[jwells89]

It’s because despite those issues, depressingly macOS still delivers an experience that to most Mac users is preferable over that of Linux or especially Windows. Increasingly it’s not that macOS is incredible, but that the alternatives are that much worse.

And I say this as someone who uses Windows and Linux daily alongside macOS. Windows isn’t going to get any better so long as Microsoft’s betting on pushing services on users to make money and while desktop Linux is better than ever it still has a ways to go to make it unquestionably better across the board for more than a small subset of users.

It’s actually quite similar to why people buy MacBooks. Generic PC laptops nearly all involve one or more major tradeoffs in day to day use, with none being as good all-rounders as MacBooks even if individual specs don’t measure up.

[seec]

I was an original Mac user (first computer ever bought) and was thinking this type of stuff too. My Windows experience was from schools, friends' computers or later client's computers.

Nowadays I had both but use a Windows PC quite a lot (was destined to be a hackintosh, but couldn't put up with the hassle later one) and the reason I use Windows more is precisely because I have found it to be more stable, less annoying and with less bugs usually.

I have a loaded Intel Mac Mini along and the audio bugs keeps happening on this system, I have particularly nasty crackling that is impossible to debug and particularly annoying for a machine of this price (and I can't swap the mobo like I could if it were a PC).

The Apple reputation is largely underserved nowadays and I find it frustrating because it is one of the reasons they use to justify their absurdly high pricing.

Considering those bugs are still not fixed in Apple Silicon Mac's, I am pretty sure this is a combination of bad software maintenance and poor hardware design, even though they pretend they know better.

Considering the price of their computers, it is unacceptable but to be honest it won't be my problem anymore because I'm not buying anything else from Apple for the foreseeable future.

MacOS is nice and had some cool stuff back in the days, but now Windows can offer an almost 1to1 alternative, at a much better price with much less hardware issues. If you put as much money into a PC than you do in a Mac, the warranty will outlast the Apple support for the equivalent Mac which is kind of funny considering the prices...

[BeFlatXIII]

> Generic PC laptops nearly all involve one or more major tradeoffs in day to day use, with none being as good all-rounders as MacBooks even if individual specs don’t measure up.

This also applies to smartphones. No matter the aspect, some specialty Android is 10x as good as your iPhone. However, it'll have bizarre drawbacks. iPhones are popular because they have right default balance for the broad audience out of the box.

[cosmical65]

In my experience, people tend to say that macOS "looks good". I have not spoken with a mac user who said that macOS is more usable or the workflows are more productive. Also, Apple has convinced everyone that they always know what they are doing, so when something is wrong in the OS it's users who think they must be doing something wrong.

But with Microsoft turning Windows into a big advertising billboard, I can see it becoming a valid reason.

[Jcowell]

Mac is more useable and productive than windows. The comes from someone who’s worked in both. And games on windows.

[soundnote]

Apart from MS's obsessive Bing pushing, I'd say Windows is easily better than macOS. Explorer beats Finder, PWA/Chrome profile support is nicer, window manager is better, archives are handled natively, touchpad gestures for eg. virtual desktops on small laptops are competitive. With a normal mouse, middle click for eg. hold to drag just isn't supported. The natural scroll settings for mouse and trackpad are bound, when you'd usually want them to be the opposite of each other.

As far as I know, iCloud is less well-featured than OneDrive.

As a recent MBA owner, the only thing I think Apple nails is hardware. The battery life and low power use are amazing and there's something to be said for Apple's ability to force-move devs to ARM.

The rest, not really. The OS is aggressively mid, as the kids would say.

...okay. Apple still makes native apps. That counts for something.

[jwells89]

A lot of that is subjective. For me for example, Explorer vs. Finder is mostly a wash with Finder edging out Explorer in a few ways (e.g. toggling hidden file visibility with the key shortcut ⌘⇧. instead of having to dive into settings), and Windows window management is grating to the point that I have to keep a hard low limit on the number of programs open to get anything done under it. Archives are handled natively on macOS too, and I install 7zip on Windows anyway because its multithreaded compression/decompression is way faster than stock. Cloud storage is moot because I barely use it.

[piperswe]

Windows supports just about every archive format natively now too, thanks to libarchive integration.

[soundnote]

How do you manage your windows on macOS?

[jwells89]

Most of the time, I don’t. It sounds silly but macOS window management works best when you don’t micromanage and just let windows pile up at whichever size fits their content, kind of like papers on a desk. Instead I group windows by virtual desktop (space) on two monitors, switching out virtual desktops to mix and match sets of windows. Individual windows are rarely moved or resized.

On the odd occasion I need tiling (which isn’t often) I use Moom[0] because it’s extremely non-intrusive (no easily accidentally triggered animations like Aero Snap) and lets you specify to leave a gap of a few pixels between windows and screen edges which looks nice.

[0]: https://manytricks.com/moom/

[soundnote]

Yeah, I've mostly ended up using a bunch of virtual desktops on the Mac too, and it's nice and convenient. Thing is, though, once I got into that habit on the Mac (because everything I was used to sucked ass), I tried it on Windows and it works just as well. It's less that you can't get a nice windowing setup on macOS, more that the competition offers the same, and more (esp. in KDE 6's case, much, much more)

[jwells89]

The problem with Windows is that it’s just lacking enough in a few areas to drive me crazy.

Its virtual desktops aren’t independent between monitors for example, so when you switch desktops on one monitor it switches on all monitors, which means you can’t mix and match window sets between monitors like is possible on macOS.

Windows’ window-centric nature also gets on my nerves. The only place you’ll see any notion of application-based window grouping is the taskbar, which is desktop-bounded, and so you can’t for example gather all windows for a program from across desktops into one desktop or close all windows across desktops unless the program’s developer has added that functionality themselves. You also can’t move groups of windows between desktops quickly.

Linux doesn’t have the desktop-based issues at least primarily because it’s had virtual desktops for decades, so the feature has been mature there for a long time, but DEs there are still overwhelmingly modeled after a Win9X paradigm and often also lack app-based grouping, even as a toggle.

[apelapan]

Rectangle.app of course! The native window management features in MacOS are Windows XP-level-crappy.

[okamiueru]

MacOS and Windows are, in my honest opinion, significantly less consistent experiences than Gnome. The list I have on MacOS UX annoyances, design inconsistencies and implementation bugs is in the hundreds.

[jwells89]

GNOME is very consistent, but the downside is that it’s not great in terms of power user features and progressive disclosure thereof. In some ways it’s also more mobile-inclined, it’s basically what one would get if they took iPadOS and applied some adaptations for desktop usage.

Some of that consistency is also undone when it’s necessary to run Electron or Qt apps. Anki for example is a real pain if you’re using fractional scaling under Wayland, because GNOME’s refusal to implement server side decorations forces Anki to run with an ugly generic titlebar and no shadow. macOS is better here, with all programs getting the system default window treatment unless they request otherwise.