Yeah Apple hardware is good, but oh boy, there are many design choices in MacOS that are real head-scratchers
- The over-reliance on weird key combinations and touchpad gestures, that you have no way of guessing until you look it up, and if it is for something you only perform once in a while, you need to look it up every time you need to do it.
- The refusal to adopt the best parts of Windows's file explorer in the Finder app
- Bad window size/position management that is seemingly never fixed
The window-management of macOS is pain. As the application menus. Outside of the application windows! Core applications like Finder are so bad, that even Apple-Fans admit it (not lack of features, it is the crippled UI). And they keep using this desktop-metaphor.
The UX of all Windows applications is crap. Everyone is using an own toolkit and neglects design guidelines. But the worst thing is, setup and maintenance are the biggest pain ever.
If you can, Linux. If you must, macOS. If you prefer agony, Windows.
PS: Simple hint, never do something like Microsoft. Chances are high, that it is good.
I still run Linux, just on my main PC where I have far more control over hardware.
Honestly, I've learned that there's a mental trade-off, and while i've got my linux system set up perfectly on my home PC, for a laptop I would much rather have something that just works.
I ran my old laptop with multiple different distros, from Ubuntu to Manjaro to Fedora. While I love the customizability of linux, there would always be some sitaution where I need to have something ready at the last minute but the driver isn't compatible or I haven't set up a specific acceleration etc.
It's a balance, I'm happy with that development process on my home PC, but if i'm travelling on a train I want something that I can rely on working. Windows used to be that to a certain extent, and for me it's no longer capable of doing so.
Nobody makes it and stays a Mac user today unless you're a real masochist.
Funny, for me it is win/linux that is painful because of decent accessibility software. Ever since switching from linux to mac in 2003, mac has great accessibility tools for vision impairment out of box experience and has never let me down for the last 22 years. With windows the tooling is unusable. With linux i've tried on and off over the years and the tools keep changing or are inconsistent and/or broken.
If the alternative is a Linux-distro, likely UX won't be much better/more-consistent when applications use different UI kits/styles etc.
Even Though Apple is doing a shitty job with their walled garden, a garden is still more organized than a jungle of different distro's/applications/frameworks/etc.
Adding an alternate data point, I was a heavy Linux desktop user, and had an adjustment period when my workplace gave me a Mac 10 years ago. Yes there are random differences. However, now I wouldn't look back for my personal compute needs.
I have been actively using all of them - Linux, Windows and macOS for the past 15-20 years and currently Linux has the best desktop environments possible. macOS is still stuck in 2010 and it is quite painful to work with my Macbook even with all the tweaks and modifications. Sure, you can live with it, but there is always something annoying about it and you can't do anything about it.
Apple has the best laptops but the worst desktop environment that does all the window management, etc.
I don't care about the UX of the specific applications, most of them work on Mac/Windows/Linux anyway. What I care about is the window manager and macOS has a terrible window manager. That is why I am using Aerospace on macOS, and it makes things better, but it's still far from what Linux has to offer.
I had a brief hiatus of not using macs for work and gave linux a spin on a framework laptop. Tried sway / wayland since everyone at work was either using sway or i3. It was alright at first and i got in the groove of things but became unusable with apps with odd ui toolkits like ghidra/java awt, etc. Also too much time is wasted in customisation and organising or curating your windows.
Switched back to mac after about a year, and i can't say i miss tiling window management one bit. I've learned that i am quite content with the chaotic style of window management that mac offers, and find it much easier to work with since you're not wasting brain cycles perfecting your layout every time a new window is opened. I do use macos out of box tiling / snapping on the rare occasion i need side by side layout but that's really it.
