I tried a Mac Book Pro for 2 weeks

There's always so much anti Microsoft talk on here, and pro Apple talk. I decided to give a Mac Book a try in the name of science (plus I needed one to troubleshoot some issues our Apple users were having). We're hiring a lot right now and had some brand new loaded up laptops anyhow.

I was a Windows guy for years, but switched to Linux when all of the MS Updates were just too much.

After updating to El Capitan, getting setup was fairly easy. I had to go find drivers for the USB Ethernet adapter I was using, but it was way easier than going to Lenovo's site and figuring out which driver I need. I used Safari to go download Chrome and Firefox. I was happy to find the Remote Desktop Connection app in the iTunes store. I am a system admin, so I need to be able to connect to Windows servers... We use Google apps and most of my day is spent in a browser.

Getting my monitors connected was no big deal, other than needing Thunderbolt to HDMI cables. The mouse and keyboard were typical bluetooth setup. I did have to change some mouse options as my fingers are trained after years of using MS scroll mice. I was able to connect to our Google cloud printers and our networked printers. All very easy.

My first issue came up while using 3 screens. I would open a private or incognito tab in chrome or firefox and they would load on a 2nd desktop. Great for porn, but not so much for logging into a different g-apps account to be able to read something to put in another browser. I finally figured out the 4 finger swipe on the touchpad.

All was well for a week and a half after that. Then I connected a USB hard drive. I could read it, but could not write to the NTFS partition. Some googling led me to believe that I would have to buy software to make it work. This was the deal breaker.

Back to Ubuntu. Physically, it was a really nice machine. I also really liked the touchpad. The gestures work well with OSX. I've also gotten really used to being able to go to the terminal in Ubuntu to do things. The Apple terminal was OK for connecting to servers. I really missed the ability to sudo and get things done. That's probably a good thing for most people.

I think they have a place for some people, but not all. For what I do, it doesn't do any more than my chromebook at home. I would still probably take the macbook over Windows these days though!

Yep. My dad wanted to convert me to the Cult of the Blue Apple away from Windows. I warned him "no", because I like games. He wanted to convert me so badly, he strait up bought me a Macbook Pro. My experience is similar to yours. It's very nice hardware, but it's clearly designed with a fairly standardized type of use and of user in mind. If you want to do things that are fairly basic outside of that (like gaming), it will fight you.

Setting up bootcamp to run Win7 caused all sorts of problems, and continues to do so. Although the hardware is there, it sucks for any type of gaming. Gaming software that is supported by MacOS frequently doesn't run quite right. Plain old Steam has issues on MacOS, not being able to synch with the cloud properly.

Although well made, I can't believe this is what Apple considers their hardest core "professional" laptop. No optical drive, no integrated ethernet, only 2 usb. Sure, it has 2 Thunderbolt, but that isn't as universal as USB.

On the flip side of this coin....
I had a few windows machines built for my by pro shops in the past. I'd get about 1 year per thousand I spend on a machine. After a few machines I decided to buy an eMac for about $600 I think (mac refurb). I turned it on and didn't do anything other than use it for about 6 years. So, I was at 1 year per hundred spent. No looking back, apple products for me.
Then a few years ago I bought a Mac mini for, I think around $500? After about 2 years it started giving me issues, another year down the road it was dead. I needed to replace it (it was my HTPC) and didn't want to spend $600+ for a current refurb'd mac mini after my last experience (my vision was cloudy. That "bad" Mac experience was still much, much cheaper than my windows fiasco's). So I bought a windows machine a few months back. I hate it. It's clunky in operation, Windows Media Center (it's a freaking windows product on a windows machine) is glitchy and unreliable. I intentionally bought a windows 7 machine (pro, 64 bit) and I keep getting these $*#& pop-ups on the screen telling me I can upgrade to windows 10!! For one thing, only microsoft does 'upgrades' worse than apple. For another thing, I know! Stop telling me over, and over, and over again that I can upgrade. Gawd I hate microsoft.
When that windows machine dies, it's another Mac for me.

All that being said, Mac is irritating me of late. Their quest for control over what you can and cannot do, and how you do it seems to be getting worse.

When I went back to my win7 laptop after my first chromebook died, I hated it with a fiery passion. I almost went with a new macbook air, but the $$$ vs a chrome book was more than I could justify for having iTunes. Thankfully, reverting to console gaming beforehand made gaming a non issue. I will revisit the subject when 4K is the norm.

You can sudo and get things done on the mac as well. Darwin is basically just BSD running on Mach. Personally I prefer to run XQuartz and a real xterm over the standard Mac terminal app.

There's no optical drive because people don't use optical drives any more. I've been using a MBP for work (I'm a software engineer) for over a decade now, my last two MBPs haven't had optical drives, and I haven't missed them. The only thing I did with before that was watch DVDs on an occasional plane flight, and there are other solutions for that.

The lack of built-in ethernet is annoying, yes. They dropped it because the current-gen MBPs are too thin to put an RJ-45 port on the side.

As I understand it, the problem with NTFS is that Microsoft has never documented that filesystem's format, and it's quite complicated. People have reverse-engineered it, but nobody's quite willing to trust that for writing to it, only for reading.

I played with bootcamp once (many years ago), but was never really interested in running native windows on my mac. I have VMware Fusion for the occasional windows app I want to run (mainly stuff like the configuration/logging app for my RaceLogic Traction Control system, or my DL1 data logger). If you live and die by windows-only applications (such as games), then no, a mac is not the right answer.

I didn't understand half of what you said...could you check your Facebook status or not?

Some of my IT folks use Macs, but they all say that the network environment is owned by Microsoft, so having a PC makes a lot of things easier.

In El Capitan, I know they did some stuff re: root/sudo, etc. for security's sake. I think you can turn it off.

And, for remote management, check this out:
http://www.royalapplications.com/ts/osx/features

Here is the thing about Mac's and PC's. Each have their overall design perimeters and once you step out side those, it can get interesting.

The MAC OS's are great if you can run everything you need to within those perimeters. They are very stable and I think good overall OS's. The problem is because of market share and Apple's developer policies, not everything that you may want to do falls inside those perimeters. So then you get into the world of VM's and patchwork to make the Mac adapt to the PC world. that is where the fun begins.

People complain about the MSFT products but it's really tough to design an OS that can run on so many user platforms and not have issues. Shoot, Win 10 is running just fine on my 6 year old Notebook I bought for $300 used.

I'll be very interested what the UX is like on my new ultrabook I've got coming. My company (Dell) was clearing out some Demo hardware that they refurbished to it's employees so I just got a E7450 (14" ultrabook with the new 5th gen processors) for over half off what it would have been new.

BTW, asoduk, what do you use for managing multiple computers in Ubuntu. I've been looking for a Mobaxterm/Royal TS equivalent in Linux, but hadn't come up with something good.