It's quite sad to me that my choice of OS has essentially boiled down to "Sucks less, costs more".
It's been a few years for me, but maybe time to start seriously looking at Linux on the desktop again.
Windows, on the other hand, has changed significantly. Sure, it runs 32-bit programs, but the interface difference between 7 and 10 is ginormous.
Linux, as much as I love it, is probably the worst offender. At one point we had GNOME and KDE as dominant desktop environments, and then we had Unity, GNOME 3, Cinnamon, MATE, etc. Now after years of forcing Unity on everyone, Ubuntu has switched to GNOME except now GNOME is in a worse state than it was back in GNOME 2. Most distros are still using X11, graphics card support is lousy, and horizontal display tearing is still a problem that every commercial OS has 100% solved.
macOS has at least remained fairly consistent compared to all the other competition.
See, my problem with macOS is that it has changed far too much in the past decade. Mac OS X circa-2010 was stable, intuitive, robust, and beautiful. There was no need to re-architect anything.
I wish Apple had gone into maintenance mode. Patch security holes, add new drivers, and update your hardware. That's all I want. New features are okay if they address a real need, and if they can be fit into your (at the time) very strong interface metaphors and guidelines.
As a tradeoff, your users won't have their apps suddenly break, and your developers won't have to spend stupid amounts of time keeping up with unnecessary system changes.
This is what's most grating about the deprecation of 32 bit support—as a user, I don't feel like I'm getting anything out of it. Catalina is all downsides. In exchange for broken apps, I get an OS which is more buggy than ever and a bunch of ported cell phone apps. Just what I always wanted!
I am by no means against change, but I am 100% against unnecessarily change. From where I'm standing, the tech industry right now is full of unnecessary change. Why does Windows have two control panels? I'll admit the new one looks nicer, but I'd much prefer having just one, even if it looks slightly dated. Maybe that's Microsoft's goal, but why should we all have to deal with a UX downgrade in the interim?
Two? Try three. If you did deep enough the original System control panel from old will come up.
I prefer those actually, easy to understand and a lot less wordy. I don't come to the control panel to read a novel.
Apple hasn't changed the basic interface significantly over the past 10 years... but I don' think they needed to.
There have been a fairly large number of changes to the underlying operating system though. Everything from updates to Safari to the switch to APFS to completing the migration to 64 bit. Retina support, things like Airdrop and Handover which make interacting with my phone much better.
> Windows, on the other hand, has changed significantly. Sure, it runs 32-bit programs, but the interface difference between 7 and 10 is ginormous.
Microsoft seems to be compelled to change their interface significantly with almost every major update, but there is never any guarantee that the change is for the better. I have seem little about Windows 10 that makes me feel the urge to move away from MacOS.
> Linux, as much as I love it, is probably the worst offender.
I'm not sure it matters too much though because at this point the vast majority of the time I'm running a web browser, or editing code with either VSCode or VIM and modern Linux seems to be pretty good at that.
Most likely the biggest things I would miss running Linux would be the same things I would miss on Windows which revolve around iPhone/ iPad integration (AirDrop/ Handoff/ Copy Paste/ iCloud Integration)
The downside is that utility comes in absolutely last place with UX geeks.
Ergo, you get a full UI redesign at every opportunity.
But... that's why you pay people: to do boring things. Like port an old UI into a more modern underlying framework without changing it.
I, for one, cannot get my head around the OSX UI, I find it impossible to use.
But at least it's mostly consistent.
I just re-read this and I think I misread your comment the first time through and we're pretty close to the same page. I wasn't trying to suggest Apple's completely dropped the ball on MacOS, only that they've lagged on some features and had several fairly buggy launches over the past 3-4 years.
I used to automatically upgrade to the latest OS early in the cycle. This year I'm not even on Catalina yet. Too many bug reports with very few features to make it worth the pain. I think the current version has ironed out most of the issues.
Had mine taking 1.5GB RAM the other day. That was amusing.
I had to write a couple of xdotools shell scripts to do things I need, such as "move active window to next monitor", but just about everything I searched for, I found a solution for. On my laptop which had a "precision touchpad" (one that offered advanced 2/3/4 finger gesture support in Windows) I was able to get all of the gestures working just like they would in macOS. On my desktops where I use a wheel mouse, I had to install a Chrome extension called AutoScroll to get wheel auto-scrolling to work there.
Tweaking the system to make it behave just the way I wanted to was also a fantastically fun experience though and it brought the joy of desktop computing back in a way I never really experienced with Windows. Being in control is great.
When I mentioned this another time on here someone said they liked the sound of that, but they wanted to use Ubuntu for better compatibility with Microsoft .NET Core. So, I thought I'd compare the experience with Manjaro. Honestly, there's no comparison. Manjaro was so much smoother of an experience setting up things because all the software is available from one repo and it's newer so there's not 10 billion articles about old versions that don't apply anymore like Ubuntu. I also hated having to add repos to Ubuntus package manager for every new package. With Manjaro you just run the Add/Remove Software GUI and everything comes from the AUR (Arch User Repository). Also, my Ubuntu experiment ate itself after less than a week when it wouldn't boot one day after an update.
I've been using Linux since the late 90s when I started learning Red Hat to build DMZ and DNS servers for work. I've tried Linux desktops here and there since that time and nothing has ever come close to the stability and ease of running Manjaro. I highly recommend it for switchers.
The best things about MacOS is its Unix underpinnings and general consistency. The flip-side also happens to be the two worst things about Windows.