Macs have become a lot worse at this sort of thing - weird, intermittent user interface failures - over the last few years.

Sometimes I can't drag attachments out of emails (which is about the only damn reason I don't use Mutt for everything) on the first few attempts; I thought for a while it was because the attachment hadn't completely downloaded, but no, it doesn't seem to be as predictable as that.

Moving files around in the Finder in general seems problematic, especially dragging between directories in the list view. This often causes much cursing.

The worst thing about Macs for me now is how much guff pops up entirely unbidden - messages about not having done any backups in 90 days, messages about an update which hasn't been able to be completed (but has caused iTerm to try and quit, which, in itself, causes a dialog to appear that I need to get rid of), iCloud approval nonsense (which also happens on both of my iPhones periodically), iTunes Store requests that I may or may not have made days ago that have failed with an unknown error, etc. The list goes on. I'm sure all of these things in isolation are very clever and should help improve my life, but in toto it's immensely frustrating.

I have similar thoughts. I feel the Mac has gone from an environment that was great for developers and creative people to a kitchen appliance that tries to micromanage its users. If there were any viable alternative, I might have switched yesterday (and Windoze doesn't cut it). As it stands, I have to split up: Linux for development, and Mac for the movies, games and email. Slowly migrating away might work better than all in one swoop.

Not being a Mac user, a similar thing that always struck me as strange is that those Mac users I know all seem to have a huge amount of windows open in the background (multiple Finders etc.). I found that being interesting because it is the first habit I got rid of when starting out in the new Gnome Shell: I have a workspace for every task going on, and each workspace contains no more than two windows, that are neatly aligned - or maximized if there's only one.

I switched to AwesomeWM a while ago, and the first thing I changed in the RC is that it replicated Gnome's automatic/endless workspaces behavior.

Of course that is highly subjective, but i always thought that going for a window hunt everytime you have to switch context is pretty backward, and I can't figure out why even the more sophisticated Apple users I know won't use workspaces for their benefit. On Windows, I get it - if only because that sort of workflow was impossible without special tools before Win10.

Does anyone have thoughts on this? Is this a "culture thing", or is it because users that switched over from Windows never even thought of the workspaces feature?

I've gotten in the habit of screenshotting. With one hot key (cmd shift 4) I pick a region and a file is placed on my desktop. This turns out to be far more useful in more circumstances for me. (The only image dragging I do is within chrome to send someone an image through hangouts.)

Just FYI, screenshotting is taking a limited-resolution, imperfectly cropped PNG from what is usually a compressed JPG. You just need to get into the habit of right clicking and "save as" and the resulting image with have perfect fidelity with the original.

That doesn't really help me when I'm, for example, sharing a flash ad or a video or any number of other things, like my Hearthstone state.

Oh okay you meant screenshots in general. I thought you were screencapping jpegs.

I do that too. I actually like the consistent interface, so to speak.