Migrate from Mac to Windows ?

Migrate to Windows ? Did I eat something ? Why go against the current ?

;tldr Begin

I am considering, for real, moving over to Windows from Mac. I have been an avid OSX user since 2003 and even made good living off writing iOS software. Now since I mainly do Web development. Is it possible ? Can you use windows even though you are not doing any Windows work ? (not dotNET programming or java).

;tldr End.


I searched long and hard for blog posts about this subject, and I did not find any except for one guy who is a photographer. All developers were running as fast as they can towards a new Mac, very few were moving full time to Linux. I am a huge fan of Linux. I have been using Linux in one form or another since well before version 1.0 came out. In 1999 I moved away from all products coming from Redmond. Before that I was a Delphi programmer and Windows System Administrator for a few years. In 2000 I was a full time Linux system administrator and stayed there until 2007. I am a RHCE (Redhat certified engineer). I purchased a Mac, Powerbook 17" in 2003, gave up on Windows XP. I had given up on getting Linux on the desktop, even though every year since 2001 to 2010 was the year Linux takes over the desktop, and it never did.  I started learning some Cocoa programming, and development was fun again.  In 2007 the iPhone came out and changed everything.

Now, in 2015, I have been doing Web development as full time employment for a few years. iOS development became a bit tired, as the only thing I was doing was fetching and posting JSON data on a webserver and trying to make everything look good. After more than 20 apps that are almost identical, I decided to try web development for full time. My tools include Python Tornado, Redis, MongoDB, Javascript and such tools, lately I have been doing most new programming in GO. So, non Mac development.

So after I purchased a computer for 23.000 nokr (Norwegian kroner) (about $2.800), and using ViM as an editor, python, GO and mongo for over a year, not even starting Xcode twice in a year, it made me think. It is pretty expensive to have a computer for 2 years that basically cost you 1.000 nok ($120) every month to own, then go through the process of selling it and then paying a huge sum to get a new computer. Since 2003, I had only owned 17" Powerbook/Macbook pro. I also looked at some of the other machines that could have 2 hard disks, higher res screens, more ports with a bit of an envy. When Apple stopped making the 17", I had to get the 15" retina one. Of course I really like the machine, but the retina screen is almost never used as I have the machine either hooked up to 2 crappy monitors or a 27" cinema display. The 512 GB disk gets full very quickly. The hardware is much more limited now and the retina screen is not a selling point, at all. It is nice, but thats about it.

And I use almost no Mac software. I stay in the terminal all day, with ViM, git and other command line tools. So I started thinking about cheaper solutions.

My current work gave me a Thinkpad, T430s when I started. I put it in a drawer and got permission to use my Mac at work. But a few months ago, I stopped carrying the Mac and started using the Thinkpad with Linux installed. Using Linux on the desktop is not a good experience, and I started using i3 as a windows manager, it is quite good. The machine it self is also quite a lot worse machine than my Mac, but it is quite usable, meaning, I can do my job very well on it, and it does not hold me back, really. There are things I am much quicker at on my Mac, but all in all, it works. My biggest grieve is Linux. Of course my web app runs on linux, and I use virtual machines and so forth. That got me thinking. Could I migrate over to Windows ?

In short, yes, yes I can.

I have not really used Windows since 1999. I had begrudgingly used Windows through the years, but not much.

So, I will be posting a few more posts, looking into if it is possible to make a Windows machine as good or even better development machine than a Mac. It has to be at least as good for me to even consider it.