She has been annoyed many times by the way her Mac is running. One day she lost all her books because of a new version if iPhoto which suddenly requires you to have a kind of remote on Apple servers, the spreadsheet/writer tool is really bad at opening Excel and Word documents, the email client has very small fonts, etc...
For basic day-to-day usage, we found that Windows/Gnome/Macos are basically at the same level of consistency/quality. You can complain against some stuff on each side, they have inconsistencies on each side, but at the end of the day, one is not any more really better than the other, but she hates the fact that she has no ideas why sometimes on the Mac it does not work.
[0]: https://www.pixum.de
This is true, however Windows suffers from the same problem (and OSX too, however in a minor degree).
> awful font rendering
Only by default maybe. I did tweak my fontconfig (just some symlinks available in /etc/fonts/conf.avail) and IMO the font rendering in my Linux systems are better than my Windows systems (even after tweaking Windows ClearType).
There is the fact that some applications does not support fontconfig, however I can't think anyone that I use daily at least.
infinality is obsolete. Freetype 2.7.0 ships a new interpreter (that's… based on infinality. but faster and simpler) http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/2016-07/...
I have never understood the claim different software should be stuffed into the same user interface paradigm. Mainly it's an artifact of the encumbrance the software stack we use to compose user interfaces imposes on us.
OS level components should have the same look and feel.
Otherwise I see it as a bonus that different applications look and behave differently. I see no added value for the user if, say, Spotify and Word used the same toolkit.
To me however, this is on a different architectural level than how the UI itself is inplemented (which, technically, is just motion graphics with hotspots, but psychologically is the most important part for most users).
It seems like "must be UI native" is a way for Mac fanboys to try to enforce their preferred design paradigm on otherwise-uninterested people.
I think we are now at a point where the glowing animated screen is far more familiar to most people and the raw power available on most devices is such the only rational constraint for UI design is that use experience must be understandable to most and that the underlying system must play nicely with rest of the device.
This is the first time in years of experimenting with desktop/laptop linux where I've been able to say that it's close enough to gain mainstream popularity.
The GUI experience on Linux suffers mostly from inconsistency when using applications written with different toolkits, awful font rendering, and a general sense of being in the uncanny valley if you're used to other desktops environments.
My first computer in the mid 90's was running Linux on the desktop, and aside from a smattering of Windows here and there for games throughout the years, I've mostly stuck with it. Using Windows and OSX isn't some revelation in usability these days. OSX is more aesthetically pleasing, and a bit more consistent I think, but otherwise I don't find it profoundly better than the Linux options. I don't think it's more discoverable, and certainly hasn't been more stable in my experience- and there are definitely features I miss going from Linux to OSX on the desktop.