It has telemetry that you can’t turn off without hacking the registry. And I use macOS because I don’t have to tell the OS to get its bullshit ads out of the main menu, because that’s not even a supported feature.

That doesn’t stop anyone from doing “real” work. Stop trying to pass your overly nerdy preferences as universal.

That’s a cop out. It doesn’t stop me from doing real work but I shouldn’t have to deal with it. I don’t think anyone asked for ads in Windows, it doesn’t take a nerd to want something I paid for to not include nagware.

The parent was talking about ads, which are obviously completely different than telemetry. But here's Apple's telemetry policy:

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

See 'Collection and Use of Non-Personal Information'

I see the telemetry as coterminous with the ads: something Microsoft is doing because they know their customers are trapped. My day job has been line of business .NET for two years, and my personal machine is a Mac. The amount of crap I have to slog through on Windows is insulting and ridiculous. Every time I think about getting a new personal machine to run Windows I remember all that crap and the thought passes. A real shame, too. MS is making all the right moves technologically speaking right now. Thankfully my latest machine has Enterprise and our AD disables most of it.

Apple’s analytics are not comparable.

> The amount of crap I have to slog through on Windows is insulting and ridiculous.

Really? I spent two minutes removing some default start menu items. My mac continually sent me pop ups insisting I use the Apple version of every product.

I had to jump through a load of hoops to get Windows to stop nagging me to use OneDrive. What popups does the Mac send you? I’ve never seen one like you say.

Do you use Chrome? You should at minimum see popups advertising Safari.

the first time I opened it I got one asking me if I wanted to make it my default web browser, which said that Safari was currently the default. But that’s not a nag, it will happen whenever a process requests to become the default browser. Other than that, no. I do use uBlock Origin though so if it’s stuff on the web I likely don’t see it. What are you seeing?

2018 MBP, Catalina, popups from Apple in the OS (not the browser) saying I should use Safari every few months.

Huh. That sucks. It seems like some people do have this issue: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/153379/how-do-you-...

I honestly don’t see it on my machine though.

> coterminous

Ooh, new word. Haven’t seen a new word in months!

Oh c'mon now.

> The start menu can be customized to turn all of that off. If you want to pin your own things to it, you can.

Shouldn't be there in the first place, including all of the other advertising and telemetry.

> WSL2 is going to drop soon. Looks like a good move by Microsoft.

It'll be always a hack. Will never beat native Unix.

> What kind of work do you do exactly that disqualifies Windows from being a "serious option for real work"?

WSL is a hack, NTFS chokes on small files (web dev), advertising and telemetry.

Also, you're computer randomly shutting off and locking itself up, jesus christ what the fuck (TBH MacOS also has this but it's 100x easier to disable).

If you put it like that whole Linux is a hack and that's a good thing, that's what makes it good.