Great response. Did you manage to post any/all of this to the feedback-request thread by the guy from Ubuntu about 3 weeks ago? If not, I think you should. I might even do so on your behalf as I've definitely felt some of these pain-points myself.

Ubuntu tried to make a decent desktop with Unity and failed. Unity was the trigger for me for switching to OS X.

The problem was, they need to put a LOT of polish in to reach OS X levels of usability, and they didn't look like they were doing that, they had some nebulous dreams of making a unified mobile/desktop interface instead.

There isn't anything in particular I'd suggest to them, because they need improvements just about everywhere. Say, is the network manager actually usable these days? When I switched it was easier to just disable it and move along.

And the main elephant in the Linux room right now is systemd. Low level Linux is basically being taken over by an incompetent developer who doesn't understand the Unix philosophy of software design and can't deliver working software anyway. He's the author of the abomination called pulseaudio - back then it was required to uninstall/disable it to have sound again. Now, software written by him is becoming a dependency of almost everything - he is trying to replace all the Linux infrastructure layer with his ideas. Sorry, I see no reason to take a look at Linux on the desktop again.

Pulseaudio in Linux has the same role, as Core Audio in macOS.

Systemd in Linux has the same role, as Launchd in macOS. Some aspects of systemd were inspired by launchd and SMF.

Interestingly, it is a good, useful thing that contributes to polished experience when it comes to macOS, but for some reason, when someone does equivalent for Linux, it is suddenly a bad thing, just because it is different than in the past and moves the polish and experience with Linux to a higher level?

Pray tell, what "polish" is contributed by systemd's binary logs that get lost in case of a crash?

Unix philosophy aside, Pottering can't be trusted to provide working software...

There are pros and cons for binary logs, they get you something (https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1IC9yOXj7j6cdLLxWEBA...), and you may lose something.

If you have such problems, that your machine crashes and loses filesystem data, just redirect it to the syslogd and go on.

Ubuntu took Linux from relative obscurity to being a relevant player on the computer desktop.

Before Ubuntu, if you expected to get a build of a typical popular Windows program/game you would get laughed at. Now it's virtually expected. That's not failure.

systemd is not as much a matter of controversy as people want it to be. If it was, you would see people like Linus rejecting it, but they haven't because it's not a major factor right now.

I know, I've used Ubuntu since it was out. I was very happy that I get a polished Debian. Until they dropped KDE from the mainline and started putting all their resources in Unity...

Some of us don't think init is great either, a mess of shell scripts that individually reinvent the wheel

Irrelevant. Ubuntu, which the other people here are discussing, used upstart before it switched to systemd. For about a decade.

You've just made one of the errors discussed in http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ .

I'm not interested in your appeal to authority, especially as it claims comparing systemd with init is pointless (why?) and contains massive flaws like "Proponents (of systemd) are usually part of the modern Desktop Linux bandwagon"

I only posted about multiple monitor support, I wanted to focus on one specific pain point, and this is I think the worst.

I agree. I've run Linux at home for ages, just not on the desktop. Recently I dabbled with switching over to it on the desktop again to see how far it's come along and was shocked to see the state of multi-monitor and HiDPI support in Ubuntu. I couldn't care less about whether it's using systemd or what format the logs are in. How can we still be struggling with multiple monitors and getting the size of text and mouse cursors wrong?

Don't forget that CMD-C, CMD-X, and CMD-V, the system clipboard shortcuts, work in both desktop apps and the terminal. Whenever I'm using Linux it drives me mad that terminals have different shortcuts. Yes, I know it's mostly for historical reasons, but that doesn't make any less annoying.

Really, consistency is something that macOS holds over other desktop operating systems in a lot of ways, and that holds true even for third party apps for the platform. After having used macOS for many years, using other operating systems where most never gave much thought to or saw any value in getting on the same page and following a set of conventions is jarring.

Just be wary when drag & dropping a folder onto an existing folder, as the destination folder and all contents will be nuked before starting the copy! This is IMHO unexpected, especially if you're coming from Linux/Windows, where folders/files are appended (with subsequent pop-up dialogs asking whether to overwrite).

What? You must be doing something wrong. I would say that is unexpected and definitely doesn't match my experience.

Here it is explained in more detail with screenshots:

https://www.howtogeek.com/198043/how-to-merge-folders-on-mac...

A dialog pops up with 2 choices: Stop or Replace. Replace will delete everything in the destination folder before copying over the source. If you hold the Option key while drag&dropping, you can get one of multiple different pop-up dialogs, depending on the circumstances... and the results are not very predictable.

> there is nothing like TextExpander

We use ubuntu at work and I was VERY worried about this. But autokey is actually good enough. The UI is not quite as slick but the rest of it is a little better. The exception is the little pop up form fill things which are cool but I found I did not really miss. https://github.com/autokey-py3/autokey

Well... This actually reinforces my point. I tried it. Installed, ran it, saw the weird warning from gtk. Then tried to use the ",gd" example shortcut in the terminal. This did not work, then froze my keyboard, and after some frantic desktop switching using the mouse, autokey finally crashed.

I'm describing this experience because it's a common one: it's symptomatic of the "Linux desktop" experience and is the reason why I would much rather use Mac OS. It's not that I can't make things work -- I probably could, but I want to spend my time on other things.

I had an MBP for a little over a year, and after it was stolen I switched back to Linux - Xubuntu to be precise, I never liked unity, and I tend to go for a more minimal desktop on any system and XFCE has more than enough customization for my needs.

The 2 major issues for me with osX were:

1: Selecting icons to copy. I don't know if this has been fixed, but if you have a file browser window open and you want to click then shift-click to select a range of files, it would always just make a rectangle (graphically) between the 2 click points, not run left to right through the window and select everything in-between, (I don't know if I am explaining this clearly)

To select the range you wanted you would have to either switch to list view or cmd click any files which got left out. I really though it was a bug until I found this forum post https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/shift-doesnt-select-ran... where they defend the behavior.

2: And kind of a silly one, but when you plug in an hdmi monitor, you can only control the volume on the monitor itself. And as with the previous issue, I was surprised at the responses I found in the forums. Complete finger-in-ears-lalalalala "It's better this way, and impossible the way you say even though linux and windows can do it that way"

Anyway, for my personal use case, linux trumps both Windows and Apple, and, in opposition to most comments I see on this thread, I run Win7 and osX in VMs if I need specific software (SketchUp on Win and nothing really on osX, I just have the VM set up in case I need something)

>like dragging files into file/open dialogs

You mentioned this twice, and now I'm intrigued. What exactly do you mean by this?

Drag a file/folder into an Open dialog and the dialog will switch to that location.

Similarly drag a folder into a Save dialog and it will switch to that folder.

Drag a file onto the "Open..." button on a web page to skip the open dialog entirely.

Drag a file into Terminal to paste that full path into the terminal...

Exactly. It's hard to believe how much time that saves. Also, you can drag the little file icon from an application title bar.

And for recent apps consistently rename the file in place from that same title bar.

And the far decried HFS+ file system had a feature I hope they will maintain in APFS. When you moved or renamed a file around, most of the time even third party app managed to figure out the new location of the file when seeking for it instead of just displaying a broken path dialog.

And this replacement only occurred if the resource was not present at the search path. Meaning that moving and replacing by a similarly named file result in similar file being used, while moving result in suggesting new location.

Don't know what's the behavior is as of today, and maybe by now Linux also provide this reliably, but first time I've seen this was even pre OSX I believe. And maybe there is a simple trick, but it looked like black magic for the 20 years me.

My guess is a Carbon API which uses inodes instead of absolute path.

That was the case (and created a huge debate) back in the old Carbon vs Cocoa days

Infamous tech note 2034: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2014/10/08/the-source-of-technote-20...

Just tried it on Linux, and… all these features work pretty much exactly the same way.

I'll mix it in with my other favourite feature so it's more fun. Say you can't be bothered navigating to find & open a file in App B you already have open in some other app (A).

Get to the Open dialog, activate App A, click-hold on the little file icon next to the file name on the top bar of App A and drag it onto the Open dialog over at B. Suddenly, the dialog has the appropriate file selected, wherever it happens to reside on your file system. Magic!

Edit: literally everyone beat me to it.