>Cmd+Tab? What exactly do you find annoying?
Cmd-` to change between windows within an Application is a behaviour I don't like and prefer Cmd-tab to cycle through all windows. Gnome defaults to the same thing as Finder but it's possible to change the behaviour.
>Try nix: https://nixos.org/nix/
I've taken a look at guix and it's promising.
> Which [of Apple's programs are terrible], and how, exactly?
Well since I stopped using a lot of these programs where possible, my opinions may be out of date. But Quicktime player doesn't play most files. It's slow. It hangs. It's all around worse than VLC and MPV. And you used to have to pay to upgrade it to do things that other players do for free. And why can't it play DVDs? Or can it? If so, why is there a separate DVD player? (Rhetorical questions; I don't care since I don't use either program).
App Store is outrageously slow to do anything. 14 seconds to check for updates? wtf? (server backend and not gui issue, but part of UX). I had XCode update fail at downloading the 3 or 5 GB ball of mud. Instead of resuming the download or checking the hash of the file to make sure it wasn't corrupt, it just tried to download 5GB again.
XCode takes up 5GB and seems to be required for some particular development work. It's not really appropriate for Mac Book Airs with their small ssds. So I just don't do that work or try to use a Linux VM.
Facetime just doesn't work 3/5 times.
Preview is alright for reading PDFs, but you can't look at an image in a directory and press a hotkey to see the next image in the directory (as least, I haven't seen how); eog does this.
Mail is an absolute pile of garbage. The threading is confusing as hell. It's soooo slooooooow. Then it hangs when pulling in sysadmin style alert folders (with thousands of mails). Deleting mails is also very very slow (i.e. cleaning out said mailbox takes days). Instead of pushing operations to a background thread it where you can see the progress like in Thunderbird or whatever, it just beachballs. And for some reason, if you want to attach Calendar to an online account you have to do it through Mail (wtf) and if you don't want Mail to be used for the Mail then you have to configure the account correctly. Some people may be tricked into subjecting themselves to the pain of using Mail. :(
With Mail being so terrible, one ends up using Thunderbird or Outlook which have Calendars integrated. So Calendar becomes superfluous. Which is a shame because it works alright with online calendars, but it doesn't seem to have the integration to help plan anything with people.
I don't understand why Notes, Reminders, and Stickies all exist. Reminders should be rolled into Calendar. Notes allegedly integrates with Google but I don't see anything from my Google Keep account in my local Notes hierarchy. And is Notes supposed to compete with OneNote? They've a lot of catching up to do.
Then there's a lot of programs that I haven't opened in a decade since they used to be terrible (iTunes can't even play ogg out of the box, wtf) or I just don't have a use (photobox, game center, imessages). I used to have Pages and Numbers but I don't remember being impressed with them. From what I read, I haven't missed anything by not using them. But if they're free now, why aren't they installed by default for people who might want to write a document?
And if I've signed on to App Store with my icloud id (which needs a credit card to get the free updates, wtf!?), why is there no single sign on? Why do Game Center and Facetime and iMessages prompt me for iCloud credentials? I guess so I can sign in with different accounts (corp vs. personal?) But keychain access doesn't prompt me. So maybe keychain isn't backed up automatically to the cloud... :(