Windows is like an experienced and flirtatious older woman: skillful, open, willing to do anything with you, and often satisfying to use. But if you’re careless, she may also bring trouble home. macOS is like a proud, cute tsundere girl: pretty, comfortable to be around, and classy to show off. But you have to listen to her, buy only what she wants, and never touch what she says you cannot touch. Linux is like an innocent young girl who obeys everything you say, but you have to train her slowly yourself, and if you overdo it you may easily break the poor little thing.

Current Situation

Mac OS X

The machine I use most at home is an iMac. Its hardware is not particularly powerful, but thanks to the excellent OS X system, the experience is still very good. I also have two Windows computers, though I rarely use them.

Getting started with an iMac is simple, although if you are switching from Windows it still takes some time to adapt. Compared with the Linux systems I used before, though, it is still pretty easy. OS X is beautiful, almost unbelievably so. By comparison, Windows looks awful.

The iMac came with a mechanical hard drive, but the experience was terrible. So I attached a Samsung 850 500 GB drive externally and used that as the system disk. If I get the chance later, I may take the machine apart and replace it with an NVMe SSD. But since the computer is mainly used for downloading things, the speed is already good enough.

I used Windows for more than ten years before that, so I had long become used to the complex Chinese network environment, pirated software everywhere, and the endless world of security managers and cleanup tools. Then, suddenly switching to OS X and its clean and tidy environment, I felt uncomfortable for a while. The contrast in both the operating system and the whole simplified environment almost moved me to tears. Over time, though, I gradually became familiar with the system and grew to like it. I also began to look down, at least a little, on my earlier habit of insisting on dual-boot setups.

That said, there are still things about the Mac worth complaining about:

1. The keyboard is awful. The key travel is too short and the feedback too weak, which makes the fingers uncomfortable, especially when you need to type a lot. But because I am poor and because the built-in keyboard looks nice, I still keep using it.
2. Uninstalling apps is awful too. Even if you delete the app, the data files stay behind whether you want them or not. As a result, the system somehow ends up occupying more than 200 GB, and the only real solution is reinstalling the system every few years.

Linux

Later, in pursuit of abandoning Windows altogether, I installed Deepin on my laptop. It is a very good Linux distribution, and I used to think its interface was the most beautiful in the Linux world, with no close rival. It was also clearly optimized for Chinese users. But it is somewhat demanding on graphics hardware, and my little Celeron 1.6 x 2 could not really cope with it. I heard that lately it has been pushed around by more powerful interests and is close to collapsing.

Windows 10

As for Windows, all I can really say now is goodbye. It has the strangest text-encoding and character-handling system and frequently produces garbled text. Its security is worrying enough that I could probably teach my grandmother step by step how to obtain the highest system privileges. There are also far too many bugs. Every system update brings a new pile of bugs, and one developer-preview update even blue-screened the entire system and corrupted it, forcing me to reinstall from scratch. And if you ask whether I care about games, sorry, I do not. I am simply not much of a gamer.