[dingus]

It's frustrating because it's the "least worst" option.

I use MacOS because it has a thoughtful, consistent, coherent, beautiful user interface and desktop environment. The things I use all day are basically a web browser, mail client, code editor, and terminal. I can do actual work on any BSD really, there is no proprietary app that causes lock-in, I don't use iCloud or any of their services.

All I want is their desktop and core system apps. If Apple stripped down the OS back to Mac OS X Snow Leopard standards, and charged $129, I would pay for it.

If there were an equivalent desktop environment for BSD that replicated the MacOS desktop environment, I would pay money for this. Charge customers to hire full time designers, developers etc.

[oneplane]

That is definitely the most frustrating thing about all of this over the past few years. Even with a customised Windows 10 to get rid of the nonsense nobody wants and adding what is missing to even work on the damn thing it's still not as 'least worse' as macOS. It's almost like all commercial OS development moved towards STB's and mobile and nobody gives a crap anymore.

I'll probably still stick to macOS on my mobile hardware (Linux and BSD on the fixed machines, embedded and servers), as it is still least worst, but I miss the feeling of high stability and productivity you would normally get when you work on your machine and don't have to touch any of the other flavours.

Right now, all any other vendor has to do (besides the create-a-BSD-desktop) is good hardware integration. Because that is more effective than people might think. Even with the whole butterfly crap the whole package deal is unbeatable. The only time I ever had hardware/firmware issues was back in the 90's where OpenFirmware got sad because one of the data lines of the ROM was corroding and the SMU would reset every boot making sleep unreliable.

Having a machine that has a good hardware-software relation down to the firmware and no weird double powerons or a bunch of stupid splash screens, one where you can just add your tools and work, it's the best thing. It it used to be exactly that when you got a Mac... any Mac, even if you don't get a powerful one. It always works the same way, it always delivers consistently (unless you break it yourself), always stays out of the way so you can do what you actually came to do.

Sigh.

[waynecochran]

Yes. Snow Leopard was the greatest OS release of all time!

I actually went to WWDC 2008 when it was announced and they handed out CD’s for it — no new user-level features — just a hardened OS (grand central station and kernel level threading and stuff under the hood was changed).

Sigh. Marketing now rules the world. Look new emoji’s!

[kwhat4]

What makes the MacOS UI so much better than say Gnome or Enlightenment? I personally can't stand most of the Mac UI experience, however, I am very curious what you (and others) love about it that cannot be replicated on a different OS?

[dingus]

I get it, for some people it doesn’t matter. There is zero difference between xfce (Gnome, Windows, etc) and MacOS.

But for some people, they have used MacOS since OS X 1.0 (or for me, System 7) and there is a particular "Mac" way of doing things. There are expectations and standards for how the system and user interface should work and respond.

Perhaps you could attribute this to baby duck syndrome. You could also attribute it to people having different mental models for the world, there are clean desks and messy desks, different cataloging systems. There is something for everybody. For people who like Macs, everything else seems like a clumsy intolerable mess.

There are themes and hacks to make systems "look" like MacOS, but they fall short of even remotely functioning like it.

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

[danellis]

Font rendering for one. It's really nice. IME, text quality on a Linux desktop varies even between applications, depending on what toolkit they happen to be using.

[K0SM0S]

That might be true, some apps just don't follow standards well (on MacOS too btw, there are old and ugly UIs from third-party vendors all over the place).

But when you're living between a terminal, editor and browser, and fonts are perfect on these 3 (or whatever else you use)... it's hard to justify using a lesser and more expensive platform, just to correct the 1% of the time some app doesn't look great.

In fact, if we speak 'consistency' in a functional way — not disturbing the user's "flow" while working — I'd argue that bad or extremely limited UX the likes of Windows and now sadly MacOS too (by comparison, and because it got worse in the last five years) is a much bigger problem than font rendering, for most workflows.

Case in point if you really care you can fix font rendering for pretty much every app (and select aliasing parameters like strength and RGB ordering to conform to your external displays panel type and pixels 'pitch'; whereas MacOS or Windows will be hit-or-miss with some models and you just can't help it). Haven't needed to on Ubuntu or Fedora, but I know as of 2017 Arch let you apply general font rendering settings over GTK and Qt, and you can use terminals like urxvt to fully control such things.

[puranjay]

I think MacOS fails very badly at basic window and file management. Finder is still broken. Not being able to preview an open application by hovering on its icon (as in Windows) is a big productivity bottleneck. Minimizing/maximizing is plain confusing - why does the window sometimes take up the whole screen and sometimes only fill up 1/2 the real estate?

[sneak]

Copy and paste work in all apps.

[PeterStuer]

On a similar note, I would pay to have the Windows 7 GUI on the Windows 10 core.

The GUI/UWA design direction that started with Windows 8 to accommodate phones and tablets was a step backwards for the desktop.

[Mijka]

You can search for Classic Shell, it will add you a panel of features to make Win/Start button menu more 7-like.