After that, I moved to OS X for various reasons, until recently when the latest OS X 10.11 and 10.12 drifted so far away from the original OS X concept as to turn me away.
As a newly returned Linux user, I tried Gnome Shell in Ubuntu, but recycled its bytes in a couple of days. Then I tried the latest KDE 5, which was even worse, an ungodly monstrosity. I briefly toyed with the idea of using a supposedly modern fork of KDE 3 (http://www.trinitydesktop.org) but then settled for Cinnamon on Mint.
Still, KDE 3 was definitely some sort of pinnacle in desktop computing. Maybe the Trinity guys are not entirely crazy!
So, if they are crazy, they're a kind of crazy I dearly love :)
(The components do, for what it's worth to anyone out there considering using some of Trinity, play nicely with others. I stopped using KDE/Trinity as the actual desktop in favor of i3, but still use a ton of the KDE/Trinity applications.)
I seriously prefer Unity over both of them in their current incarnations and that's something I never thought I would have said when Unity first came out.
Many people also use them every day and love them. I'm one of them.
It's largely fragmented I guess...
I wish it worked as well as you describe. It only works if the application you are using is KIO-enabled.
On Windows, you can use a "\\servername\sharename\path\to\file.txt" style path (a UNC path) virtually anywhere and it just works. It also has the smarts to pass along your credentials, etc, so it's virtually transparent. The only exception I've seen to this is that the command prompt doesn't understand a UNC path as a working directory, but commands like copy, etc, do work with it.
Anyway, I use emacs on both platforms and it handles all of this for me, so my dog retired from this game many years ago.
The key problem I have with KIO is that it's doing something that should be done at a lower level so that every application can benefit.
As I see it, there are three classes of apps on Linux when it comes to file handling:
* Apps that can open remote files using one set of protocols (KIO-enabled apps).
* Apps that can open remote files using a different set of protocols (things that reinvent this wheel, like emacs in your example).
* Apps that can only work on local files.
So we get a situation where I can open a file on an SMB server using Kate, but I can't open the same file in Sublime Text. It makes for a terrible user experience.
The Mac makes it easy to mount filesystems, but it's kludgey compared to using UNC paths in Windows. This is the one feature that I really miss from Windows.
All I was saying originally was that KDE was the first Linux environment I used which came close to the level of broad support and integration you get from something like Windows, and in some cases it went beyond.
https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KioFuse
Never tried it myself, so I don't know how well it works.
The real win would be the Plan 9 filesystem protocols which had the same feature but at the file system protocol level.
I remember having my friends over for parties and when they saw Amarok - instantly wanted to try Linux. It was, imo, the killer app of Linux.
When I switched to Windows 7 - tried to customize foobar2000 to make it feel like Amarok, but it wasn't the same. :/
It is partly my fault because I wasn't careful what I was doing. But I never thought a media player would do such extensive reorganization on file level.
So really, if you're an Apple user, you have no business even joining discussions like this about non-Apple software or anything that runs on a non-Apple platform. You're basically trolling.
I have to admit I drifted off to OS X for most stuff, but I still have fond memories of how well thought out, consistent and tasteful everything was.