5 ms·

Most devs simply hate Windows, no matter how much better value Windows hardware gives you. I used to hate Microsoft in every sense years ago, but not anymore. W

Most devs simply hate Windows, no matter how much better value Windows hardware gives you. I used to hate Microsoft in every sense years ago, but not anymore. Win10 is a great OS, I don't understand why more people just don't give it a chance. Especially with WSL now there's almost little excuse to use Linux or macOS other than bias against Microsoft.

stupidcar 10y ago
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.
- rashkov 10y ago
  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.
  - mbel 10y ago
    > 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 :/
  - kitsunesoba 10y ago
    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.
- PatentTroll 10y ago
  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.
e40 10y ago
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.
- PatentTroll 10y ago
  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.
  - NTripleOne 10y ago
    Near enough everything from the Win7 control panel still exists, yeah - a few things have been completely moved to the Settings app though.
- zspitzer 10y ago
  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
  - NTripleOne 10y ago
    NO YOU CAN'T DO THAT THAT DOESN'T EXIST LA LA LA LA But Spotlight Search is ok!
    - mikewhy 10y ago
BoorishBears 10y ago
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.
jjuel 10y ago
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.
- dcdevito 10y ago
  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"?
bsuh 10y ago
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.
- dcdevito 10y ago
  "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.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    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.
    - dcdevito 10y ago
      right-click --> uninstall. Not difficult.
      - mikhailt 10y ago
        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.
vetinari 10y ago
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?
- snuxoll 10y ago
  > 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 :/
  - vetinari 10y ago
    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.
swah 10y ago
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.
WayneBro 10y ago
> 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.

stupidcar 10y ago

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.

rashkov 10y ago
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.
- mbel 10y ago
  > 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 :/
- kitsunesoba 10y ago
  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.
PatentTroll 10y ago
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.

e40 10y ago

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.

PatentTroll 10y ago
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.
- NTripleOne 10y ago
  Near enough everything from the Win7 control panel still exists, yeah - a few things have been completely moved to the Settings app though.
zspitzer 10y ago
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
- NTripleOne 10y ago
  NO YOU CAN'T DO THAT THAT DOESN'T EXIST LA LA LA LA But Spotlight Search is ok!
  - mikewhy 10y ago

BoorishBears 10y ago

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.

jjuel 10y ago

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.

dcdevito 10y ago
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"?

bsuh 10y ago

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.

dcdevito 10y ago
"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.
- DanBC 10y ago
  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.
  - dcdevito 10y ago
    right-click --> uninstall. Not difficult.
    - mikhailt 10y ago
      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.

vetinari 10y ago

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?

snuxoll 10y ago
> 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 :/
- vetinari 10y ago
  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.

swah 10y ago

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.

WayneBro 10y ago

> 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.