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917 points cryptophreak | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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gspencley ◴[] No.45762648[source]
A lot of this type of stuff boils down to what you're used to.

My wife is not particularly tech savvy. She is a Linux user, however. When we started a new business, we needed certain applications that only run on Windows and since she would be at the brick and mortar location full time, I figured we could multi-purpose a new laptop for her and have her switch to Windows.

She hated it and begged for us to get a dedicated Windows laptop for that stuff so she could go back to Linux.

Some of you might suggest that she has me for tech support, which is true, but I can't actually remember the last time she asked me to troubleshoot something for her with her laptop. The occasions that do come to mind are usually hardware failure related.

Obviously the thing about generlizations is that they're never going to fit all individuals uniformly. My wife might be an edge case. But she feels at home using Linux, as it's what she's used to ... and strongly loathed using Windows when it was offered to her.

I feel that kind of way about Mac vs PC as well. I am a lifelong PC user, and also a "power user." I have extremely particular preferences when it comes to my UI and keyboard mappings and fonts and windowing features. When I was forced to use a Mac for work, I honestly considered looking for a different position because it was just that painful for me. Nothing wrong with Mac OS X, a lot of people love it. But I was 10% as productive on it when compared to what I'm used to... and I'm "old dog" enough that it was just too much change to be able to bear and work with.

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1. abustamam ◴[] No.45773505[source]
I grew up with windows. Used it until after college when I was gifted a MacBook pro for dev work. I used parallels to keep a windows box close by (I think I only ever used up to Vista), but then eventually I just went full Mac and got used to the interface and key bindings. It's a fine interface, not amazing, not terrible, but I can get around. And every job I've had basically required a Mac anyway.

Years later, I built a gaming machine so obviously I needed Windows. Got Win10 and eventually upgraded to 11 and it's just so jarring how unusable it is.

In older windows I could click on my computer to see all my drives and files. Now I have no idea where it is so I just click on the little folder icon at the bottom which opens I think my home directory, then I have to click on somewhere else to see my C and D drives. I can probably make a desktop shortcut or something but point being is that it's un intuitive. And powershell is not a great terminal, and I haven't found one for windows.

SO, after learning that gaming works well on Linux, I recently switched to Ubuntu, and I haven't looked back. Gaming, AI workflows, everything I need works just perfectly, and if it doesn't I can easily customize things to work the way I want it to. I'm not treated as a criminal for installing software on my computer. It's awesome.