Fedora and pop OS have been ahead of windows for a while.
Personally also think Mac is going the way of windows, I have to use it for testing safari sometimes the OS is an absolute nightmare to use, always popping up asking for my password or fingerprint or some other password, or some other permission, it's just a whole bunch of antipatterns.
You are absolutely correct. I remember when I switched from Windows XP to Mac how much quieter it got. No more constant pop ups, and importantly, apps were not allowed to steal focus. Now there’s a constant stream of interruptions. I’m constantly having window focus stolen by others apps while I’m typing, constantly having notifications, and the UI has only gotten worse over the last few years.
But damn if that hardware isn’t the best.
I’m torn on how best to switch to linux as a daily driver considering how much I depend on the very customized workflow I have running on my Mac.
Get a ThinkPad and install fedora. Read the arch wiki if you run into problems with specific software. You'll barely notice the change tbh, gnome is really good these days especially on a standard fedora workstation release.
ThinkPads mostly just work (they use Ubuntu to run their acceptance tests before shipping). You do sometimes run into issues for a couple months on new machine releases while kernel catches up but having enough Linux users running them means things get fixed eventually unlike on say system76. Dell xps works about as well if that's more your style.
> having enough Linux users running them means things get fixed eventually unlike on say system76
In the Bad Old Days, this was true-having Linux developers using your Windows hardware would ensure it's eventually mostly supported. Note the "eventually" and "mostly."
System76 ships with Ubuntu or Pop! OS, and they support it for up three years. This is a _huge_ improvement. System76 makes sure both that Linux supports he hardware, but also that the _hardware_ supports _Linux._ This is night-and-day different from the bad old days.
macOS 12 is better about interruptions because having different focus modes for work, personal, etc helps a lot. It is the same system on iOS 15 if you have an iPhone or iPad.
Installed it on a Dell XPS13 recently. It's great except I have to restart GNOME every couple hours because of of annoying visual glitch that makes all text disappear.
Why would anyone without an Nvidia card be using X? You have to go out of your way to use this antiquated and deprecated technology with Gnome nowadays and screen tearing is specifically one of its problems.
If it's on a laptop: Fractional scaling. On wayland you can get some blurry apps (iirc xwayland apps) and on xps 13" (unless its the oled probably with it's weird resolution) integer scaling isn't good enough tbh
It seems Wayland still has some issues with dual monitors and higher resolution (note: I am following the PopOS configuration guide on the frame.work forums. I’ll probably give Wayland a try later today as I wasn’t aware of this.
Try adding 'i915.enable_psr=0' to your kernel params. This fixes a weird bug I encountered where text would disappear, or weirdly not disappear when it should have disappeared. Hopefully this helps!
Not to minimize the other commenters issues, but I've never seen an issue like this, and I've run Pop on a wide variety of hardware.
And as the sibling to this comment points out, Pop only officially support their own hardware, where this would never happen.
Edit: It also seems worth pointing out that the reasons these conversations are had is that it can be fixed. Mac and Windows? Not so much in my experience. Working in a repair shop I have seen some things out of both of those that make bug's like this one look minor (remember when Windows updates decided user data didn't matter?), and there's nothing/not much you can do about it.
On the other hand I still cannot configure CMD-tab to work like on Windows and most Linux desktop environments ln my brand new Mac.
Keyboard navigation (moving between or selecting words or lines of text) still seems somewhat hit or miss even though it is better than when I left Mac OS behind in 2012.
Of course this might not matter to you (and I even know some of you prefer the separation between "application switching" and "window switching") but for many of us these are way larger issues than having to fix a config file once.
I've been running macos since 2012 and never had such issues.
Only if you install it on a very short list of approved hardware. Try to install OS X on a random Dell laptop and you will have far greater challenges than what most Linux distros will give you.
Can confirm installing macOS on unsupported hardware is very time consuming and makes me wish I had just installed Linux instead. For example, you have to manually map USB ports and install tons of random drivers to your installation media before you can get a working system. Enabling each part of the experience is a whole adventure in itself (eg. audio support requires you to set a value in the bootloader, but there are actually like five values for each kind of audio chip and you have to try each and every one until it works).
Also, WiFi support is a nightmare. Worse than I've ever had it on Linux.
Even vanilla Windows installs don't always work that well.
OS X is great for specific use cases and specific users. If you want Linux, OP is saying PopOS is the gold standard. OS X isn’t exactly in the same vein.
Apple gets to dictate both what display server and what graphics hardware macOS users get to use. Linux distros necessarily face integration issues that Apple has never had to.
You're right that it still sucks, but this isn't a matter of Wayland being insufficiently 'advanced'. This is about relationships between enterprises as much as it is about technical challenges.
ThinkPad x380 user: I've had the best touch experience with GNOME 34/Fedora so far - three finger pinch/swipe to change desktops, pinch to zoom in Firefox, sane scrolling in most apps, and GNOME dashboard is touch friendly if you ever need to open apps. Maybe the jankiest part is rotation but I just try not to do that :D
Personally also think Mac is going the way of windows, I have to use it for testing safari sometimes the OS is an absolute nightmare to use, always popping up asking for my password or fingerprint or some other password, or some other permission, it's just a whole bunch of antipatterns.