I’ve been using MacOS and various iPhones for the past ten years. Apple computers have been my daily driver for general web browsing and as my development machine of choice. As a developer that works on a lot of Linux/UNIX based projects having a “proper” terminal was the main deal breaker for while!
I first started with MacOSX when I purchased an iMac back in 2009 – It looked cool, sleek and I loved the aluminium as well as it’s opererting system’s foundation being UNIX. A year or so later I then decided that I would get myself a MacBook Pro – I opted for the 13inch i5 model and at the time, given that the RAM and HDD was upgradable on this particular model, I very quickly upgraded the slow 5400rpm mechanical hard drive to an SSD (wow, what a speed boost!) and the 8GB of RAM that it came with to 16GB – It was great, I hooked it up to an external 27inch monitor, connected an external bluetooth keyboard and mouse and all was good!
Three years later (in 2016), it was time to upgrade it, this time I opted for the MacBook Pro 15inch model, I maxed out on the specs on this one – I went with the 512GB SSD and the i7 processor knowing that the money would be worth it as they’re built so solid.
Most “old skool” MBP owners will know that the late-2015 MacBook Pro was the last model that didn’t come with soldered on RAM… I’ve known for a while now that my next MacBook Pro would lock me in on my specs – whatever I upgrade to in future would be “set” with a soldered storage device and RAM. I also knew that further investment in Apple products would mean that I’d have to start collecting all the “dongles” if I wanted to plug stuff into it! I’m also not keen on their latest keyboards too!
I know a lot of people, esepecially content creators that have made the switch to premium non-Apple ultrabooks of late and I too have toyed with the idea of switching my daily driver back to Microsoft Windows (from MacOS) for several months now.
I did it! – I bit the bullet and a couple of weeks ago took delivery of a new Dell XPS 15 7590, the machine has an i9 processor, an NVIDIA GTX1660 graphics card and 32 gigs of RAM (upgradable to 64GB).
I’ve already upgraded the NVME drive to a superfast 1TB Samsung EVO PRO (far better performance over the one I could have upgraded to on the Dell website) – Although still rather expensive it’s far superior over any of the latest MacBook Pro’s and should last me a good while now!
I knew that in order to be happy with this setup and not run back to using Apple products in the next month or two, The laptop must have a “premium” non-plastic feel to it, it needs to be “solid” – The Dell XPS are built using Aluminium and Carbon Fibre! I also needed to ensure that I could setup a development environment on Windows 10 Pro that I would happy with…
In the past week, I’ve installed and configured WSL (Windows Sub-system for Linux) enabling me to run a linux terminal on Windows, I’ve also setup Docker and I’m super happy with the results!
Microsoft are also due to release WSL 2 later this year which provides further speed improvements and allows me to run Docker inside WSL – Awesome!
Why didn’t I just got for a Linux based setup? – I already run several Linux based servers and have used Linux Desktop machines a lot in the past too but as a daliy driver, using a machine that fully supports all the software I need and use (Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Micrsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio – Yes, previously I was using a second Windows laptop just for Visual Studio!!) means that a Linux desktop isn’t really something that I could use as a primary laptop. Battery life on Linux laptops (for the most part) sucks too!