[ivraatiems]

Despite my bellyaching, Windows is built on much more solid ground than macOS is these days. All the new stuff introduced in 8/10 - Metro stuff, control panel stuff, etc. - can be wacky, but the core OS is strong. It works, it doesn't crash, it acts the way you expect it to. That's all I really want from a desktop OS, and given that Apple has total control over their ecosystem, they are frighteningly bad at providing it.

What areas do you find W10 to be lacking in?

[edko]

I have switched from Mac to Windows a few months ago. My biggest annoyance is privacy. I do not feel my data is safe while using Windows. I had to switch off too many defaults (keylogging, for example!), and I really do not know if I missed any, or if some update has sneaked in any new way for MS to spy on me.

[ivraatiems]

I totally understand. Even with the bugginess, it's my single biggest issue with W10.

[klurriplurrr]

I find W10 lacking in consistency.

Poke around in the settings for a while and you will find remnants from the NT days.

The dark theme is another example, it works for a handful of their own apps, not even half of them.

Half baked and unpolished. I'm a daily W10, macOS sierra and Fedora Linux user. I develop on all the OS:es and play games mostly on W10.

[alanfranzoni]

I agree 100% with that. Microsoft stacked new features without deprecating old ones. Nowadays you can do things in 32 different ways; some ways are the same as they were in Windows 2000 and XP, but maybe some "advanced tweaks" are not available in the "old interface", so you need to struggle to find two different interfaces that achieve the same essential function.

This is, IMHO, a backlash of Microsoft's long update cycle. The yearly update Apple pushed to MacOS, along with free updates, allows for an easier deprecate-then-remove approach that gently transitions users from the old to the new approach. It's hard to do the same when people got used to an OS for many, many years. Maybe W10 with its "rolling" approach will suceed, btw.

[ivraatiems]

Yeah, that's exactly the problem.

Happily, though, the inconsistencies don't reach as far down as the kernel level. W10 looks weird and sometimes acts strangely when you try to use the new stuff, but its bones are stable, which is all I really need.

[Cowicide]

>the core OS is strong. It works, it doesn't crash,

Windows almost never crashes for me, but I haven't had a system crash on my Macs in close to a decade even after updating the OS numerous times without a clean install. Granted, I know to use combo updaters for Mac instead of the streaming updates, so that helps me quite a bit along with making sure I update third party apps first.

On the other hand, Windows 10 updates have caused all kinds of various issues and it's documented to be widespread. Killing many webcams is one major issue that comes to mind.

Then again, some people have had wifi issues with Mac updates, so no OS is perfect, that's for sure. However, to allude that the macOS system core with Sierra isn't as strong as Win10 doesn't seem realistic to me.

macOS Sierra has been as rock solid as Win10, if not more in some cases.

>given that Apple has total control over their ecosystem, they are frighteningly bad at providing it.

That's a myth. I have Android phones integrated with Macs just fine, for example. I use the free MightyText to send & receive texts and that's just one of several good options. Google Keep app to sync notes across Mac & Android and the list goes on and on.

If any professional power user wants to skip Gatekeeper on a Mac and install apps without any hoops (a simple right-click, basically), Apple made it as simple as this in Terminal so there's no hoop at all:

sudo spctl --master-disable

Done.

I use both Windows and Macs daily. I run anything and everything on my Mac I want and have done so for many years. I'm not trapped in some ecosystem at all on my Mac. If anything, I feel more trapped (privacy-wise) on Windows 10 than Mac and I despise how Microsoft forces updates on me that have crippled my workflow on occasion whereas Mac just puts up a daily reminder until you do it.

Now, the iOS devices are another story, but that's a huge can of worms when we're talking about phones and the need for security, etc. -- I'm not going to get into that here since we're talking about Mac vs. Windows -- not iOS vs. Android, etc. (my preference is Android for most of my use cases and iOS for some others).