Plaidophile

So, because there's no more Linux support, we have to move to Windows for our primary dev environment, and since Windows and OSX don't really get along that well in terms of managing file permissions and so on, I decided it'd be easier to just reinstall Windows on the laptop and use that as my only environment.

I was never that big a fan of Windows, but starting today I absolutely loathe it. Anyone who thinks that Windows and Macintosh are "more or less the same" can bite me.

One of the common complaints about MacOS vs. Windows is that Windows lets you resize the window from every side, while MacOS only lets you use the single lower-right drag handle. Well, I'm sorry, but that one single drag handle is actually EASY TO USE, while the Windows borders are so skinny that you have to be really fiddly with your mouse in order to actually grab it. For someone with a severe RSI, that is quite literally painful.

People complain about how the Mac is very mouse-oriented while Windows lets you do more stuff from the keyboard. I actually hardly have to touch the mouse in MacOS, and the keyboard actions are very efficient; cmd-Tab to switch entire applications - not individual windows, cmd-space to bring up Spotlight which lets you find pretty much any document you want by just typing a few letters of the filename or any of the content inside it, and application menu-item accelerator keys are usually straightforward and easy to remember. In Windows they're not even consistent. Some apps let you do ^C/^V for copy/paste, some seem to require you to use the older ctrl/shift-insert keys (which aren't very convenient on many modern keyboards), and some apps don't even seem to support reasonable clipboard stuff at all.

MacOS might not be completely perfect in automatically configuring things, but at least it's pretty good. Your mouse is recognized and turns on right away (you don't have to wait for login to finish and then wait another minute for it to decide to maybe let you know that, oh yeah, the mouse was found), Wi-Fi networks are VERY easy to connect to (unlike on Windows where you often have three different competing 'Wi-Fi connection wizards' which all step on each others' toes, and even when they don't, figuring out how to get it to even accept your goddamn WPA key is a bit of a challenge), cellphones sync over bluetooth without much fuss at all (pair the phone, start up iSync, the entire sync takes just a few seconds, compared to Windows where you pair the phone, bring up your vendor-specific sync app, tell it you have a phone, the app insists on redoing the pairing, eventually it finds the phone after about 10 tries, then it MIGHT sync or it MIGHT NOT, and when it does sync it opens about 20 different sessions because That's The Way Outlook Does Things).

And even then, it's just the first sync after powering on your system that works. The next sync fails because the phone is still connected and the vendor-provided sync tool doesn't know how to deal with that. (And unlike on OSX, where sync is indicated by a little tiny spinning arrow in the menu extra area, the damn Windows sync tool decides it's necessary to put up - of course - a big ugly window in the middle of the screen to let me know exactly what's going on!) Also unlike on OSX, there doesn't seem to be any way to explicitly disconnect from the device. Also, bringing up the "bluetooth settings" window also brings up the "add new connection" wizard. (Even though there's a separate menu item for bringing up "add new connection." STUPID.)

Of course, don't even get me started on how much of a piece of shit Outlook is compared to Mail.app/iCal/Addressbook. Not to mention that Outlook is so stupidly locked-down now that other apps can't even make use of the stuff for fear of viruses or other malware (good luck making Pidgin use your address book for contact information, if Outlook's address book even supports IM addresses anyway).

Every app wants to bring up its own stupid window in the center of the screen on top of everything else. It wants to do this when I'm in the middle of something else. On the other hand, when there's a notification window that I WANT to see, of course it doesn't show up at all - it starts up buried under all the other windows on the screen! Under OSX, there's no issue with windows needing to mess with your user experience because all they have to do is bounce the dock icon and that notifies you gently without interrupting what you're doing while also without getting lost.

The few apps which do properly use taskbar notifications on Windows are still freaking annoying. Passive notifications (like a new IM) show up on OSX like a little red dot on your dock, visible and easy to see but not distracting. On Windows, the taskbar button - which is big - flashes, repeatedly, and annoyingly. Outlook's notifications are less annoying (showing a transitory notification window and then changing the systray icon) but they're also easy to overlook, and since the systray constantly shuffles around and rearranges everything you don't even have a glanceable interface since you have to actually actively look to see if there's an envelope instead of the little stopwatch or whatever the hell it is that Outlook's icon is supposed to be.

On the topic of the systray, god DAMN is it loaded up with a bunch of useless icons, while simultaneously managing to not have a single one of the icons I actually care about. Oh, neither of the ethernet ports are active? YOU DON'T SAY. And I have two icons for my wireless connection, one telling me I'm connected (in a not very clear way) and one telling me... that it's not managing my wireless connection. Great! Oh and then another one tells me that I have a phone configured for use with it! And of course each of these little tiny icons with their little tiny fiddly click targets (many of which are activated in inconsistent ways) are the only way of accessing a bunch of stuff. Okay, conceptually it's no different from the Menu Extras area on OSX, but the implementation is very different (menu extras don't just jump around, the icons are clear and concise and meaningful without taking a lot of space, they're activated consistently, they tell you useful information, and there's generally more than one way to access certain things, not to mention that the Menu Extras are mostly pretty consistent about how you use them).

Per-window vs. screen-level menu bars are mostly a matter of taste, except that screen-level menu bars are also much more consistent and clear and well-organized (because they refer to the app, not the window). It also seems that every single freaking app on Windows has its own stupid theming engine, and so all of their menu bars behave in fundamentally different ways (with regard not only to look and feel, but where to find them, how items activate, how to deal with navigating deeply-nested menus, etc.)

While Exposé is fairly overrated, one mode I do use a lot is "Reveal desktop." There is an equivalent function in Windows (Win-D), but Exposé is actually easy to use and allows you to do complex drag operations between the windows as they move around and so on, whereas revealing the desktop just makes everything disappear, and if you happen to do something while it's revealed that brings up a window or two, well, the next Win-D press will just hide those windows instead of restoring your previous state.

There are two benefits to switching to Windows: the work-related toolchain installation for Windows is much slicker than the equivalent stuff for Linux, and I can finally play Team Fortress 2 for the PC. Neither of those have anything to do with the OS.

I hate this operating system.