That's a) too vague and b) I know my org runs a 100,000+ install base of Win 7 and unless people do something stupid no one reinstalls their OS ever. The reason you might not see much Mac and Linux calls is people aren't doing the same things they do with Windows in a business environment. Try installing a ton of 3rd party stuff, add a bunch of old software, expect it to work with any hardware you throw at it and you'll find Mac and Linux fail miserably beyond your normal browse/email/code/publish workflows.

If you are talking Enterprise - there is nothing that even comes close to what Windows does - ton of hardware, ton of backwards compatible stuff, ton of manageability stuff and so on. Try doing all that with a Mac or Linux. I guarantee you won't get too far unless you run a startup with people doing just coding and deployment. Windows in Enterprise is an entirely different beast - that it works so well is in itself a miracle. Mac and Linux won't even compete beyond the basics.

But that's the thing: one the biggest value-adds of the mac ecosystem is that the hardware combinations are all well tested (or, from the point of view of an app/driver developer, they are heavily constrained). While it's not Microsoft's fault that they have to deal with a combinatorial explosion of drivers and it's not 3rd party vendors fault that they have to deal with a combinatorial explosion of hardware configurations, it's still a problem that leads to instability in the Windows ecosystem, users still have to face the instability, and it's still an argument in favor of using the Mac ecosystem if you value stability (outside of enterprise contexts -- we're in complete agreement there, OSX server is a shitshow). My personal anecdata is in a sibling post to yours.

If you need a UNIX like system and can't live with Cygwin or native Windows tools then yes, having OS X laptop and hardware is the way to go. Admittedly the Mac hardware is still a bit nicer than anything in PC space but the trouble is Windows support is not very great (look up trouble about System Interrupts taking a ton of CPU on both Windows and Linux running on Mac laptops for instance.)

Thanks! That's good to know! After 3 or 4 tries, looks like Cunningham's Law pays off again (sorry).

> If you need a UNIX like system...

Yep, that's a big plus for me. A UNIX-like system with a decent terminal emulator and an IDE like Xcode makes my workflow so much easier. Probably enough to keep me in the mac ecosystem regardless.

Why does my daughters MBP frequently get very hot and the 'genius' in the Apple store tell us there's nothing wrong with it (in the most condescending way possible)

Apple stuff is just as buggy as Windows stuff (perhaps even more so)

This is especially true on Laptop where no drivers update ever get released.

I have an external USB3 1TB hard disk drive that boots into Ubuntu 14.04. I'm using it right now.

So far it boots with all my computers and several work laptops and desktops and recognizes all the hardware I have used so far. I does it much better than windows, because for some stuff like add on video and network cards, Windows needs the boring 'go to manufacturer's website, download and install' additional drivers.

In fact, if Windows was installed into the external drive, it would have failed to boot in a second computer. Linux can.

I also use and enjoy Windows and friends, like MSSQL Server and Visual Studio, but let's be realistic here:

Linux is much more from what it used to be a decade ago.

My fiancee has had her PC updated to windows 8. Now she can't play solitare on one side of the screen in a window with a video playing in a window on the other side of the screen.

She's forced to 'split' the screen in half, with solitare taking up a full 50% of the monitor.

Now if she wants to bring up a web page, it only loads up in the 'desktop' half of the screen.

This type of interaction is infuriating for someone used to XP, 7, etc.

I switched to the Windows ecosystem from the mac ecosystem in 2012 because two things happened: I kept hearing that windows had gotten better, and I finally grew up enough to admit that none of the windows complaints I made as a mac fanboy were actually based on experience. Windows did nothing but disappoint and embarrass for a year and a half before I finally gave up and moved back to mac. I've got a list of "small" complaints the length of my arm and a large list of big complaints that were "my fault" in the weak sense that with foreknowledge I could have avoided them. I won't post those. Here are the big complaints that happened after I adopted a "don't do anything my mother wouldn't do" policy in an attempt to improve stability:

* An update broke the dynamic linker or something: every time I would try to launch a .exe I would get a segfault in ntdll. Needless to say, rollback didn't fix the problem, all checksums appeared fine, and I had to reinstall.

* During the Win 7 generation, the shut-down process broke. All process would appear to exit, but the computer would then spin up its fans and never actually shut off. Every time I restarted the computer would want to spend the better part of a day on fsck. Naturally I habitually canceled it; day-long reboot times aren't acceptable. Eventually this led to blue-screens on reboot. Reinstall!

* After months of normal functionality, Windows 8 decided to forget my serial number. Upon entering the number again, it refused to re-activate. After 5 hours on the phone running remote diagnostics, they had me reinstall the OS.

* Most recently, sound and/or keyboard would stop working on wake from sleep. I installed fresh drivers from the laptop vendor (they mentioned a similar problem in the release notes) and it didn't work. I uninstalled those and installed fresh drivers from the sound card manufacturer; those didn't work either. What kind of a laptop is a laptop without sleep?

* The battery life got down to 20 minutes on a year old laptop. That was the last straw.

I've been told that this isn't normal, but I've caught the same people who told me that I simply purchased from the wrong manufacturer living with huge wake-from-sleep bugs so I don't know what to think. I'm sure that there exists hardware on which Windows is as stable or more stable than Mac OS is on my mac, but I don't know how to reliably find it.

Now, it isn't fair to say, 'You must have 5 years in desktop support to use this product', but it harkens back to the problem of that people are making judgements about an OS that aren't really caused by the OS. You can say, 'I had issues with drivers' and 'I felt that the UX here and there was poor', but to say, 'Windows is broken. Here's the problems I had that say it's broken' is dead wrong.

Furthermore, a lot of people do this kind of stuff on 500 dollar laptops and other equally crappy hardware and expect the same kind of quality as they got from a $2000 MPB. You want a rock solid PC? Buy a Dell Precision. Comparing the cheap hardware put in the budget-line laptops to the (mostly) decent hardware put in the line of portable Macs is pretty foolish, and again comes back to the idea that it's not Windows that's broken, it's your crappy hardware.

Windows is unbelievably stable and while it isn't without it's problems, 99% of the problems that people actually report as 'problems with Windows', aren't.

That's why I add the word "ecosystem." I'm sure that most of the big problems I complained about can be traced to a 3rd party, but the fact that something isn't really Microsoft's fault doesn't mean it isn't their responsibility in the sense that it would be different in the mac ecosystem and therefore should affect my purchasing decisions.

* Broken activation: maybe a 3rd party program overwrote a registry key, maybe I reinstalled the damn OS too many times and their servers locked me out. Either way it's not Microsoft's "fault" per se, but Mac OS X doesn't have an activation mechanism to break, so it's a win for the Mac ecosystem.

* Broken fsck: there was really no excuse for this, it falls squarely in the MS's-fault bin.

* Broken major updates: I didn't mention the broken 8.0->8.1 update because it's evidently common knowledge in the Windows ecosystem that updating without doing a clean install approximately never works and it was therefore "my fault" that I tried it. Guess what? It approximately always works in the mac ecosystem, and that's a win for the mac ecosystem.

* Broken linker: Undetected virus? Registry overwrite? Clearly it didn't affect everyone, so it must have been something specific to my computer, and therefore probably wasn't MS's fault per-se. Still, during that install I had been extremely careful about being gentle by not installing non-default drivers, system tools, etc, so it must have been the fault of an app, possibly one I downloaded by fumbling while running the download-button gauntlet. Guess what? That kind of BS simply doesn't exist in the Mac ecosystem, at least not nearly at the levels that it exists in the Windows ecosystem. Microsoft's fault? Not really, but I'm not a charity or a judge, so I don't really care. If things are better on the mac side of the fence, that's reason enough for me to return.

> Comparing the cheap hardware put in the budget-line laptops to the (mostly) decent hardware put in the line of portable Macs is pretty foolish

Fair enough, but once you're buying the expensive PC hardware the Microsoft ecosystem no longer wins by default on price so it comes down to personal preference and things that are Microsoft's fault.

> 99% of the problems that people actually report as 'problems with Windows', aren't.

True but irrelevant.

Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause ntdll to break. Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause Windows activation to break. Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause shutdowns to take hours instead of seconds. Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause suspend to spontaneously bork.

You're blaming inexperience for things that are fixed on pretty much every modern operating system. Yes, those problems are caused by the OS, because it's really the only OS that chronically has those kinds of issues in those quantities.

Let's go through and demonstrate exactly why blaming the user for broken software is inaccurate at best:

* According to jjoonathan, the ntdll segfaults started happening after an update - something which should be routine. Do you expect users not to update their software? Especially when Windows will happily do the update and reboot automatically (and annoyingly, I might add).

* Shutting down isn't that hard, yet somehow Windows pretends that it is. It's rather hilarious to watch Windows take twice as long as, say, openSUSE to do something as basic and fundamental as shutting down. This isn't even including Windows' hilariously-convoluted method of installing system updates; if my laptop's openSUSE installation can install updates without having to drop down into some sort of maintenance mode, why can't Windows (for the record, though, OS X annoyingly has the same problem). I shouldn't have to sit through 100 updates installing when all I want to do is shut off my laptop and continue with my life.

* Activation problems with Windows are very common. I've run into them repeatedly with clean installs and multiple Windows versions. I shouldn't have to open a command prompt and type in arcane commands in order to activate Windows so I can customize the homescreen. Hell, I shouldn't have to do something as silly as activating my rightfully-purchased copy of my operating system, period, but that's another story.

* Really? You're going to blame Windows' fragility when it comes to power management on the user?

These sorts of problems are common with Windows. They aren't common with modern operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD (and even OS X, no matter how hard Apple tries to mangle it and force it to be as poor of a product as Windows).

Yeah, "unbelievably stable" and "Windows" don't belong in the same sentence (except for this one, obviously). You're delusional if you sincerely believe Microsoft's shoddy programming to be the fault of their customers* of all people.

> Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause ntdll to break. Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause Windows activation to break. Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause shutdowns to take hours instead of seconds. Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause suspend to spontaneously bork.

Inexperience causes all these things. Listen, my experience goes way, way beyond 'anecdotal' when it comes to managing end users running Windows. Never, ever, ever with the exception of a small handful of updates, does Windows fundamentally break itself. When you see a bluescreen, 100% of the time it is your fault or it's your hardware's fault. 100% of the time. Sometimes it might look like it's not your fault. Sometimes it's McAfee removing important files that break the OS because it's being stupid, but that's not a Window's problem.

If shutdowns are taking awhile, something is broken. Your inability to diagnose that isn't the fault of the OS. Ever.

If your computer 'suddenly borks', then your hardware failed, or you are bad at computer. 100% of the time.

If you can't manage to upgrade Windows, than I can't help you. Someone did it from 1.0 to 6.2 in a straight shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WP7AkJo3OE

When stuff like this happens:

> According to jjoonathan, the ntdll segfaults started happening after an update

It usually means that some third party software, usually legacy/dated drivers or your AV solution, has fucked up. The aforementioned McAfee bug is pretty famous for that, which you can read about here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/mcafee_false_positiv...

Your inability to diagnose the problem isn't the fault of the OS.

The half dozen Windows computers I own and the close to 600 I manage never, ever have these problems that seem to plague other people who seem to insist 'it's just Windows'. So, why is it that my customers never have these problems that you insist are ubiquitous to the platform? It'd be because I can manage them. I can leverage GPO to make sure my AV solutions at least report when it's doing something fishy. I monitor my computers so when something bluescreens, I get a copy of the dmp file and I can peel through it immediately. I don't let my users have unrestricted access to absolutely everything. I can use and manage the OS and leverage the extremely potent tools Microsoft gives me to diagnose problems and use that knowledge to prevent problems in the future.

And here's the thing: I don't really enjoy white-knighting Windows, but I also really don't enjoy people in the field of IT acting like Zealots in regards to products and platforms they don't know anything about.

I'm not a huge fan of Linux. I'm not a big fan of how esoteric the OS is and how management is unintuitive and complex. I'm not very good at fixing the problems that show up on the platform because quite frankly, I'm just not experienced enough to take any problem and pave a path to a solution. I've sworn more at my SAN running Openfiler because of Openfiler than I care to admit and if I could do it all over again, I'd never have put Openfiler on that box, but here's the thing: I'll never say, 'Linux is bad' or 'Linux isn't stable' or 'Holy shit I'm so mad at OpenFiler because if you have an iSCSI implementation and your boot device fails, your arrays are fucked unless you can rebuild', because I'd be speaking from misunderstanding, inexperience, and an incomplete understanding of the tools I'm using and I might look like an idiot by saying as much.

These things are the fault of the operating system when other operating systems have already solved these problems. Blaming users for Microsoft's bastard child of DOS and VMS being poorly designed is, well, misguided, to say the least.

I don't particularly like white-knighting Unix, either, but after about a decade and a half of Windows support and administration - in environments ranging from ordinary households to healthcare facilities with hundreds of workstations and almost half as many virtualized servers - it eventually got to the point where I'd rather use something that doesn't require that level of babysitting - something like Unix, for example - and put my time and energy into better things than unclogging my Registry and sitting through 2-hour-long shutdowns due to Windows Update and such.

I don't even particularly like GNU/Linux, either, but it's certainly amusing to see someone like you compare it with Windows and call the former, of all things, "esoteric". Windows is the textbook definition of esoteric.

And nice ad hominem, by the way, assuming that the Dunning-Kruger effect is in play right now.

Your case is extreme. But on every windows install I've seen at least one of these kind of inexplicable un-fixable problems you just have to re-install to fix or live with.

I like linux because every file is owned by a package, or it's a plain text config file in /etc, or it's in my home folder and has absolutely no effect on another user. It's just generally more under control. Files are not just modified by patch installers etc. So I love OS X app-folders, but many things for OS X use pkg installers, including stuff from Apple, so it's kinda the windows situation again, just a bit more transparent because it's mostly unix.

My tips for Windows: don't do what your mother would do. First things first, go into Programs and Software in the control panel, and uninstall stuff, even stuff you don't recognize. Check the Device Manager to see if you've accidentally uninstalled a driver, and if so re-install it (get it from the laptop manufacturer's support website). Don't install or run Microsoft or Adobe (or Apple) software, stick to the open-source windows software where possible, like 7-zip, sumatra-pdf, Libreoffice, Firefox or Chrome, etc. Also go ahead and disable System Recovery on all drives, to save disk space and performance, since if something goes wrong you'll have to re-install anyway.

This is probably one of those things where experiences will vary but for me most of the time on my old win7 laptop when a bad install broke stuff system recovery worked fantastically.

I've been experimenting with NixOS lately, which has some very nice features along the lines of System Restore done right; being able to roll back any change to system configuration is pretty awesome.

Startup "chkdsk" on a Windows machine that simply didn't finish shutting down should be very quick - basically the last thing Windows does is write a "clean shutdown" flag to the drive. On startup, if the disk doesn't have that "clean shutdown" flag set then Windows sees the drive as "dirty" and will prompt to check the disk. Chkdsk for this should take less than 5 minutes and will generally not find anything (since almost all processes had ended & almost all files should have been closed). If chkdsk in this scenario is taking a very long time or is making a lot of corrections, that's a very strong indicator of disk problems.

I have no particular guidance on sound issues.

There are a bunch of things that could impact battery life, but if you have hard drive issues and it's constantly remapping sectors, etc. then that would definitely have an impact.

IMO? You already own it. Boot Camp is the best way I know of to run Windows on a portable machine. (I still prefer to do Visual Studio work through Fusion on my 2012 15" rMBP, but I'll reboot to play games when away from home.)

I don't know if I'd call Windows "worse", I think you happen to be a serious edge case, but I like having both at hand for different things. There's no better environment for what I want to do with regards to game development than VS2015 on Windows, there's no better general-purpose dev environment for me than OS X.