging and dropping things into modal dialogs sounds like a terrible way to do anything.

This sounds exactly like what the proxy icon functionality in macOS does.

Dragging oriented UI was fine on mouse era (still on Windows?) but now macOS' primary pointing device is trackpad. Dragging with trackpad isn't good.

> Dragging with trackpad isn't good.

Agreed for the default behaviour. But I always turn on three finger drag[1] (which used to be more discoverable) and it’s fine.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204609

Three finger drag is good but sometimes trackpad don't have enough distance and a bit hassle.

It's super weird that your list just assumes the Windows way for things is "standard" or "normal" and the Mac way is wrong, when both paths are (most of the time) entirely arbitrary. E.g., Home and End behavior, delete key behavior.

As others have noted, your list also includes dings on the Mac that are factually inaccurate, so...

> It's super weird that your list just assumes the Windows way for things is "standard" or "normal" and the Mac way is wrong, when both paths are (most of the time) entirely arbitrary. E.g., Home and End behavior, delete key behavior.

To be fair, most "mac is better" list do the same.

Ultimately to each their own and let's all be glad we have both alternatives.

>To be fair, most "mac is better" list do the same.

That hasn't been my experience, but okay.

Well, things like the home/end behavior and back/delete key behavior are different on OS X but behave the same on Windows, most standard linux flavors, Sun OS, many BSD flavors, and Chrome OS (I'll give you the argument that this is just linux with a coat of paint), to name a few off the top of my head.

When you take that into consideration, OS X is the odd one out.

I do agree that some of the things in the list aren't correct though, and some are definitely more subjective.

I don't believe I've ever had a keyboard with Home/End keys. What do they do on OS X/Linux?

Home and End move the cursor to the beginning and the end of the line, respectively, on any computer except a Mac.

It's extremely unlikely that you've never had a keyboard with these keys!

Control a and e (the Emacs shortcuts everybody knows) work on all Mac applications. That’s why home and end work differently.

Vim user: I think you mean ^ and $

> (the Emacs shortcuts everybody knows)

[citation needed]

You have almost certainly had a keyboard with these, even if it was behind a fn key combo on a laptop.

I haven’t read the list in full, but some of the things you treat as impossible on macOS are trivial. On the first section alone, here’s two examples of not knowing about ⌥.

> Cannot get total file size of everything inside a folder

Press ⌥ with the context menu open and you’ll see it.

> OS X has a different concept of maximized that only does a true full screen, thus hiding your menubar and such.

And “only” is bolded. But again, press ⌥ and see the maximize icon (and behaviour) change.

One may argue what the “correct” default and optional/alternate behaviours should be (those are the names of the key: opt/alt), but they are there.

OS X has some shitty discoverability. I was required to use a macbook as my work system for a little over two years, and I never discovered those.

Would it not make sense to just put these kinds of things in the open? Why not have a fourth taskbar button? I don't remember seeing an option for maximize but not full screen anywhere, so I would just resize windows until I slapped Spectacle onto the system.

Not that I'm a windows user. I have a number of complaints related to usability on Windows as well.

I think I remember a setting in Finder's view options waaay back in System 7 that you could check to calculate folder sizes in list view. I usually left it off because it slowed down my (68k) Macintosh, but it was great if you had a screamin' fast PowerPC!

You can still do that, I always do.

I warmly recommend adding Everything to that list. It's an instant-results file search tool that indexes your entire hard drive. It lets you find any file instantly.

https://www.voidtools.com/

EDIT: for some extra context, this tool changed the way I name and store files. I hardly ever navigate to a file anymore. I search Everything for, well, everything. After a while, I found myself caring less where I store a file, and more what I name it. I now add any word to a filename that I think I might search it by. Effectively it's a bunch of tags right there in the filename. This removes the need for a separate tagging program like the author suggests.

"Everything" is one of the most amazing pieces of software for window. I literally use it every day to find "lost" files.

Probably the first tool I install on every Windows machine. It's beyond me how Microsoft has not incorporated something similar into Windows to replace its ridiculous native search.

Isn't that what Cortana / indexing service is supposed to be?

"Supposed to" unfortunately being the key word here.

Because the native search searches also inside the files.Everything only shows you what files are indexed in the NTFS.

This is not a bug it's just hilarious that Microsoft thinks its search that is not communicating clearly what it does is better.

Everything can search file content, but you have to ask for it, and of course one looses the great performance that is Everything's main selling point.

I forgot the syntax, because I never used it for that reason, but the option is there.

> I forgot the syntax, because I never used it for that reason

"Everything" can search file content with the content: search function.

https://www.voidtools.com/faq/#does_everything_search_file_c...

> Because the native search searches also inside the files.

Even if you disable that its much slower.

Windows search exists so Bing searches increase. Everything you search delivers results from bing, which opens in MS edge.

Why does this tool look inside the files while start menu search can't even handle simple fuzzy search? When I writes 'note' it does not find 'SinpleNote' which is insane. I refuse to believe that this is some power user feature, might as well disable search if all the people are so dumb that they can't learn how to use tools and ways that make us more productive.

Additionally, there is EverythingToolbar which integrates Everything to Windows taskbar.

https://github.com/stnkl/EverythingToolbar

I second that with a proper indexed search tool one can stop bothering keeping track of folders hierarchy. You just type in the name of the file and you get it!

However, after using Recoll[0] on Linux Desktop for years, I have to say that searching by file contents is even more convenient than searching by a filename.

And... I have to admit that unfortunately the current state of indexed search (file contents) in Windows 10 is "hit and miss".

I have tried to re-index the whole drive several times, but still, you don't know if the query that you type in with `Win + S` will return any results. Even when you know that it shall.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recoll

Uh, a Windows-loving thread on a hacker forum!

Let me try to make myself useful, and add an important addition that's missing from the original thread:

stop Windows 10 from restarting automatically

https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wak...

In particular, step 2... my Windows Surface Go hasn't auto-restarted in months... and this is plain vanilla Windows 10 Home version 2004 (not a fancy Professional or Ultimate).

You probably should restart every month or so, otherwise you're not getting the monthly security patches.

Obviously. The beautiful part of this approach is that it doesn’t disable the icon in the taskbar that alerts you of updates... but it won’t restart automatically.

Thanks, random internet stranger. This literally bit me this morning.

Sorry, but it's bonkers that you need to follow 6 complex steps (or use a 3rd party software to do it), in order to stop your OS from doing something it shouldn't be doing in the first place. A computer should never decide on its own to turn itself off.

I'm not going to let Mac off the hook either. You have to deliberately choose to not have it "automatically update" itself, and it keeps begging you to turn that function on.

Thanks for sharing this. I've been going crazy with the Windows 10 machine starting up by itself at random times. I searched online, and I think I did disable the wake timers, but I certainly didn't do it on all the power management profiles. I'll have to check this one out again.

If there's one thing I've seen with Windows, it's consistent in how annoying it can be in every release.

My god, I wish MacOS would restart automatically! The amount of times I've gotten a nastygram from IT about an update I just expected would be installed (or at least notified!) automatically...

In my experience MacOS is much better at restarting - programs just continue where you left off. I'd still hate it because programming language environments still lose state... but in any case, Windows is much worse at this.

Windows does the same thing if your app supports.

> Make the Start Menu Full-Screen

I'm surprised by this one. I couldn't stand Windows 8 because of the full screen start menu. Maybe it was because it was too animated. But I think it was more because I didn't like getting kicked out from my desktop and losing context of what I was doing.

I much prefer pressing the Windows key and typing the first few letters of the app I want. Seeing a full screen of apps is way too distracting to me, especially with live tiles.

That one surprised me too. Lukas is usually pretty insightful on UI/UX issues, but I couldn't disagree more with him here. Interface behaviors that temporarily take over the whole screen, or large parts of it, leave me disoriented and distracted.

The "File" menu in recent versions of Microsoft Office for Windows has the same problem. It takes over the whole window, and after I'm finished doing whatever I was doing from that menu, it sometimes takes 10-20 seconds for me to reorient myself... where was I? What was I working on?

The default behavior of "Aero Peek" on Windows has the same issue too. At least I'm glad they reversed the full-screen-by-default Start menu after Windows 8.

The problem I had with the Windows 8 full screen start menu was that it was a disorganized cluttered mess of nearly indecipherable navigation that was so aggressively altered of an experience and change from prior versions. I hated having to open applications from it. I still hate the Vista+ version of the start menu as well, because it turned a manageable fan-out of applications I could just edit into sub-categories into a compact vomit of every application in a list, and Windows 10 only improved it by making it more presentable with spacing and abundant size on screen. The one good thing is that I can just tap the Win key and type what I'm looking for and hit enter, which is almost always faster than trying to navigate it via mouse. I just don't care for the pinned tiles, I don't know if it's still a thing, but major updates were loading tons of useless icons and stupid junk I didn't want there and it was always a fight to reclaim it, so I just opted to get rid of it. I want it to just do its job and be a location to open things, not tell me the weather and stock market info.

> PeaZip has a very clean UI, and nice green icons, so it’s very obviously the better choice.

If you're "opening" an archive directly you're doing it wrong. The beauty of 7-Zip is the shell integration where you can just right click an archive and do "Extract to [folder name]" or right click a folder and do "Create archive...". I have not had a need for the UI that appears when you double click on an archive in any archive program in 20 years.

I use the archive tool in KDE ("ark") fairly often, although only for reading. I regularly need to look at one or two metadata files within an archive, but not the gigabytes of data.

On the command line, I'll "unzip -p archive.zip metadata.xml" (with tab-completion for the archive entries), but if I've retrieved the file with a web browser I'll let it open in ark and open the entry files from there.

Same with Vim for Windows.

Right click and edit using gvim, regardless of the file type.

PeaZip also has similar functionality.

My only gripe with this is that I'm never sure what the structure inside an archive is like until I inspect it. It's not a massive inconvenience but I don't like extracting to a new directory just to find it empty save for another directory with the same name.

As much as I would like to love macOS, Windows has absolutely perfect mouse acceleration. I can’t for the life of me tune the mouse experience on a mac to match windows. I always come back to my trusty PC after couple hours on a mac. So much snappier experience.

agreed, especially with a couple of 4k monitors, it's a long mouse journey on macOS

Funnily enough these "small" things are probably the biggest barrier for switching. I'm a long-time mac user and I asked for a Surface laptop at my new job to give me some variation. Luckily I was able to switch to a Macbook Pro after a year or so, not because of the mouse but because of Windows' awful font rendering.

I know, I know, some people prefer the Windows way of rendering, but I just get sad :) Great system otherwise, especially with WSL!

Windows font rendering is just awful. It still feels so like 20 years ago with XP running cleartype on a low dpi monitor

It's mostly a personal taste thing, but I find the macOS (and even Linux) font rendering superior to Windows, even on low-dpi panels below Full HD. On Windows, the letters are thin, have sharp edges etc. I've tried using the ClearType tuning utility but the results honestly aren't much better. The macOS system font also seems nicer.

I actually hate macos font rendering...Windows has way better fonts on 27" 2560x1440 or 24" 1920X1200 monitors

With work issued macbook pro I have 2 4k 24" monitors to get that retina clarity instead and they keep fans on all the time.

Check out SteerMouse, my friend. It figuratively saved my life as I too can't stand the standard settings. It lets you configure both acceleration and sensitivity, and while it takes a while to find the sweet spot for your mouse, when you do - it's great!

https://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/

> Windows has built-in screen sharing, but only if you have a Pro license

Actually windows has built-in screen-sharing on all versions for free. It is not well-known. It is called Quick Assist and is preinstalled on every Windows 10, though it is not as robust as other screen-sharing programs.

Windows Remote Desktop is only avail with pro but it is not really screen-sharing as it takes over the session completely (it logs you out from the local session). Sure, you can always use AnyDesk but we're talking here about built-in.

What’s the typical uptime for a Windows machine in daily use? On MacOS that’s usually in a few months scale because that’s how often an update that needs a restart is released. I usually have 5-10 workspaces, and despite that macOS will restore most of it after a restart, I still feel unease restarting.

My main issue with Window was that it required quite a lot involvement into the upkeep of the machine, like frequent restarts due to OS and driver updates. Is that a thing of the past now?

My machine needs to be online 24/7, so I reboot it just once a week, on Sunday.

I'm not forced to do that, I just like the idea of a "fresh start" since I don't have ECC memory and I do detect a bit flip (through CRC checks) every 2 months or so.

You can keep pushing update required reboots forward as much as you want, one week at a time, so I just push it past the Sunday reboot.

Updates that require a reboot are 1 a month at most, and you can put off doing the reboot/upgrade for as long as you want (unless it's a work computer, in which case the company can set a policy which forces a reboot within a certain number of hours of the update)

I generally restart only when necessary for updates and multiple months of uptime is pretty standard for me.

After about one month of uptime I need to restart my Windows machine as it usually starts to behave weirdly. It might be because I put it into hibernation every night. Waking up from hibernation used to be problematic, because some devices/drivers didn't wake up and restore properly, but it's much better now.

Windows, by default, would forcibly restart itself way before one month of uptime. I have had unsaved work lost because of it. Now I have automatic restarting permanently disabled.

Even worse offender is Windows automatic wake up. Once it woke up my old laptop form hibernation while riding in a car and caused bad sectors on the hard drive (HDD was in perfect condition before that ride).

>Once it woke up my old laptop form hibernation while riding in a car and caused bad sectors on the hard drive

Had the exact same thing in college, my Lenovo laptop woke up inside my bag on my way to class and the HDD got damaged.

That’s why I always used SSDs back in college. Reliability and speed are much more important than drive capacity in a laptop.

Some of us aren't young enough for that :)

Normally, one wants to restart Windows after installing updates, i.e. about once a month.

> I still feel unease restarting

Oh yes, I know that unease all too well. Simply booting the system is usually the least problem, but starting all my applications, placing the windows across the different workspaces, ssh'ing into various machines, etc. is always such a hassle. However, this problem is pretty much constant across different operating systems, at least to me.

MacOS restores everything, most apps have state saving and they also get restored exactly the way I left them, not just re-open. Only stuff like the terminal will need to re-init the scripts and sessions manually. I like that, it's good enough but I would prefer 0 restarts, of course.

I haven't been keeping track anymore with Windows 10 but it feels like at least once a month the system forcefully reboots. It's mostly hands free in terms of the update process but it is very disruptive.

Back in the day with Windows 7 and not being forced to update I've had 6 month+ uptimes and things ran very well.

Try Reboot blocker https://udse.de/reboot-blocker/

I don't bother with updates anymore, as they usually cause more trouble than they are worth these days. Consequently I pretty much never restart my computer unless I really really think I want an update.

Current uptime on my home machine is >6 months.

>What’s the typical uptime for a Windows machine in daily use?

Only rebooted once in 2021 and that was me turning it off for electrical work.

Definitely been in the 2 month+ numbers at times with extremely heavy use like dual GPUs running 100% for 12+ hour periods at a time.

Honestly been very impressed with Windows recently as a place for where I get my high end work done. I still use a Macbook for browsing/writing sometimes.

Hahahaha what? I have to remember to reboot my Mac every couple days or it becomes unbearably slow. Not only that, but once a month there's a security update released that, you guessed it, requires an update. If there's some magic to not requiring an update for those please let me know, because I'm sick of waiting 30 minutes every time I install an update.

Interesinting that some of the tools he installed to "improve" default windows are open-source and also available on linux.

Anecdata: about a decade ago I asked a few colleagues if a mac user would feel more at home using windows or Ubuntu. Answer were almost unanimous: Ubuntu. It is a shame that market needs (hardware, services and software) still makes people need windows.

I've been a Mac user since 2004. I switched my main computer to Windows right when Windows 10 released, mostly for gaming. Late last year, I've switched to Linux (Manjaro then straight Arch) with a heavily customized, simplified Gnome desktop (to fit my exact needs).

In my opinion, for what I need, Linux & Gnome is so much better than Windows 10. And better than Big Sur, I must regretfully add. UX has gone abysmally low with macOS 11, sadly.

I have had a similar experience, I got a Mac in 2013, switched back to Linux in 2017. There is one thing I miss - the emacs-keybindings in the system text input widget, that one was awesome. But otherwise, I feel much more at home on Linux with Mate.

I was a Linux/FreeBSD user for a decade, before I switched to mac(have it been 8 years already?) and my preference is still mac > FreeBSD > Linux > Windows, fwiw. Working on something which is not *nix seems odd to me and I've always found windows being extremely complicated under the hood.

GNOME developer loves macOS so the result isn't surprising.

As a long-time Windows user I clean-installed Ubuntu (Pop!_OS) on my laptop and forced myself to work with it for three days.

Had to revert back to Windows yesterday in exasperation: things still looked way too glitchy, it took two entire minutes in general to boot up (Windows takes ~30s), apps like the Brave web browser took another minute to open, GNOME felt actually less customizable than Windows explorer (where you can at least natively move the panel to wherever you want), Bluetooth headphones connected but gave terrible audio quality, Colors on screen got too bright at one instance then too dim at the next, Battery barely lasted an hour, some frustrating apt bug just refused to let me install the software (even from .deb setup files) I wanted, CPU fans ran on full throttle all the time ...

I even had to manually download and compile some obscure unmaintained software to create a Windows bootable USB. Windows is universally hated as a meme, but its industry dominance isn't really undeserved. With WSL2 there's much less reason to shift to Linux now.

I use Windows at work for its killer feature I rarely see mentioned: text antialiasing and rendering.

I believe (?) Freetype came very close to Cleartype in Linux land, but MS holds patents on the extra bit that makes Cleartype just a bit better.

I assume text antialiasing will be unnecessary in 10 years due to the rising ubiquity of high resolution monitors, but that day is not here yet. I’ve noticed that macOS has just completely bailed on text antialiasing. Hooking up my MacBook Air M1 to my 109 DPI monitor is a truly awful experience. On the other hand, text on the Retina screen is holy grail. However, holy grail is unattainable for me at the moment. LG Ultrafine monitors are too expensive.

Due to DirectWrite, it’s very easy to get an end-to-end best-in-class GPU accelerated text rendering experience on Windows.

Mac and Linux antialiasing are light years ahead of Windows, unless you are using 20 year old 100 DPI or lower monitors. Now that 4K is standard on laptops, and 5k on desktops, Cleartype is an artifact of antiquity.

Is 5K standard on desktops? Where can I get a ~200 DPI 5K monitor for less than $1,299.95?

Firefox user data shows 4K at roughly 2 % and "other" resolutions (only part of which will be high DPI) at slightly less than 7 %.

> Now that 4K is standard on laptops, and 5k on desktops,

Neither of those are “standard”, they are both high end. On laptops FHD is still dominant. Desktop displays are more diverse, with beyond-FHD being more common than on laptops but split between 1080p-but-ultrawide, 1440p, 4K, and the rarer 5K+.

> When I hit the start menu, it’s because I want to launch an application. I don’t need to see the rest of the desktop. So why is the Start menu by default only occupying a small portion of the screen, and wasting the remaining space?

Hilarious.

I mean, I fully agree with the author on that. But since the author is not tied to a Windows ecosystem, he doesn't know that a full-screen start menu actually happened on Windows 8, and it was nearly boycotted by Windows userbase because of the fact that it occupies full screen space. Users demanded to have a Windows95-style start menu, and MS had to redesign it.

Why it's so important for Windows users to have a Windows95-style menu, is beyond me.

There you have it :D

He does, he links to the following footnote: "Windows 8 was the best version of Windows. And that’s just a fact."

You're right, I missed that.

I run many applications on my computer at once and I often find myself opening the start menu to launch an application while keeping an eye on another window in the background. The hierarchical organization and text-with-icons style of the classic start menu also feels less overwhelming to me than the flat organization and icons-with-text style of the Windows 8 menu.

But I also think these are minor issues and the backlash against the menu in Windows 8 was over-the-top. At the end of the day, I think the real reason people were mad is that it just looked very different from previous menus, which made casual users uncomfortable. Which is kind of funny seeing as it's very similar to the app menus used by macOS, iOS, and Android.

My complaint with the Windows 8 start menu wasn't that it took up the whole screen, it was that it took up the whole screen to show _the same number of items_ or fewer than the 95-style start menu. And half of them were ads.

A full-screen start menu with the same information density as the 95-style start menu, possibly with a pane for programs and a pane for explorer, is something I'd happily try out.

> Why it's so important for Windows users to have a Windows95-style menu, is beyond me.

Because there is no other mechanism to start an installed program except maybe by navigating with windows explorer and double clicking the exe or typing the full path in cmd.exe.

1) Add shortcuts to the Desktop [1] (since 95)

2) Win+R Run dialog [2] (since 95)

3) Pin to the Taskbar [3] (since Vista)

4) Windows key and type [4] (since Vista)

5) PowerToys Run (new; optional addon from GitHub Microsoft/PowerToys; mentioned in article), and similar tools from third party vendors

[1] So many Installers since '95 still do this by default. I've seen so many Windows users that that's how they launch everything, from a super cluttered Desktop that constantly rearrange. It's partly why I turn off the Desktop entirely, as I personally don't have an interest in managing that cluttered mess.

[2] Not something I'd recommend today, but a lot of people have ingrained muscle memory going all the way back to '95. It has an interesting search heuristic and you don't always need to type a full path. Plus it has autocomplete when you do need to type a full path.

[3] I keep a lot of important things pinned. Pins are also great because they give you automatic global shortcuts for free. Win+{N} where N is between 1 and 9 (inc.) and is the number of the pin in taskbar order.

[4] Searches all installed apps, enter to launch. Arrow keys to navigate if multiple suggestions. Quick, fast, convenient.

Microsoft said when building Windows 8 most of their telemetry showed "no one" actually used the Start Menu to launch apps and people either fell into bucket [1] or bucket [3 + 4] (me), with a few stodgy outliers in the bucket [1 + 2] camp. The full screen Start Menu acts the way most Desktop-heavy users work (hiding all Windows until they could see the Desktop to launch their next app, whether by one of the Minimize All Windows shortcuts or the actual Win+D Desktop shortcut), and helped bring down the amount of auto-installed clutter for those of us in the [3 + 4] camp that didn't want to manage the Desktop as it has been since '95.

As a fun lesson in telemetry, because Vista and 7's telemetry for app launching "mechanism" was opt-in, apparently the people that actually used the Start Menu as a Menu mostly failed to ever opt-in. The vocal anger of that very crowd at Windows 8 is a large part of why Windows 10 moved to a more opt-out telemetry model to avoid the sorts of assumptions that happened in Windows 8. (The irony shouldn't be lost that many of the same people that hated Windows 8 for ignoring their use cases are the same that hate telemetry in general. It shouldn't be that shocking that Microsoft doesn't cater to your use cases if they can't gather telemetry to know that you exist. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

> It shouldn't be that shocking that Microsoft doesn't cater to your use cases if they can't gather telemetry to know that you exist.

User research isn't limited to, and existed before, telemetry. Telemetry, if used, should be an additional channel of user research, not an excuse to be lazy.

User Research isn't omniscient by any means and has the same opt-in biases. (More so, even, because most User Research wants to be done in lab environments and that raises the bar from "press check-box for passive data gathering" to "can physically get to lab for testing". Even the middle ground of "surveys" still has a time/attention/patience bar to hurdle that telemetry does not.)

Microsoft certainly used both Telemetry and lots of User Research in the Windows 8 development process, and clearly had many of the same blind spots in both. The point remains that opting into telemetry is still the lowest bar to hop as a user to getting your "voice" heard (as aggregate statistics).

I've found over the last few years, as much as I hate to say this, that Windows has been a decent experience for me. It's not perfect, but the combination of the right programs (Directory Opus 12, X display server, SSH client) plus WSL makes it a usable experience.

VS Code is also now my IDE of choice.

I look forward to the day I can switch to Linux full-time (probably Arch), but for now I need good OneDrive integration.

For when you do, abraunegg's OneDrive is useful: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive

Office 365 in wine is still hit-or-miss, I will admit. I got it working but only with a great deal of pain, and apparently setup is broken for a lot of people right now.

(I use arch btw)

Don't forget windows now has a ssh server too! I run Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) - but certain proprietary vpn clients just don't work right, so on occasion I'll boot a VirtualBox vm, login to VPN there, then use the vm as a ssh jump box to the network on the far side.

I'd prefer not having to deal with crappy, propiatary vpn gateways - but at least this way it works.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrati...

There is a windows phenomenon that I don't know if happens with everybody, but it happens with most of my acquaintances:

Every time someone buys a windows computer I get impressed about how fast the computer is. Six months later, same computer, I get impressed about how slow it gets. This experience has been like this for decades. Never seen anything like that on linux or mac.

If your machine is low on RAM and you keep installing services to it, it will slow down. OS has nothing to do with it.

All of that 'telemetry' collection isn't free. OS choice definitely matters, some OS vendors will insist on default sevices and 'require' the ability to arbitarily enable more for you as they see fit over time.

You don't own your PC running windows, microsoft does.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying that windows users love installing services?

Yes, especially Virus services.

I'm not saying windows users love installing services.

I meant, maybe your acquaintances aren't that tech savvy and don't understand the implications. My parents we're the same before I've taught them not to install stuff before consulting with either me or my brother.

Whenever I get Windows-curious, the one thing holding me back is all the telemetry and privacy compromises I hear about on forums like HN. One thing I'd love to see in a "switch to Windows" list is a simple list of steps to harden the privacy characteristics of a fresh Windows 10 installation. I occasionally see automated solutions for this, but it's hard for me to judge the reliability and trustworthiness of such tools. A simple, clear list would be great.

The problem is such lists become obsolete after the next update when Microsoft introduces a new privacy-invading feature or they revert some of the settings that you previously changed.

The only winning move is not to play.

What you probably want is Windows 10 LTSC. It's barebones Windows 10 but without all extra crap that comes installed with all the other versions of Windows. I have been running it for a while now and its great.

Do you need a specific key for it, or would my 10 Pro license work?

LTSC is definitely the best Windows 10 version for office / dev work. You need an Enterprise license as a Pro license will not work. Also, LTSC can be hard to come by. See /r/Windows10LTSC for Q&A.

> Since Windows’ window management works much better than what OS X’s does

I find this interesting because to me, it just seems that macOS does this way better, especially on MacBooks with the gestures (some of which work on windows). I really miss Mission Control whenever I have to use Windows.

I don't know what Mission Control is, but seeing from the screenshots it seems to be something like what you get on windows after pressing Win+Tab ?

Honestly I never understood the appeal of gestures as I use my OS not only on laptops but on desktops too where there is no touchpad.

Apple's bluetooth touchpad is pretty nice.

It's pretty similar but it's more clunky (literally just a full-screen Alt-Tab), often requires scrolling, clutters the space with useless "past activities" and so on. Mission Control does one thing and does it well.

> Honestly I never understood the appeal of gestures as I use my OS not only on laptops but on desktops too where there is no touchpad.

Apple's mice and trackpads (which are sold for desktops as well) support them.

Yeah but Mac OS needs more windows to function. Windows Explorer is definitely superior to Finder, it has a lot more features.

IHMO the Explorer from Windows XP (this is the last Windows I used before Windows 10) was better, did the job and was simple, now it seems bloated for me and too mouse dependent, I like to use the keyboard whenever possible, other big feature missing in windows and built in in mac is the file preview, you just hit space and you can see most common file formats without opening them, maybe Windows has this but I'm not aware of it.

In general I think Mac has better UX out of the box, Windows surely has a lot of features but not very easy to use, other thing that I miss about Windows is that before with one right click and a left click I could change my network settings (LAN), now I need a few clicks to get to it (but I never remember which menu I need to click it).

Some linux distros are now easier to configure than windows, mac is the king in this regard (but there are some advanced configurations that you need the terminal for, so this is a cons, but most of them are rarely used)

You can get a preview in Explorer by toggling the preview pane using Alt+P.

Win-Tab shows an overview over opened windows, different desktops (yes, Windows has these) and has a timelime of recently used documents.

The desktop can be shown using Win+D or by moving the mouse into the lower right corner (this can be enabled/disabled). Windows can be arranged and tiled by using Win+<arrow key>

The mentioned Power Toys allow to customize shortcuts and provide an overview of Windows shortcuts when holding down the Win-key.

At least for me, Win-Tab takes ~2 seconds to “engage”. The animations are very much not smooth. The animation isn’t synchronized an multiple screens either.

It’s a start, but it’s not there yet.

However, window management on macOS isn’t great beyond mission control.

It opens really fast on this PC but is neither synchronized between screens nor smoothly animated. The time to open this view seems to depend on the number of windows on the screen.

I've never owned a mac so I don't know what Mission Control is fully capable of but is Win10's "Task View" similar to Mission Control? WinKey+Tab

Yeah, I much prefer the macOS approach. You can get everywhere with the keyboard, too.

- cmd-tab to jump through apps (release tab and then press q to quit the selected app, nice convenience)

- cmd-` (tilde) to loop through windows of the same app - this is a thing a lot of people don't realize you can do

Keyboard control over dialogs has gotten a lot better, too.

I use an app called sizeup to tile/position windows on screen and it is wonderful. It will remember different monitors too so that you can easily rearrange everything when docking/undocking a laptop.

I cant use Windows as my main for its terrible tendency to allow programs to just pollute the filesystem anywhere and everywhere.

I need a way to keep my system tidy and any installation can possibly mean

1) infection with whatever *ware (even legitimate software acts like one 2) polluting the whole system with files you will not be able to easily find and delete (or registry or whatever else)

No, macOS just makes it seem like apps can't add files anywhere. They only recently made it a requirement to ask to write to certain locations like your Documents, Downloads folder, etc.

Just use scoop: https://scoop.sh/

Another way I prevent such pollution is use portable versions of software and store them in a singular Software directory.

And to cleanly remove such "polluting" software, use Revo Uninstaller: https://www.revouninstaller.com/products/revo-uninstaller-pr...

I went back to Winwdows after a long hiatus for my 'personal' laptop. The OS definitely doesn't have as much polish but I've been quietly impressed.

I'm not a developer, but I am developer-adjacent, and I really struggled to get set up with WSL. Even using some guides like this: https://char.gd/blog/2017/how-to-set-up-the-perfect-modern-d...

I'll probably have to start it again from afresh, I just found setting up WSL unintuitive and the relationship between WSL and Windows confusing. I believe the situation was previously much worse so forward progress I suppose.

Things I like about Windows:

- Windows take up more space on the screen. When maximized, there's no title bar and sizing icons taking up space like on MacOS. For example, Chrome tabs are right up to the top of the screen without going full screen.

- There's a program for everything. I've been able to play games I used to from 20 years ago and where they don't work out of the box (some do), someone has made a utility to make it all work. I'd forgotten the advantage of Windows having so many more users.

I don't mind Windows; there are some apps that are VASTLY superior to anything I could find on Mac or Linux. Nor Mac, for a different set of apps. I don't think I would ever spend the Apple tax on one though; as long as work provides me with one that's fine.

I tend to do my "real work" in a unixy context, but WSL, VMs, and `brew install coreutils` gets me close enough to run my dev tools of choice.

> There’s no OmniDiskSweeper on Windows, but there is WinDirStat, which does the same thing

WizTree is much faster than WinDirStat as it directly reads NTFS's Master File Table. It's not open source, but it is free for personal use.

TIL: Win-Shift-S. Very useful to know that Windows has a built-in tool for cropping screenshots before they even end up in the clipboard.

I teach college. I did an assignment where I had students do a little tutorial and submit a screenshot as proof. After so many submitted pics of their screen they took with their phone, I told them about the built in snipping tool in windows (and there's one in macos, too). It blew the minds of many of them.

I'm not a teacher but I totally feel you. Everytime I see someone take a screenshot using their phone, I cringe. Especially when it's a developer who should know better. And especially when they could have simply copied the source code as text, which would have enabled me to copy and run it instantly.

Win+Print automatically saves a screenshot to the "Pictures\Screenshots" folder by the way.

Funnily enough I was aware of that one. :) But Win+Shift+S is a perfect replacement for what I have been doing for a long while, pressing PrintScreen (without Win key), pasting into some graphics application and then copying a selection of the screenshot, just to paste into yet another application.

Another nice tip is Alt+PrtScr which copies just an image of the focused window.

You can also make this the default when you press "Print" on your keyboard. Go to Windows settings and search for "screenshot". It's so hard to discover -.-

This is definitely a nice built-in tool. I still find ShareX to be a bit more flexible and fit my workflow better, but this is great for getting screenshots from other people.

I keep meaning to try this out. Every time I boot a fresh Windows 10 install I am traumatized enough to walk away and not try again, though.

The install process is pretty bad - the same ancient UI that came from Longhorn. Towards the end you go through about 20 differnt checkboxes to un-toggle all the various annoying settings you don't want like tracking and advertisements on the login screen. Creating an account is also a headache - MSFT is really pushing the online signin stuff now. Everything also feels sluggish to me, but perhaps that is due to the machine I am using (i7-3770k, 16gb ram, but kinda old in general) and there just feels like an abundance of noise and crap everywhere (Windows explorer is like a junk drawer that wont close)

I ended up using it for one thing - I managed to pay Titanfall 2 through the entire campaign on an Xbox controller. That was a pretty fun experience. Recently I wiped the box to start giving Fedora a shot as a sidekick box.

I cannot quit macOS though. It is just too good at staying out of your way and not being annoying (I am on Mojave) - and the muscle memory is strong.

DHH's take resonates with me: https://m.signalvnoise.com/back-to-windows-after-twenty-year...

Windows and Mac both have this issue of terrible defaults.

WizTree is better and far faster than WinDirStat (think seconds instead of minutes to scan your whole system).

There are several references to WSL (Windows System for Linux) in this thread, but I think this shall be posted as a separate WSL-related comment.

I switched to Windows after almost 10 years on a Linux Desktop (mostly Ubuntu) when WSL was in version 1. It was slow and buggy.

However, as of today, WSL 2 is a very strong reason to use a Windows machine as a dev machine.

Windows Terminal is fast, snappy and modern. It looks like and behaves like a regular *nix shell with all the bells and whistles.

VSCode works both with the Windows filesystem and with the WSL. You can even run `code .` and it will open a proper Windows VSCode instance in a Linux directory.

I have been developing and running (with/without Docker) Python, Ruby, Java, Node, Elixir on a WSL-enabled machine for quite some time and the experience is good.

From a smooth development process point of view, I don't see any reason to use a Linux machine anymore.

I don't like the full screen start menu, but I always expand it to allow three columns (and with the 'show more per group' setting). And I have all app shortcuts there, as small icons and grouped into categories, because that's what makes more sense to me, always available at the click of a button, and not in the desktop.

In fact, and all those who see me working always asks, I have my desktop configured as follow:

* No shortcuts, only the recycle bin and the files I'm currently using.

* The desktop is the default folder for firefox downloads.

* The icons are HUGE, and I mean that, press control and use the mouse wheel until the icons's height is a third of the desktop height more or less.

My desktop is my workplace, all the temporary items I need are there, until I move them to their proper folder into Documents, Images, or where necessary. I rarely have more than 5 files, and those who are there have my total attention. And, since the icons are huge, it's extremely easy to see the previsualization for images, pdf, videos, etc.

I started using MacOS in around 2009 and I don't see any problems between the two that aren't simply "Okay this is just different, but not necessarily wrong". The only big problem I have is that MacOS doesn't have a proper native maximise option which doesn't make the window fullscreen.

With regards to the recommendations in the article, Windows actually shifted to a start menu that was full screen and was hated by the majority of Windows users (including me). Atleast they give you the option now.

Either way, I think this is a good genuine article. Its rare that I see people describing what its like to use Windows after being such MacOS enthusiasts, rather than the other way.

If anyone prefers video, a while back I put together a similar type of post / video going over and demoing a bunch of apps / tools that I use on Windows to have what I feel like is a decent development environment focused on web development using Docker, WSL 2 and heavy terminal usage.

That's at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-linux-dev-environment-on-wi...

Been using the set up for years now with slight changes over the years (WSL 1 to WSL 2, etc.), it's solid.

Nobody talk about doskey. When I started working in windows I missed my aliases that I had in linux. Doskey is a great tool to mimic the functionality. Some example of my aliases:

  edit="%EDITOR%" $\*
  kbs=ag $\* --file-search-regex "\.md$"  "C:\Users\my\Dropbox\MyNotes" 
  pg_start="C:\My Program Files\Scoop\apps\postgresql\current\bin\pg_ctl" start -D "C:\My Program Files\Scoop\apps\postgresql\current\data"

I load the file with the aliases like this:

  doskey /macrofile=C:\Users\me\doskey.cmd

So I haven't used Windows in a while, but the thing that kicks me back to Linux (1st choice) or OS X (2nd choice) every single time was file locking.

I think the majority of windows software opens files with an exclusive lock, making it really annoying to use, e.g. you can't delete a dir if anything in its subdir is open for whatever reason.

With the amount of software running on a system nowadays, and things like windows update, nothing bothers me more than having files locked in Windows for whatever reason and forcing me to update.

I've also never had a good experience with Windows Update (it fails all the time)

> As far as I can tell, 7-zip is more widely recommended amongst Windows users, but what do they know? PeaZip has a very clean UI, and nice green icons, so it’s very obviously the better choice.

I appreciated the pithy joke, but I was curious about an actual comparison since I always use 7-Zip. This short article seems like a useful rundown of the (very minor) differences if anyone else is interested: https://en.softonic.com/articles/head-to-head-peazip-vs-7-zi...

> Around 2015, I started to realize that I was no longer part of Apple’s target audience.

2015 was also in the era of the big CPU stagnation when Intel refused to make bigger steps forward in order to maximize profits

it put Apple in weird spot because they depend on 3rd party for their hardware, they can't play the same cards as Intel, obviously, it's Apple

now that they released their own silicon, it is pretty clear what happened in the past, and what was their exact goal, to not depend on intel anymore or any 3rd party, so developers can experience fast machines again, and how things are changing today.. in a very good way

don't be this closed minded about "apple don't understand developers", because that's not true at all

And that's pretty weird, because today Windows 10 is doing exactly what you though Apple was doing to you ;) without investing in their own silicon, without improving their OS, and without improving their filesystem

worse, 1 icon at a time!

The processor stagnation was the least of Apple's issues in 2015. The MBP redesign sacrificed durability, expandability, and repairability for a slightly thinner envelope. The newly reintroduced MacBook line hinted at a future where Apple computers would be more like iPads with glued-together hardware and only 1 port. The Mac "Pro" had not seen a real update in two years since abandoning a tried-and-true form factor for a beautiful mess.

I had already figured out that I was no longer in Apple's target audience at the introduction of the Retina MBP and soldered-down RAM modules, so I'll just be content as long as I can keep my 2011 iMac and my 2012 MBP running. After having used those fine machines, there are very few options on the PC side that I find anything near satisfactory.

the future is wireless

the everything soldered together makes sense, not only for portability, but also for energy efficiency, also help save costs

reparability is a non issue, since you sacrifice everything above as a result, better focus on making the "board" as cheap as possible to produce, and recyclable

See, that's where they've lost me. I don't feel like those cost savings are being passed on to the consumer to a great enough extent to make me feel okay running out to buy another whole computer when one ram chip stops working, if the battery stops taking a charge, or if I decide I need more storage for what I'm doing. We'd have to get down to Raspberry Pi pricing territory before I'd be willing to consider buying a computer that is essentially disposable.

Is it really more economical and environmentally friendly to recycle a whole computer than a ram module or an SSD?

i was tempted to switch back to windows but i am worried i won't find the same build quality/durability from non-apple machines. anyone can recommend good/durable windows machines?

I have almost 2 decades of Thinkpad X series stockpiled around the house and none ever broke. (Granted, I don't run Windows on them).

I've had some good Thinkpads and HP business-class desktop computers. Apple build quality is amazing if you compare it to consumer-class hardware, but once you step up to business machines it's pretty standard imo. I find Apple's designs tend to be more elegant than a lot of them though.

Microsoft's own Surface line is meant to be of comparable quality (though reviews/individual experiences may differ in some cases) and certainly of comparable aesthetics at least to Apple machines. Obviously Surface hardware comes at a bit of a premium to most other OEMs.

I'd second the recommendation to look at business hardware over consumer hardware (again, at a cost premium), but beware that isn't universally true. Some of the business lines are "churn-centric". For instance, a lot of companies have big HP or Dell contracts (as two examples) that they lease so many machines per year with quick turnaround "no or few questions asked" replacement strategies. Those companies treat the devices as "disposable", they ship old ones back every year or three and get newer models back. Those "disposable" business lines don't have a huge incentive to build quality/durability if the laptops are going to be replaced in 3-year or less cycles anyway.

You might also explore some of the "prosumer" segments. Some of the OEMs have a "Media Creation" line of one sort or another that often ups build quality. Most OEMs have a "Gaming" segment. Even if you aren't a "gamer" or play many games, sometimes you find good premium options among those lines that go toward build quality/durability. The trouble there is determining model to model whether with that model you are paying a premium for 1) useless bells and whistles like RGB lighting all the things, 2) build quality/durability, or 3) bleeding edge hardware that is the opposite of quality/durable. Manufacturers vary in which of those 3 is their priority for "Gaming" and even within some of those Manufacturers they might have sub-sections that vary the position on that triangular space defined by those three extremes. A heuristic I've used in the past is pulling out the business line pages and "Gaming" pages of an OEM and trying to spot the most similar models that might imply one is just a rebadging of the other, that intersection may indicate the quality/durable sub-line, and then decide between the two based on price difference (surprisingly sometimes it is the "Gaming" line that is still cheaper), and whether or not the other bells and whistles of the "Gaming" line seem amusing enough.

For work I use a Mac and I remote into Windows, and I have so much trouble making my brain swap the keys for copy/paste. Ctrl-C Command-V is so painful.

PeaZip has many good features, eg smart new folder. But the UI is pretty slow.

And also the compression is slow. I tried to compress some VMs and peazip was much slower than 7zip for 7z compression.

Is there a good AutoHotKey equivalent for Linux?

You don't need it nearly as much. Most of the things I used to use AutoHotKey for on Windows are better dealt with by changing a config file somewhere. For the odd case where GUI automation is really needed, you have xdotool, which is not nearly as nice as AutoHotKey, but does the job. In short, I was a heavy user on Windows but don't miss it at all on Linux.

windows is getting a lot better but there's no decent tiling window manager.

on macos, yabai is quite ok.

on linux, it's a the best. just take your pick

Have you had a chance to play with Fancy Zones yet on Windows? (It's in the PowerToys.)

It's not quite as full featured as some of the options on other platforms, but I'm finding it scratches the itch for me a lot more than I expected it would at first glance, especially when you allow it to take over the "Aero Snap" keys (Win+Arrow Key). They've been adding and polishing features at a decent pace, and it's worth checking out (again) if you haven't recently.

yes, fancy zones is what i ended up using but i still miss tiling wm.

Yeah, but I find it interesting how much of the itch it already scratches. I've been somewhat keeping an eye on the GitHub issues as you can tell Fancy Zones is very much still a "minimal viable project" to prove interest/demand and there's definitely enough Tiling WM loving developers on the project that they've got some sense of direction towards it, even if they are still more concerned of finding the "Windows way" toward it than going beeline for i3wm or xmonad features.

if microsoft can pull that off, windows can really shine as a developer friendly OS

One of the things I loved about Windows 8.1 was that it had a Tiling Window Manager getting some real love out of the box. The Window Manager for the "modern" ("metro"/UWP) Windows apps was a tiling WM. It was limited to only vertical splits at the time, and you had to upgrade to the modern apps to get the most benefit from it (the entire Win32 desktop was just a single tile to that WM). At points in 8.1 I'd have a dozen or so tiles across 2 screens on my desktop. It was lovely, for that brief time it existed and there were enough apps to make use of it. When they inverted things back in 10 and put all the modern apps in traditional overlapping Windows, that tiling WM got crippled and relegated back to only support two tiles at a time and then only in Tablet Mode (though it got slightly smarter about semi-maximizing Win32 apps).

Windows 1.x itself had only a tiling WM. (Not a great one, mind you.)

There's a lot of tiling WM DNA in Windows development history. Like I said the impression I have from GitHub Issues at least is that there are an interesting number of developers of Windows (even if that's a small overall percentage of the huge Windows organization at Microsoft) interested in pursuing good tiling WM tools on Windows. I hope Fancy Zones does continue to be a good playground for exploring that.

I started working on yatta for Windows 10 because I was missing yabai and bspwm after I started working from a Windows 10 desktop last year.

I made a post about it on the Rust subreddit yesterday looking for more contributors: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/lh4uyq/yatta_bsp_tili...

It's still early days, but it has automatic tiling, gap control, focus switching, directional moving and tree orientation toggling and you can use AHK or any other hotkey daemon to manage your keybindings.

You still have to build it from source at the moment, but I'm hoping to have it installable via the Scoop package manager in a month or two.

https://github.com/LGUG2Z/yatta

cool. i will def. check it out

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