Here's one huge reason: every single Windows version (well, at least the last 4-5 of them) have changed around the location of things. The control panel is completely different between some versions of Windows.

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.

It's not that hard in Windows 10, left click the start button and just start typing the name of the thing you are looking for, or right click the start button and you have direct access to all the major admin tools

I haven't manually looked for a command in Windows since... Vista? XP? Whichever was the last release to not let you search from the start menu.

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'".

> The control panel is completely different between some versions of Windows.

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.

Who even wants to dig around menus and control panel anymore? Give me PERFECT search capabilities, so I need only hit one key, and type in what I'm looking for.

All the old control panels and amin stuff is still present in Win10, isn't it? Also, you can do almost anything these days in powershell.

Near enough everything from the Win7 control panel still exists, yeah - a few things have been completely moved to the Settings app though.

yeah, it's odd that there is a new UWP Settings app, and the old control panel - but it isn't that difficult to find. I mean, since you're surfing YC I'm assuming you're tech savvy - is Windows that hard for you to use?

"tech savvy" people dont like wasting their time on stupid tasks. we like using well-made products that dont play games with the user and dont create vendor lockin by making users memorize bullshit nuances about the UI. Bullshit nuances are antifeatures, they're dark-patterns.

You said it perfectly before I had a chance to answer.

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

Yes, windows 8's UWP settings (I believe 10 is the same in this respect, correct me if I'm wrong) is hard to use.

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.

Many devs hate Windows for precisely defined reasons. But because we people are different, you may not be not bothered by their reasons and vice-versa. However, calling it "they simply hate" without taking their reasons into consideration is pure ignorance, that doesn't move the debate anywhere.

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?

> 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 :/

Thanks, that's what I found out until now. I'm looking for a solution without any enrollment at all, however.

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.

Are you looking at a BYOD setup of some fashion? I hate AD as much as any good Linux admin, but I'm curious what the use-case for non-domain joined machines accessing kerberized services is.

Exactly, BYOD setup. As I hinted, single organization and several independent people working together with their private laptops, using several on-premises services and right now, way too many passwords.

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.

For me, Windows 10 is a step backwards for consumers. Microsoft was the one of the few software giants that cared about backward compatibility and not breaking users' workflows. Google is notorious for sunsetting products depended on by people at a whim and good luck getting updates for your Macs or iPhones without buying new hardware every few years (even if older hardware is supported, often updates make the devices run slower because they've been tuned for running on the latest hardware). But the people have spoken loudly with their wallets and Microsoft has listened. It's trendy and profitable to fuck consumers. Now they aggressively pushed Windows 10 on people and it comes with forced updates, ads, and telemetry that can't be turned off without hacking about.

"forced updates, ads and telemetry"

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.

You've basically answered his answer. You can't ask someone what they're talking about and then go on to describe three situations that answered the questions. It's not FUD when it is a known fact.

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.

Incorrect. There is no supported way to disable telemetry in Windows 10 Home and Pro. It can only be disabled in Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions.

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.

> telemetry (easily turn it all off in Settings).

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).

Ads now appear in the start menu and on the lock screen. Turning off suggestions does not stop all ads. For example, my start menu tiles currently include Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition and Microsoft Solitaire.

Except MS reinstalls them on each update for me.

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 don't care how easy they are to uninstall. Why is my start menu a suitable place for ads?

I installed Yosemite on a Mac Pro from 2009 and it ran like a champ, the only thing that was slow was video transcoding. Stop with the FUD.

I can't even get updates for my original iPad any longer. It's stuck at 5.1 or something like that.

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.

That's absolutely true on mobile platforms, which have made major advances in both performance and architecture over the past couple of years.

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.

For me, the problem is high DPI support. It just works in macOS, even when mixing high DPI screens with lower DPI ones. In all the version of Windows I tried, including 10, things look like garbage. Things are too big, or too small, or pixelated, or blurry.

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.

Is there a difference between dpi support for third party apps versus Microsoft apps? I wonder if apple simply has more control over the graphics stack than Microsoft does, or maybe has more leverage over its developers to add high dpi support.

The difference is that the vast majority of third party app devs developing for macOS use Cocoa/AppKit, the system's native UI toolkit. Because of that, all Apple had to do is get HiDPI mode and a decent fallback (2x scaling) working in Cocoa and boom, 90%+ of all Mac apps, even those that stopped getting updates, have proper retina support. Devs didn't even need to recompile; at first it was an option in a property file in the app bundle (enabling users to "turn on" HiDPI support in older apps by editing the file), and later it was turned on for all apps.

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.

> Is there a difference between dpi support for third party apps versus Microsoft apps?

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 :/

This! Windows hidpi or mixed dpi on different monitors is garbage. But that's a side effect of all of the backward compatibility of win32, right? Modern apps ("metro apps") scale just fine because it's a newer framework.

WSL is not nearly the same as actually using Linux. If it actually interacted with the rest of the system instead of just in it's little box it might provide some value. The way it stands you really have to search for everything. There are lot of tools for devs that just work on Linux/Unix that just don't work on Windows. I find Windows a pain (and am a C# developer professionally). I also like to game so of course Windows stays on my desktop at home, but my next laptop (MBP currently) will have Windows replaced with Linux for sure.

you can set symlinks up, but true not internally (yet), but it's coming in the next update. And which tools "simply do not work in windows"?

I use Win10 as well, but I hate some parts: the command line (not being bash, even though you will say powershell is awesome, its not bash, and everyone knows bash). The filesystem which is not very compatible with Linux ones. Missing apt (even though there is chocolatey, its not apt).

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.

I love Windows 10 and used it from preview, but like OSX better. WSL is like improved Cygwin for me (I know they aren't the same under the hood and WSL is way more powerful). Still not exactly as smooth or integrated as bash/zsh on OSX.

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.

> Most devs simply hate Windows...

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.