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Ask HN: How do you make Windows feel more friendly to Mac users?

3 points by menshiki ↗ HN
I've been a Mac user for a long time but for the last few months I've been forced to use Windows for work related stuff. I imagine I am not the only person in this kind of situation. Looking for some tips on how to make my time spend using Windows more pleasant.

6 comments

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pseufaux
If you’re a heavy CMD-Space shortcut user, I have found the windows button to provide a similar feel for quickly opening apps via the keyboard. If your able to install apps, Keypirinha (https://keypirinha.com/index.html) is a major upgrade. It’s not quite as clean as Alfred, but still a great tool.

Other than that, are there any particular aspects of Windows which stick out to you as things you would like to change? Windows provides a decent amount of customization options; though, most are not easily accessible via the UI.

menshiki
Thanks a lot for your recommendation. I will definitely check it out. On MacOS I've recently switched from Alfred to Raycast and they are both amazing. So far on Windows I've only tried the PowerToys Run utility and I think it's lacking quite a lot of functions.
brudgers
Attitude.

Are you a 'Mac user' or have you used Mac's?

Good luck.

menshiki
For half of my life I've exclusively used MacOS for all my desktop/laptop needs. I feel like that should be enough to call myself a Mac user.
navjack27
I use both pretty much interchangeably every single day since my Mac mini is my TV computer and I use that for pretty much everything and my Windows computer is my main desktop.

What parts of the Mac OS operating system do you take advantage of? Are you all in on using all the workspaces or whatever they're called and the fancy app switching?

I would really just suggest going head on into just using Windows 11 or whatever version of Windows that you have to use for work and learning to become adaptable because while you can customize things and add programs to make things more mac like you are just going further away from the norm and the default way of using the operating system and the further you go away from that the less you are actually adapting to the operating system and the more you are actually making it harder for yourself in the long term if you have to use a standardized workstation.

JoeMayoBot
I went the other direction, from Windows to Mac a couple of years back. The main differences were scrolling direction, menu ordering and location, and ctrl/cmd keys. I found that most other things weren't hard to adapt to. Having had very nice Windows laptops, I felt like the MacBook Pro is one of the best I've worked with. For my latest project, I needed to go back to a Windows laptop. It was a couple years older than my Mac and of lower quality in comparison to other Windows Laptops. So, I went out and bought a new laptop - got a Dell XPS-15 this time. It's nice, light and good keyboard. The fingerprint reader doesn't compare to the Mac, but with Windows 11, it isn't too bad. I think the transition would have been tough on an older Windows OS and laptop. So I guess the best way to ease the pain is to be on the latest OS with a nice laptop. Today, I transition pretty seamlessly between machines and don't think about the differences because I've gotten used to it.