Macs have Pixelmator and Preview for images, Apple Notes is actually very decent for actual notes, Zed for nerdy text files, QuickTime/IINA for video (or hell even VLC looks much nicer than on Windows). All of them are modern, beautiful, and work well
macOS is the most consistent OS and Windows the least [1]. With the exception of IrfanView I find neither of those apps particularly crusty though. There's https://imageglass.org
I personally moved from macOS to KDE Plasma and I'm a happy camper as long as I stay with Plasma/Qt apps.
[1] https://ntdev.blog/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windows-how-many-...
Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible endeavor and the developers deserve endless praise, but for people that aren't already familiar with navigating things like GIMP, KDE, Open/LibreOffice, it's not especially welcoming.
This is true for all complex software, though. People who have never used Apple's software also struggle with it until they become more familiar.
By contrast, "open this image and draw a single red circle in it" in GIMP is as challenging to a newbie as quitting vi. Even for an intermediate user - I use GIMP a handful of times per year and I absolutely could not tell you from memory how to do that.
The moment you criticize an app, someone on the Internet will jump in to tut-tut and insist to you that it's "complex software" and you can't possibly understand how complex it is. Case in point: Just a few years ago the Windows Terminal team chastised[^1] users by claiming that fast font rendering would literally require several PhDs of research and can't be solved otherwise[^0]. At some point we have to realize that claiming something is complex doesn't prove that it's inherently complex nor justify any complexity in how it was built.
[^0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687
[^1]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...
Something like a year later, Microsoft did actually improve the behavior and never credited the guy who proved it was possible.
Thanks for telling me about that development. I'm … speechless.
Why is there a playlist by default? What are these dozens of obscure options at the first level under every main dropdown in the title/menu bar?
I vaguely remember recently trying mpv and being pleasantly surprised, but I mostly use QuickTime or IINA on macOS. mpv seems to be available cross-platform though; maybe the Windows port is usable?
Is there? I know the feature but I thought it was off by default and I think it's this way on my computers.
I am no expert but these things I've done in limited amounts. Mostly I just double click a file and watch it though.
(No I can’t use Krita for specific reasons and it isn’t much easier anyway)
It was like, hidden underneath the janky gui, there was actually a lot of thought put into how things work together.
If you want to annotate screenshots, KDE's screenshot tool, Spectacle, has this built in too.
VLC is simple as pie. open folder, click music or video, it plays. drag files to it, it adds them to the playlist. same functionality as WinAmp, etc.
I had to watch three (3) youtube tutorials to figure out how to import a pdf and copy-paste a signature to it.
Having said that, VLC is still my last resort when nothing else can play a file.
[1] One example is subtitle rendering. Last I checked VLC was just plain uglier than MPC-HC.
In today's modern world of "UI Overhauls" (read: fucking everything up and taking away every useful power you had in the name of 'usability') it's basically god tier. The damn thing is stable, that's literally all i need. I'll learn the interface, just for the love of God don't change it every time i get used to it!
Also, please tell me you are not trying to take the standard IBM desktop Interface (File, Edit...) away ?
The non full screen UI is a little more crusty but still looks better than the windows version imo.
I usually use rg, which is way faster than grep for searching many repositories at once.
But one of my tasks involves searching things in a single XML file of hundreds megabytes, or even several gigabytes, and for this, grep is way faster than rg apparently.
So under the right conditions, grep is actually quite fast and you may be missing out if you never try using it.
The choice to go for windows as main OS kinda includes prioritizing advanced features and versatility over the UX. Even firefox is not as nice on windows than on mac.