My experience now is that the Windows desktop is intolerable compared to Linux at this point. Overwrought, buggy, and confusing. Mac is better but it's far too locked down. If you are willing to put some effort into customization, especially with tiling window managers and other WMs besides gnome, you can get a sublimely efficient and natural experience. I'm currently using Sway and it's vastly better than commercial desktops for software dev.
Unless you're living in XCode all day long or beholden to Final Cut then what does MacOS give you that you can't find on a truly open OS? Of course I am not forcing or coercing anyone to move to an OS they're not productive in. I am just saying keep an open mind to Linux. I tried the Magnet approach when I was a die-hard MacOS fan and apologist and it just didn't work as well as i3 does. I literally went to Linux because of i3 and stayed because everything "just works" like it used to on teh Mac.
Well, I'm using Linux for 20 years and macOS for 16 years at this point. I prefer Linux desktops and Mac Notebooks, due to hardware quality, and having an alternative OS in my life, so I can port features between them while developing something (i.e. The code I develop contains best features of both OSes where appropriate).
I'm also using KDE close to 15 years at this point, since 3.5.x and I'd prefer it over anything tiling or floating because of the feature set and power it brings.
So, why someone would want to use macOS? It's not only XCode and Final Cut (I prefer Eclipse on all platforms). Omnigraffle for example. A tool which can draw diagrams and technical diagrams, Dia can't come close, or any other alternative I tried.
Same for MindNode. More powerful mind mapping solutions exist on Linux, but MindNode works like an extension of your brain. I can create gigantic maps in minutes, limited by my typing speed.
Another example is Scan Thing. It's mostly an implementation thing, but that thing works so well for extracting text and images. Well, while we're talking about text, we can talk about Prizmo, which can correct the curves of camera scanned images and then OCR them, so PDF Pen Pro, which is a power tool for editing PDFs.
There also fun novelty tools like Monodraw which I use to draw ASCII diagrams for my code, and leave it as a comment inside my codebases.
Is Linux side gloom, then? Of course not. Kid3 is irreplaceable, so Gwenview, and macOS has no equivalent of it. Many of the other tools I use on macOS are built-ins for Linux systems and work much better than their macOS counterparts by leaps and bounds. Darktable is a powerhouse for photo post-processing, and while macOS alternatives exist, they're not as good as Darktable for my use cases.
So both sides have very good applications, macOS has hardware advantage on mobile side. The main reason I keep macOS on the mobile side because it's a POSIX compliant UNIX at the core, so it can work with Linux systems reasonably well, and yes I like the hardware and having another reference point to see where the world is headed. Living in echo chambers is not good, IMHO.
See I hear this and think: "KDE!?! That bloat?! There's no way I'd choose that over the simplicity of i3/sway!" And yet, that's the beauty of it all: On Linux/BSD you can choose your environment and customize it till your heart is content. The OS then becomes a tool shaped to your needs vs the other way around. Bayindirh you seem to take a more practical approach to things than I do and that's dope.
Re your point about Apple laptops and *Nix Oses I 100% agree which is why I am a supporter of the Asahi Linux project. I would love to see everything-working-out-of-the-box support for my favorite distro on M1/M2 hardware so I can get a nice M1 or M2 laptop but run my favorite OS on it instead of MacOS.
Well, people think that KDE is bloated. This is not true. Yes it consumes resources, but the bigger consumer is baloo, which is the file name and context indexer of KDE, which can be turned off with a click. So, In short why I do I use KDE? Let's take a look:
If I need to find something inside a file? There's Baloo, and it's available via KRunner ır Dolphin.
KRunner is also a great comand palette, window changer, and plethora of other tools combined. I generally open Krunner and open applications and do many things over it, no need to touch to mouse.
People rave about dual pane file managers, rightly so. Dolphin is both a single pane and dual pane file manager, rolled in one.
I connect to other services (FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and whatnot), ah no tools. Dolphin has adapters for all of them. I can directly SFTP into a machine via fish:// for example.
I'm also a big music listener, so I rip some CDs from time to time? Do I need a tool? No. Open Dolphin, navigate to CD. There are folders (MP3, FLAC, OGG, etc.) drag your favorite format to your home folder. It's encoded on the fly. Metadata? It's retrieved when you insert your CD from MusicMatch service and reflected automatically. Neat. No?
More interconnectedness: Add your e-mail accounts and calendars to Akonadi. They are fetched and processed even if your mail client is not running. That's what multitasking is, if you ask me.
People think KDE's eye candy, but it has many quality of life things: Present windows with search, desktop grid with reorganization, dim inactive windows to prevent focus loss and eye fatigue. Just to name a few.
People terminal-hop, but Konsole is one of the best and fastest terminal emulators alongside GNOME's. New guys rave about speed, but this speed optimization thing is done by big boys in 2003-2004. GPU acceleration is also the same story.
KDE is not slow. If you disable windows appearance and destruction animations, things happen before you lift your finger from the button you're pressing. Animations take a bit of time, so things look slow.
KDE guys love GTK as they love Qt. Every KDE release comes with counterpart GTK renderers, so all applications look the same.
So, TWMs, i3/sway, and others are very nice things. They solve a lot of people's problems, and I support these people wholeheartedly, but KDE is an integrated solution which works well across the board. Give it a shot someday, in a VM.
Oh, you want to be pleasantly surprised? Try E17 (Enlightenment 17). That thing is really nice.
After having 2 failed recovery efforts with Time Machine I had totally given up on it in my remaining Mac life (Time Machine had known recovery issues so I always made regular regular backups as well, so fortunately I didn't lose data).
> I’m not sure how people use their touchpads without middle click emulation either.
Because there is no need for middle click on mac? Not sure when you would use it, but there is probably a different combo (maybe even superior?) for whatever action that's mapped to a middle click. There is no emulation of a scroll wheel either.
> Because there is no need for middle click on mac? Not sure when you would use it, but there is probably a different combo (maybe even superior?) for whatever action that's mapped to a middle click.
Middle click opens a link in a new tab. A quick search suggests this isnt possible on Mac OS using the touchpad, which would personally drive me crazy.
I am a long time Linux desktop user (20+ years) but am still forced to keep a copy of windows around to use Adobe Acrobat for filling and signing forms. I have tried various Linux pdf applications (including commercial ones), using Adobe Acrobat via wine/crossover but haven't found a solution that works across the board. That is the only holdout from not having to interact with windows/mac.
Even if you are using windows, there is no reason to subject yourself to the bin fire that is Acrobat. Literally[0] every single other PDF program is better, faster, cheaper, easier to use than acrobat. Plus many of them don't randomly crash and burn half your CPU usage until you kill them like acrobat does.
[0] No, clearly I haven't actually tried all them, don't be so pedantic.
Reading PDFs is no problem, I use `evince` since ~15 years and it does the job.
I _very_ regularly have to sign documents though, and as OP said, nothing beats Adobe for that. I even pay the subscription so that I can have it on my phone, sign on the go, etc.
I use Okular for work, first on Linux for a long time and now on Windows, works superbly for signing/annotating PDFs and can be installed via package manager on either system (APT or Winget)
You need to install at least dozen applications on macOS to come near to features/capabilities of a run of the mill KDE desktop.
GNOME also improved a ton, it seems, but I'm not using it for a long long time.
macOS is lean, but doesn't have the composability and flexibility of Linux at any level. Things designed to add this composability feels bolted on loosely and limited at utility.
> You need to install at least dozen applications on macOS to come near to features/capabilities of a run of the mill KDE desktop.
I can get my run of the mill KDE desktop to hang at startup by dragging a networked folder with a custom icon to the taskbar, then attempt to log in over a flaky network connection. Or if I attempt to drag too many application icons to it in the Wayland session. Don't get me wrong, I like it, I mean, I use it, but Plasma 5 is still, at best, late beta. My only hope is that, unlike its predecessor, it doesn't get abandoned and rewritten when it gets a semblance of stability.
Plasma on Wayland is a late beta yes, because Wayland itself is a late beta. I'd not use Wayland, yet if I want to use KDE, and if I need to install Wayland, I'd use another desktop environment.
I never restart KDE on my system, unless I upgrade my kernel, and restart the whole system.
Yeah, see, the fine print kills it. It's a "rock solid"* desktop, it does everything I want.
* Unless you use large network mounts, as long as you drag icons one at a time, for a fixed screen resolution, doesn't apply to Wayland, only until the next major rewrite...
Actually no. Because of my career, I deployed KDE to some very resource limited thin clients and it worked pretty well.
Also I talk with people who use KDE, and report bugs I encounter, or encourage people to report bugs when people I talk encounters them.
I'm pretty beyond "It works in my machine, so PEBKAC" at this point. I think using Linux for 20 years and managing a large fleet for 15 years helped on that front a lot. :-)
Oh, a milion humble apologies, my liege, I was entirely unaware of your decades of experience. Surely machines work better under your touch, for they can see the twinkle of authority in your eye. I shall revise my erroneous configuration for surely my ability to hold it right is insufficient; indeed, my mastery of software has dwindled since the days when my patches were accepted in KDE 3.1 and I am truly at a loss when it comes to manipulating the advanced software of our days.
Well, I'm pretty aware that you know current experience way better than all of us, combined.
On the other hand, our parents, partners and non-technical friends use their Linux systems without ever calling us, the venerable yet dumb as a dead tree "Linux folks".
Unless you're speaking about ChromeOS and Android, which take the Linux kernel as implementation detail, and replace the GNU userspace with Web and Java based technologies, I pretty much doubt it, given the 2% market share of Linux Desktop usage across the globe.
Nope. I'm talking about people using GNU/Linux systems. These people are our relatives, and our friends. We see with our eyes, chat every day.
Maybe I'm on an island with everyone which makes this 2%, but these people are real, and they are not compiling things from source or throwing their machines out of windows because of frustration.
They just use their computers, be productive and live happy lives.
