Switchers to Linux/OSX - do you miss Windows?

Soldato
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Since I got my Mac at home, I've barely touched my PC at all - a couple of times to play Oblivion, and that's it. I'm seriously considering selling my reasonably well-specced PC for parts, as I don't use it.

I'm trying to work out whether I'll miss it. I genuinely don't think I'll miss Windows at all, but I think I might miss games... particularly Oblivion (I can get it on the 360, not the same but it'll probably do) and Dawn of War (no alternative, that'll be bye bye!)...

What do you guys who've switched to Mac or gone Linux think? What do you miss about Windows, if anything?
 
Associate
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A decent shell (The Finder is dreadful) and NTFS, but that's about it.

Oh, and Alt-Tab that works between windows rather than between applications (Yes I know of exposé but it's slow and badly placed).
 
Soldato
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As you prob seen with all my post I am a 5 days mac owner and loved it to bit now... First couple of days was giving me a bit of head ach getting to know things and finding software i like.

Now I got everything and got use to everything and the know of MAC I LOVE IT :D

Honestly it soo much better faster and to be honest easier now i know what to do ha ha ha....

Am i right there not as much software for Mac like there is for windows? Or is it just the matter of finding them?
 
Soldato
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Will_3rd said:
miss playing games on it......and that's about it

oh and being able to right click --> create text document, an essential feature missing from OSX :p

Now this been mention here i though i ask :D I too have miss this feature so what is the easy way of doing it on the mac then :D
 
Caporegime
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mosfet said:
A decent shell (The Finder is dreadful) and NTFS, but that's about it.

Oh, and Alt-Tab that works between windows rather than between applications (Yes I know of exposé but it's slow and badly placed).

Yes, the Finder is a bit crapola. I want to be able to do more from open/save dialog boxes like rename/delete/copy/paste files.

By the way, did you know pressing CMD+` will cycle through the current application's windows? Note that it's a ` not a '

And Leopard is supposed to be coming along with Sun's ZFS which seems to be the DB's of file systems.
 
Permabanned
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I do do miss windows to be honest (and I still have a windows machine), not because I prefer windows to OS-X, but there's a lot I can't do on my Mac.

1) I use a program called R (a stats package) and whilst the core distribution runs on OS-X there's a number of "library" packages that don't.

2) MS Office isn't native yet

3) There's a good deal of maths applications that don't have universal binaries yet.

4) It can be annoying reading Adobe PDF's in Preview, when I click CTL-DOWN it moves to the same point in the in following page that you where at in the previous page, rather than going to the top of the next page... mighty annoying

5) It's hard to find cheap add-ons for example I wanted to get a USB device that had composite-in, I am yet to find one.

But the good features far outweigh any of the above, in particular:

A) Networking - it is FAR easier to get my Mac to detect my PC, than the other way round. X11 is great for SSH'ing into a server and running a graphical app.

B) The Expose (thats the hot corners thing right?) is outstanding, especially if you have LOADS of windows open like I normally do. You just flick your pointer to a corner and I get a little version of all the windows, and I just click on the one I want, MUCH better than ALT-TAB in windows.

C) Connecting extra monitors is VERY easy, and I encounter no problems. On windows for example if I have a video playing and than transfer it to another monitor, it crashes.

D) I like that you have decent Unix style command line when you need it, so you've got all your data manipulation tools like grep, cut, head etc..on windows you'd need MiniGW /MSyS.

E) There are lots of Mac only academic bits of software, a good example is Papers which for anyone who deals with large numbers of research articles (so hence any postgrad) it's a must.

F) Although I can't play games on my Mac, for me this is quite a good thing, I treat it much more like a work /research machine than my PC (which is quite the opposite of the Mac adds I know).

G) I like the fact that there's not a bizilion different combinations of hardware (so I dont have to read the backs of software packages looking through something like:
AMD 1.4GHz Athlon or Intel Pentium 4 1.4GHz or etc..
512 MB RAM
Geforce 2 or better or ATI radeon 9200 or better Direct X 9 compatible GPU
Direct X 9 compatible 5.1 channel surround sound card or better
etc....)
On most mac software it's just
Intel Mac or PPC 1.4GHz +

In essence once you look past a few annoying bits and peices, a Mac is a far more efficient work tool and more enjoyable operating system to use. Although I've not used Vista yet. And whilst it's not true that Macs "dont crash" (because they do, and quite a bit too, R has crashed my Macbook tons of times) they are much more stable than windows. If software companies get there act together and start porting their software to intel based Mac's I honestly think Apple have a chance of taking a large part of the hardware market in the future, that is if leopard isn't crap!

David
 
Soldato
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Like others, one thing I do miss about being a full-time Windows user (now Linux) is just the convenience of being able to have a quick bash of a game in a spare five minutes, rather than having to restart and boot up into Windows. Having said that, I'm not exactly an avid gamer so it's really no big deal. And furthermore, it's somewhat nice not to have the distraction.

The other major issue is the lack of good 'media' software, both for creation and playback. While much software for Linux is outstanding, especially from OS projects, many don't match the maturity or quality of their Windows counterparts.

Amarok/Listen/Q-L are amazing (excepting crappy gstreamer), but fail to beat the simplicity and flexibility of foobar2000, for example. The GIMP is superb, and while I do actually use it professionally, no matter what anyone says it does not match up to the build quality and performance of Photoshop (I know it was never designed to be an equivalent, but it is the only equivalent). Same goes for Inkscape, fantastic but not in Illustrator's league. EAC's yet to be matched - Rubyripper's a great project but rather buggy. Then there's the lack of decent, professional audio-creation software - Cubase, Fruity Loops, CEP/Audition and so on. And the equivalent lack of software from professional soundcard manufacturers. I'll be damned if I can figure out how the outputs of my EWS88MT have been organised in the Gnome volume control panel, but nonetheless it does magically work.

Does it make me consider going back? No, not at all. Linux more than satisfies my day-to-day needs and excels in the areas that I really need a computer for - web-dev, programming, server admin etc. Love it.
 
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Soldato
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Games, but im not a huge game player otherwise i wouldnt have swapped.
The biggiest thing though has to be decent hardware support! Like others have said soundcard support just doesnt exsist, and what there is, is only through reverse engineering.

Though i did try go back to windows and found i missed linux more than ive ever missed windows, thats even with not being able to get 3d accel to work in linux.
 
Man of Honour
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I switched over to OS X about 2 years ago and I don't understand, what is this Windows you speak of? :confused:
 
Soldato
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See, since I got my Mac I've really found the 'switch' very easy, seeing as the whole reason I got a Mac was because I missed OSX which I used at work for two years 9-5, so the 'new' bits of it weren't really new to me. All I had to get accustomed to was improvements from 10.0.8 (I think) to Tiger, and to be honest they're not so much changes as additions mostly. Everything that was there is still there I think.

I do miss Oblivion though. It seems so silly to keep a PC I could probably hack to bits and sell for a few hundred quid just to play Oblivion and Daw of War, but I think I might actually end up keeping it :D
 
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