But Microsoft still find ways to screw things up.

I don't know if ICS was working pre-Anniversary update, but it certainly wasn't working reliably post-Anniversary, which screwed me right over. It'd work fine when you set it up, only to die and require disabling and re-enabling to work again.

The Anniversary update broke the DMP client (not that I use it). It mangled the IPv6 DHCP client as well for a lot of people supposedly.

And that's ignoring stuff like the awful search functionality, Windows Defender randomly breaking and effectively eating a CPU core, profiles breaking for no apparent reason, the randomly resetting/breaking non-default file associations, the regular bullcrap trying to push you to Edge, the broken gaming platform (seriously, how hard is it to accept money for the Solitaire collection upgrade?)...

That's barely scratching the surface.

Then one day I posted about it on here, realized how silly it was I was investing so much effort into turning my Windows machine into a MBP and traded it for a 2015 MBP. I took a big hit in raw power (i7 to i5, 940m to integrated) but it was worth it.

When I have an administrative task on Windows, it's like Find Waldo. Where did they hide that setting? The number of times I've had to Google to find out how to do something on Windows... significant.

On macOS, there is a single place I need to look and it's been the same since the beginning. Yes, there have been minor tweaks over the versions, but I never feel like I'm lost. The number of times I've had to Google to find out how to do something on macOS... almost never.

And I'm much newer to macOS than I am to Windows.

Here's a funny thing: Microsoft Office's settings are just like the System Preferences of macOS! In look and feel.

I had to take the A+ certification for a stupid work requirement (I'm a senior security consultant, how does that make any sense?) and even though I've been a Windows user since Windows 95 came out, it was really hard to answer questions like "what is the name of the Control Panel task that manages users?" They didn't like the answer of "hit the Windows key and type 'users'".

Or that one of the results for "environment variables" brings you right to the correct dialog, while the other opens a dialog that opens the other dialog.

This is a big issue I have had with recent versions (7 onward) of Windows. I found that earlier versions of Windows incorporated Control Panel changes but the Control Panels were intuitive enough where I very quickly learned how to locate what I needed. The current control panel seems so foreign to me as to be intimidating.

The fact is, Apple did it right and Microsoft did it wrong.

Does it happen to you occasionally that you look up instructions on the internet about "how to do X"? It does to me, for example, "how to mark a network private". It used to be that you could open Control Panel along the browser window and work through it. Not anymore! Now, the setting up takes the entire screen. You have to use two screens if you want to do something that the Mac has supported flawlessly since 1987, and Windows only since 1990 (but no later than 2014).

When I point out to Windows users this example (and others) of how horrible and hostile Windows has become since Win8, I get answers that I can only describe as learned helplessness and stockholm syndrome.

Btw, can Windows 10 use Kerberos auth from KDC that is not AD yet? Preferably without enrolling? Simply running ticket viewer, entering principal and password, getting ticket? And using it for accessing services (file sharing, for example) then? Just like macOS and Linux can?

Depends on what answer you are looking for. You can technically join a Windows machine to any arbitrary kerberos domain, but since Windows has a very "unique" user/group model all it will do is let you access kerberized services.

You can also just install the MIT kerberos client, but any software will need to explicitly support it (Firefox does, at the very least).

Ultimately though, the best solution is to just set up an AD domain and a trust to the kerberos realm you want to use services on :/

Background: think of a group of freelancers, working together with one organization. The freelancers have each their own BYOD laptop and there are few servers, that provide services. Until now, each of these services had their own unique user database, so every user had to remember several passwords.

We want to change that and are currently experimenting with FreeIPA. In the lab, everything works as it should - with macOS and Linux. Even Windows machines, that are joined to a domain with the trust set up with FreeIPA domain work (that would be some of the servers). However, the standalone Windows machines are the problem. So far, only Firefox and Putty can use GSSAPI. Chrome uses SSPI, even PostgreSQL windows client supports only SSPI, and now I’m playing with the svn klient to figure out, whether it can use GSSAPI. For smb shares, Windows insist on NTLM (and on the Linux side, sssd doesn’t support NTLMSSP), so there I’m looking into plain LDAP backend for Samba. At least they could enter the password into the Explorer dialog and get to the files.

For webapps, it is actually quite simple - just use some IDP. Those who cannot obtain a tgt, will log-in using forms. It doesn’t really matter whether they put their password into web form or into kinit or ticket viewer. It’s the non-web services, that are the problem.

The other solution would be to let them RDP into terminal server and let them do everything there. This solution slightly complicates the work for the users, because they will have to use some locally installed apps anyway.

Towards AD, I'm kind of ambivalent. However, it's all or nothing approach is not suitable right now. What I need now is just the Kerberos, and the willingness of the apps to use it.

Seriously - there is so much FUD about this it isn't funny anymore. What ads are you talking about? Sure, there are recommended apps (can be turned off), apps preinstalled (takes 30 secs to uninstall them) and telemetry (easily turn it all off in Settings).

So-called "developers" and tech enthusiasts are smart enough to get Linux up and running in a heatbeat yet struggle to turn a few things off in Windows that takes 1 minute at most to do. Please.

None of these things should've been opt-in for an OS by default. Microsoft is already updating the setup/first-run experience to inform the users about the telemetry options and let them opt-out.

Every Windows Update that I've installed on my SP4 has reset these settings back on, thus yes, it is somewhat forced on me. I'm definitely not the only one who had this happened as many complaints in Feedback Hub was about this and other MS forums. In fact, it was only recently that MS said they'd keep track of the default app settings to prevent reinstalling them upon updates.

And I did have Windows update forcibly install itself in the middle of a session when it was supposed to wait until later.

You need to download a third-party program like O&O's Shutup10 to disable telemetry. As this is not a supported method, Microsoft ignores the user's clear preferences and turns it back on with every major OS update.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

You can indeed opt-out of ads, you're correct there.

Not unless you are running enterprise.

Also, I also find that things I've removed get reinstalled on updates. And that updates reboot my win10 computer unexpectedly. And that I have to hack registry and kill processes to stop that - but that updates occasionally circumvent my circumvention.

Seriously, Windows is hostile. I was forced to pay for an OS that goes to great pains to be hostile to me and subvert my wishes and configuration. DO NOT WANT! (And do not use, except for one machine that I'm forced to use to support some customers).

Yes, it is difficult to get them uninstalled forever.

They should've never been in there in the first place, that's what forced ads mean.

I installed iOS 7 on my iPhone 4 and the code is so unsuited for that device that many UI elements don't respond to touches and gestures made at normal human speed. You have to slow down by a factor of two or more for things to register. Trying to double-click the home button is an exercise in frustration.

It's definitely not FUD that apple releases OS upgrades that don't do well on older hardware.

It isn't true on PC hardware, where a modern kaby lake i5 performs similarly on desktop tasks to a a 5 year old ivy bridge i5. PC hardware has advanced tremendously in power efficiency, but much less so in performance.

I could understand it when Windows 8 first came out, and high DPI screens were still relatively rare. But for the support to still be so bad, years later, is unforgivable.

Compare this to the situation on Windows where people using the native toolkit is a rarity, with tens or hundreds of different UI toolkits in use and even a bunch of totally custom UI, much of which assumes a 90 DPI desktop. There's really not much MS can do about that except make an educated guess about offending programs and try to force-scale them to 2x.

Yes, there is.

The only app that I am using that seems to be able to handle high DPI and DPI changes during runtime is Firefox. Most of the third-party apps that I used (not that many of them) either do not support high DPI at all (and are scaled by the OS), or fully support high DPI mode (with changing DPI during life of the app). So all of them work in more or less predictable manner.

The worst are non-modern applications by Microsoft. They behave randomly, sometimes only parts of application get scaled. The worst offender is MS Office, each app of the suite has it's own high DPI related quirks (Outlooks gets blury, PowerPoint's UI becomes huge).

Also the task bar icons do not expect DPI to be changed during their lifetime :/

But the main reason is that most devs use OSX so their projects build on OSX (and Linux)...

I love the graphical side of Windows, though.

OS X has better multi monitor DPI handling, more dev tools written for it (brew blows chocolatey out of the park), and in general just feels smoother.

I don't think so. Most devs on HN seem to hate Windows, but everywhere else they love it.

The startup scene seems to hate Windows, but most programmers aren't working for a startup either.

Everywhere I go on the east coast, programmers love Windows.

I looked at the issues on that GitHub project: iMessage. Every place I see hackintoshing discussed, I notice that iMessage doesn't work. People effuse about how great hackintoshing is, but there are consistent gaps in the setup. Like Linux users, they gloss over these problems. (I'm guilty of this myself, and it's probably why I notice.) I use iMessage on my MBP a LOT. macOS without iMessage wouldn't really be macOS to me.

I loved OSX because things were smooth, the Hackintosh got in the way of that.

Besides, ULV processors are all slow. Skylake i7 ULVs in >1000$ ultra books was on par with my 2009 400$ HP's i5 mobile processor. i5 ULV vs i7 ULV is barely an upgrade.

"Desktop Linux", (what distro/version?), tends to work out of the box with no problems on mainstream desktops, even with Pascal GPUs.

I feel like the "Linux doesn't work out of the box" thing was true 10 years ago, but today is just repeated by people who haven't tried it but want to feel that there still is something crappier than what they're doing.

You'd be surprised.

In the past, I've have been happy to tinker a bit to make it work, but these days I'm busy working, so I want my display setup to just work out of the box. Ubuntu is close, but 16.10 applies the scale factor from the 4k display to the secondary display as well, so things don't look very good on the secondary screen.

It just works without fuss on Windows 10, so I tend to just run Win10, even though I prefer the look and feel of several different Linux desktop environments. The Win10 linux subsystem has been good enough so far than even ruby and rails development is painless - whereas before I used to run into some minor but annoying issues.

My Linux desktop experience is far from terrible - these days, I just fire up a Win10 or Linux VM and full-screen it on my secondary display and just use it for running a browser to look up documentation and other such things. In doing things that way, I'll end up with proper DPI scaling on both screens. But it adds enough friction to the process that I usually won't bother with it until I get sick of the Windows look and feel and want to look at something different for a few days.

I realize my use case is probably atypical, but it as least serves as an example of a non-seamless Linux desktop experience.

> 16.10 applies the scale factor from the 4k display to the secondary display as well

Though not surfaced in the UI, easy enough to fix with this with xrandr. This SO question solves a similar problem http://askubuntu.com/questions/393400/is-it-possible-to-have...

"Oh well yeah, that's a little broken but that's a 5 minute fix!" x 100;

"Yeah, that sucks but there next version of (Gnome/Wayland/switching distros/getting less problematic hardware) should fix that" x 50;

And "I'm not saying PEBKAC... but maybe PEBKAC".

So I don't bother anymore.

Linux is for some reason expected to behave perfectly, while Windows routinely screws with audio, borks updates etc. and nobody calls it unusable on the desktop or similar, another thing - most of these kinds of posters just refuse to read or understand the Linux way of doing things and try to apply their Windows mentality to Linux and if it doesn't work the same way, complain.

But in general if you have a question that is not worded in the Linux sucks! sort of way you'll get tons of great help.

I mean... generalizing people who use Windows in such an unflattering light certainly doesn't help anyone (or thier views of the Linux community). When any user complains about Windows they usually get an "amen", but suddenly when a Windows user has a problem with Linux it's because "they're trying to apply their Windows mentality"? So when people complain about how cmd.exe sucks, should I tell them "Shed your Linux mentality and use the GUI" instead of pointing out Powershell and WSL?

Windows and Linux have their warts. I don't think anyone holds Linux to any unreasonable standard compared to Windows (I mean we're at a stage where people are still impressed when a stock Ubuntu install supports all their hardware because it wasn't that long ago that was something taken for granted).

I generally don't try to treat Linux as primarily a desktop OS because it doesn't do that as well (for me) as it does as an OS running in embedded settings and servers, and I generally think that's ok, it doesn't have to excel at everything.

I'm sure it is possible to start fiddling around and configure stuff if you need/want to, but so far the XPS 13 (well, Precison 5510 in my case but it is the same line of product) with Ubuntu works as I expect it to

Setting up CUDA along with Bumblebee is real pain though. In the beginning sometimes the lightdm just crash on start, but it has been stable after the first week.

Strangely, this is exactly my experience of running Linux on my Thinkpad. It just works: Every time. No fuss, no messing about with drivers, no dorking about with DEs. Open it up, get down to work.

Admittedly, when I worked full time with a Mac Pro as my desktop, OSX was perfectly OK. I honestly can’t say that I felt it was any better than my Linux experience on a day to day basis though.

I just don’t spend any time fiddling with Gnome; sure, it’s a bit opinionated about how it wants you to work with it, but so was macOS. I don’t spend any mental cycles worrying about the DE on either macOS or Gnome & that’s exactly the way it should be.

I’ll freely admit that the possibility of going down the rabbit hole of fiddling with your DE until you’ve got it just so is always there under Linux, whilst you have to to be a lot more committed to customisation on macOS if you want to mess around with that kind of stuff. But I decided long ago that so long as the DE got out of my way & let me get on with doing stuff then I wasn’t going to care about it.

It’s possible that I’m missing out on some amazing experience that would transform my computing life, but having tried both I’m really just not seeing it personally.

That's hyperbole if I've ever seen it. You can look at how many problems plagued Fedora on the XPS13 as recently as a year ago:

https://major.io/2015/02/03/linux-support-dell-xps-13-9343-2...

The tl;dr version is that the guy spent so long trying to get it working properly that he ditched the laptop for a Thinkpad. And FWIW, Fedora usually has better support for recent hardware than other distros due to the up-to-date kernel.

From what I gather, Thinkpads are the crown jewel of Linux-supported laptops. This is more of a dogfooding thing than anything else: kernel developers, Redhat employees, and other Linux users tend to use Thinkpads, which means they then spend more time getting support for Thinkpads into the kernel.

The community sorted out most of the issues, so about 6 months later the experience was actually quite good.

Dell released the Linux version of the laptop too early, I guess they wanted to get some traction but it backfired.

I find GNOME 3.22 to be at least as, if not more usable than macOS.

Would you like to describe your experience? My use of the DE is mostly for staring browsers/terminals and jumping workspaces (not as smooth as a Mac w/ trackpad).

> It's a great OS, by far the most stable OS I have ever used.

Windows 10 is reasonable, but I wouldn't say it's the most stable OS I've ever used and updates are usually a pain, specially compared to Debian/Ubuntu or Fedora.

It's a bigger challenge on Windows than OSX. On OSX devs only have to target a small number of High DPI resolutions.