Re:Ask HN: Mac OS vs. Windows in 2022
by viraptor on Sunday September 04, 2022 @05:02PM
(#32717694)
I honestly hate both. On macos, I need 3 utility apps just to make the desktop windows behave / layout / switch in a reasonable way. Advanced firewall and permission control basically doesn't exist. If you compile lots of software, you'll occasionally find things that fail for very Mac-specific reasons. At least it's a posix-ish system, so many Linux tools can be compiled natively. But if you use homebrew as a developer, prepare for occasional breakages.
On Windows, the lack of packages and automatic updates running as an extra app for everything is absurd at this point. (Yes, winget is getting there and can be usable if you know about it and your apps support it) Each device driver thinks it's a marketing opportunity for the producer with yet another tray bar entry. Start search sucks every time (I'm told it's fixed in win11). WSL2 exists, but it's just a vm with nice tooling. Constant marketing spam that comes back after you disable it in a product you paid for. Failing updates.
Edit: Also, both have a layer below which debugging is extremely hard. Why did something fail? Haha, good luck, we'll just log "Operation: failed", hope you like dtrace and digging into the kernel to solve it.
So, I'm not recommending either. Macos is less bad due to posix-ish environment. Happy Linux user.
On Windows, the lack of packages and automatic updates running as an extra app for everything is absurd at this point. (Yes, winget is getting there and can be usable if you know about it and your apps support it) Each device driver thinks it's a marketing opportunity for the producer with yet another tray bar entry. Start search sucks every time (I'm told it's fixed in win11). WSL2 exists, but it's just a vm with nice tooling. Constant marketing spam that comes back after you disable it in a product you paid for. Failing updates.
Edit: Also, both have a layer below which debugging is extremely hard. Why did something fail? Haha, good luck, we'll just log "Operation: failed", hope you like dtrace and digging into the kernel to solve it.
So, I'm not recommending either. Macos is less bad due to posix-ish environment. Happy Linux user.