[skunkworker]

It's really simple to have no desktop icons on the Mac. Just open the finder settings and under General untick all of the boxes to show on the desktop. Then move everything out of the ~/Desktop folder. It won't have anything on it after that.

As for the dock you can set it to auto hide, and change the delay so that it will come up but after N seconds [1].

[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/59556/is-there-a-w...

[zumu]

I will try the finder changes, but I have my doubts crap won't randomly appear in my ~/Desktop folder automagically.

As for the dock, auto-hiding it doesn't disable it, it just hides it. So it remains visible in mission control, and still has bouncing icons from time to time. It also uses system resources, etc.

Ideally I wouldn't have to hack around these settings and could just turn off both these features, like I could on Snow Leopard.

[skunkworker]

The only "automagic" thing I know of that would need to be changed is changing where screenshots are being saved which can be done fairly straightforwardly.

https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/change-where-mac-screensho...