I just moved from Macos to Linux. The Linux desktop experience has improved a lot in the past five years (at least KDE has).
Compared to my first Linux laptop (a Sony Vaio circa 2000), my current XPS 13 works as well as any Mac laptop I have ever owned, and all the hardware that you would "expect" to work (but probably didn't work as smoothly 10 or 20 years ago) Just Works (WiFi, external displays, excellent battery life/sleep, etc...)
Based on the complaints I have heard about Apple hardware and MacOS over the past few years, I'd even argue that Linux-on-the-desktop isn't any less stable or harder to get working than a Mac.
Both suffer from a laundry list of minor annoyances that snowball into something that's hard to ignore, and in KDE's case the UX design they employ just doesn't jive with me at all.
It's all enough that I end up coming back to macOS because despite its problems, it fits me in ways that nothing else even comes close to touching. Sometimes it feels like there will never be a macOS alternative that has what it takes for me to switch without feeling a major sense of loss.
This sounds just like your familiarity. I could have used the exact same sentence to describe how I feel using macOS for work after being used to Linux (GNOME) for 8 years.
When you use something for a while you learn to avoid all the bugs and the UX starts to feel natural. Any switch will end up in you running into new bugs and finding the UX odd, no matter if it is to or from macOS, Windows, GNOME, KDE or otherwise.
I would say that I run into 10x more bugs on macOS than GNOME. But that probably isn't because there are 10x more bugs. There is likely a comparable number on GNOME but I have learned to subconsciously avoid most of them.
I’ve dug through message boards and bug reports, and a lot of the features that MacOS has will never be implemented. I’m taking about features released 13+ years ago on OS X 10.4.
Highly, highly subjective. I use Linux as my main OS and have for many years.
Of course everything is not perfect, but that wasn't true in mac either. I had to hack and shim so many things to get my system to behave the way I wanted to. There were also horrible bugs like where plugging in an external (Apple branded) monitor would cause the laptop screen to go black forever until I held down the power button.
I just bought parts for a desktop that's literally 4x cheaper than a similarly specced Mac Pro with the usual caveats (Ryzen instead of Xeon, non ECC, etc.) It will have to be pretty rough for me to consider investing anything beyond a Mac Mini so I can have access to Xcode once my MBP dies.
For example changing from a low-resolution (non-hidpi) screen to a hidpi one doesn't work that great. You want to watch netflix or prime video in FHD? Not going to happen (although, admittedly, that's not linux's fault but a DRM-related decision).
I've noticed that, as usual, all this is highly dependent on what one does with the computer. If it's a laptop often used with a high resolution external screen and for on-line media consumption, the experience can be less than ideal. If it's a working computer used in fixed conditions, the experience can be outright great. My "work" computer is a desktop linux with a UHD screen and I absolutely love working on it. But for random hanging around on the internet, watching a movie or whatever, I'll grab my macbook.
Care to name any? Other times I’ve heard things like this on HN I’ve been able to locate them.
OK here's another, very related: the ability to have apps remember their open files when you quit and re-open them.
These are significant productivity boosters, and I will miss them. It's definitely a trade-off, but now Apple has tipped the scales too much in favour of Linux...for me.
It was one of the smoother GNOME distros, and its installer was far more competent than Ubuntu's (mainly, it didn't screw with the boot partitions of every drive in the system like Ubuntu's installer did). Ultimately though, GNOME itself is flawed in its approach to a few things.
Not only is it an application firewall, but also gives you DNS filtering (ie. Pi-Hole basics) and DNS-over-TLS.
Not sure what you mean with "the speed of it's UI ..." though.