That’s sort of my take as well. I can’t think of a single Windows program that would wish was available to me on the Mac or Linux.
You never hear a company advertising that their product is only feasable thanks to the features provided in the .Net framework, or that their application takes advantage of the foundation provided by Windows.
I not saying that Windows is bad, it’s a truck, meant for business, and games. It’s just that there aren’t any overwhelming programs which could only exist on Windows. Many programs don’t even feel completly native to the platform, and basic features like drag’n drop, copy’n paste or shortcut are frequently a little hit and miss, it have become much better, but still, it’s a little late.
Visual Code is a fantastic product, but it’s not really a Windows application. That sort of tells me that not ever Microsoft really believe that Windows have that much to offer on the desktop, that you can’t just replace it with web technologies.
X1 Search is the single Windows program I wish so badly was available on the Mac. So much that I switched from Mac back to Windows twice in the past because the functionality was so important.
I search for a word or phrase through 1000s of documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, and email archive files going back two decades. On my desktop or in a cloud service. X1 displays matches in real time, fast-as-you-type, with all the results easy to grok in one glance in list form, sorted by any field. And on the same screen, X1 renders a preview of the file/email as I click through the list. No need to open the file/email: I can read the whole document right there on the search screen. I can also copy & paste from that document. And all search terms are highlighted.
TLDR; My main question for you - What kinds of programs do you think could only exist on a Mac or Linux which could not possibly work on Windows?
> You never hear a company advertising that their product is only feasable thanks to the features provided in the .Net framework...
Yes you do. There are whole companies (and publications) that only exist thanks to the .NET framework and before that, Visual Basic. How many "Swift/Obj-C component companies" are there? On the .NET side I can count at least 2 big ones off the top of my head (DevExpress and Telerik), but I'm probably forgetting dozens more from decades past.
If these companies and their customers were already being served by Java or Obj-C then .NET would never have taken off.
Outside of the .NET components business, there is a whole class of applications which would be extremely difficult to develop and maintain on Mac and Linux. Programs like TortoiseGit which heavily customize the Windows Explorer and other bits of the Windows UI in ways which Apple would never provide APIs for. On Linux, to develop apps like these you'd have cover to much of the fragmented landscape of desktop environments. I still miss TortoiseGit on my Linux desktop.
AutoHotKey is also in another class of apps that I can't see existing for Mac or Linux. Automating Win32 is easy because you can hook into everything and there's a stable, unfragmented landscape. Here's something I recently did with AutoHotKey - created a 2 line script that waited for a "HID key/Special key/Media key" to be pressed and ran a program. On a Mac you'll be writing a whole custom program or hunting down an obscure utility. On Linux, you'll cobble together a few different programs depending on your DE setup. On my Mac, I had trouble even finding a program [0] that would show me what keyboard keys were pressed so I could use the key id in my script, like this - https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/KeyList.htm#SpecialKeys
> I not saying that Windows is bad, it’s a truck, meant for business, and games.
It's a general purpose OS, just like Mac and Linux. If Windows is a truck, all three of them are trucks.
> It’s just that there aren’t any overwhelming programs which could only exist on Windows.
What kinds of programs do you think could only exist on a Mac or Linux which could not possibly work on Windows?
> Many programs don’t even feel completly native to the platform, and basic features like drag’n drop, copy’n paste or shortcut are frequently a little hit and miss, it have become much better, but still, it’s a little late.
Not sure specifically what you're talking about here. But - a little late for what? The vast majority of desktop users and more than half of all programmers are already on Windows.
I've never had problems with basic features like cut/copy/paste or window management on Windows. On my Mac I've given up on trying to fix the lack of window management features and the inability to do things with keyboard like "pressing just delete to delete a file". On my main workstations I had to cobble together various scripts and obscure utilities to do things Windows does, such as "use this hotkey to move window to other monitor" (for XFCE).
> Visual Code is a fantastic product...
It's called Visual Studio Code or VS Code.
> ...it’s not really a Windows application. That sort of tells me that not ever Microsoft really believe that Windows have that much to offer on the desktop...
Nah, they built VS Code as part of their expansion into cloud services so they could market those services to Mac and Linux programmers more easily. Electron is just the path of least resistance for building cross-platform apps. They couldn't use Windows-only tech to build it because of course Windows-only tech is a bad way to build cross-platform apps.
[0] - Just found this today, but note the comment on the second answer that "it doesn't work for media keys" which was my problem. Also, the first answer doesn't show you key codes just highlights the key being pressed. - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/40192/how-can-i-te...
Programs like TortoiseGit which heavily customize the Windows Explorer and other bits of the Windows UI in ways which Apple would never provide APIs for.
