I head up our IT department and I use both; Windows for business apps, MacOS for creative apps. 10 is mindbogglingly inconsistent from the way the UI changes between old and new control panels to the way graphic scaling is horribly broken. The cloud side is getting better and works great for users. We've slowly peeled away 3rd party (Dropbox, Slack, Webex) services.

Everything in Windows 10 feels like it's in beta. There is no polish, that final 1%, to any of it.

This is likely a huge part of it.

I'm primarily macOS but have a LOT of experience with Windows.

I still feel like I'm fighting against Windows to do anything. I just think different people are suited to different workflows & macOS and Windows are very very different to each other.

Having done dev on OSX you are going to be constantly fighting the machine. Apple is worse about walled gardens than MS is. With Apple, you need to do exactly what they want or you will have pain.

My experience is the exact opposite - but we're probably looking for different things.

That walled garden approach is why, in my opinion, the OS feels as good as it does. MacOS feels like a mature operating system that Apple have created with restraint and control - where to me Windows feels like a piece of legacy enterprise software with a shiny UI.

If I wanted out of a walled garden, there's no way it'd be to a non *nix based OS - especially not to one that uses it's start menu to pump ads at me.

A definition courtesy of wikipedia

> A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, wherein consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications and content.

By this definition Mac OS isn't a walled garden, save for kernel modules, although it could become so in the future thus its cohesive design is to be pedantic a product of itself rather than a closed ecosystem. A product of actually having a mental picture of how the whole thing works and a cohesive set of applications to go with it.

Historically windows has without third party applications been a pretty garbage experience even its image and text editors were so bad that you could randomly generate urls until you hit an alternative and most likely get a better choice. Its not shockingly that a platform that doesn't even know what good look likes doesn't have an ecosystem full of anything that represents this.

> MacOS feels like a mature operating system that Apple have created with restraint and control - where to me Windows feels like a piece of legacy enterprise software with a shiny UI.

Quibble, I don't think this has to do with being a walled garden—or at least, I think you may be using the term in a different way than I generally think of it. Apple could have much better legacy support and an equally well designed OS.

Some older applications might look out of place, but that's preferable to not letting them run at all—you can still choose to stick with newer software and have the same experience. Alternately, Apple could stop overhauling the OS's visual design for no reason every seven years...

Where exactly do you feel like you’re fighting with macOS?

My entire C/C++ development cycle. I haven't touched it in years because of this. If what you want to do is bang out a GUI in Xcode you'll have a pretty good time, if instead you want to interact with your hardware or other software in ways Apple didn't predict then you're probably just not going to be able to do it.

I can accept that this works for most people. They don't want to mess with the UI and want to "solve problems." But for me the two were linked, and I had to ditch OSX. I had similar problems on Windows but Windows lets you work around the OS if you really need to.

Have you looked into Macports (or Homebrew) at all? At the command-line level macOS is really quite like other Unix systems, once you install a bit of standard tooling.

The semi-exception where I occasionally run into problems is TCC. It's usually not a bother on the command line, but starting with Mojave it can occasionally interfere. But, since Mojave came out in late 2018, if you haven't touched macOS in years you didn't run into that. :)

(I really really really hate modern TCC...)

Yes, I used homebrew extensively. It helps but does not solve every problem. There's still things Apple does not want you to do and you will not do them.

Okay, I'm still quite curious what specific development tasks you're able to do in Linux but feel restricted from doing on macOS. If you turn off SIP (takes five minutes), you can rewrite kernel memory if you want to. Which is of course a different thing than ease-of-use, but I'm not sure what would be so different.

I'll echo this, I develop C/C++ on OS X every day. Have no issues with it at all.

I've upgrading a Macbook early 2011 to Mojave using the dosdude1 patches and the uploaded app keeps crashing when the reviewer tries to open it. It worked fine with no issues locally and with the High Sierra XCode 10.1. I can't figure out a solution. I would not recommend a hackintosh for iOS development with regards to provisioning issues.

Tell me about it - I work a support desk for an MSP; all Windows. I can't tell you how many times I've struggled with file permissions or partitions that I know would be very easy to fix in a *sh shell... Imagine being told "access denied" when you're running the command prompt as "administrator"!

> Imagine being told "access denied" when you're running the command prompt as "administrator".

Coincidentally, I run into this on macOS due to System Integrity Protection.

But what I like about SIP is it's easy to turn off and never be bothered by it again...

I find the opposite, every time I find myself using Mac OS I find myself fighting to try and do things that should be easy but are instead convoluted.

Can you give some examples? There are exactly two things that I wish macOS would copy from Windows: full paths visible and interactive in Finder, and the ability to create new files within Finder (how is that not a thing?!)

Finder has been able to show interactive, full paths since Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard; it’s just not enabled by default.

To enable it, make Finder the active application, then click View → Show Path Bar (or use the keyboard shortcut ⌥⌘P).

I'm in the same boat as you. I was primarily Windows for many years, but reluctantly made the switch to MacOS for my daily driver a few years ago and I'm glad I did.

Still have a Windows 10 machine, and although I do have some love for a few Windows-only applications, it just feels like an uphill battle whenever something isn't working.

I agree that UI between the two is largely just a personal preference thing. But the POSIX underpinnings of MacOS is objectively useful for a great many developers. I appreciate what MS is doing with WSL but it’ll always be a poor substitute.

I agree with it being familiarity. I grew up with Macs in school, and have been using them since OS 8 and 9, some experience with System 7 (uncommon for how young I am). There's lot and lots of little details that have carried on throughout all the years that just seem "normal" to me.

I find myself facing inconsistent and surprising behaviors with Windows despite it being my primary OS at work.

Growing up with Mac and Linux makes Windows seem quite strange :)

Familiarity is a huge part of it. Windows is getting better very slowly but consistently. Really the only major pain points where I say MacOS is objectively better are:

- Window flickering on resizing, both have it but MacOS has a lot less of it.

- Being able to customize any shortcut menu item in any app

- Finder, Document proxy icons and open/save dialogs are just leagues ahead of Explorer.

Another anecdote: I was a Linux user and had to use a Mac for apps development, and the transition was smooth. I imagine transitioning from windows to unix system would be pretty jarring because not only the ui is different, but the underlying system is different too.

Counter: I grew up with Windows, using Macs only occasionally in stores and such. Never really liked Windows. Tried Linux for a year when I was 12 or so, ended up coming back to Windows.

When I was 16 I decided to Hackintosh my Dell and absolutely fell in love with Snow Leopard. I've used OS X in some form ever since.

If hackintoshes becomes popular enough to threaten their bottom line the very next version of OS X and those thereafter will include countermeasures designed to make your life difficult. This doesn't seem to be a sustainable love affair with a counterparty that will never share your affection because you represent a potential loss not a customer.

I have bought real Macs since, it just so happened Hackintosh was my introduction, because I didn't have money when I was a teenager. It worked out very well for Apple, actually.