In my computer lifetime, I’ve used Windows 3,NT,95,… 10, Linux (mostly Gnome from 2002 onwards) and since late 200X Mac. Currently I’m mostly using Mac because it fits nice between Windows and Linux.
At a certain time I was doing a demo on my Linux laptop and I got a blue screen in front of a client. Pretty much a No No for everybody … So I decided to switch to Mac and ever since no problems doing demo’s and presentations.
My Mac is already pretty old (read +3 years). As I’ve installed a lot on it, I decided to re-install Sierra. Try the good old Windows way, re-install and get a fast machine again. But what happened pretty much blew my mind …
I did a clean install and afterwards checked my laptops memory consumption … the bare system was still eating 7 Gigs of memory … Okay I may have 16 in total but why would my core OS without any additional installations need 7 gigs … This is utter madness and even a complete rip off. This would mean that in order to run a descent Mac Sierra you always need 16 gig to run at a descent speed … I’m following Microsoft pretty closely as they are more than ever focusing on good products and helping the opensource community (Did you know Microsoft is the #1 contributor to opensource software ???!!!). Even their Windows 10 is looking like a descent product again …
My current Mac is still doing fine, so I hope to postpone the purchase of a new machine somewhat to a far future … However if I need to purchase something at the moment, I wouldn’t know what to buy.
The new Macs really scare me. The touch bar is something that nobody seems to find useful even worse, pretty much everybody I talked to hates it and finds it a waste of money … for myself I find Microsoft did a good job at Windows 10, however the command line interface is still not up to par with the on from Mac or Linux one … So if I should buy something right now, it would probably be a laptop with an SSD, I7, 16 gig or more diskspace that is completely supported on Linux. I would then be installing Linux Mint as that’s still the distro that seems for myself the most user friendly …. if you have other suggestions, just let me know !!!
Lets just hope Apple can turn it around, and can make descent desktopsagain that don’t eat all your memory for no un-necessary reason.