It is really difficult to have a constructive discussion about OS X and Windows, mostly because both projects are mutually exclusive with their goals and users feel their interests aligned with one side.

To name an example, most of the people who prefers OS X complain that Windows lacks aesthetics (ie. font rendering, high dpi support, etc.).

On the opposite side, most of the people who prefers Windows complains that OS X lacks support (ie. a huge library of software, backwards compatibility, etc.).

Unfortunately, BC and aesthetics are mutually exclusive, taking support for High DPI under Windows as an example:

Only the modern stacks like WPF or UWP are DPI Aware by default, but the amount of software built with these stacks is relatively small, on the other side, most of the software on the wild is built with stacks like GDI/MFC or WinForms, but they'll always look "ugly" with High DPI configurations.

Apple is the kind of company which would demand developers to update their software, Microsoft can't afford to alienate its developers.

>On the opposite side, most of the people who prefers Windows complains that OS X lacks support (ie. a huge library of software, backwards compatibility, etc.).

I've been very impressed with Mac backwards compatibility. Old Apple hardware (going back nearly a decade) still works great with latest macOS Sierra and I have decade+ old utilities and custom scripts working as fast or faster than ever before.

There's some of my custom scripts I've had to tweak over time due to Apple's increasingly locked-down security measures within the OS, but that's very much worth the small amount of time I've spent tweaking them and I appreciate the better, overall security.

There's rarely the case that there's a functionality in Windows that can't be found within the many hundreds of thousands of Mac apps available. There's more Mac apps that one could ever use in a lifetime. As a matter of fact, the problem I've run into with Windows is the lack of quality apps that can't match the superior third party Mac apps or built-in macOS functionality in many cases. Of course, there's occasions the opposite is true and I run Crossover and Parallels in Coherence mode for those.

There's also a lot of built-in, time-saving functionalities within the macOS that third party apps in Windows don't replicate well or at all. For example, spring-loaded folders or a solid, fast alternative to Mission Control in Windows that works as seamlessly as it does in macOS.

I use Windows 10 and macOS in near daily production and consulting/support environments. Windows 10 has its advantages over the macOS, but Task View isn't one of them.

Mission Control on Mac in a production environment blows away Task View - which was only finally copied by MS from the macOS after already being in use for well over a decade for Apple users. Granted, there was some Windows third party apps that attempted to clone Exposé (former name of Mac's Mission Control), but they were terribly slow, clunky, crashy and buggy on Windows. That's why I was really happy to see Windows 10 finally copy Mission Control and incorporate it natively, but I was sorely disappointed after using it.

For example, I can use corner gestures with Mission Control that've been removed from Windows 10. Microsoft had corner gestures in Windows 8, but removed the option entirely in Win10.

Even after I brought corner gestures back to trigger Win10 Task View with a custom script that works via a third party app (the great AutoHotkey), it's still incredibly limited compared to Mission Control. The AutoHotkey app doesn't even trigger itself right away consistently like the built-in macOS corner gestures always instantly and reliably does. I've wasted time with multiple third party triggers and none work as well as the native, built-in macOS corner gestures.

On top of that, with the macOS (and I've been able to do this for about a decade with Exposé and now Mission Control) - I can drag any file to my corner gesture, then drop the file directly into a preferred Mission Control thumbnail window.

Try that in Windows 10 Task View. There's no integration with the file system in Win10 Task View at all and that severely cripples its functionality. There's no third party app that fills the void yet for this either. Granted, I often use launchers on both Mac & Windows to move files, but when there's a need to have a more GUI, visual approach with dragging and dropping, Win10 fails badly because it also inexplicably doesn't have spring-loaded folders in Win10 and no reliable third party app copies that functionality properly either.

I do enjoy the Task Bar thumbnails in Windows that the macOS lacks, but I just use a third party app called HyperDock that not only replicates the functionality, but much improves upon it - and HyperDock has never had any speed or stability issues against the macOS for me like many third party Windows apps tend to have.

That said, there's definitely various advantages to running Windows over Mac and that's why I work in a mixed environment at home and in my work tasks.

Despite my bellyaching, Windows is built on much more solid ground than macOS is these days. All the new stuff introduced in 8/10 - Metro stuff, control panel stuff, etc. - can be wacky, but the core OS is strong. It works, it doesn't crash, it acts the way you expect it to. That's all I really want from a desktop OS, and given that Apple has total control over their ecosystem, they are frighteningly bad at providing it.

What areas do you find W10 to be lacking in?

I have switched from Mac to Windows a few months ago. My biggest annoyance is privacy. I do not feel my data is safe while using Windows. I had to switch off too many defaults (keylogging, for example!), and I really do not know if I missed any, or if some update has sneaked in any new way for MS to spy on me.

I totally understand. Even with the bugginess, it's my single biggest issue with W10.

I find W10 lacking in consistency.

Poke around in the settings for a while and you will find remnants from the NT days.

The dark theme is another example, it works for a handful of their own apps, not even half of them.

Half baked and unpolished. I'm a daily W10, macOS sierra and Fedora Linux user. I develop on all the OS:es and play games mostly on W10.

I agree 100% with that. Microsoft stacked new features without deprecating old ones. Nowadays you can do things in 32 different ways; some ways are the same as they were in Windows 2000 and XP, but maybe some "advanced tweaks" are not available in the "old interface", so you need to struggle to find two different interfaces that achieve the same essential function.

This is, IMHO, a backlash of Microsoft's long update cycle. The yearly update Apple pushed to MacOS, along with free updates, allows for an easier deprecate-then-remove approach that gently transitions users from the old to the new approach. It's hard to do the same when people got used to an OS for many, many years. Maybe W10 with its "rolling" approach will suceed, btw.

Yeah, that's exactly the problem.

Happily, though, the inconsistencies don't reach as far down as the kernel level. W10 looks weird and sometimes acts strangely when you try to use the new stuff, but its bones are stable, which is all I really need.

>the core OS is strong. It works, it doesn't crash,

Windows almost never crashes for me, but I haven't had a system crash on my Macs in close to a decade even after updating the OS numerous times without a clean install. Granted, I know to use combo updaters for Mac instead of the streaming updates, so that helps me quite a bit along with making sure I update third party apps first.

On the other hand, Windows 10 updates have caused all kinds of various issues and it's documented to be widespread. Killing many webcams is one major issue that comes to mind.

Then again, some people have had wifi issues with Mac updates, so no OS is perfect, that's for sure. However, to allude that the macOS system core with Sierra isn't as strong as Win10 doesn't seem realistic to me.

macOS Sierra has been as rock solid as Win10, if not more in some cases.

>given that Apple has total control over their ecosystem, they are frighteningly bad at providing it.

That's a myth. I have Android phones integrated with Macs just fine, for example. I use the free MightyText to send & receive texts and that's just one of several good options. Google Keep app to sync notes across Mac & Android and the list goes on and on.

If any professional power user wants to skip Gatekeeper on a Mac and install apps without any hoops (a simple right-click, basically), Apple made it as simple as this in Terminal so there's no hoop at all:

sudo spctl --master-disable

Done.

I use both Windows and Macs daily. I run anything and everything on my Mac I want and have done so for many years. I'm not trapped in some ecosystem at all on my Mac. If anything, I feel more trapped (privacy-wise) on Windows 10 than Mac and I despise how Microsoft forces updates on me that have crippled my workflow on occasion whereas Mac just puts up a daily reminder until you do it.

Now, the iOS devices are another story, but that's a huge can of worms when we're talking about phones and the need for security, etc. -- I'm not going to get into that here since we're talking about Mac vs. Windows -- not iOS vs. Android, etc. (my preference is Android for most of my use cases and iOS for some others).