I left apple a bit over a year ago because I wanted to get a laptop with some serious GPU power (I was doing lots of sequence alignments that took hours to do on my old laptop and hours to upload to / download from my university's compute cluster). The computer performed fabulously at this task, but my experience with the Microsoft ecosystem has been absolutely dreadful. Now that I no longer need the GPU power, I will gladly pay a few hundred dollar premium to get a mac laptop for my next computer. I would probably pay a 2x premium if Apple asked it.
-------- OS Installation: The Horror Story --------
* Reinstalling the OS is a 4-5 hour manual slog through serial numbers and a dozen drivers that must be manually installed in the correct order, not a 1-hour fire-and-forget process like in the Mac ecosystem. (hours of my time vs minutes of my time).
* The bundled "backup solution" works neither for imaging nor for incremental document recovery. "Time Machine" this is not.
* MSE antivirus was dreadfully slow (Just downloaded an installer? It'll wait 30 seconds before launching 5 copies of the .exe corresponding to the 5 times you clicked on it).
* I got a 30gb SSD as a boot volume and put Windows on it, then linked ("junctioned") the "Program Files" directory to my HDD (I'd done similar on my mac without trouble). Big mistake, none of the applications would launch. They didn't launch after I copied them back either (yes, I looked up permission-resetting instructions and followed them to the letter). I had to reinstall.
* I looked up a Microsoft support document explaining how to properly put programs on a different HD (and also that it was unsupported). It involved registry edits and DOS-fu from the system restore disk. The next time Windows Update ran, it broke my system so that no program would launch (DLL error every time). Rolling back the updates didn't work, of course. I had to reinstall. Gave up on the 30gb SSD.
* I tried to upgrade my Win7 install to Win8. Big mistake. The installer took 2 hours to give me an unhelpful generic error message. After hours of searching through forums I found out that it scans your installed Win7 drivers+programs one by one and barfs if any of them aren't compatible (but it doesn't tell you that, of course).
* I tried a fresh install of Win8 on a new 250gb SSD I got on black friday. It froze every time I woke from sleep. Oh, and it would boot to an I/O error bluescreen unless I booted into Win7 first, touched a file on the SSD, and rebooted (yes, touching a file was necessary). Two firmware updates and a handful of driver updates later and I had the same symptoms.
* On a hunch, I switched the SSD from SATA slot 2 to 0. This broke the bootloader, and Microsoft's instructions to fix it didn't work, giving a generic error message that many people on the support forum seemed to experience but that nobody had a fix for. There were 2 Microsoft employees with unhelpful non-fix "solutions," though.
* I nuked the Win7 HDD install and reinstalled Win8 afresh on the SSD (now slot 0). It seems to be stable so far.
* There was a 4-month period where Dell's GPU drivers had broken OpenCL compatibility and the manufacturer drivers would silently fail to install unless I ran a 3rd-party sketchware wiping program first and disabled signature enforcement on every boot.
* Audio drivers occasionally fail to wake from sleep (no audio till reboot). No, updating them to the manufacturer version didn't help. No, reinstalling Dell's recommended drivers didn't help either.
-------- Small Gripes --------
* No decent UNIX command line. Cygwin starts slowly and is poorly integrated with the system.
* I can't get decent 2-finger scroll without a 3rd party program that is occasionally broken by system updates.
* I can't remap capslock without downloading a 3rd-party program to perform registry edits.
* I can't shut off the screen without installing a 3rd party program to do so.
* In Win7, all allowed keyboard layout switching shortcuts were combinations of modifiers that conflicted with productivity apps like Illustrator. Also, the layout would occasionally become "stuck" and failed to respect the GUI switcher. In Win8, they added a no-conflict key combination for switching layouts but it doesn't work in fullscreen apps.
* Metro. It looks slick, but it doesn't have any of the options you regularly need to access. Fortunately the old menagerie of Windows utilities is still there, just moved around.
* No standard install system that lets you inspect the installer's logs, scripts, or contents.
* The intimate connection between my computer account and Microsoft cloud account creeps me out.
* The full-screen force-quit mechanism is insane (ctrl-alt-del, open Task Manager, press Windows to reveal the Launch Bar, click on the arrow to see all system tray icons, right-click the tiny Task Manager icon (a gray box), enable "Always on Top", highlight the program in the task manager, hit "End Task", wait, hit "End Task" on the dialog box that pops up, and finally decline to send a bug report to Microsoft)
* I can't use the keyboard to navigate directories that contain a mixture of files and folders because in Mircrosoft-Land "Alphabetical Order" means "Sort folders first, then files."
* The sub-HD preloaded desktop backgrounds (yes, really).
-------- Small Victories --------
* Cheaper, better hardware (not remotely cost effective, given the hassle)
* I can manually tweak virtual memory settings (not that I should have to tweak it, which I do, but I think it's terribly cool that I can and that there's a GUI for it)
* Compatibility
* The super-handy "superuser menu" (Win-X)
* The ability to roll-back updates. It has never worked when I needed it to, but I like the idea.
-------- Concluding Remarks --------
I've had better UX with linux, which is saying something, since I had previously considered linux UX to be fairly poor, or rather great -- until a mission-critical piece of it inevitably broke. Turns out the same thing applies Windows, except worse. Sadly, it sees that there is tremendous value in having a non-fragmented ecosystem.
My next computer will be a mac.
-------- My Plea to You --------
If you know how to fix any of my gripes, please speak up. I'm still a newbie. Maybe these are just growing pains. I don't think so, but I can hope.
My last Windows OS will be Windows 7 because of many similar problems and reasoning.
This has spawned a change in career because I currently make my living working in the Windows space. I'm throwing away 15 years of experience and a deep knowledge of Windows' internals. Also, work has slowed down tremendously since the year or so leading up to through the release of Windows 8. I don't see my current job existing in two years or other people as capable remaining where they are.
I can only address one of your gripes, but not really. Powershell isn't that bad. It's not good, but it's not that bad. It can do some things, but probably not the ones you really want.
I think, given the amount of customization you're looking for, you want a linux desktop, not Windows.
I can't speak for Windows 8, but I've built a few dozen Windows 7 machines of various configurations and never had the kinds of install problems you've had. Here's how I do it.
1 - Put in the disk
2 - Boot to disk and run the installer
3 - it reboots a couple times while it's installing, but I don't care because I'm off doing something else
4 - it asks me a few questions and starts up
5 - let it run through a bunch of update cycles (which does take forever, but it's semi-automated so I'm doing something else most of the time)
On occasion I've had to install a network driver after it finishes, or if it's virtualized some guest additions but that's it. It does take hours, but they're mostly unattended hours that I can ignore, and if I want to use the machine quicker, I can skip the update cycles and just get going and let it update when I shut the machine off at the end of the day.
My latest machine, which I just built, didn't require any driver futsing.
I have no idea why you were trying to install 7 (and it sounds like your goal was to get to 8) on a 30GB SSD. I wouldn't install anything but a bare bones command-line only CentOS on a disk that small. It sounds like a couple days of your time were wasted trying to put a 50+GB OS on what's essentially a medium sized thumb drive and suffered for it.
All that being said, back in the XP days I did build a system with Program Files on a different machine and for the most part it did work, but it wasn't really well supported (even if it's supposed to be) and felt kludgy.
The Registry is one of the worst ideas in the history of computing. Nearly every time I've had something go wrong with a Windows machine that wasn't outright hardware failure, it was a problem with the registry. Registry editing really is a last resort for the bold and desperate. There's some serious voodoo in there.
So we've solved two of your problems off the bat, 1) don't install the OS on disks that are too small 2) don't mess with the registry
On to small gripes
* No decent UNIX command line. Cygwin starts slowly and is poorly integrated with the system.
True. Your best bet if you want Linux is to virtualize a linux machine or install linux or use Powershell. Remember, you aren't using a nix.
I can't get decent 2-finger scroll without a 3rd party program that is occasionally broken by system updates.
Touchpad support on Windows is lightyears behind OS X. Apple has actually turned the touchpad into something useful instead of an emergency replacement for a mouse. In Windows, just use a $5-10 2 button mouse with a scroll wheel.
* I can't remap capslock without downloading a 3rd-party program to perform registry edits.
True.
* I can't shut off the screen without installing a 3rd party program to do so.
What do you mean? Are you trying to just use the laptop hooked to a monitor and don't want the monitor on? Just set the power management so you can close the lid and leave the machine on. It's something that doesn't exist in OS X so you probably haven't thought of it.
* In Win7, all allowed keyboard layout switching shortcuts were combinations of modifiers that conflicted with productivity apps like Illustrator. Also, the layout would occasionally become "stuck" and failed to respect the GUI switcher. In Win8, they added a no-conflict key combination for switching layouts but it doesn't work in fullscreen apps.
What do you mean? Why are you trying to switch the keyboard layout so much?
* Metro. It looks slick, but it doesn't have any of the options you regularly need to access. Fortunately the old menagerie of Windows utilities is still there, just moved around.
No experience at all with 8, it looks like a version I'll probably skip alltogether as 7 is still majority supported and I don't have any compelling reasons to go to 8.
* No standard install system that lets you inspect the installer's logs, scripts, or contents.
True. Installation under OS X is much slicker and better thought out in general than on Windows. What's your compelling use case to need to do this though?
* The intimate connection between my computer account and Microsoft cloud account creeps me out.
Must be an 8 thing. 7 doesn't really have anything like this (at least that I use or care about).
* The full-screen force-quit mechanism is insane (ctrl-alt-del, open Task Manager, press Windows to reveal the Launch Bar, click on the arrow to see all system tray icons, right-click the tiny Task Manager icon (a gray box), enable "Always on Top", highlight the program in the task manager, hit "End Task", wait, hit "End Task" on the dialog box that pops up, and finally decline to send a bug report to Microsoft)
Hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc, go to "processes", right click on the problem process and just hit "end process tree". I don't know why you're doing all that extra stuff after you've got the task manager up.
* I can't use the keyboard to navigate directories that contain a mixture of files and folders because in Mircrosoft-Land "Alphabetical Order" means "Sort folders first, then files."
Why not? I pretty much only navigate in Explorer via keyboard. Why does sorting folder first (which in my and many people's opinions is far superior to mixing them up with your files) prohibit this?
It's bad enough in OS X that most of the finder replacements I've tried change the sort to folders first then files. Folders are different then files and should be sorted separately. Between music, retrocomputing, movies, and photography I manage over 3 and a half million files using pretty much explorer from the keyboard without much fuss. It's lightyears ahead of Finder in this respect.
One trick, with a folder open, just start typing the name of the file or folder you want and it'll quickly navigate down to around where the file is.
* The sub-HD preloaded desktop backgrounds (yes, really).
Replace them with whatever you want. The built in Windows picture viewer is better than OS X's (it even lets you look through folders full of pictures in sequence!) and you can right-click and turn any picture into a background.
* The ability to roll-back updates. It has never worked when I needed it to, but I like the idea.
Sometimes when your registry gets b0rk3d, this is the only way to save the computer. I don't really like it at all when I try to use it manually, but it's got my bacon out the fire on more than one occasion.
I left Apple last year after nearly a decade of using Apple products. I have a Zenbook Prime running Debian unstable now. I find Gnome Shell just as easy to use as OSX. In fact its more functional in many aspects like how quickly I can get to the things I'm looking for. That said, there are pros and cons to using OSX or Linux. But I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I think people should use whatever floats their boat.
I left Apple around the PPC->Intel transition, for Thinkpads (and recently, a Zenbook) running Debian. No regrets; life got much better; would not go back; YMMV. (I still have to use OS X and iOS machines regularly at work, and this only confirms my decision.)
jjoonathan|12 years ago
-------- OS Installation: The Horror Story --------
* Reinstalling the OS is a 4-5 hour manual slog through serial numbers and a dozen drivers that must be manually installed in the correct order, not a 1-hour fire-and-forget process like in the Mac ecosystem. (hours of my time vs minutes of my time).
* The bundled "backup solution" works neither for imaging nor for incremental document recovery. "Time Machine" this is not.
* MSE antivirus was dreadfully slow (Just downloaded an installer? It'll wait 30 seconds before launching 5 copies of the .exe corresponding to the 5 times you clicked on it).
* I got a 30gb SSD as a boot volume and put Windows on it, then linked ("junctioned") the "Program Files" directory to my HDD (I'd done similar on my mac without trouble). Big mistake, none of the applications would launch. They didn't launch after I copied them back either (yes, I looked up permission-resetting instructions and followed them to the letter). I had to reinstall.
* I looked up a Microsoft support document explaining how to properly put programs on a different HD (and also that it was unsupported). It involved registry edits and DOS-fu from the system restore disk. The next time Windows Update ran, it broke my system so that no program would launch (DLL error every time). Rolling back the updates didn't work, of course. I had to reinstall. Gave up on the 30gb SSD.
* I tried to upgrade my Win7 install to Win8. Big mistake. The installer took 2 hours to give me an unhelpful generic error message. After hours of searching through forums I found out that it scans your installed Win7 drivers+programs one by one and barfs if any of them aren't compatible (but it doesn't tell you that, of course).
* I tried a fresh install of Win8 on a new 250gb SSD I got on black friday. It froze every time I woke from sleep. Oh, and it would boot to an I/O error bluescreen unless I booted into Win7 first, touched a file on the SSD, and rebooted (yes, touching a file was necessary). Two firmware updates and a handful of driver updates later and I had the same symptoms.
* On a hunch, I switched the SSD from SATA slot 2 to 0. This broke the bootloader, and Microsoft's instructions to fix it didn't work, giving a generic error message that many people on the support forum seemed to experience but that nobody had a fix for. There were 2 Microsoft employees with unhelpful non-fix "solutions," though.
* I nuked the Win7 HDD install and reinstalled Win8 afresh on the SSD (now slot 0). It seems to be stable so far.
* There was a 4-month period where Dell's GPU drivers had broken OpenCL compatibility and the manufacturer drivers would silently fail to install unless I ran a 3rd-party sketchware wiping program first and disabled signature enforcement on every boot.
* Audio drivers occasionally fail to wake from sleep (no audio till reboot). No, updating them to the manufacturer version didn't help. No, reinstalling Dell's recommended drivers didn't help either.
-------- Small Gripes --------
* No decent UNIX command line. Cygwin starts slowly and is poorly integrated with the system.
* I can't get decent 2-finger scroll without a 3rd party program that is occasionally broken by system updates.
* I can't remap capslock without downloading a 3rd-party program to perform registry edits.
* I can't shut off the screen without installing a 3rd party program to do so.
* In Win7, all allowed keyboard layout switching shortcuts were combinations of modifiers that conflicted with productivity apps like Illustrator. Also, the layout would occasionally become "stuck" and failed to respect the GUI switcher. In Win8, they added a no-conflict key combination for switching layouts but it doesn't work in fullscreen apps.
* Metro. It looks slick, but it doesn't have any of the options you regularly need to access. Fortunately the old menagerie of Windows utilities is still there, just moved around.
* No standard install system that lets you inspect the installer's logs, scripts, or contents.
* The intimate connection between my computer account and Microsoft cloud account creeps me out.
* The full-screen force-quit mechanism is insane (ctrl-alt-del, open Task Manager, press Windows to reveal the Launch Bar, click on the arrow to see all system tray icons, right-click the tiny Task Manager icon (a gray box), enable "Always on Top", highlight the program in the task manager, hit "End Task", wait, hit "End Task" on the dialog box that pops up, and finally decline to send a bug report to Microsoft)
* I can't use the keyboard to navigate directories that contain a mixture of files and folders because in Mircrosoft-Land "Alphabetical Order" means "Sort folders first, then files."
* The sub-HD preloaded desktop backgrounds (yes, really).
-------- Small Victories --------
* Cheaper, better hardware (not remotely cost effective, given the hassle)
* I can manually tweak virtual memory settings (not that I should have to tweak it, which I do, but I think it's terribly cool that I can and that there's a GUI for it)
* Compatibility
* The super-handy "superuser menu" (Win-X)
* The ability to roll-back updates. It has never worked when I needed it to, but I like the idea.
-------- Concluding Remarks --------
I've had better UX with linux, which is saying something, since I had previously considered linux UX to be fairly poor, or rather great -- until a mission-critical piece of it inevitably broke. Turns out the same thing applies Windows, except worse. Sadly, it sees that there is tremendous value in having a non-fragmented ecosystem.
My next computer will be a mac.
-------- My Plea to You --------
If you know how to fix any of my gripes, please speak up. I'm still a newbie. Maybe these are just growing pains. I don't think so, but I can hope.
busterarm|12 years ago
This has spawned a change in career because I currently make my living working in the Windows space. I'm throwing away 15 years of experience and a deep knowledge of Windows' internals. Also, work has slowed down tremendously since the year or so leading up to through the release of Windows 8. I don't see my current job existing in two years or other people as capable remaining where they are.
I can only address one of your gripes, but not really. Powershell isn't that bad. It's not good, but it's not that bad. It can do some things, but probably not the ones you really want.
scardine|12 years ago
[1] https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki [2] https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/
bane|12 years ago
I can't speak for Windows 8, but I've built a few dozen Windows 7 machines of various configurations and never had the kinds of install problems you've had. Here's how I do it.
1 - Put in the disk 2 - Boot to disk and run the installer 3 - it reboots a couple times while it's installing, but I don't care because I'm off doing something else 4 - it asks me a few questions and starts up 5 - let it run through a bunch of update cycles (which does take forever, but it's semi-automated so I'm doing something else most of the time)
On occasion I've had to install a network driver after it finishes, or if it's virtualized some guest additions but that's it. It does take hours, but they're mostly unattended hours that I can ignore, and if I want to use the machine quicker, I can skip the update cycles and just get going and let it update when I shut the machine off at the end of the day.
My latest machine, which I just built, didn't require any driver futsing.
I have no idea why you were trying to install 7 (and it sounds like your goal was to get to 8) on a 30GB SSD. I wouldn't install anything but a bare bones command-line only CentOS on a disk that small. It sounds like a couple days of your time were wasted trying to put a 50+GB OS on what's essentially a medium sized thumb drive and suffered for it.
All that being said, back in the XP days I did build a system with Program Files on a different machine and for the most part it did work, but it wasn't really well supported (even if it's supposed to be) and felt kludgy.
The Registry is one of the worst ideas in the history of computing. Nearly every time I've had something go wrong with a Windows machine that wasn't outright hardware failure, it was a problem with the registry. Registry editing really is a last resort for the bold and desperate. There's some serious voodoo in there.
So we've solved two of your problems off the bat, 1) don't install the OS on disks that are too small 2) don't mess with the registry
On to small gripes
* No decent UNIX command line. Cygwin starts slowly and is poorly integrated with the system.
True. Your best bet if you want Linux is to virtualize a linux machine or install linux or use Powershell. Remember, you aren't using a nix.
I can't get decent 2-finger scroll without a 3rd party program that is occasionally broken by system updates.
Touchpad support on Windows is lightyears behind OS X. Apple has actually turned the touchpad into something useful instead of an emergency replacement for a mouse. In Windows, just use a $5-10 2 button mouse with a scroll wheel.
* I can't remap capslock without downloading a 3rd-party program to perform registry edits.
True.
* I can't shut off the screen without installing a 3rd party program to do so.
What do you mean? Are you trying to just use the laptop hooked to a monitor and don't want the monitor on? Just set the power management so you can close the lid and leave the machine on. It's something that doesn't exist in OS X so you probably haven't thought of it.
* In Win7, all allowed keyboard layout switching shortcuts were combinations of modifiers that conflicted with productivity apps like Illustrator. Also, the layout would occasionally become "stuck" and failed to respect the GUI switcher. In Win8, they added a no-conflict key combination for switching layouts but it doesn't work in fullscreen apps.
What do you mean? Why are you trying to switch the keyboard layout so much?
* Metro. It looks slick, but it doesn't have any of the options you regularly need to access. Fortunately the old menagerie of Windows utilities is still there, just moved around.
No experience at all with 8, it looks like a version I'll probably skip alltogether as 7 is still majority supported and I don't have any compelling reasons to go to 8.
* No standard install system that lets you inspect the installer's logs, scripts, or contents.
True. Installation under OS X is much slicker and better thought out in general than on Windows. What's your compelling use case to need to do this though?
* The intimate connection between my computer account and Microsoft cloud account creeps me out.
Must be an 8 thing. 7 doesn't really have anything like this (at least that I use or care about).
* The full-screen force-quit mechanism is insane (ctrl-alt-del, open Task Manager, press Windows to reveal the Launch Bar, click on the arrow to see all system tray icons, right-click the tiny Task Manager icon (a gray box), enable "Always on Top", highlight the program in the task manager, hit "End Task", wait, hit "End Task" on the dialog box that pops up, and finally decline to send a bug report to Microsoft)
Hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc, go to "processes", right click on the problem process and just hit "end process tree". I don't know why you're doing all that extra stuff after you've got the task manager up.
* I can't use the keyboard to navigate directories that contain a mixture of files and folders because in Mircrosoft-Land "Alphabetical Order" means "Sort folders first, then files."
Why not? I pretty much only navigate in Explorer via keyboard. Why does sorting folder first (which in my and many people's opinions is far superior to mixing them up with your files) prohibit this?
It's bad enough in OS X that most of the finder replacements I've tried change the sort to folders first then files. Folders are different then files and should be sorted separately. Between music, retrocomputing, movies, and photography I manage over 3 and a half million files using pretty much explorer from the keyboard without much fuss. It's lightyears ahead of Finder in this respect.
One trick, with a folder open, just start typing the name of the file or folder you want and it'll quickly navigate down to around where the file is.
* The sub-HD preloaded desktop backgrounds (yes, really).
Replace them with whatever you want. The built in Windows picture viewer is better than OS X's (it even lets you look through folders full of pictures in sequence!) and you can right-click and turn any picture into a background.
* The ability to roll-back updates. It has never worked when I needed it to, but I like the idea.
Sometimes when your registry gets b0rk3d, this is the only way to save the computer. I don't really like it at all when I try to use it manually, but it's got my bacon out the fire on more than one occasion.
mkhpalm|12 years ago
tokenrove|12 years ago