How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

> Sleeping the mac does not sleep the mac, it wakes up at all sorts of times

This can be improved a bit by forcing the Mac to "hibernate" instead of suspend when you put it to sleep:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/51729

By default, it would hibernate only after some time.

You can also disable the "Power Nap" checkbox on Settings > Battery.

EDIT: Typo

> Maybe this sentiment is a holdover from an earlier era

It's a holdover from two different earlier eras.

First, you have everything up to about 1998, which covers MacOS Classic through Mac OS 8, and Windows up through Win98. At the beginning of this period, when "PC" meant MS-DOS, the usability difference was obviously stark. But even in GUI era of PCs, System 7 compared favorably with Windows 3.1, and Mac OS 8 compared favorably with Windows 95.

Then Windows 98 and Mac OS 9 came out, and I'd say that things at least evened up. All else being equal, OS 9's GUI was still simpler and more intuitive, to my taste, but all else was not equal. Windows 9x had memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking, and Mac OS Classic didn't, and there were issues with system extensions and stability in Mac OS that I personally felt were more troublesome than Windows's famous BSOD problem during that era. This opinion could be a product of my experience working tech support at the time. BSOD was usually fixed by cursing profusely while rebooting. System extension conflicts were fixed at great physical and emotional cost to the person doing the fixing.

So I'd say Windows was generally easier to use than Macs for a while, until OS X eventually came into its own. It's harder to place a start time on this, but let's say 2002ish, with the release of Jaguar. And then there's been a sort of long slow decline as they clutter up the GUI, while at the same time Microsoft was putting serious work into cleaning things up. I'm not sure if the switch happened during the Windows 7 era or the Windows 10 era, but yeah, I'd definitely say I find Windows easier to use nowadays.

Personally, the main thing keeping me on Macs nowadays is frankly just the touchpad, to which I seem to be addicted.

I was unable to reproduce your success. I just tested in GEdit, it failed, just as I expected.

I could move the file, but this broke the association with the open document. I saved to ~/test.txt, then moved it to ~/Documents/test.txt, and saved a second time. The second time I saved it, it saved the file to ~/test.txt, which is incorrect and useless. Now I have two files, but no action I took as a user should have created two files--moving a file should not create a second copy, and saving an open file should not have created a second copy, so why should moving and saving create a second copy?

On Windows, you typically get an error message, because you can't move an open file. (Not all applications keep the file open, so this doesn't always happen.) Personally, I think that enforcing exclusive locks is the worst, most significant design flaw in the entire history of the Windows operating system.

Only on macOS do you get the nice, expected behavior... it does not matter if you move a file while it is open in an application. When a file is open in an application, the open file is associated with the file, not with the pathname. You can rename a file in the Finder or reorganize a bunch of files in the Finder (or do the same in the terminal) and it does not matter whether those files are open in any applications. You can reorganize files in the Finder, and then when you save open documents, they save to the new location, not the old one. If you rename files in the Finder or rename a bunch of files with a script in the terminal, the windows for open documents you renamed will update their titles to match the new names.

The problem here is that (opinion time) the standard filesystem API is a really terrible interface. What you want is some way to create durable references to files. File handles can do that, but only while your application is open. Paths can do it while your application is closed, but the reference is lost if you move the file. On macOS, there's a standard API which provides something more persistent than file handles and more durable than paths. I think they're called "bookmarks" now, but they used to be called "aliases".

Microsoft Word is an example of software which allows keyboard shortcut discovery pretty well [1]

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/keyboard-shortcuts...

For me maximize to full screen and multiple desktops is most useless feature of Mac. For me cmd+tab never works even for 1st party apps like Terminal if it is maximized. Cmd+tab always shows all apps so you can't use multiple Desktops for mental separation. and being Mac you can't change default behaviour of button to maximize