[anaisbetts]

Why can Mac developers absolutely never resist making dated Win9x / Windows XP / BSOD references every time they make a port of their software to Windows? Zed did the same thing recently and it was just as overplayed.

Developers please, when you do this, you are telling your audience, the people you want to pay you money for your work, "Yeah, we think you suck, but here's some thing we finally got around to porting over" - why would you do that?

[vintagedave]

I agree this is in poor taste. It feels a little insulting -- and I get why they didn't think that, but, I can read that into it, a 'you're still using Windows, never getting yourself out of that rut' sort of vibe.

I think people who do this think that people who use Windows perceive that the Mac experience is smoother, and may have some sort of Mac envy.

The end of the video gives this away: it's the Think Different font. It's a direct callback to the _idea_ of Apple vs Microsoft, not the reality today of Apple vs Microsoft.

I know many devs who use Windows exclusively, but they are in two camps:

a) Super old-school: still maintaining Windows desktop apps; that's what their career has been and there's no need for anything else.

b) WSL-based, VSCode-using devs who are one step away from just using Linux. These are the folk who fifteen years ago would have been using what was then still OSX. But these folk don't use Windows as Windows: they use it as a semi-Unix.

[commandar]

>I think people who do this think that people who use Windows perceive that the Mac experience is smoother, and may have some sort of Mac envy.

There's an irony in this due to this:

>b) WSL-based, VSCode-using devs who are one step away from just using Linux. These are the folk who fifteen years ago would have been using what was then still OSX. But these folk don't use Windows as Windows: they use it as a semi-Unix.

The people still doing the "hurr durr wind0ze suxx" routine are the ones stuck 15 years in the past. Modern Windows is an entirely different and vastly more capable beast and it still runs huge swathes of the enterprise world.

The best technologists I know don't really care all that much which desktop platform you stick them on anymore since most of what they really need is either available everywhere or running on a backend that isn't their desktop anyway.

[LoganDark]

I think if all you want is a Unix, you're better off with Mac, or at least you would have been before the Apple Silicon transition broke Windows support, and Valve stopped supporting Proton on Mac, and CrossOver still doesn't support Unreal Engine, etc.

Stuff like games and proprietary drivers is what keeps people on Windows, I think. Either that, or just a distate for the Mac's design language / user experience, which is also completely fair.

Back in 2016 or so, I had a triple-boot on my MacBook Pro:

- macOS for daily driving, and most development

- Windows for Windows-specific development, gaming, and proprietary drivers or IDEs (Texas Instruments programmers; Samsung / OnePlus flashing; some other embedded tooling)

- Arch Linux for Linux-specific development, usually involving the GPU, which I couldn't get to work in a VM; and also just for fun

These days I simply cannot do most of those things with Mac hardware. I can't even run Asahi yet, because M4 Max.

[diego_sandoval]

c) Those of us who've been using Linux for a decade, but are forced to use Windows in our day job because of MS Office/Proprietary VPN client that only runs on Windows/other program that doesn't run well on Linux.

[JosephRedfern]

I think you're being oversensitive, especially in the context Raycast adding support for Windows.

The whole purpose of Raycast is to improve productivity and UX, be that under macOS or Windows. It'd be a pretty shitty launch announcement if the blog post didn't mention the problem that they're trying to solve.

Edit: I'm not sure if the post was edited after my reply, but ATM there's no mention of BSODs - the closest I can see to a dig at Windows is:

> You know the feeling. Search that can't find your files. Apps buried in menus. Simple tasks that take too many clicks. Your computer should be faster than this. It should feel like everything is at your fingertips. That’s why we built Raycast.

[anaisbetts]

That's certainly what the app itself does (I'm even using it myself!), but I just don't understand why they couldn't resist putting in these overused digs.

[thomaspaulmann]

Fair and point taken. If you want to know a bit more about the video, we shared a bit more here: https://x.com/peduarte/status/1991510075505070260

[perching_aix]

On some level I understand. These products are solutions, implying that there exist problems that they're thus solving. How they go about presenting these is a matter of taste, and apparently this is just the taste these people tend to have.

[microtonal]

Windows had a good run from Windows 2000/XP-ish [1] to Windows 7, maybe 8.1. Any tech person who lived through the 90ies knows that 95/98/ME was a tire fire. With Windows 10 and 11 the enshittification started in a big way and it became a vehicle for analytics, pushing ads and Microsoft stuff, and now forcing their on AI on users.

All the ridicule is well-deserved IMO. There is an alternate universe where Microsoft would have continued Windows in the 2000/XP/7 tradition and it would be a solid operating system, serving the user, underpinned by a very good foundation (after all, the original NT people were stellar engineers that worked on VMS before).

[1] Earlier NT versions were also quite good, but most consumers didn't encounter it.

[RicoElectrico]

Exactly, at least dunk on something relevant in 2025, otherwise you come over as someone out of touch.

[blackcatsec]

Yeah. This is generally the type of thing that turns me off to working in the Linux/MacOS world. It's just a near constant "We're living in the 90s" attitude towards everything Microsoft does or has done. It's just absolutely insufferable.

I know more about both Windows AND Linux than most Linux Systems Administrators that I encounter. I know more about how making them work together in an enterprise than any Linux Administrator. I understand more about literally every underlying protocol AND how to manage those items on Linux and Windows, from DHCP, DNS, Networking, etc.

For all intents, I could be a pretty bad ass "Linux guru"--and for the most part, I hold my own quite well. I know how to manage SSSD, understand integrating Linux and Windows environments into harmony with each other. But my peers often see something in Windows they dislike, or a single thing that Microsoft hasn't really bothered to improve, and holy fuck in their minds the sky is falling and it's the absolutely worse thing they've ever had to do with a computer.

So I keep one foot outside of that world because these people are just fucking insufferable to work with and around.

[dustbunny]

It's "we think windows sucks"

And they are right.

The enshittification of windows is by far the most egregious example in modern software.

Windows is disgusting. The start menu is disgusting. The bloat, slowness, lack of design cohesion and flakiness has real consequences.

Its not "you suck" it's "windows used to be better" and to me it seems objectively true that it used to be better

[p_ing]

Windows used to require a reboot to change an IP address.

Windows used to BSOD when the graphics stack crashed.

Used to come without a built-in firewall exposing all sorts of vulnerabilities to the public Internet.

Used to not isolate critical kernel components to 3rd party software.

(And Windows has always had a hodge-poge of UI designs dating back to NT4/Win95 which contained Win3.x design elements)

The list can go on about how it most certainly, objectively, was not "better".

[theoldgreybeard]

Nah man. Windows 10 and on are hot garbage and everyone knows it.

XP was the golden age and this is just a play on nostalgia to when Windows was actually useful.

I’ve been off of Windows for a few years now and any time I need to use a Windows system it’s just a constant reminder of how terrible everything is.

[NicuCalcea]

I feel the same way about macOS, I used it for several years for various jobs and now will literally not accept a job offer if they force another Macbook on me.

Point is, if you're selling something to Windows users, don't say their choice of OS sucks.

[ls-a]

Raycast is built using Rust. So the rust toxicity has to be there in their community

[bigyabai]

Non-sequitur