Ask HN: What's it like coming back to Windows from OS X?

I'm in the process of switching back from osx on a Mac mini to a laptop dual booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu. I've been using Ubuntu almost exclusively. There are very few things I miss, actually. In fact, I'm struggling to think of any now that I think about it.

Ive been enjoying windows a fair amount recently. With the Linux subsystem it has turned into a surprisingly great experience. All the familiar unix tools are here now and Windows 10 is pretty tasteful as an OS. Only request I have from Microsoft is to add a feature to disable file notification hooks from file created in the unix subsystem. Creating a lot of small files has always been slow on windows because it pounds the antivirus. I was hoping that the unix sandbox would be exempt from this however I see the Anti virus works hard even when I do IO in the unix subsystem.

Also Hyper-V being built in and free means that you can have test VMs with snapshot capabilities built right in the OS which is nice since it allows you to avoid the VMWare/Parallels tax.

Ctrl vs CMD, again.

I'd reconsider Linux. As long as you make sure the laptop is supported Linux is great if you're a developer.

I've never bought into Apple. I think Windows 10 is great, but I love tiling window managers. So I run Linux.

Windows 10 provides a polished, efficient, well designed interface. You have to get pretty far out on the edge of hardware before stuff doesn't just run [e.g. my eight year old Dell Precision configured as RAID 1 on via proprietary third party BIOS on the mother board interfering with the Windows 10 automatic upgrade until I turned it off and disconnected the disks until the upgrade had completed].

On the other hand, Linux provides a deeply documented operating system with text configuration files. It affords ample opportunities to hone one's RTFM skills, e.g. a 2016 kernel upgrade that borked Synaptics drivers made configuring my new Dell an exercise in understanding X11, systemd, libinput, and mouse configuration. Getting a 4k display well sorted is still underway (thanks for being the exception to deeply documented Unity!).

The downside of Windows for me is that most free software is untrustworthy and Microsoft has not quite come around to a good package manager system for native applications. By which I mean, there's lots of read the news apps in the Store, but not MIT-Scheme or little utilities like nmap. What I would say is that when Linux sucks, it sucks very consistently in a particular way: there's a fix that I am left to find myself and it might involve patching and recompiling the kernel (though it usually does not).

Anyway, Dell Precisions and some XPS laptops, can be ordered with Linux installed (at least in the US). So it's not just System 76. Also, there's generally a good Linux story with Thinkpads.

For me, switching between the two is painful - mostly due to difference in keybindings, and the only reason to keep a Mac around is the need to use it for projects targeting Apple's mobile platform. Windows seems to be a better PC-based gaming platform than either Mac or Linux, but overall Linux is what makes most sense for me - as a Unix and as a platform to get important and interesting stuff done.

If you haven't run Linux on a laptop recently, I suspect you'll be pleasantly surprised. As long as you're not buying a really cheap consumer-grade machine, or a bleeding-edge high-end machine, the chances it works out of the box are very high. Furthermore, the level of software support has improved drastically from even a few years ago.

Look at it this way. You're going to wipe and reinstall anyway, right? Might as well give running a real *nix a shot before you settle for less.

I moved from OSX to Linux-only laptop in 2012. I'd intended to dual-boot, but re-installing Windows[1], even by itself, was much, much more pain than I expected; I eventually gave up on it. Go figure.

Linux having poor compatibility with laptops is, in my experience, a myth. Ubuntu worked fine, but I've since moved to Fedora, and extremely happy with it. Everything "just works". I can't really see my self going back at this point.

For me at least, the Mac's original value-proposition being a no-hassle Linux-like machine. Now that the real thing is hassle free[2], there is no point in anything else.

Finally, I've heard that it's gotten much better lately, with the "new" Microsoft (which I applaud) but, as a developer who did so for a few months this year talking about "just works", the amount of friction involved in building anything outside the narrowest "MSFT-only" niches on Windows is crazy. I'm not a ragey guy, but it got to me, and not in a good way.

[1]: The then-new Windows 8 installer had a forever-grey "next" button at one point in the install-wizard that no amount of hair-pulling seemed to fix.

[2]: I would still recommend spending a few minutes online looking for red flags when choosing a model to use.

I haven't left Apple completely, but I've gone from having just a Macbook to also having a Thinkpad X220 running Win10 and Linux, an Asus Zenbook running Win10, and a beefy desktop running Win10 and Linux.

My goal has been to make it so that I can do most of my development work on any of the OSes, on any of the computers. Before the Win10 Linux subsystem, it was a little bit painful on Windows, but now it mostly just works. Node.js and Ruby native extensions have so far worked perfectly in WSL once I apt-get installed build-essential.

So far, I've only run into a couple of issues:

- A few ruby gems with native extensions have given me some trouble on OS X, but were fine on Linux and Win10 (using the Linux subsystem).

- Last time I tried React Native (a few months ago), there was a bug that prevented the build system from working on Windows. I found a fix had been added to the master branch, but hadn't yet made it into a release. I added the fix on my machine by hand and everything worked after that.

I mostly use VSCode and Atom for editing, so my editing experience is pretty consistent across operating systems. I've done a bit of F# in Visual Studio on Windows, and was able to load the project up unmodified in Xamarin Studio in OSX. I imagine it'd be the same now in VS for Mac.

I only use Photoshop occasionally, and it seems to perform a little bit better in Windows.

Other thoughts:

- Ultraportable, high DPI laptops are a much better value outside of Apple land. I picked up an Asus Zenbook with a hidpi IPS touch screen, and pretty well exactly the same specs as the current Core M Macbook for $649CDN on sale. The Macbook sells for $1549.

- Consider a previous generation Thinkpad if you'd like to run Linux. I picked up my X220 for $300CDN earlier this year. It was technically 'refurbished', but they refurb'ed it so well it looked like new. It had a crappy TN display, but I picked up an inexpensive IPS panel for it on eBay, and it was super easy to install. The Core i5 it in still performs well. A bit slow clock-for-clock than the newest i5s, but still lots of power for most tasks I've thrown at it. I'd say that Win10 and Linux Mint perform equally well on it.

- Lots of Thinkpads make good Hackintoshes in case you ever want to try that.

I switched from Windows to OSX about 7 years ago. I recently gave my MacBook Pro to my partner, I was interested in a new laptop, and looked at the market offerings. I was very impressed with what had been released in the Windows ecosystem; so much that I bought a Surface 4. Windows 10 is significantly more polished than the windows that I left. The Ubuntu subsystem also satisfies my requirements for Bash. All-in-all, I am impressed with how much Microsoft has improved.

having ads baked into the OS so deeply just feels weird to me. The lock screen[1] has ads, the start menu has ads[1].

there's a frustrating bug on 1511/10586.678 where all my carefully created file associations keep getting reclaimed.

[1] I'm not sure what they're actually called. :/