I can't answer for Op, but I've been a Linux user at work for many years and OSX at home. I sold my last Mac in 2013 and used Linux for a couple of years until I tried Windows 10. I never used (or plan to use) Windows for servers. I had interest in Nano Server, then I realized it's not free and although running in the cloud I could probably feel no big difference in spending, I just don't have expertise (or will to learn maybe).
I was making a list of things I like from Windows 10, but some are as good in Linux and OSX. To be honest I'm not entirely sure why I'm sticking to Windows 10. I think it is comfortable to use and I have no reason to leave it either. It is installed in the computer, it gets big updates every now and then. It looks stunningly beautiful compared to any other Windows before.
In any case here's a list of things I like right now:
- It just works
- PowerShell and PowerShell ISE
- Office and especially Outlook (with an Exchange server) and OneNote
- I've got Bash now, which runs Linux binaries, with apt-get and in a terminal that sucks less than cmd. I had a tingling feeling the other day compiling a Go app in my WSL window. I know Go is multiplatform, but it was fun to compile a Linux binary in a Windows OS and run it.
It feels a lot how OS X used to make me feel years ago. It just worked. The difference is that here I've got all the Windows software and I can choose laptop from Macbook-like stuff to a £149 Lenovo Ideapad 100S, passing through tablets of all sorts. The OS is the same.
I don't feel like I'm tied to a platform when I'm working on my laptop. I guess having multiple putty sessions to Linux servers opened helps a lot :)
I'm not so sure about Cortana and Edge. I want to like both, but so far my feelings are just "meh".
On the other hand, the updates are definitely more insistent than before; but I don't think I ever got an ultimatum without prior notice of pending updates. I too defer many times (after all, if I'm looking at the computer means I'm probably busy), but it helps me keep up to date.
Now that I think about it, I think I've found my computer restarted and installed updates overnight a couple of times in the last year.
"It just works" - in my experience it really doesn't.
- I run win10 on a Vaio Canvas Z, a pretty recent machine. Graphics driver crashes regularly, although it remains stable doing so, screen freezes for around 2 seconds.
- when I wanted to install international keyboard profiles it has become way worse then older windows versions, which already weren't great. On OSX this is a totally solved problem. On Windows it would often show me the wrong thing installed until reboot, couldn't switch over to something newly added, the whole list is buggy.
- the terminal... god I hate it. It's stuck in the mid 90ies. Even Apple who supposedly doesn't care about power users anymore, has continuously improved its terminal application and it has become pretty great. On Windows I can't even have a decent color setting that would make all the standard unix colors readable without doing all kinds of hacks in .bashrc. Yes it's MinGW, but it uses the MS given terminal as-is.
- preinstalled PDF support is still a joke. Can't even annotate or rotate or really do anything with it.
- I can't get the preinstalled Mail/Calendar to reliably connect to gmail, gave up after an hour of fiddling around. That thing is a complete joke. And I hate Outlook's UI even though I've developed for it in the past.
Is it really better than Ubuntu though? I guess I don't use Microsoft office at all, so that could be a compelling reason, but Linux can be Linux with any kind of UI you want. Which for me is anything other than the touch-centric metro monstrosity with pages and pages of menus. You can make it your machine instead of microsofts auto-restarting spyware bundle of bugs
I don't think it's better than Ubuntu, but it's not worse. There are some aspects where Windows would be a no-brainer (gaming) and others where it is catching up with Linux (development outside Visual Studio? I'm just a hobbyist).
I never got 3 monitors to work reliably on Ubuntu or Fedora, though. Apart from that, I could probably switch back to Ubuntu and be as happy.
I honestly haven't tried it on Mac. It also runs on Android and iOS which is great.
I'm in the market for a cheap-ish ultraportable with good battery and I'm considering a second hand Air or MacBook. When it comes to the OS, why would I go back to macOS?
(Note that I would go back if I've found a cheap enough Air ;))
I'm not saying you ncessarily should. Windows has gotten better, but still has some infuriating stuff for development, like the 260 character path-length limit. Mac has more native Unix stuff, if you don't care about that there really aren't huge differences in experience anymore.
why?