It seems like more and more of the work on MacOS is dedicated to propping up iOS instead of simply making a great desktop OS. As someone who does not use or want Apple's mobile devices, it's been hard to get excited about these last few releases.
Now I'm trapped between MacOS, Windows 10 and maybe Google's Chrome environment. Linux, please take off. I wished the open source community had good interface/usability designers.
The majority of the professional community for creating UX/UI do not have the tools to work in FOSS, so you aren't going to see many designers working for FOSS projects as result
Then put a call out for what tools you need replaced. Maybe even back GNU to hire people to do it. As a free software developer, I have no clue what you need in order to do good design work. From my perspective, inkscape works "good enough for me". But I'm not a designer.
Free software communities require some give as well as take. The fact that there isn't a free software version of $tool is because nobody has given enough of an incentive to replace it (we're too busy replacing other proprietary tools or making our own tools better).
LibreOffice + {Gnome,KDE} + {Chrome,Firefox} is enough for quite a few users "outside of the programming community". My girlfriend uses GNU/Linux (she has to use Windows now because my university requires some proprietary CAD software that I don't want to set up with WINE), several of my non-technical friends now use GNU/Linux.
It's dishonest to claim that just because some professional designers aren't happy with the tools we have available right now on GNU/Linux that "Desktop Linux has died because programmers have no idea how to make it useful for anyone outside that community".
I would downvote you if I could.
More specifically the issue of getting preinstalled Linux out on store shelves right next to Windows and OSX.
In large part because there is no marketing machine to match Apple available, nor the deep pockets to get into a war of attrition with Microsoft.
The closest we came was when Asus shipped their original EEEPC. And Microsoft wasted no time offering a specialized license for Windows XP so that OEMs could offer it instead. Keep in mind that MS had stopped offering XP, and was trying to sell Vista at the time.
On top of that most stores have gotten damn used to the Apple MS duopoly. Thus anything thats not an Apple is a MS, with all the customer support problems that entails...
During the day, do your work with the tools you are used to. During the night, share a few design tips with open source folks and try out the FLOSS tools.
Sorry, no can do. We have to complete the process of breaking everything with systemd, then as soon as that's done rewrite KDE and Gnome from scratch again.
After approaching Gnome 3, Cinnamon, and Unity with an open mind, I'm a happy Unity user.
If you want to use cgroups and don't want systemd to start messing around with your setup, then you have to go through systemd (which is bad, but it gets worse when you find out that systemd doesn't support all cgroups). Also, systemd has ridiculous defaults. I wrote the pids cgroup code in the kernel, and was surprised when systemd set the default limit for all system services to be 512 tasks and 4096 for all user tasks. Then there's the binary logging format which is such a brain-dead idea, that I'm not even sure how someone actually went through the process of writing the code without ever considering that it was a bad idea.
That's just one example of the things that annoy me with systemd. Things mostly work with it, but if you actually want to do something, using it is such a pain. If systemd had stayed as what was promised (a replacement for init scripts) and hadn't gone beyond that (managing your bootloader, binary logging, abusing cgroups and changing the kernel plans for what cgroupv2 should look like, messing around with coredumps, misusing /dev/kmem to actually spam people who are trying to debug kernel issues, an-almost-but-not-quite reimplementation of ntpd, etc).
If they didn't have such strong views that they were entitled to be the owners of my system, it might actually have turned out as a good project. Too bad that the management of the project has decided that they should "rewrite all the things, but badly".
For what it's worth, if you find a distro that doesn't have systemd you can run Docker and runC on it -- both use the underlying kernel primitives themselves and aren't wrappers for systemd scripts.
Here, however, your audience has launchd, and has had for over a decade, running on top of Mach IPC; and BSD APIs such as kevent() for tracking forking processes.
Case in point, the "Do you want Windows to search for a solution?" Since the day this feature was added I've never once had Windows figure anything out; I always get "Windows was unable…". In the Win2K/XP days, you could right-click on a network adapter and choose 'repair' to do all the standard stuff (flush DNS, release/renew DHCP lease, etc.) which would solve most problems. They took that out in Vista in favour of the "idk man" wizard, and now you have to do it by hand.
Windows is also full of catch-all error messages, where it says "We couldn't copy the file. Check file permissions, make sure there's free space, and if it's a network drive make sure you're still on the network", as if those weren't things that the computer couldn't check for me in milliseconds.
When people say that macOS is falling behind Windows, it seems to be, at best, a superficial judgement from people who don't use both of them for productive work. Windows 10 has a lot of polish, but it also has two separate control panels for changing settings, apps which don't seem to know what kind of apps they are, and more and more new APIs and features that only store apps can use, in exchange for extremely limited access to the system.
Windows is great for playing games, but for any serious work the overhead of making it work and keeping it working is just ridiculous.
I've seen this with every new version of Windows (except Windows 8.x, which I haven't used and instead jumped from Windows 7 to Windows 10). With each new introduction and addition of polish, you still see old dialogs and methods of doing things underneath once you go one or two levels in. Control Panel is the best example of this. Windows 10 isn't even a complete OS yet. As an example, if I go to Settings and search for "proxy", nothing would show up. If I drill down into Network manually, then I can see and change the proxy settings. I'm sure there are many other unfinished things in it. It's as if they released an in-progress OS right in the middle of a development cycle, and I find it both frustrating to use and ridiculous!
My guess is that most of Mac users do want/use Apple mobile devices, and that in fact the majority of their computing time is now on those devices so it makes sense that the team would focus heavily on the interface and overlap between iOS / MacOS.
Which doesn't really change the fact that even Windows 10 has been starting to pass them by with significant new features.
Actually there are indeed more iOS users than OS X -- but OS X users almost all have an iOS device, which is what's important here.
Out of that demographic, I don't see much people that care enough to buy a mac but choose an android or windows phone.
Apple is tying all it's devices strongly together through software and services. This way you have a huge incentive to completely buy into the Apple ecosystem.
This matters far more than something like a new filesystem - a term most Apple customers have never even heard.
That's what it is... a guess. Unless you can produce some data to back it up.
There's a huge community (especially outside of US) who use Macs for day-to-day work but use android mobile devices as that's the most sensible choice for a majority of the world.
That is a highly subjective statement at best.
And as a result, the app and services ecosystem supports Android as the main platform in large ecosystems outside the US like China, India and Brazil.
I don't own an iOS device, never have, and don't see myself ever getting one in the future.
All of my personal mobile devices are Android, and all my desktops/laptops are Windows.
That is my biggest (and really only) complaint against Apple. Sometimes you have to go under the hood and do a few things. I don't know what Apple has against this way of thinking though.
1. Mac OS is just too unfamiliar. It starts with the keyboard layout, which I reverted to Windows-style after I went crazy trying to find the square brackets. (Which, probably for aesthetics, they didn't bother to print ont he keyboard.)
2. Mac OS's poor multi-monitor support regularly drives me crazy. To their credit, they have ironed out a lot of the bugs in Mavericks, but there is still plenty of stupid behavior (e.g. screen 1 sliding back to the desktop from a fullscreen app when a new window opens on screen 2, or a messagebox from an app on screen 3 opening on screen 1, completely out of my sight). Windows is somehow much better in this regard (at least, I was not annoyed by it that often), and even Linux has very solid multi-monitor support these days (at least for me, YMMV).
3. The userland is UNIX, but does not match my expectations well enough. It's basically in the creepy valley. For example, I was using units(1) one day and wondering why it gave a syntax error when I tried to use a power operator (like "2^64"). Then I noticed that I was in the Mac terminal, not in my Linux VM (where I usually work), and upon inspecting the manpage, I found that they hadn't updated their units(1) since 1991 (wtf).
4. The company where I work is mostly a Windows shop, so corporate IT is based on Microsoft products (AD, Exchange, Lync aka Skype for Business) all the way through. While there are Office for Mac, Outlook for Mac, and Lync for Mac, these are still no match to their Windows counterparts in terms of polish and OS-level integration.
All in all, I'm already set on going back to a Windows notebook when it is time to get a new machine. (It's not like my Linux VM cares which host OS it runs on, anyway.)
Apple's US keyboards have them in a good place: on dedicated keys to the right of the 'p' key.
Scroll down a bit here:
http://www.apple.com/magic-accessories/
Like you, I am baffled as to why some of their BSD userland programs are so very out of date.
Standard UK layout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_United_Kingdom.svg
Apple "UK" layout: http://i.imgur.com/pIGiilv.jpg (@€#@|\`~ are all wrong)
I'm not sure it's correct now, but at least it's useful.
The Unix outdatedness is really annoying sometimes. I wouldn't even mind running some kind of big update after getting a new machine and waiting a couple hours for things to improve. The number of Macs I've seen with Linux VMs running on them just to get up-to-date things on them is really unfortunate.
But I don't get the complaint about multiple screens either. It's always been plug in -> desktop extended. I wouldn't even know what to get wrong.
There was always weirdness about the dock and menu bar that's sort of now settling down, but the dock used to display all sorts of bizarreness, especially when it was set to autohide.
Fundamentally it came down to issues with Apple's way of thinking about workspaces, monitors, desktops, applications and windows. Even now I still have to spend far too much time hunting down things across multiple desktops and monitors. It seemed like Apple was dancing around what should probably just happen in an effort not to too closely mimic Microsoft.
But to get at the heart of it, what happens when you full-screen an app? Apple had no idea what that meant when it was launched in 2011. However, what Apple chose to do in the case of full-screening an app on multiple monitors made absolutely no sense and was absolutely useless: the app would take on the role in the hierarchy of a desktop, and the other monitor would go grey. Why? nobody outside of Apple knows, but it took until 2013/2014 to fix.
Everything you need to know can be summed up in the fact that, in OSX, you can click the green button with a '+' in it, and that window can get smaller.
That's an interesting one. OS X has a BSD user land (FreeBSD to be specific), while Linux is traditionally used with the GNU user land. Looking at the FreeBSD site, they ship the same units version from 1993: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=units&sektion=1
I assume you're using a non-US keyboard? I've been using Macs for programming for 15 years, and I haven't seen this, and I have MacBooks Pro from 2010 through 2016 in our office and they all have square brackets on the keyboard.