I sincerely hope that one day, Linux GUI land will receive similar amounts of work as the kernel.
While it's great that we can boot it on pretty much every device out there, I would much prefer if it was a viable Windows alternative on a few devices instead.
Just yesterday, I plugged an external screen into my Ubuntu laptop. And then I had to duck-duck for like an hour to figure out how to make the fonts large enough to be readable again.
And why doesn't the file browser reliably show me all the files in a folder? Sometimes, the first file in alphabetical order is just omitted.
I sincerely want to like Linux for Desktop as much as I love it on servers. But the fact is, OSX and Windows just make you so much more productive, because things just work.
Anecdotal I know, but I very recently got a macbook air after years of practically exclusively using Linux and the opinionated user interface drives me crazy.
Here's a few pain points:
- Scroll direction can only be set globally so either touchpad or mouse scrolling feels awkward for me
- You need an extra click on another window before you can interact with it
- No focus-follows-mouse (there used to be 3rd party plugins but those seem to be gone now)
- While basic split screen tiling works and you can set up a global kb shortcut to move windows to left/right of the screen, Firefox seems to completely ignore those
- If you're running multiple displays macos for some reason always picks the most awkward display to open new windows in
- I really miss being able to grab and resize windows using a modifier key like in XFCE
I'm sure I'd get used to many of those, but the lack of focus-follows-mouse and easy window manipulation are the big one for me and I don't think that'll change much. Actually I think those were already pain points when I last tried out Mac OS in the late PPC days.
There's of course plenty of things that I like, especially the tight integration with my iphone and trackpad gestures (although I'm not sure how ergonomic using the trackpad all day is).
I was hoping it could become my main driver at home, but now I ordered a Ryzen mini PC for that.
edit: Oh, I completely forgot the biggest deal breaker for me at the moment. As of now the GUI version of Emacs (either downloaded through brew or from https://emacsformacosx.com/) doesn't work. MacOS simply refuses to start the binary.