the windows experience of 2024 is very similar to the experience of buying a gateway 2000 in the 90s to me. there's tons of bloatware, ads all over the OS, you're constantly being prompted to buy Onedrive and Office (what the hell?) a lot of the Things i've gotten used to on macOS that windows doesn't have, I miss a lot (consistent shortcut keys across apps fro all vendors, the speed and reliability of spotlight as an app launcher/switcher, the ease of previewing files in the OS without launching separate applications, the fact that for all intents and purposes you're in a *nixlike environment and have basically the full suite of tools available to you first class.) every time I go back to my windows 11 desktop after an upgrade I'm baffled by some other weird addition to the OS that I didn't ask for and don't want. In a way, I kind of appreciate that macOS tends to evolve slowly and doesn't do a lot of experimentation. When there's multiple valid ways of solving a problem, they'll leave it to utilities to provide those options. I kinda am okay with that. I used to think apple was extremely opinionated but it seems more and more like their philosophy with macOS is "leave it to the users to solve this problem." i'd also argue there's a ton of windows features missing, which extremely confusingly i have to add manually by installing powertoys (which means microsoft actively builds the solutions to these problems and then just chooses to distribute them in this bizarre, out-of-band way? it makes no sense.)
I won't deny there's a bunch of obvious stuff that i cannot understand - window snapping being a key thing, they've gone all in on their weird full-screen approach, which I don't vibe with. The fact that I need to buy an app (bartender) to hide icons in my menu bar in the year 2024 is pretty bonkers to me, and I cannot understand what motivates the complete lack of management tools for this, especially given how out of control it can get on a company-managed machine. finder is in need of a lot of love across the board. i'm also baffled by some of the stuff they choose to include - mission control is one of the single most confusing features they've ever added to the OS and i still have zero understanding of what the intent behind it was.
i guess all this to say i feel like having a lot of experience with macOS, i much prefer opening a clean mac to opening a clean windows machine (linux obviously is its own can of worms where it can't really be evaluated by these standards) and i can't at all agree that UX-wise it's a letdown.