Talking about dark patterns, here are a couple I've noticed.

In Windows, I'm very careful about NOT signing in to anything Microsoft, unless I have to. I make sure I use a local administrator account instead of a Microsoft account.

Yesterday I had to open Microsoft Edge for something that would only work in Edge, and lo-and-behold, Microsoft had taken my Xbox Game Pass sign-in and applied to Edge, then informed me they are syncing all my browser history to their servers for my benefit..

It's even worse when you activate Office 365. There is a small checkbox at the end which if you don't uncheck, converts your local administrator into your Microsoft account.. Going back to a local administrator account is not an easy task.

Looks like switching to linux when win 7 support ended was the right move.

All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason, but at least I don't have to deal with that BS.

Really? I made the same move (or at least finished it 100%) at the same time, and that's not a problem I've ever seen.

Some (surprisingly few, actually) don't perform well under Wine/Proton, or at all, but random freezing I've never seen. And certainly not all of my games.

But it’s linux, so one obscure setting in a config file or slightly different hardware can make all the difference. I say this as a linux user since WinXP.

The whole OS market is pretty rough right now.

Unless you care about gaming MacOS has been rock solid for at least a decade. For what it is worth I am no mac fanboy, I am typing this to you on a windows 10 computer in my shop(that I use for gaming, among other things).

I've got a Mac at work and I hate it with passion. I now use my own linux Laptop instead. There is no del key, no home, ctrl and alt are swapped in some aplications and not the others. Login screeen does not remember the language and animations come back after every update even when I explicitly disable them. Muscle memory from other 99% computers I use doesn't work and most of the games don't. I feel like mac os is in contempt of me and I really hate it when I have to use it for mandatory tasks. Mac doesnt fit for me at all, I use Linux for Production and Windows for games

> no del key

Ctrl+d, like in emacs

> no home

Ctrl+a. Also: Ctrl+e for end-of-line. Like in emacs. Also Ctrl+fbpn.

Works best with CapsLock->Control, which is a native GUI option, not something you have to install/CLI for (linux) or something you have to registry hack (windows). I really miss these on Windows and Linux, though not enough to fight the native layout. It's a rougher fight than you might imagine, though.

> Login screeen does not remember the language

It does for me, but more importantly: it shows it. Windows likes to swap the keyboard layout out from under me and doesn't show it. Mix with a 3-strikes-you're-locked-out policy at work, and it turns into pain.

> animations come back after every update

Yeah, that's fair.

> Muscle memory

That's not.

> I feel like mac os is in contempt of me

I feel like windows is actively malicious towards me and linux desktop doesn't care enough about me to do even minimum viable bugfixing. It's definitely a "pick your poison" situation.

I use xmonad in Ubuntu and I haven't dragged a window on my personal laptop in years. Not only was that option missing on MacOS, the underlying OS abstractions actually made it impractical to build the last time I checked; windows were owned by the application, there was no language to move another application's windows except asking the application to move its own, and doing that required the application to be frontmost. So tiling was a context-switch morass and a bad UX.

However, it appears the Accessibility Manager may since have grown enough feature hooks to support what I want, and https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst may do the job. I'll have to test it the next time I have my hands on a MacBook of some flavor.