I totally agree with you- but it's worth pointing out that a tiling window manager + minimal applications is still a designed interface.

This is what I use Windows for. It's an SSH terminal that has a web browser and plays music (via groove which is actually quite good)

My previous laptop was a windows machine that acted as a web browser, music/video player and VirtualBox host. All of my work was done in linux in virtualbox (and my SSH terminal was also bash running on linux in virtualbox).

My linux environment was very minimal though (mostly living in the terminal, used a tiling WM, vim as my editor). In many ways my mac environment isn't that different except without the tiling WM.

That setup worked quite well, although used more resources than if I hadn't used Virtualbox.

Is Putty still a thing on Win or does it have something native?

Putty (or Kitty or MobaTerm) is still a thing, but there are other options. The Linux subsystem will give you a *nix shell and ssh that works exactly like you expect it to. There is also msys which will give you an ssh client you can run directly from cmd.exe or power shell. Microsoft have been working on a proper native port of OpenSSH, but while it apparently works pretty well, it's still not feature complete or ready to be shipped as a standard part of Windows (hopefully early next year).

I use putty. Haven't found a compelling reason to use anything else yet.

I agree. To my mind the greatest obstacle to Linux Desktop adoption is the traditional Desktop concept.

To me, NeXTStep was the best feature rich desktop.

I wish there was a modern version that isn't macOS.

Well it depends on what you consider modern but Openbox is still alive and kicking (albeit it is only a window manager).

On a rant tangental note a slight annoyance I have lately is that all the window managers are getting pushed out / ignored because of Wayland.

With Wayland you basically have to write an entire desktop instead of just a window manager. I used to love that about Linux.. the pick and choose what works best model but now the choices are becoming fewer.

Oh well back to my macbook with zero choice.

The only wm I loved and stuck with on Linux was Windowmaker. Your comment is why - NeXTStep was awesome and missed..

Back in 2009 my dream was to run OSX with a Thinkpad keyboard and trackpoint. Now that I have OSX on a Thinkpad X220 my dream is to run i3-wm with unified application design language and underlying foundations. On OSX Spotlight works well and gives me what I want, and applications look good. There aren't any missing icons and text size isn't all over the place. Amethyst WM on OSX is pretty good, but it's not as good as i3. I'm not sure if it's easier to make applications look good on Linux or to get a WM that looks more like i3 on OSX.

Oh nice, how is driver support on the X220? I've had mixed luck with Hackintoshes.

I agree that there is a lack of great window managers on OS X. I'd love to be able to run awesomewm.

Weirdly enough that's how I spend a lot of my time on my iPad Pro - use Mosh to connect to a Linux box and then use tmux and vim to set up tiles and do my work.