[pier25]

I tried to switch to Windows for work (for gaming it's the obvious choice) but I just couldn't.

Windows 10 is IMO the best Windows ever, but I was surprised that the ecosystem was really poor compared to macOS. Most of the software you find online are outdated win32 apps with scaling problems. Even modern software from major companies still has scaling problems such as Adobe CC or even the mighty Photoshop.

I also didn't find worthy replacements for my most used apps such as Alfred. Even something like iStatMenus doesn't have a replacement in Windows, all the alternatives are really poor in comparison.

[ksk]

Just to give a counter point - every single device we use at work (biotech R&D) requires windows. All of our equipment (plate readers, flocytometry, purification systems, PCR, fermentors, congutators,etc etc) runs on windows-only software. And these are all several hundred million dollar verticals. Personally, I haven't run into a single piece of equipment that works with MacOS. Except maybe one of our bioreactors, which used a web interface, but that too required a windows tool for other things. Windows is used in a TON of proper manufacturing setups, traditionally only for SCADA/HMI, but more so now on the control side, with PC based automation becoming more prominent.

Which ecosystem is "poor" depends on your own current situation.

[xenihn]

As far as I know, you can somewhat easily run Windows on Mac hardware. The opposite isn't true.

[kn0where]

Microsoft does an excellent job making Windows run on just about any x86[_64] device (excluding ancient hardware). Windows runs perfectly on a Mac, whether in a VM or via dual boot.

[MikusR]

Even on Macs that can't run current Mac OS version

[rikkus]

Does the touchpad work properly now? Last time I checked was 2010 so obviously it might have improved.

[ksk]

Yeah, but I don't know if you can get your system validated, which is a requirement for us, and most people in this field. The HN audience is more aligned towards certain domains, and I merely wanted to present an alternate context. Not that it matters, but I like using OSX :)

[nathansoz]

Which is super unfortunate considering it is an artificial limitation.

[dawnerd]

> The opposite isn't true.

Sure you can. I've gotten macos installed in a vm and even ran a hackintosh for a while which was remarkably easy these days.

[0xFFC]

No it is not. It is not officially supported nor there is strong community support. When people like myself want for work, i want something 100% , I cannot explain it to my supervisor:”naaah, my hackintosh required a little bit of maintenance, so that’s why I submitted the paper late”.

[dawnerd]

Fair enough. Although I’ve had just as many issues running Windows in boot camp.

I do realllly wish Apple would open up and let us officially install on different hardware - especially if they’re only going to update the Mac pros every few years.

[pier25]

> Which ecosystem is "poor" depends on your own current situation

Indeed, I was speaking from my personal experience.

[seanalltogether]

Oddly enough I think mac and windows switched professional users somehow. I don't know a single developer on a windows machine, however most people I know working in 3d, digital illustration or video work all use windows machines now.

[Viper007Bond]

Windows Subsystem for Linux has been huge however. I used to have to run Vagrant or something on Windows to build stuff but WSL makes life super easy as a developer on Windows. I'm still one of the handful of people at a 600 person company though that runs Windows. :/

[cube2222]

I'd like to second that. I've been using WSL + Docker on Windows for a long time now for web development (linux backend development) and it's been a breeze. Works flawlessly.

You can do fun things, like tail logs to a file using linux and simultaneously analyze the file using windows tools.

[swah]

How do you access your files inside the subsystem? Don't you get permission problems (executable files etc)? I had so many issues with Virtualbox in Windows, I rather just use a Linux desktop distro...

[cube2222]

They made a compatibility layer.

You shouldn't access files in WSL using windows, but the other way around it's absolutely ok.

So if my projects are at C:/Development/Projects/...

Then I just open /mnt/c/Development/Projects/... on WSL

I haven't had any permission problems, not even once.

Same for Docker for Windows. It uses Hyper-V + some network disk sharing magic, which makes directory mounts into docker containers work great. So sometimes, like, when I need to debug a non-cross-platform linux program. (WSL doesn't handle process forking well, so some debuggers, like Go Delve don't work) I just do something like

docker run -v C:/Development/Projects/MyProject:/mnt/MyProject -it ubuntu /bin/bash

[snuxoll]

Apple lost a lot of the creative market with the trashcan Mac Pro. If I was doing heavy video editing or other work that demanded a high-end workstation I would immediately look at HP or Dell because I don't want to buy hardware that's obsolete out of the gate with no internal expansion support, or at least no STANDARD internal expansion support (proprietary GPU and SSD connections are stupid, why do you do this Apple).

On the other hand, outside of ML it's not like many software developers need to upgrade to a new GPU every (other) year and current processor trends show very little performance uplift between generations to upgrade - once Apple finally gets 32GB of memory in the MBP most developers will be set for many years.

[pier25]

> Apple lost a lot of the creative market with the trashcan Mac Pro

Exactly.

I wrote this last year criticising the current state of Mac hardware.

https://medium.com/@Pier/the-problem-of-osx-hardware-in-2016...

[WalterSear]

If you are a developer who needs lots of machine power. there are few reasons not to work in the cloud, these days.

[nikanj]

1) Latency 2) Developing custom hardware that needs to be attached to dev box 3) No rage when the wifi at the airport sucks 4) etc

Even though you don't need lots of power, there's plenty of solid and valid reasons why others might.

[WalterSear]

Exactly: a few reasons.

Moreover

1. latency is low enough that people are playing triple AAA video games on AWS for a $1/hr.

https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow...

2. Sure, that's a good reason. It had better be spewing out lots of data, though, or again, you might as well process in the cloud.

3. Being able to access your workstation via airport wifi at all is actually a benefit in this case, unless you intend to wheel it around like a suitcase.

[kpxxx]

> Being able to access your workstation via airport wifi at all is actually a benefit in this case, unless you intend to wheel it around like a suitcase

Did you walk out of a 1980s time warp or something? The workstation in this case carries 1TB of storage and weighs 3.5 lbs. (And it still has wifi in case you need that).

[skinnymuch]

Latency is still annoying. I prefer VMs still.

Regarding your number 3. For a lot of this, we are talking about devices like the MacBook Pro line. Not huge workstations.

[kyriakos]

This is indeed very odd but true. I understand why developers switched and the reason is probably that most development these days is Web development and OSX is the closest to a Unix os with a polished gui. On the other hand I can't understand why creatives switched to windows.

[sangnoir]

> On the other hand I can't understand why creatives switched to windows.

Apple's neglect.

[kn0where]

Yup. Here's how Apple lost[1] creatives:

- The laptop lineup only offers Intel graphics or AMD's weakest mobile GPUs. I suspect that Metal has something to do with why they've pretended Nvidia doesn't exist for the past ~5 years.

- The only non-abandoned[2] machine in the desktop lineup is a non-modular all-in-one.

- Apple ceded the creative-pro software market to Adobe. Final Cut, Logic, used to be industry leaders, and they had companion software products that Apple has either neglected or discontinued. Premiere + After Effects is a far more powerful & widely used toolset than Final Cut + Motion, plus Adobe's software also runs on powerful Windows PCs, eliminating Apple's lock-in.

- Pen-input is iPad exclusive. Apple has no desire to bring touch to the Mac, and while I agree that macOS is not designed for fingers, I'm sure artists would like a convertible MacBook Pro that supported the Apple Pencil.

[1] Obviously this is a generalization

[2] For all intents and purposes, the Mac Pro will still be abandoned until they release the promised new one circa 2018. The current Mac Pro and the Mac mini are terrible, ancient PCs that only sell any units because Apple has neglected giving macOS any good hardware to run on in those form factors or price points.

[demonshreder]

> Apple's neglect.

Elaborating on it, Custom hardware (esp. GPU) support. DX 11 over Metal. Apple chose not to upgrade OpenGL or implement Vulkan.

[scholia]

> however most people I know working in 3d, digital illustration or video work all use windows machines now.

You can stick really fast processors, tons of RAM and one or two Nvidia graphics cards in a very cheap tower. If only Apple sold a cheesegrater-style tower that could do that ;-)

Thee are even some Windows laptops that do the job now. Wirecutter picked the Dell XPS 15 as The Best 15-Inch Laptop for Photo and Video Editing https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-15-inch-laptops-for-p...

[21]

> I don't know a single developer on a windows machine

There's also a fair amount of peer pressure.

I was at a big software company and I choose a Lenovo with Windows instead of a Mac. I was the only one, and the other members of the team constantly tried to get me to switch, and trolled me, as if they were embarrassed with me. Now I'm at another big company, where Windows is more prevalent (legacy), but team members are still shocked that I chose again a Lenovo with Windows and Ubuntu VM on top.

If you were to interview to a startup and the founder coded on a Windows, what would most devs feel about it?

[ksk]

Well you need windows if you want to develop windows software!

[sydd]

For me it feels like you want to tweak Windows to be a clone of your OSX setup. Hint: it will never happen, same way you cant ever make OSX really like Windows. For example I could never find a good replacement for Paint.NET on OSX.

I dunno why people say that one or the other is superior for work (except if you work with some special software that exists only for one OS). Both of them are equally good, since everything is moving to the cloud, for most non-specialized tasks you need one app - a browser. If you look at other fields like programming, graphics work, 3D,.. they are the same again (except for special cases like C# or Swift development).

And things like iStatMenus is not something that is used for work, its a widget that you like. Perhaps you simply like the look and feel of OSX more?

[pier25]

> For me it feels like you want to tweak Windows to be a clone of your OSX setup

Not really. The features I want could be easily developed in Windows, or Linux, but for some reason this isn't the case.

A good example of this are launchers. Once you start using a launcher you wonder how you could have lived without it.

MacOS offers Spotlight which is very limited but there are 3 very good third party options: Alfred, Launchbar, and Quicksilver. These offer a lot more than simply opening files and applications.

There are launchers for Windows too (launchy, Wox, etc) but the functionality is very limited compared to the macOS options. I suspect this may be cultural. Maybe there are no good commercial solutions like in macOS because there is no market.

Even Linux has better free launchers than Windows. For example: https://github.com/qdore/Mutate

I have found this same problem with other types of applications. For some reason the macOS options are simply better. And again, this is completely unrelated to the OS. It seems there is simply no interest in the Windows world for these types of things.

For example macOS has Karabiner which allows to configure you keyboard in a myriad of ways. Terminals like iTerm are also better in macOS, maybe because of the *Nix tradition. Monitors like iStatMenus which offer you one click access to deep information on hardware, network, etc, are non existent. BetterTouchTool which allows to deeply configure gestures on your trackpad, again, nothing on Windows like it. I could go on, but you get the idea.

[Razengan]

Re: Paint.net on macOS, how do Acorn and Pixelmator (and the soon-to-come Pixelmator Pro) fare for you?

[gressquel]

Funny, I tried to go the other way but just couldnt.

The ecosystem on windows 10 is poor but then again I just download from one of the million win32 applications. I just don't use "apps" from store.

[pier25]

But those million win32 applications tend to be really outdated and poor in terms of features compared to the macOS ecosystem. At least that was what I experienced.

[zeusk]

Regardless, they're at-least usable and Microsoft cares about backward compat.

Just last week I played a game of Age of Empires II with my cousin, a game which was "released" in 1999 on a Surface with Windows 10. While on my MacBook I have issues because every major OS upgrade breaks something and I have to repurchase newer versions or give up if the dev isn't interested/around anymore.

[pier25]

I agree, Windows is much better at backwards compatibility.

OTOH I've found that it's not such a big deal in practice. In my 10+ years as a mac user I've only hit this problem a couple of times. Likewise in Windows I rarely open old outdated software.

That is of course my anecdotal and personal experience.

[nathansoz]

It's not a big deal for consumers. It's a huge deal for STEM departments in universities (a software upgrade for a hundred-thousand dollar machine can sometimes be thousands of dollars).

[agmcleod]

agreed. I have a gaming PC at home, as well as a separate gaming laptop that I use for events. I've tried coding on it, and it's just not as good. Little things like the apps you mentioned I miss. Soulver, text expander, proper twitter clients, spotlight, brew.