KDE beats macOS

My daily driver personal laptop is a macbook, it's the best machine I've ever owned & my next laptop will most likely be a macbook. My work machine is also a macbook.

But they are not intuitive nor highly "usable". After many years going through various osx/macOS transitions, it's an OS with objectively bad ux in many ways.

That's not to say it's bad software. Apart from the hardware of my personal laptop being great, I also like the OS for a few reasons. UX has multiple components outside of intuitiveness & ease of use:

1. reliability. Things work. It has its bugs but generally speaking the utility functions within the OS work well much much more frequently than windows or linux. Peripherals work. Suspend/sleep/hibernate work. Wifi works. Bluetooth works. Everything works. Without fiddling.

2. Builtin apps are sensibly functional & comprehensive. Disk tools have been built-in & better than Windows forever (even Linux usually has none unless you install gparted). Preview supports pdf editing & annotation (& saved signatures!) - these are things that literally every person needs at some point & I'm not even aware of any windows/linux apps that do these other than paid Adobe Acrobat. That's absurd. Screenshot/image preview support better image annotation than Windows (& still trying multiple linux utilities for this that don't have any annotation at all). Very basic day-to-day shit like this has actually been priorities and covered.

3. Unix-y stuff is good enough. I'm a linux guy so this is still a bit of a step down but it's actually fine. Anything that takes place in a terminal is very comparable to linux (& the builtin emulator is a lot better than what comes bundled with many linux DEs).

But. Everything about the macOS desktop experience is terribly unintuitive and bad. Maximising doesn't work (not configurable, ctrl-click remains hassle forever). Multiple windows within one app is badly supported. Finder window closing behaves different to everything - alt-tabbing to it rarely brings anything to the fore. It took them years to add a way to manually lock your screen without a hot corner.

All of these things are bad for both experienced users & new. There's no trade-off: you don't get some hidden benefit by learning to work around these difficulties. They remain bad.

TL;DR: People use macOS for good logical reasons, despite its objectively bad usability.

  1: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx/thinkpad-x13s-(13-inch-snapdragon)/
  2: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/vh1xse/setup_linux_on_x13s_snapdragon_thinkpad_megathread/
  3: https://youtu.be/YWRbNogRBTw&t=1755

I love this about macos. Its consistent: eg, you close documents with cmd+w one by one, until they're all gone. Then you press cmd+n to create a new document. This is consistent and logical. On other OS, cmd/ctrl+w does something different if you're closing the last document.

Another example of the inconsistency it causes is in browsers when you close the last tab and it asks you "closing the browser will cancel the in-progress download, are you sure?" and so you have to keep an arbitrary tab/document open to keep background downloads going.

Also in a practical sense it is useful for slow-starting applications to be running and ready to load a document without needing to keep open a blank document.

The equivalent behaviour on other systems is achieved by MDI applications which are much less elegant IMO. Or for apps that have to keep running but don't have a specific window to show, they implement something similar to mac anyway where the application appears in the system tray.