How many of the functionalities the author misses and doesn't want to install "unsupported 3rd party tools" are NOT 3rd party tools in ubuntu?
Ubuntu linux is a distribution, and only a very very small set of tools and functionalities is "Ubuntu", all the others are simply packaged up 3rd party tools
These 3rd party tools are tested and supported by the distribution though.
It's a big strength of Linux distributions. There is one central, easily reachable place where you can report and track bugs for pretty much everything you do on the computer.
Obviously there are no guarantees that things will be fixed (fast) if you don't pay some sort of support but that's fair enough and still, the maintainers usually want the stuff they package to work reasonably well (they wouldn't spend their time packaging it otherwise) so one can expect a minimum level of functionality for most things unless explicitly stated otherwise.
The supported area for Windows and macOS from Microsoft and Apple is small in comparison to BSD and GNU/Linux distributions and good luck reaching them anyway.
And no less importantly, on a Linux distro these 3rd party tools are installed with native package management tools from a (minimally) vetted source. No need to go out and search the wild web for forum posts of suggestions of which tools to risk your install on.
It's reasonable to have unfixed bugs for years if they are not really blocking many people (and even if they did, but that would be too bad). Maintainers are focusing on other things that need to be done (or not, anyway nobody is supposed to fix bugs for free if they don't want to).
In this case, launchpad works as intended, as a place were you can track the (non) progression of your bugs.
Me too, probably, by the way (in other projects). My bugs reports are more like FYIs to the community.
If the problem is in the software provided by a package, most of the time you can report them in the bugtracker of the distribution, but it wont be fixed/supported by the distribution since the bug is upstream.
Mac OSX is also a distribution, containing (formerly mostly GNU and now mostly BSD) third-party utilities. However, the surface area that Mac OSX tries to cover in terms of real UNIX utilities is getting smaller and smaller.
It's almost ;) as if Apple doesn't care if real UNIX people prefer their laptops anymore.
Apple has moved on, to a bigger and far less demanding market: "real" people who have never heard of the artist formerly known as UNIX.
In my case I use sshfs, which also uses FUSE and is a "3rd party tool". Is that more reasonable than osxfuse? (Honest question, I'm unfamiliar with the latter)
edit:
sshfs is "unsupported": "However, at present SSHFS does not have any active, regular contributors, and there are a number of known issues (see the bugtracker)."
gvfs-sftp counts as native to me if you're using a gnome desktop. The author is using a fullfat gnome distro like Ubuntu, so it's probably even preinstalled.
I wasn't familiar with that (I don't use gnome). After a quick lookup, it seems it doesn't even use FUSE - but it does have a "fuse bridge" for interoperability with other apps.
Apparently this supports a bunch of other "virtual filesystems", like Google Drive, as well.
Since it's part of Gnome, I guess it's fair to compare this with MacOS and consider it "woking out of the box".
It is, I have been doing diff of files from different remote machines using meld and gnome gvfs mounting for years. It works out of the box and is really mature.
Only thing app that wasn't working well with gvfs was libreoffice. I don't know if it is still the case but it refused to handle a file gvfs mounted on my NAS regardless of the protocol (ssh, smb, nfs).
Ubuntu linux is a distribution, and only a very very small set of tools and functionalities is "Ubuntu", all the others are simply packaged up 3rd party tools