It will always have little bits of jank, always have inconsistencies and although all it does is draw objects on a screen it just doesn't do it to the level of quality as in tear and flicker free that MacOS can manage.
Pretty much every actual window management feature on macOS aside from dragging windows by the titlebar is janky as hell. :-\
(It is neat that display server crashes/restarts on macOS don't cause you to lose your graphical session, though. Idk if any F/OSS WMs have that.)
That said, their stability and flexibility is unmatched. Windows got a lot better recently, and they have a harder surface to deal with (orders of magnitude more hardware to support). But from an outsiders perspective Apple's feel like the best balance right now.
There isn't a maximise behaviour. Per the interface guidance, that button is called "zoom" [1], not maximise, and it therefore makes sense that apps do something different depending on what they need to zoom in a way that makes sense for them.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
The button now serves dual purpose as "full screen" and "zoom" (with option). It's not "maximise" though.
I don't know when it deteriorated on Mac OS X, but I've recently started to use Rectangle a lot (https://rectangleapp.com/). This has been really useful.
Windows and Linux just can't come close. I get why Linux never will for good reasons but Windows has absolutely no excuse.
None of the 10.0+ releases of macOS used DP, instead it used Quartz2D, eventually added OpenGL to the mix, and now uses a combo of Quartz and Metal.
End of the day one can drag windows around smoothly and resize them without flickering and have consistent drag and drop etc and the other does not.
No, it doesn't. But means one cannot claim "it will always have little bits of jank, always have inconsistencies although all it does is draw objects on a screen" just because it is old, since it turns out it actually isn't. X11 does have a lot of cruft, but so does WindowServer.
> End of the day one can drag windows around smoothly and resize them without flickering and have consistent drag and drop etc and the other does not.
That is just a lie. I can easily make Firefox flicker on OS X while resizing and I can easily resize say Gtk+3 windows on X without flickering. And I have almost 3 4k displays...
That said, I do agree that I would generally expect even older Apple codebases to be less crufty than stuff like Xorg. Apple rips out legacy APIs and rewrites things pretty ruthlessly on basically every macOS release.