Re: IntelliJ looking bad on Windows, I do know that JetBrains IDEs are still stuck on using GDI for drawing fonts rather than the new DirectWrite protocol. The poor quality of GDI (especially on high DPI displays) is very noticeable when you switch from Linux or macOS to a Windows app that uses it. I looked it up a while ago, and as I recall it was an issue with the Java runtime that JetBrains IDEs use.

Well did you try out Linux bash on windows. In less than 2 minutes you setup a Debian instance. You got shells and everything. All well known ide's are available on both Windows and Mac. In my opinion there is no real difference anymore. I am a Mac user and windows user. The only reason why I still use my Mac is because of the ergonomics.

In my experience Mac OS still has the edge in terms of stability. But certainly the gap is closing.

The only crashes I've had from NT kernel over the past 15 years or so are from graphics card drivers and bad RAM.

Linux is a lot less stable, as a laptop OS, than Windows or OSX. Suspend and resume in presence and absence of multiple monitors is like rolling dice; locks up about 15% of the time.

Not my experience. I used mostly Linux for 15 years, and I had zero problems with laptops, external screens and suspend in the past 8 years. I have a Linux laptop that's used for demo hooked up to a TV, settings are changed from dual screen to mirroring all the time, then it goes to sleep, is woken up with the TV off, etc, zero trouble, it hadn't rebooted in 2 months.

And Windows still requires random reboots for updates, of course usually at the worst possible time (fortunately I only use windows in VMs for testing). God how I hate Windows, it's unbearable really, after 5 minutes at the third nagging stupid popup (update Java! update Acrobat! update antivirus! don't turn off the computer, installing update 2 on 10532!) I want to throw the thing out of the window :)

I've been using Linux since 1996; not wet behind the ears. Graphics drivers are substantially worse on Linux than Windows, and even on Windows they're still the main source of problems.

A mix of dock and undock with multiple monitors is dodgy; like rolling a die. Plugging in the display port cable after a resume from a prior docked suspend, for a presentation, is flipping a coin.

A lot of what you say describes a fairly common experience with Windows too. Perhaps not with a Thinkpad maybe but I’ve failed to revive a sleeping windows machine on a few occasions, and switching between output sources can be unpredictable too. Mac is the only platform which consistenly succeeds at these kinds of things because of the vertically integrates hardware. Its the drivers as you say ... I don’t think the actual o/s has much say in it beyond the drivers that are supported.

> Linux is a lot less stable, as a laptop OS, than Windows or OSX.

Can't remember any major problems with Linux on laptops for latest 5 years. All works like charm.

If you use a cheap/noname/non-popular hardware - it happens, yes, but in Windows world too.

Lenovo Thinkpad.

It's the multi-monitor / dock interaction. It's just not solid.

Which dock do you have?

I've had issues with USB-C docks. I've had zero issues over four different Thinkpads (FC28 and FC29) with the Lenovo Thunderbolt dock.

Lucky you! I do a reboot on my Windows 10 machine every night. I also suffered from intermittent complete and total lockups due to a bug in what I traced to spotify. Similar thing happened with MacOS and safari recently enough too so I stopped using Safari for a while ...

using a Lenovo P50 with windows 10 for 2 years now, I only reboot it maybe once a month, for the rest, I close the lid, it goes to sleep, next day in the office, I open the lid and continue where I stopped. so far I have had zero issues with it.

That's how I use my mac. Sad to say I've never had that experience with Windows but then again, I've never had a Lenovo ...

What kind of machine do you have?

Why do you ask?

To take your anecdote in context.

You think I’m making it up or something?

Genuinely curious - which ergonomics do you mean? Macbooks have objectively terrible keyboards these days, and the lack of dedicated buttons on the trackpad makes two handed trackpad use a royal pain. Yes, the mouse movement is precise, but the trackpad doesn't blow my mind.

Old thinkpads with 7-row keyboards had proper ergonomics, to my mind anyway.

"from a development standpoint, MacOS still seems way ahead of Windows"

Sorry but have you heard of Visual Studio?

>Sorry but have you heard of Visual Studio?

A sluggish clumsy bloated IDE? What's good about it? I've used it for a couple of years when I wrote directshow filters, and it was a complete shit back in a days (2015-2017).

* terrible clumsy project system, where changing a flag is a quest. As abominable as autotools.

* using non-vcproj projects is a pain, especially when you have a bunch of make files

* It's slow as hell.

* Language support is lacking. No OCaml, no Lisp, hell, even C11 is a quest.

After they've added a package manager and clang support, it became less painful, but fur from great experience.

Everyone has heard of Visual Studio, and nobody that has to use it wants to. Just because you have Stockholm syndrome doesn't mean everyone else has to have it too ;-)

It has been a long time since I used Visual Studio but I remember it as the best IDE I have ever used for C++.

I am now working on Linux with Sublime Text, Makefiles and the command line. I am most comfortable with that setup but there are many features that I miss from VS: the debugger, online help, code navigation, ...

Not that these features don't exist in other editors and IDEs, but with VS, they worked reliably and out of the box.

Note: VSCode is completely different. It is a multi-platform text editor, one of the best in town. A bit lacking in the performance department though, that's why I am still using Sublime Text.

I'm really suprised at this comment.

I'm confident most of the .NET community is very happy with Visual Studio.

In my opinion, Visual Studio massively outclasses Eclipse, VSCode and Netbeans. It even makes IntelliJ (which is pretty great too) look a bit inadequate.

(I use Emacs these days though.)

>from a development standpoint

>I'm confident most of the .NET community is very happy with Visual Studio

.NET is not the only ecosystem people develop for. There are embedded C/Forth, web frontend/backend, written in Java, Scala, Ruby, Python, other stuff. VS sucks for nearly everything safe C#/C++ for windows.

Besides, even for C# people use an additional plugin, resharper, so VS is not enough even for its target ecosystem.

> Besides, even for C# people use an additional plugin, resharper, so VS is not enough even for its target ecosystem.

Those that have CPU cycles and memory to spare do.

ReSharper is a meme in the .NET world, similar to how Crysis in the gaming world is: https://i.imgur.com/LQkRlSN.png

I have a laptop with 64GB of memory just because I need to run VS + ReSharper in a VM. Seriously.

It's why I put in: unless you have to use it, which means: if you target Windows. If you target anything else, you're probably not using it unless you already happen to have it. I agree that most IDEs are crap, it's pretty strange when you think about it, software developers developing software to develop software, but developing it badly so it now sucks for everyone.

Must be a different development sphere to me. I have to use xcode for dev on the Mac and it is feeble compared to VS. I can't think of a better IDE to be honest (C++, C# for me).

Whenever I have to use other offerings like Eclipse, Netbeans or Android Studio for other languages I am never very satisfied with them. Android Studio in particular breaks gradle and projects between updates, although Flutter seems to work.

VS is pretty nice if you run it without plugins that slow it down (like ReSharper)