[jjoonathan]

I left apple a bit over a year ago because I wanted to get a laptop with some serious GPU power (I was doing lots of sequence alignments that took hours to do on my old laptop and hours to upload to / download from my university's compute cluster). The computer performed fabulously at this task, but my experience with the Microsoft ecosystem has been absolutely dreadful. Now that I no longer need the GPU power, I will gladly pay a few hundred dollar premium to get a mac laptop for my next computer. I would probably pay a 2x premium if Apple asked it.

-------- OS Installation: The Horror Story --------

* Reinstalling the OS is a 4-5 hour manual slog through serial numbers and a dozen drivers that must be manually installed in the correct order, not a 1-hour fire-and-forget process like in the Mac ecosystem. (hours of my time vs minutes of my time).

* The bundled "backup solution" works neither for imaging nor for incremental document recovery. "Time Machine" this is not.

* MSE antivirus was dreadfully slow (Just downloaded an installer? It'll wait 30 seconds before launching 5 copies of the .exe corresponding to the 5 times you clicked on it).

* I got a 30gb SSD as a boot volume and put Windows on it, then linked ("junctioned") the "Program Files" directory to my HDD (I'd done similar on my mac without trouble). Big mistake, none of the applications would launch. They didn't launch after I copied them back either (yes, I looked up permission-resetting instructions and followed them to the letter). I had to reinstall.

* I looked up a Microsoft support document explaining how to properly put programs on a different HD (and also that it was unsupported). It involved registry edits and DOS-fu from the system restore disk. The next time Windows Update ran, it broke my system so that no program would launch (DLL error every time). Rolling back the updates didn't work, of course. I had to reinstall. Gave up on the 30gb SSD.

* I tried to upgrade my Win7 install to Win8. Big mistake. The installer took 2 hours to give me an unhelpful generic error message. After hours of searching through forums I found out that it scans your installed Win7 drivers+programs one by one and barfs if any of them aren't compatible (but it doesn't tell you that, of course).

* I tried a fresh install of Win8 on a new 250gb SSD I got on black friday. It froze every time I woke from sleep. Oh, and it would boot to an I/O error bluescreen unless I booted into Win7 first, touched a file on the SSD, and rebooted (yes, touching a file was necessary). Two firmware updates and a handful of driver updates later and I had the same symptoms.

* On a hunch, I switched the SSD from SATA slot 2 to 0. This broke the bootloader, and Microsoft's instructions to fix it didn't work, giving a generic error message that many people on the support forum seemed to experience but that nobody had a fix for. There were 2 Microsoft employees with unhelpful non-fix "solutions," though.

* I nuked the Win7 HDD install and reinstalled Win8 afresh on the SSD (now slot 0). It seems to be stable so far.

* There was a 4-month period where Dell's GPU drivers had broken OpenCL compatibility and the manufacturer drivers would silently fail to install unless I ran a 3rd-party sketchware wiping program first and disabled signature enforcement on every boot.

* Audio drivers occasionally fail to wake from sleep (no audio till reboot). No, updating them to the manufacturer version didn't help. No, reinstalling Dell's recommended drivers didn't help either.

-------- Small Gripes --------

* No decent UNIX command line. Cygwin starts slowly and is poorly integrated with the system.

* I can't get decent 2-finger scroll without a 3rd party program that is occasionally broken by system updates.

* I can't remap capslock without downloading a 3rd-party program to perform registry edits.

* I can't shut off the screen without installing a 3rd party program to do so.

* In Win7, all allowed keyboard layout switching shortcuts were combinations of modifiers that conflicted with productivity apps like Illustrator. Also, the layout would occasionally become "stuck" and failed to respect the GUI switcher. In Win8, they added a no-conflict key combination for switching layouts but it doesn't work in fullscreen apps.

* Metro. It looks slick, but it doesn't have any of the options you regularly need to access. Fortunately the old menagerie of Windows utilities is still there, just moved around.

* No standard install system that lets you inspect the installer's logs, scripts, or contents.

* The intimate connection between my computer account and Microsoft cloud account creeps me out.

* The full-screen force-quit mechanism is insane (ctrl-alt-del, open Task Manager, press Windows to reveal the Launch Bar, click on the arrow to see all system tray icons, right-click the tiny Task Manager icon (a gray box), enable "Always on Top", highlight the program in the task manager, hit "End Task", wait, hit "End Task" on the dialog box that pops up, and finally decline to send a bug report to Microsoft)

* I can't use the keyboard to navigate directories that contain a mixture of files and folders because in Mircrosoft-Land "Alphabetical Order" means "Sort folders first, then files."

* The sub-HD preloaded desktop backgrounds (yes, really).

-------- Small Victories --------

* Cheaper, better hardware (not remotely cost effective, given the hassle)

* I can manually tweak virtual memory settings (not that I should have to tweak it, which I do, but I think it's terribly cool that I can and that there's a GUI for it)

* Compatibility

* The super-handy "superuser menu" (Win-X)

* The ability to roll-back updates. It has never worked when I needed it to, but I like the idea.

-------- Concluding Remarks --------

I've had better UX with linux, which is saying something, since I had previously considered linux UX to be fairly poor, or rather great -- until a mission-critical piece of it inevitably broke. Turns out the same thing applies Windows, except worse. Sadly, it sees that there is tremendous value in having a non-fragmented ecosystem.

My next computer will be a mac.

-------- My Plea to You --------

If you know how to fix any of my gripes, please speak up. I'm still a newbie. Maybe these are just growing pains. I don't think so, but I can hope.

[busterarm]

My last Windows OS will be Windows 7 because of many similar problems and reasoning.

This has spawned a change in career because I currently make my living working in the Windows space. I'm throwing away 15 years of experience and a deep knowledge of Windows' internals. Also, work has slowed down tremendously since the year or so leading up to through the release of Windows 8. I don't see my current job existing in two years or other people as capable remaining where they are.

I can only address one of your gripes, but not really. Powershell isn't that bad. It's not good, but it's not that bad. It can do some things, but probably not the ones you really want.

[jjoonathan]

Yeah, I need to check out powershell. I've heard that it has some pretty neat tricks up its sleeve regarding typed output. I won't expect more than "two steps back, one step forward" wrt the UNIX command line, but I should check it out.

Anything on my new "gripes" list that you have advice for?

---------- More Misc Gripes --------

* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in GUI text fields

* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in DOS

* Copy+paste is broken and/or inconsistent in terminal windows

* Can't jump to a document's location from the document's GUI

* The 2nd type of file open/save dialog (you know, the one makes you start from root, makes you scroll through every folder, and doesn't support copy+paste of paths, favorites, or any other civilized feature?)

* No equivalent of "Spin Control.app" (now spindump, Instruments.app) that automatically traces hung apps

* Can't take time profiles (function call trees weighted by # hits over a 5s interval) from the built-in process viewer

* NTFS wants to spend 8 hours (I let it go and timed it once) checking the disk after every crash, which amounts to every other time I restart.

* No "screenshot region to clipboard" shortcut. I have to printscreen and crop in paint every time.

* No "look up the word under the mouse in a dictionary" shortcut

---------- More Misc Small Victories --------

* The utility that profiles startup times and identifies boot-slowing apps is awesome

[bane]

* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in GUI text fields

* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in DOS

You will definitely not find emacs-like anything in Windows-land. It's pretty much an anathema in the ecosystem.

* Copy+paste is broken and/or inconsistent in terminal windows

Copy+paste in cmd.exe works weird (not to mention that cmd.exe is far inferior to even basic terminals in the x-nix world).

1) Click the upper left icon/button in cmd

2) Click edit/Mark

3) With you mouse select what you want to copy

4) Hit enter

5) It's now in your clipboard and can be ctrl-V'd anywhere else This works 100% of the time and is consistent even if it's weird. I suspect they couldn't get ctrl+<key> deconflicted for dos compatibility and it just sort of stuck around

to paste into cmd:

1) Have something in your clipboard

2) click the upper left icon/button in cmd

3) Click edit/paste

4) Stuff pastes. This also works 100% of the time as expected.

* Can't jump to a document's location from the document's GUI

What do you mean? Pg-up/down doesn't work? Or you need to ctrl+f find?

* The 2nd type of file open/save dialog (you know, the one makes you start from root, makes you scroll through every folder, and doesn't support copy+paste of paths, favorites, or any other civilized feature?)

No idea, some oddball java/cross platform gui toolkits screw up the conventions but I just checked all the apps I typically use and I can click in the path at the top of the dialog and type/paste/etc. my path.

* No equivalent of "Spin Control.app" (now spindump, Instruments.app) that automatically traces hung apps

True, you probably need a third party util. They're likely dozens and they'll likely all be free.

* Can't take time profiles (function call trees weighted by # hits over a 5s interval) from the built-in process viewer

True, the process lister is no ps.

* NTFS wants to spend 8 hours (I let it go and timed it once) checking the disk after every crash, which amounts to every other time I restart.

One of my pet peeves is that Microsoft really needs to get a modern file system. NTFS is "ok" for all the permissions stuff, but it's a lousy file system w/r to putting files in sane places on the disk. Defragging should be a rare thing and checking for disk errors should be much faster.

That being said, why is your machine crashing that much? My uptime in Windows is usually measured in months and outside of bad hardware they don't crash -- ever. My last Windows desktop ran without a crash for 3 years then 3 more years (it crashed because of PSU issues, pop in a new PSU and it was up and running fine). My brand new machine is a month old and I haven't had it crash yet and it's been up and running continuously.

My Mac crashes or beachballs every couple of weeks in comparison. Either that or the system will just start behaving weird and I'll have to restart.

* No "screenshot region to clipboard" shortcut. I have to printscreen and crop in paint every time.

1) Use the snipping tool.

2) Be glad you have paint. I've needed to do some cropping on my mac and the lack of a basic paint program is forehead slapping.

* No "look up the word under the mouse in a dictionary" shortcut

This is very app dependent some like Office have better support for this sort of thing. But I agree, it would be nice. I usually just define:<word> in chrome and use google for it.

[maxerickson]

Turning on "Quick Edit Mode" and "Insert Mode" help make cmd a little better:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/131977

[busterarm]

For the NTFS thing, prior to Windows 8, I would have said remove autochk in the registry. Microsoft overhauled how it checks disks in Windows 8, supposedly to save time, but I don't know if that works anymore.

[scardine]

For an alternative to Cygwin, take a look at GoW[1] and ConEmu[2]

[1] https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki [2] https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

[jjoonathan]

I'm loving GoW, thanks!

[bane]

I think, given the amount of customization you're looking for, you want a linux desktop, not Windows.

I can't speak for Windows 8, but I've built a few dozen Windows 7 machines of various configurations and never had the kinds of install problems you've had. Here's how I do it.

1 - Put in the disk 2 - Boot to disk and run the installer 3 - it reboots a couple times while it's installing, but I don't care because I'm off doing something else 4 - it asks me a few questions and starts up 5 - let it run through a bunch of update cycles (which does take forever, but it's semi-automated so I'm doing something else most of the time)

On occasion I've had to install a network driver after it finishes, or if it's virtualized some guest additions but that's it. It does take hours, but they're mostly unattended hours that I can ignore, and if I want to use the machine quicker, I can skip the update cycles and just get going and let it update when I shut the machine off at the end of the day.

My latest machine, which I just built, didn't require any driver futsing.

I have no idea why you were trying to install 7 (and it sounds like your goal was to get to 8) on a 30GB SSD. I wouldn't install anything but a bare bones command-line only CentOS on a disk that small. It sounds like a couple days of your time were wasted trying to put a 50+GB OS on what's essentially a medium sized thumb drive and suffered for it.

All that being said, back in the XP days I did build a system with Program Files on a different machine and for the most part it did work, but it wasn't really well supported (even if it's supposed to be) and felt kludgy.

The Registry is one of the worst ideas in the history of computing. Nearly every time I've had something go wrong with a Windows machine that wasn't outright hardware failure, it was a problem with the registry. Registry editing really is a last resort for the bold and desperate. There's some serious voodoo in there.

So we've solved two of your problems off the bat, 1) don't install the OS on disks that are too small 2) don't mess with the registry

On to small gripes

* No decent UNIX command line. Cygwin starts slowly and is poorly integrated with the system.

True. Your best bet if you want Linux is to virtualize a linux machine or install linux or use Powershell. Remember, you aren't using a nix.

I can't get decent 2-finger scroll without a 3rd party program that is occasionally broken by system updates.

Touchpad support on Windows is lightyears behind OS X. Apple has actually turned the touchpad into something useful instead of an emergency replacement for a mouse. In Windows, just use a $5-10 2 button mouse with a scroll wheel.

* I can't remap capslock without downloading a 3rd-party program to perform registry edits.

True.

* I can't shut off the screen without installing a 3rd party program to do so.

What do you mean? Are you trying to just use the laptop hooked to a monitor and don't want the monitor on? Just set the power management so you can close the lid and leave the machine on. It's something that doesn't exist in OS X so you probably haven't thought of it.

* In Win7, all allowed keyboard layout switching shortcuts were combinations of modifiers that conflicted with productivity apps like Illustrator. Also, the layout would occasionally become "stuck" and failed to respect the GUI switcher. In Win8, they added a no-conflict key combination for switching layouts but it doesn't work in fullscreen apps.

What do you mean? Why are you trying to switch the keyboard layout so much?

* Metro. It looks slick, but it doesn't have any of the options you regularly need to access. Fortunately the old menagerie of Windows utilities is still there, just moved around.

No experience at all with 8, it looks like a version I'll probably skip alltogether as 7 is still majority supported and I don't have any compelling reasons to go to 8.

* No standard install system that lets you inspect the installer's logs, scripts, or contents.

True. Installation under OS X is much slicker and better thought out in general than on Windows. What's your compelling use case to need to do this though?

* The intimate connection between my computer account and Microsoft cloud account creeps me out.

Must be an 8 thing. 7 doesn't really have anything like this (at least that I use or care about).

* The full-screen force-quit mechanism is insane (ctrl-alt-del, open Task Manager, press Windows to reveal the Launch Bar, click on the arrow to see all system tray icons, right-click the tiny Task Manager icon (a gray box), enable "Always on Top", highlight the program in the task manager, hit "End Task", wait, hit "End Task" on the dialog box that pops up, and finally decline to send a bug report to Microsoft)

Hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc, go to "processes", right click on the problem process and just hit "end process tree". I don't know why you're doing all that extra stuff after you've got the task manager up.

* I can't use the keyboard to navigate directories that contain a mixture of files and folders because in Mircrosoft-Land "Alphabetical Order" means "Sort folders first, then files."

Why not? I pretty much only navigate in Explorer via keyboard. Why does sorting folder first (which in my and many people's opinions is far superior to mixing them up with your files) prohibit this?

It's bad enough in OS X that most of the finder replacements I've tried change the sort to folders first then files. Folders are different then files and should be sorted separately. Between music, retrocomputing, movies, and photography I manage over 3 and a half million files using pretty much explorer from the keyboard without much fuss. It's lightyears ahead of Finder in this respect.

One trick, with a folder open, just start typing the name of the file or folder you want and it'll quickly navigate down to around where the file is.

* The sub-HD preloaded desktop backgrounds (yes, really).

Replace them with whatever you want. The built in Windows picture viewer is better than OS X's (it even lets you look through folders full of pictures in sequence!) and you can right-click and turn any picture into a background.

* The ability to roll-back updates. It has never worked when I needed it to, but I like the idea.

Sometimes when your registry gets b0rk3d, this is the only way to save the computer. I don't really like it at all when I try to use it manually, but it's got my bacon out the fire on more than one occasion.