It's sad that so many people, myself very much included, now stick with OS X merely because ``it's not quite shitty enough to switch''. When I switched to the Mac initially, I switched because it was vastly better option than XP; now, I feel that lead has been eroded and that Windows 10, while different, isn't far behind OS X in most respects.

As far as workflow and window management goes, OS X is a good half decade behind Windows, and in a lot of system-level ways, it feels a decade behind. I use a MBP Retina at work, and it feels primitive compared to Windows 10, which I use everywhere else. Everywhere else, I'm doing audio, video, and photo editing though. If your day to day work is more CLI and *nix oriented, I can understand the appeal of OSX... although some of the variations of Vim that I see people running might as well be GUIs.

Windows 10 is -in my limited experience- awful. Admittedly I don't use it for much more than gaming, light browsing, and occasional ssh sessions but it's painful to use, the apps aren't great, and it frequently craps out with weird error messages (e.g. "The required TCP protocols not installed on this machine" actually meant "The NAS isn't responding").

I've found the opposite, its been rock solid for me.

I switched to OSX originally because the company I was working for was all-Apple. I probably wouldn't have thought XP was shitty enough to change otherwise, even though it obviously was.

Conversely, I'm now working at a company that's all-MS, but even after two years now (albeit, only a month on W10, previously on W7), I'm still not feeling much of a desire to switch to Windows at home. My Macbook is getting pretty old now and I'm going to want to replace it sometime soon and it's going to be another MBP.

The funny thing is I actually switched from OS X to Windows XP, primarily because Apple made me angry when they refused to do anything to continue Classic app support. (If I'm going to lose all of my favorite apps anyway and have to start over, might as well start over on the OS that has 10 times more apps, right?) (Also, I still hold a grudge over the "free forever" .Mac service.)

I wouldn't say Windows 10 is behind OS X at all. In some contexts, like a corporate workplace, it's at least a decade ahead, and always has been. (Then again, Apple and Mac fans generally discount that environment entirely.)

The biggest problem Windows 10 has are: 1. Crummy HighDPI support (and yes, they've been working on this, but the work is WAY too slow-- this should have been solved 5 years ago, guys) 2. Crummy third-party apps, made by developers who have no respect for the OS or its users 3. The new "constantly updates, and occasional ads" philosophy Windows 10 is taking. I wouldn't even mind the ads much if they weren't so stupid. (Stop trying to sell me the copy of Office 365 I ALREADY OWN!)

> The way I survive Windows problems is pretty simple: never plug in an ethernet cable. I'm sure things are far better now, but for a large part of the past 15 years, doing so opened you up to a lot of problems and required utilizing software you simply should not have to install in order to have a functional system.

I don't think that's really true. From 2K onwards windows was pretty solid if you kept it up to date. I never used any firewall/antivirus/etc., just disabled unneeded services (admittedly the defaults in 2K and XP were poor), didn't run executables attached to suspicious emails etc.

>Also, a high percentage of OSX users have no idea what XCode is, let alone care if it's not as nice as VisualStudio.

I really liked XCode, a lot more than Visual Studio, until they remade it to look like iTunes (around 2012).

So there is definitely some preference involved for those people who say Visual Studio is better (and of course, vice versa).

Xcode 4 was a definite backward step in UX terms, in my view, from which the product has yet to recover. Xcode 4 has the dubious distinction of being one of only a handful of products that I've used daily for a good period - in Xcode 4's case, 20 months - without ever finding a way that I could be happy using them.

(Sometimes I just throw my hands up and decide that something, whatever it is, is just never going to be my cup of tea, and that's that. I've done that with a few software packages and/or styles of working. But in Xcode's case, I'm pretty sure it's them, not me. Because Xcode 3 was fine...)

Regarding your last point about many people not knowing what XCode is: I assume GP was theorizing that Apple's declining software quality is related or even in part caused by their bad development environment and tools, compared to competitiors.

just curious, what software were you using for audio production under windows?