DEV Community

Discussion on: Windows vs MacOS vs Linux: My Story (and share yours too!)

Collapse
 
ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

I'm not particularly fond of Windows, though I use it out of necessity because it's kind of impossible to game sanely on any other OS. My biggest complaints about it are:

  • Lack of rebindable global hotkeys. Windows is literally the last big platform that does not let you set your own hotkeys for OS-level functionality (like manipulating windows or handling virtual desktops).
  • The VFS layer is a pile of coprolite. It places an absurd number of limitations on how you can access files in the name of 'compatibility' with software that most people are never going to use, and is horrendously slow compared to BSD, Linux, and macOS.
  • The console host borders on being unusable, and the new Windows Terminal Micorsoft is working on is almost as bad.
  • PowerShell lacks a large number of features that have been considered standard anywhere else for a command shell for decades, most notably the complete lack of an escape character (you have to quote anything that has a special character in it, you can't just escape individual problem characters).
  • The lack of certain features that any sane person would want to use in the Home edition (like pausing updates) is a constant point of irritation.
  • You should not need to completely reboot for every single effing update, even if you want to insist on maintaining consistency of the system components.
  • Binary log and configuration files.

I use Linux on a daily basis for work and almost everything except gaming, though I won't try to claim it's perfect. Biggest complaints with Linux are:

  • It has a tendency to just start behaving oddly when it runs into hardware issues. Windows and macOS at least have the decency to crash 'cleanly' (that is, they definitively crash) in such cases, or at least tell you that something is wrong.
  • Hardware support is often spotty (fun fact, Linux actually has to claim to be Windows on some systems when talking to the system firmware just to get it to behave correctly). This isn't entirely a problem with Linux itself though, as the hardware vendors are just as guilty of not even trying to support it (see the example of the USB 3.0 Displaylink devices for a good example of that).
  • Many of the big name distributions make some pretty big assumptions about how you might want to user your system, and this can have a seriously negative impact on usability for some people.

I've not actively used macOS myself, so I can't really comment on it other than expressing disbelief about the complete lack of configurability in some cases (TimeMachine, I"m looking at you).