[didacusc]

Saying that the macOS desktop is vastly inferior to Linux desktops is absolutely nuts. I've tried to get my relatives on Linux desktops so many times, just for it to go completely wrong a couple of weeks after and having to reinstall Windows. It's just not made for average (or below-average) users, so I don't see how it can be VASTLY inferior to something as easy and polished as macOS.

[baq]

I don’t need polished and superior, I need to get work done. I want the OS to get out of the way, not slow me down with animations, stage managers and pretty docks. I don’t even need customization, I just need it to stop trying to outdo itself and fall over.

I’d run kde or even gnome on my work MacBook if it let me without a second thought.

PS just installed ios 26 and what is this? If this low contrast blobby window thing makes its way to the laptop I’ll be very, very not impressed.

[mrheosuper]

if you are power user, why bother with GUI at all ?

[zer00eyz]

> If this low contrast blobby window thing makes its way to the laptop I’ll be very, very not impressed.

You have quite a bit of control over all of these features. Dark mode, contrast controls...

There is a lot there you can tweak to have it look how you want and it stays that way through pretty much all upgrades.

> animations, stage managers and pretty docks.

You can turn all this off for the most part.

Spend as much time and effort customizing your Mac as you do customizing your Linux desktop and a lot of your laments will go away.

I use both often enough to know that linux on the desktop is a much steeper investment if you want it to work for you.

[dustbunny]

My parents can never understand windows because they keep changing the ux design and my parents can't tell the difference between Microsofts AI ad stuff and the real os. My parents will literally type "email" into the Google search bar and hope to find their email address.

Windows has failed them.

Linux Mint/Cinnamon is closer to windows 95 than windows 11 is. It's cleaner, simpler, better.

Mac osx is annoying compared to cinnamon. I hate the empty space around the dock. I hate how Mac windows don't always consume the same amount of space for some reason so I can see the different rounded corners on different "maximized" windows. I hate Mac osx's full screen mode forcing each fullscreen app onto a different desktop. I prefer cinnamons default window tiling/desktop switching/fullscreening keyboard shortcuts and animations.

Finder's default mode of unaligned randomly placed folder icons is so wild. .DS_Store is so annoying. The lack of a system tray meaning you have to use the dock in order to see if you have a DM in slack. Spotlight opening the "spotlight" app when I type the "spot" of Spotify. Idk I just truly prefer cinnamon.

There's things about Mac osx that are great. The central nature of /Applications and of ~/Library is great. Lots of things are great.

Mac hardware is by far best in class but Mac osx is honestly pretty ugly compared to Cinnamon imo. I'm not biased. I paid through the nose for my MacBook. But I like the esthetics of Cinnamon on my desktop much more than osx.

[trueismywork]

I just got a work Mac and I have spent around 20 years now on linux before it. I was making a list compared to KDE (not pros/cons just differences) It is still a work in progress since its only a couple of days since im using it.

1. No delete button. I know you can do Fn delete but It is more problematic. And I do use delete often.

2. System keeps important system stuff in Library directory in home. Do not do remove any directories.

4. Os x doesnt quit apps and then expects me to go through all apps in windows switcher.

5. The spaces dont wrap around.

6. Finder is always in your alt +tab? Causes issues with switching.

7. Corners are round. How to Disable it control the roundedness

8. Alt +Tab doesnt automatically restore minimized windows.

9. App store is quite weak compared to archlinux

10. There is no spaces pager (a small bar at top where I can immediately see which desktop im in)

11. It seems that I cannot have windows of same app in multiple spaces.

12. Same app has only one window. Apple mail for example. Cannot copy text from email to settings.

13. How to Disable HTML display in apple mail.

14. Kmail has much better interface for signing

Both for viewing rhe signed emails and for deciding which key to use

15. Opening a new windows from spotlight is not possible

16. Download multiple wallpapers at same time is not possible

17. All operations related to an app should be inside an app. Alt+w for tab and ctrl+tab for switching makes me move two fingers instead of one.

18. Spectacle is so much better than screen shot on MAC os

19. Ramdisk on mac os x

21. Threads view in emails isnot possible in apple mail

22. Application specific power optimization (for good battery life) on OS X

23. Better security and access on OSX for apps.

23. Switching between apps of same windows on OSX does not bring up a visual aid..

24. Long press leads to accents which is very cool but also I didn't use it.

[bityard]

25. Left-clicking in a window to raise it _sometimes_ performs actions in the app (e.g. clicking a button or scrolling the window) and _sometimes_ only raises the window. It seems to depend on the app.

26. No ability to use focus-follows-mouse.

27. Home/End keys send you to the top/bottom of the whole document instead of the start/end of a line. The latter is much more useful to me and I use it all the time. You can change this behavior with a terminal command followed by rebooting, but some programs still do whatever they want.

28. Automatic text replacements change the text you entered into the text that Apple thinks you mean. (Can also be disabled.)

29. Holding down an alphanumeric key brings up an accept/symbol selector, as on iPhone. This isn't compatible with many terminal applications like vim.

30. The dock has a tendency to move automatically to another display when there is a maximized window on that display. (I know how to move the dock by going bottom of the display and moving the mouse down, this isn't that.)

31. The camera notch can hide icons and you have no way to get to them without either connecting and external display or a workaround like https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden.

[Nevermark]

> The spaces dont wrap around.

Indeed. I would love it if I could name spaces too. Amazing how little details improve productivity.

> It seems that I cannot have windows of same app in multiple spaces.

Right-click app icon in dock.

For different app windows in the same app, appearing in different spaces: Options->Assign to Desktop->None.

For app windows appearing across all spaces: Options->Assign to Desktop->All Desktops.

("Desktop" here actually refers to spaces, for some reason. And it would be nice to be able to do "All Desktops" at the window level, but nay.)

[sonofhans]

I feel your pain here; I remember my transition from Debian to MacOS. I’ve used DOS, Windows, Linux, and MacOS — each full-time for more than a decade. The switching pain is real, and some things still feel wrong to me after I got to love them on a prior OS.

E.g., in Windows apps, menu items are keyboard-addressable by default. This is brilliant for accessibility, and for accustomed power users. MacOS has no _by default_ equivalent.

E.g., managing virtual desktops in Linux are exactly as flexible and powerful as you want them to be. MacOS does it One Way (more or less), and you’d better like it.

I still love MacOS the most. Some of the things you list are real misses (#1). Some of them, I believe, are things you haven’t found yet (#11, #15, #16). Some are MacOS-specific metaphors which I’ve come to love compared with the alternatives (#4). Some I don’t understand but would be happy to discuss with you (#17).

[cesarvarela]

4 - in macOS apps != windows (some apps don't respect this)

8 - minimize in macOS is more like "get this window out of the way without closing it", and it is related to 4)

15 - because of 4

23 - wat

Personally, once I got used to cmd+tab and cmd+` for window management, I can't go back, but it needs a different mental model than the one on Windows/Linux.

[astrange]

> 19. Ramdisk on mac os x

It has ramdisks (`diskimagetool attach ram://`) and tmpfs.

[jakeydus]

To be fair a lot of these might be because OS X was unveiled in 2016 /s

[AuthAuth]

MacOS is just missing way to many core features. It feels more like a demo than actual software to be used day to day for a variety of computing work. I know the technical under the hood are all solid but the software the user interacts with is bad, all the default apps are barebones with bad defaults and no settings to fix it. My final point is: finder.

When I put non techy people on mac they end up having a good experience because they learn quickly there is no reason to touch anything except the web browser. I also want to highlight Macs are high end hardware in a premium package compared to Linux where people usually try it on a really old low/mid range device.

[heavyset_go]

What are your relatives doing?

If they're like 95% of computer users, they use them to check their email, their FB/IG/etc and browse the web. A Chromebook would suit their needs, but in my experience, so would a modern Linux installation + a browser.

The biggest friction in my experience is UI differences, but that is solved by just mimicking Windows/macOS UI in KDE. Put buttons and components where they expect to find them and it seems to just work, in my experience.

[hbn]

You can also just tell them to get an M2 MacBook Air for $800. You'll have to do near zero troubleshooting, it'll last them the better part of a decade, they get unmatched battery life and hardware reliability, and if they do run into issues they'll have top-of-its-class support from Apple.

I know Linux guys don't mind putting up with the Linux experience but if your family is trusting you as "the techie," you'd be doing them a huge favor by not making them put up with that stuff.

[mistercheph]

Yeah, and my fisher price car is a lot easier for my 3 year old to drive than my car.

Sometimes powerful tools need sophisticated users that have time to invest in learning to use the tool. "Inferior" might depend on who is trying to accomplish what, but it's hard to argue that if you're trying to do or build the most sophisticated and cutting edge things that computers are capable of doing, you probably don't want to be using macOS or window.

That doesn't mean that it doesn't work marvelously when you have 0 time to invest in learning to use your computer, and all you want is to access web applications and manage a few files on a screen bigger than your smartphone and with a physical keyboard.

[yehat]

People's habits have nothing to do with "superior" or "inferior" qualities of a certain OS. No matter how good or bad, the habits have a strong resistance force against any change. That's not necessarily bad, but let's not make it part of judging OSes qualities.

[Theodores]

Clearly this is a matter of opinion and opinion requires belief and belief means facts don't matter.

[UK-Al05]

You're forgetting the target market here. Linux is better for power users. Not average joes.

[jebarker]

I do all my software development in remote clusters/supercomputers. I’d consider myself a power user. My laptop is for running a terminal, vscode, a browser and the various applications my company requires, e.g. Teams, Slack. So I want reliability, low configuration and maintenance overhead on my part and good battery life. Linux can’t compete on these fronts.

[cosmic_cheese]

It’s more subjective of a thing than many would like to admit. As someone who’s been working as a dev for a decade and writing code outside of work for twice that, one of the things keeping me away from Linux is that there simply isn’t a true Mac analogue DE.

[wqaatwt]

Sometimes jumping through random hops to solve things just work on other operating systems is fun (not sarcasm).

[GuinansEyebrows]

hey, i don't know if you've considered it, but this comes across as a pretty unnecessarily-insulting way to state a personal preference.