[skydhash]

I have made my peace with that as well, but the ground keep sifting under. There was the Music.app stuff, the System settings, Apple Intelligence, and now the whole UI of the OS. Those are the things that you would interact with daily.

It could be fine. I'm also OK with GNOME's strict approach to design. But with Apple, you wait the next release with dread because you never know what they will pull next.

[microtonal]

To be honest, I have used macOS since OS X 10.4 and most of it is still very similar UI-wise? Finder, Spotlight, basic window management, etc. are still pretty much the same. If you had a time machine and took someone from 2006, they would still feel pretty much at home on macOS 26. For me the only larger breaking change was when they axed Spaces in 10.7 for Mission Control (Spaces was so much better).

GNOME from 2006? Quite a different story.

I agree on lower-level stuff. Nowadays you have to partially disable SIP to use DTrace, which is meh... (and it seems largely unmaintained) Instruments is quite great though.