[pxc]

It's pretty simple: third party, commercial software isn't an OS feature. It's not part of the desktop environment. Things like the clipboard and its behavior are.

And the macOS desktop environment is missing a ton of shit that you can take for granted across a dozen Linux desktop environments. They add up to a sense that the desktop itself on macOS is neglected and barren in its very fundamentals.

[dsego]

It's probably missing a couple of practical things, not a _ton_ of shit. Most of those things are solved with 3rd party addons.

On some linux environments I can't take for granted that I will see an image preview in the file picker, so there is that.

[pxc]

> On some linux environments I can't take for granted that I will see an image preview in the file picker, so there is that.

That is indeed a jarring and annoying limitation! I'd count that as likewise failing to meet reasonable minimum expectations.

I don't really have some complete, ideal feature comparison in mind. If you take an experienced, dedicated (that is, not having used other computing environments regularly for many years) user of macOS and an experienced, dedicated user of Plasma and sit them down at each other's computers, both might reasonably feel like on balance, things are missing and the experience is lacking.

I have strong intuitions about what parts of a whole desktop computer system are 'operating system features' or part of 'the desktop environment'. But the reality is that the demarcation (and whether one cares about it) between is cultural. My view of that is shaped by my own experience and preferences.

Still, the impression is overwhelming when one comes to macOS as a power user from elsewhere that lots of the basics are missing, and that the majority of Apple's efforts go into the integration of applications that sit on top the core operating system and desktop environment rather than the software that comprises those things. That impression is made much more grating by macOS high reputation as well-designed and something that 'just works out of the box'.

For me, at least, some of the third-party applications which add back in macOS' missing features just irritate me more. Consider what has to be done to disable mouse acceleration on macOS, for example. Why does that OS care so little for flexibility or accommodating common use cases that a precarious driver hack which intercepts my mouse input events and relays them to the operating system as tablet presses or some crap is necessary for such basic configuration as linear mouse movement? Should I be grateful that I can pay for the privilege of a workaround that Apple will almost certainly break in some future OS update? And what about the depressing process of discovering, first, that none of the still-documented `defaults write` secret config changes work, and neither do any of the other third-party drivers or utilities? Often, the bit of missing functionality comes with its own miserable journey of discovery. The Plentycom developer is great, SteerMouse is brilliant and I'm glad they figured out a way. But nothing about that situation leaves me with a positive impression of macOS itself!