In a similar vein, the "Costs of Switching Schoolchildren Between Windows, Chrome, Mac?" (https://slashdot.org/submission/17349696/costs-of-switching-...) begins:

If you've ever made the jump from PC to Mac (or vice versa) at work or home, you're painfully aware that there are very real costs of switching platforms in terms of lost knowledge and productivity. In addition to flushing years of accumulated knowledge down the toilet — goodbye Outlook-Teams-OneDrive-SharePoint-Excel-Word-PowerPoint-VBA, hello GMail-Workspace-GDrive-Sheets-Docs-Slides — there's also the matter of a thousand UI and other "paper cuts" to contend with ("Why are you looking for a 'prt sc' key," condescendingly replies a Mac aficionado in response to a question from a former Windows user, "when Shift+Command+3 is so intuitive?").

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bob1029 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> If you've ever made the jump from PC to Mac (or vice versa) at work or home

I make this "jump" about 20 times per day. I have iOS, MacOS and 2 windows machines at the moment. Very frequently I will RDP into the windows machines from the MacBook.

> goodbye Outlook-Teams-OneDrive-SharePoint-Excel-Word-PowerPoint-VBA

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/mac/microsoft-...

Maybe it used to be hard to do this and I just got used to it. I have made zero attempts to normalize anything.

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MrGilbert 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Painfully? I love the stimulation of my brain to learn something new. It didn’t really hurt.

	▲	disillusioned 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It hurts _all the time_ for me. I've used a Windows PC my entire life. 35 years of PC. I use my MBP M2 Pro when I travel, and for about 6 weeks every summer, and it's like pouring lemon juice into a paper cut the entire time. Specifically, my concerns are around this exact matter: I have such muscle memory attached to, say, slamming my pinky across L-Ctrl+L-Shift+left arrow in order to quickly select just the previous word from the cursor. This is something I do... I don't know, at least once a paragraph, as I very very quickly type and then realize I've introduced some basic typo that I need to nuke the previous word to address. Doing this on Mac keyboards is Shift + Option + Left Arrow and... it's hell. It's absolute hell. Mashing that extreme corner shortcut with my pinkie is so baked in that there's just... no reasonable way for me to reprogram my brain to do that on a Mac. Similarly, I have a stroke every time I try to mentally remap what things use control and what uses command. And while I could potentially remap the fn key on an MBP keyboard, I tend to use my Logitech K800 on both systems, so instead try to remap control to ALSO be command to basically get me as close to muscle memory as possible for things that need the command + shift. Since control is relatively rarely used, I think I just remapped it to caps lock. Though boy does that screw me in tmux. Either way, when I'm typing extremely fast, being able to reliably navigate the caret and jumping around words, whole lines, etc. is just something I simply cannot get anywhere close to on a Mac and I die a tiny death every time I try.

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crabbone 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a bit exaggerated... It's not really painful. I worked in a newspaper. The whole designers department moved to PCs when OS10 (a.k.a. OSX) came out. This also coincided with moving from QuarkXPress to InDesign.

Some nice things had been lost, some nice things had been found. Maybe it's also because OSX was also somewhat of a downgrade from OS8/OS9 in terms of user experience. Especially, Finder became a lot worse. So, people didn't feel very motivated to upgrade, and it made the switch easier... But, overall, there was very little struggle, the time we'd spend setting up the newspaper / magazine for print didn't really change.

Well... now, when I think about it, most of us used PCs at home. So, maybe it's not a fair comparison. But, even people who had Macs as their home / personal computers didn't seem to have any issue with the switch.

I think, some people kept the keyboards that came with G3/G4 (the clear heavy plastic ones with black key caps). They could be used with PCs. People didn't keep them to preserve the Mac-style layout (it wouldn't work anyways iirc), they just liked the quality of the physical product and accepted that some keys won't work the same way they did on a Mac.

Even though you could connect Mac mouse to a PC, I don't think anyone used that.