Many moons ago, about 7/8 years ago, I used Windows XP, which was awesome, stable and secure. I then decided to move to Windows Vista when that got released, then moving on to W7 which again was kinda like XP in my eyes. But with more development work coming and Windows constantly updating every time I rebooted/turned on, I got a little fed up with, so I looked at alternatives.

From my Googling, I found Linux Mint, which I installed on my Dell laptop which at the point had Windows 7 on and I was blown away with it, but then running programs like Photoshop became a problem so I began looking again for alternatives. I spoke with a few friends about different systems & OS's and everyone I spoke to mentioned an Apple mac, so after visiting a client again I was speaking to the client about systems and he'd just bought a brand new mac mini at the time and it gave it me as a present, which was great so I brought it home and starting playing around with and I've had Apple computers for the past 5 years now and won't touch anything else, purely on the basis it does everything from development to playing games and "just works" never had any problems and the updates aren't every other day and when there are updates 95% happen in the background without having to reboot which is a plus in my book.

I have nothing against Windows or any other OS, this is just purely my opinion & my views/experience(s).

@jlrdw "The biggest single problem with Linux is you cannot use Microsoft Access"

Are you serious?

This actually made me laugh out loud and I had to explain to my boss why is was laughing. When I told him, he also laughed his socks off!

PS if you really wanted to continue with this insanity you could just use Crossover.

I went through almost this exact journey about a year ago, and have settled on a dual-booting (Win10 and OSX) MacBook Pro.

I thought I would spend about 80% of my time in Windows and the other 20% in OSX, but actually it's more like 95% in OSX, and I only ever use Windows is I have a Windows-centric, VBA, or ActionScript project.

Each OS has its pros and cons, but if you use the machine mainly for coding, I'd say get a Mac, even though Windows 10 is BY FAR the better OS (honestly, it's brilliant).

But here are my tips and observations (has turned into a bit of a big post!).

My original Workflowy list of all setup steps, tweaks and other observations (will eventually turn into a series of blogposts) is here: https://workflowy.com/s/YnjDfjs4qf

Setup - Dual booting Macbook Pro

Pros:

• MacBook Pro 13" all the way!
• Fabulous hardware, light, powerful-enough, great connectivity
• Brilliant hardware and battery life!
• AWESOME trackpad. Just amazing. Makes working on the road ACTUALLY productive.
• You can run 3 screens on a MacBook - the laptop screen, and 2 external 1920x1080 monitors. Boom!
• Dual boot if you can. It's a major pain in the ass to set up with a Data partition (see the above link for the steps - they are many) but a good way to work as you can save everything to the one drive. You need to run NTFS drivers on OSX or alternatively HFS drivers on Windows
• Best of both worlds - you can:
  • boot into either OS
  • use Parallels or Fusion 8 to boot the partition WHILST IN OSX. That is pretty cool. There are some file-sharing drawbacks, and why I'm not doing it yet, but I'm hoping that I may be able to overcome them.
  • Use Fusion 8 to run already-installed Windows apps standalone
  • Use WINE to run Windows programs in their own window

Cons:

• Trackpad is useless in Windows (I swear Apple sabotage it on purpose) . It took me a while to just figure - get a mouse
• Using the Mac keyboard in Windows is an exercise in frustration. Don't kid yourself that you'll "learn" how to do it - you won't, and at the critical time, you'll accidentally try to use the Mac ALT-LEFT to go left, and will instead go back in history and lose your web form. Just connect a Windows keyboard and relax
• Windows / Windows software seems to have severe problems with mixed density displays. The only solution I found was to run either JUST the laptop display, or if connecting 2 x 1920x1080 screen, disable the laptop display.
• Turns out I can't upgrade to El Capitain. This is a major drawback, but nothing wrong with Yosemite, really.

Overall:

• As a Mac, it's brilliant.
• If you set the Windows side up with external everything, you won't even be able tell you're on a Mac :)

OSX

Cons:

• Window management is f***ing appalling. Honestly, it's like herding cats, and Apple should be ashamed of themselves. It takes so long to put windows where you want them, you have to move windows to their own Desktops to make them usable, you need to hold a mental map in your head of where windows are, Windows get lost behind other windows, the very fact you need Expose is a fail in itself; it's just rubbish
• File management is also f***cking appalling. I don't trust the Finder as far as I could throw it. The lack of Windows explorer is like someone cutting off your left hand when you first make the leap to Mac. I'm currently trialing PathFinder and it's not bad, but having to load a 3rd party app just to navigate your files is dumb. File management IS the OS; come on Apple.
• All these little UI animations build up - it just takes longer to do things on a Mac, because the UI has to flash, animate, swoop, or do some other dumb sh*it before you get what you want to get done. By way of an example SHIFT+Cmd N to create a new folder, immediately start typing the new name, and it skips the first couple of letters because it's still animating in
• Takes a decent amount of tweaking to get everything working the way you want to; both UNIXy stuff and 3rd party programs
• Shortcut keys - there is no system. On Windows, Win (system), Alt (menus), Ctrl (commands), Shift (modifiers) have a pretty distinct hierarchy. On Mac it's a free for all. Especially when editing text, you're constantly moving your fingers around to get things done. Hell, they can't even agree on the symbols or even names (alt/option) of their own keys, WTF! Overall - frustrating.
• You need to get used to general Mac oddness, like mounting disks, unintuitive menu item labeling, strange additional menu items, menu items closing if you mis-click on a divider
• If you're used to Outlook, prepare to discover there is no good email client on Mac.

Pros:

• AMAZING touchpad and swipe gestures; Windows simply cannot compete (though I hear the Surface Pro 4 is pretty good; battery life is a measly 4 hours). Swipe gestures are pretty much the ONLY place where I can recommend Mission Control (the Mac Desktop manager)
• Often, it really does just work
• System preferences are smaller, and more sensible
• Terminal, and general development setup is just better. No more wasted hours banging your head against the screen.
• SSH and all that kind of stuff just works. No PuTTY, Pagaent, converting keys, etc
• Pretty much all tutorials are Mac based. No more "Sorry, we don't know how to help you" on forums
• You just can't get some things to work on Windows, where they do on OSX/UNIX. End of.

Tips:

• The launcher is actually a pretty good alternative for the start menu.
• Spotlight with Cmd + Space is a neat way to find things - though to be honest, the reason is exists is because the Finder does nothing of the sort

Windows 10

Cons:

• The start menu is still sh*te. They've tried to copy the Zune / XBox / Mac way, and it just doesn't work. They need to give up on this ASAP. Luckily, you can run Classic Shell, plus my Windows 10 skin which makes it look just like the rest of the OS! https://github.com/davestewart/classic-shell-win10
• Settings / Control panel. Still a bit of a hodge-podge to be honest; I hope they will in time perfect this
• Windows Explorer still has some cludginess about it - namely all the extra folders they add, though there are registry tweaks you can apply to kill them.
• Getting a decent development setup working is HARD. I eventually settled on SourceTree for everything Git, as it takes care of SSH for you. The terminal is poor, unless you run Cmder or something, but you shouldn't have to. Can't wait for the UNIX command line to arrive!

Pros:

• Windows 10 really is a great OS. It makes OSX feel like it was designed in the 70s
• Window management is AMAZING! Snapping, moving, multiple desktops, it's just perfect. Well done MS.
• Windows Explorer is THE way to manage files. Can't fault it.
• Keyboard shortcuts all obvious and rock solid
• Classic Shell start menu :)
• Everything just feels quicker than a Mac.
• Office suite is still better on Windows

Overall

Overall, I'd say that working in OSX is a compromise. But it seems to be a compromise I've stuck with - the proof is in the pudding - for development, anyway. And all your settings end up being in one place, so I don't like to swap as much as I thought I would.

I moan about it constantly to certain friends who care about this kind of thing, but I'm still using it.

When you're using Terminal, PHPStorm and Chrome as your 3 main apps, and you can ignore the rubbish window management, it's pretty good. Work gets done, websites get built, and as I said, on the road, it's an unbeatable laptop.

As for all the i-stuff; I don't know - as mentioned at the start, it's JUST become a work machine now. My PC used to be a bigger part of my personal life, so my usage has kinda changed.

Congrats if you got to the end of this, reader!

@davestewart there are a few apps that can help with window management/annoying animations etc on OS-X :

https://www.spectacleapp.com/

http://manytricks.com/moom/

http://ianyh.com/amethyst/

http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html

There are a few finder replacements too - I hardly ever use it and just stick with the terminal most of the time though. But I've got mucommander installed for the occasional use. I use xubuntu on my work desktop as it's pretty much distraction-free but have OS-X at home as I need to use photoshop :-/

@ohffs - Yeah, I use Spectacle, but it's essentially polishing the turd that is Mission Control.

Thanks for the links though; I'll check out MuCommander

MacBook is the best choice.

@davestewart yeah - it's pretty grim :-/ I only ever encounter it when my cat stands on my keyboard, thankfully ;-) I tend to use Alfred for most 'launcher' type actions. The built-in spotlight thing has become unusable for me over time :-/

@davestewart thanks for taking time and writing an informative post.

After all the feedback I got here, I decided to start by upgrading to Windows 10 and give it a try and also to get my Windows 10 product key. I did a fresh install on Windows 8.1, upgraded and then installed my apps and it's working as expected. It's like Windows 8.1 but with better window management and a shitty built in start menu. I've just pinned the most important shortcuts I need to the task bar and start and search for anything else but I might just as well install Classic Shell and use your skin.

I also have plans to try out Ubuntu and Linux Mint before I decide on what my next development computer purchase will be.

I guess what I came to realize thanks to everyone is that there is no best OS, everyone has different needs and expectations and even if an OS can help you work better/faster in some ways, it can only help you a little. What I mean is if you're determined, you can sit with Windows Notepad and write all the code you need. However if you're not determined/focused/motivated, no OS can change that.

After using Windows XP for years, I switched to Ubuntu, that was 6 or 7 years ago, never looked back

I am finding myself in a similar situation.

I have read all your posts and still trying to decide if my next purchase (nearby future) will be an iMac 27 with that 5k display screen, or maybe I will stick to Windows 10.

There have been some opinions about MacBooks but how about those iMac All-in-one desktops ?

Is it worth the price? The prices are quite high (at least here in Europe).

It doesn't matter what OS you have for web development, just use Docker and it is all the same on all OSes.

@AngelinCalu I have a iMac 27" 5K and it's amazing. Can't think of a better setup.

@AngelinCalu if you go with anything mac, I'd suggest waiting another month. They are supposed to announce new macbooks, iMac's, etc. in October.

@gcwilliams Well, there are always rumors about apple products. Never know what they're really "cooking"!

Later edit: They have just announced today the new iPhone7 and iPhone7 Plus, Wireless headphone with AirPods, Apple Watch series 2. Nothing about some new iMacs soon. http://www.apple.com/newsroom/

@nate.a.johnson It really looks like that. Although I've heard that the Fusion Drive is a "must have" and sometimes it looks like it could use some extra RAM. Which config are you using?

@AngelinCalu mine is from 2014, so it's a little old. 4GHz Core i7, 32GB RAM, 500GB flash storage, and the AMD Radeon graphics. I used to have a fusion drive in an old mac and I feel the fully solid state is way better. It's hard to beat programming on a 3200x1800 monitor (that's the most number of pixels you can get on this thing without using a custom program to take advantage of its 5120x2880 screen).

@nate.a.johnson your configuration, in current models they have available, it's over 4000 euros in Europe. So I find myself above the budget limit :)

Work bought mine or I wouldn't have spent that much myself either.

@AngelinCalu You never know when they are going to really announce or release things, but today's event was always intended to just be about the iPhone and not about the Mac line. The Mac line changes aren't expected until October. All the rumors about the iPhone turned out to be true, so I expect the same for the Mac line. It has been almost a year since a new iMac was released so an update should be coming soon. But like always, if you need it now, then get it now as there are always new things coming "soon".