Oh and if that isnt good enough - check out https://www.protondb.com/explore?page=0&sort=playerCount to play windows-only Steam games on Linux
I think of that bottle of ersatz Worchestershire sauce whenever I hear from Linux advocates who say that some piece of GUI software is as good as a big commercial project in the GUI realm. My experience with Linux window manager solutions is that they look good in screenshots but whenever you go to use them, the fit and finish just isn't there.
* I wouldn't say soy sauce tastes all that much like Worchestershire sauce, but it's a far closer substitute than anything I've seen labelled as vegan Worchestershire.
I haven't been using macOS for any serious work yet, but so far it feels a lot clunkier and messier. It's like an idiot butler.
I'm making an effort to use it with the default settings, as it was designed, rather than trying to bend it towards my workflow.
I'll see how it goes, but so far macOS is nowhere near competitive with Fedora in terms of polish.
I don't think that this is at all fair. Some anecdata:
I can't compare GNOME with macOS, as I haven't used either, but when I switched from Windows 7 to Ubuntu/Unity, I honestly felt that Unity was far superior both in terms of usability and degree of "polish", to the extent that during the transition time, while still dual-booting, I futilely tried to make Windows more Unity-like.
Further counterexamples: Firefox vs IE, VLC vs Windows Media Player, etc.
(Yes, in most of these cases the FOSS version has/had a large organisation behind it, to some degree, but then so does GNOME, at least for the moment.)
I still occasionally use Unity (once every couple of weeks) and I am not missing anything from MacOS
Apparently you don't even know what you're comparing. In none of MacOS, Windows, Android or iOS is there a separate, standalone component that is a window manager. There is one huge OS, of which the desktop environment is a small part, and the window manager is a small, possibly unidentifiable part of that small part. Whereas a window manager is one part of a completely modular stack of software. It can definitely be perfected into something that works like those abovementioned systems (see elementary OS or Ubuntu, for example; and it's not like the "fit and finish" is there in Windows 10), but the thing is that the core userbase isn't in the market for that sort of perfection. I specifically use this stack of software (and there's way more to it than Linux itself) because I can decide what's perfect for me and still run loads of software on it wihout having to port them. Fit and finish is mine to do.
I totally understand that someone may not want to do that, there are distros for them (Android is one), and then there is Windows and MacOS, all are options. But you're criticising (some) distros for doing what they're supposed to do, i.e. being highly, even completely customisable. Furthermore, I can easily say "they look good in screenshots but whenever you go to use them, the fit and finish just isn't there" about Windows or Macs, and what that basically means in all of the cases is that I'm criticising an unfamiliar paradigm with total disregard for or ignorance of the motives that cause it to be the way it is.
Please don't hate me for this, but I'd like to respectfully correct you, with a bit of info on pronunciation that I hope will assist you in future.
I'm a Brit, and in England there's a town called Worcester (usually pronounced "wuster" rather than "war-sester"). It's in a county called Worcestershire (usually pronounced "wuster-shuh", sometimes "wuster-shire", but the "wuster" bit holds).
This county has a famous sauce, inevitably called Worcestershire sauce, that often contains anchovy extracts, hence the availability of vegetarian/vegan versions.
Hope that helps.
Until you hear a Massachusetts native tell you they're from Wahstur(??) - Worcester, you wouldn't have realized that US English still has a lot of varying accents, even after we've been thoroughly homogenized by mass media.
http://extensions.gnome.org/ - extensions to customize your desktop built in javascript and installable from your browser.
Tons of stuff like that. Try it you will like it.
> The company has also claimed that "Lord Marcus Sandys, ex-Governor of Bengal" encountered it while in India with the East India Company in the 1830s, and commissioned the local apothecaries to recreate it.
Think of Gnome as the chutney to OSX's Worcestershire sauce. Ultimately that's what the Brits were trying to replicate you know ;)
P.S. Referring to Bengal in particular, then what we are talking about is Kashundi
I'm reminded of Stephenson in Cryptonomicon spending pages talking about a main character's past odyssey to deal with their wisdom teeth as an allegory for their current relationship status.
On the other hand, I left my job and the associated Windows environment in the summer to found a startup. I bought a T430 cheap off ebay as my main development machine. I put Fedora 28 on it, and have been using it for a few months. The entire experience has been a very pleasant surprise in terms of pain.
Fedora installed flawlessly and everything worked, down to fingerprint reader and keyboard backlight. The only command line tinkering I had to do at setup was to install tlp to help the battery life.
Gnome has also been really very good. It handles multiple monitors well, the task switching is good, I like the overall approach once I'd used it for a few days. It is genuinely a better DE than Windows, and I prefer it to MacOS.
My main niggle with Gnome is notifications - there is some magic algorithm based on your activity that decides when they should disappear, and when they do they are never to be seen again (no history or anything). This is my only issue with it on a day to day basis, and it's really not that bad (far less than I have to deal with on Windows or Mac).
For example, I used MacOS in my last job and Windows 10 in my current job and I still prefer to use Fedora Workstation. In addition to that, my experience with MacOS and Windows 10 showed me where Linux could improve (except software selection which is a hard problem to solve)
Agreed on Gnome 3.30, I know desktop environments are controversial around these parts for some reason but I think it's fantastic.
You can pry my simple tiling window manager from my cold, dead hands.
Also, I cannot stand the ubiquitous hamburger menus of Gnome. I really wish we could all go back to humane menus.
The title bars and other UI elements are quite large though, probably for usability reasons. Traditional tiling wm's waste less screen estate.
All around just a superb distro.
You are right, that is very cool. It seems like they're definitely kicking it up a notch. I like the notes and podcast apps.
What do you use that isn't a first class citizen on the others? What does macOS have for web development that you can't find anywhere else?
I am really struggling to work out what applications macOS has for web that would make it anything more than an equal.
SequelPro. Man, is this good for handling databases. I used DataGrip for a while but got fed up with slow and cluttered interface. This is even the reason stopping me from using PostgreSQL as it only supports MySQL. I haven't tried but HeidiSQL seems decent for Windows.
ImageOptim. This is the kind of app I like on macOS. Simple, effective and even free. I don't mind paying but interestingly no good alternative for other OS that work on jpg/gif/png/svg exist.
Homebrew is pretty good to install newer small tools, like ripgrep, exa and the likes that hasn't made it into apt repos but you don't have to manually download and deploy them in /use/local and keep them up to date.
CodeKit, which I don't use often myself but for client side only development, this is very useful but once again, there's only Prepros that comes to my mind as an alternative which also supports Windows but isn't as good.
When it comes to image editing for someone who's not a designer like me, Pixelmator is simple, clean looking and powerful enough. There's also Sketch for vector tools which is becoming very popular. Maybe Paint.NET works too for Windows.
And with VMWare Fusion, you can test your site on Windows browsers easily but you can't test on macOS from other OS due to licensing.
For smaller utilities, Kaleidoscope can show diff of images and folder structures which I sometimes use. No idea about alternatives. Unclutter which can work as quick memo as well as clipboard history. I don't see anything that's as elegant as that.
And this is probably most important and not a development app but BetterTouchTool. The comfort of using trackpad with custom gestures just can't be beaten.
IDE (Jetbrains) works everywhere though.
I just like how most if not all of those have clean interface instead of a dozen menu to start with having 'advanced options' where you can configure more uninteresting options like in casual Windows apps. (Of course except for Jetbrains with hundreds of options but they're there for good reasons.)
I see no reason to leave macOS for a while.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MxN0J9ZxVI [1]: https://www.spinics.net/lists/fedora-devel/msg249136.html