As far as I know, shortcuts are already pretty much global. Keyboard navigation, copy/paste, open/close/save, it all pretty much follows the same Windows standards. It takes time to learn to use all the shortcuts though, and a lot of them aren't intuitive. I've had the same experience when I tried macOS, none of the shortcuts made sense and behaviour was often non-intuitive coming from a non-Apple platform.
If you're happy with macOS you should totally stick with macOS, but luckily there's people working hard on solving the most glaring issues with modern UIs. Once trackpad support improves, a lot of people might feel a lot better at home than they do right now.
Word and like jumps in Windows also felt backwards to me, doing the equivalent of w instead of e in vim, and couldn't be consistently combined with shift.
Support for Alt+Dpad(+Shift) and Command+Dpad(+Shift) is important IMO. As well as Double/Triple-click+Drag: it should select additional units not letters.
These last paragraphs are OS-level but the features were missing or inconsistent.
I just tried this in macOS (Catalina), in Chrome while I happened to be looking at a design page in figma.com and nothing happened.
Not so surefire I guess. To be fair - I assume the web page was capturing that shortcut. It worked on the new tab page.
The point though is that this is an app thing, not a macOS thing. If every app on Windows and Linux decided to use the same exact shortcut for opening preferences, then we'd have that. On macOS, Apple does not strictly enforce Cmd+, for opening preferences - any macOS app can use that for whatever they want.
> Word and like jumps in Windows also felt backwards to me...
Jumping words is done with Ctrl+left/right arrow in Windows and Linux. On macOS it's Option+left/right arrow. On all systems, it can be combined with Shift to highlight the word.
> Support for Alt+Dpad(+Shift) and Command+Dpad(+Shift) is important IMO. As well as Double/Triple-click+Drag: it should select additional units not letters.
Not sure what this means, but on my Linux desktops I have absolute freedom to make my keyboard and mouse to do just about anything I can dream of. Meanwhile, in macOS I am often told that if I am not loving the way that Apple has chosen for me to behave, then I must be expecting the wrong thing...
[1]: ± some depending on if you count multiple ways of creating the same character, etc. Eg. ‘≠’ can be made by combining / and = in either order. Also ‘Compose, number, s’ for footnotes, ‘Compose, +, -’ → ±, ‘Compose , <, '’ → “‘”, ‘Compose, -, >’ → “→”, ‘Compose, =, >” → “⇒” are nice. And υɳⅰеηⅽоⅾе.
This is why I don't use Linux on the desktop. (About half of my servers are Linux.)
Every couple of years I'll bring out my old HP laptop and spend most of a week installing all the newest desktop environments to see how they've progressed. I'm always disappointed.
I've been counting on Linux to be the big disruptor for two decades now. But more and more it's just becoming the poor man's Windows, by aping Windows conventions.
If I want Windows, I'll run Windows. If I want macOS, I'll run macOS. What I want is something different, not something that tries to be a watered-down version of both.
In 2009ish I had a ui where you could zoom out to a giant wall and rearrange all the windows on your virtual desktops and use a macish expose to bound to a mouse key to pick from the windows on the current desktop. The visual metaphor was better than macs and windows and to boot there were so many knobs you could tweak virtually anything.
Tiling window managers like i3wm and 17 more are both minimal and powerful. Notably i3 has MUCH more powerful keybindings and treats individual monitors as virtual desktops.
With xmonad your window manager is a haskell program with awesome a lua one.
If you want to go all in on emacs you can make it your window manager too.
Honestly its only windows lite if you want it to be so and really everyone is basically xerox lite to some degree or another because we are basically using the same basic metaphors described therein.
I used to hate Mac shortcuts, because I never really spent more than 30 minutes with the system. I think there is nothing to hate - they are just different and IMO better.
The surprising thing to me is that most of the small details I rely were in OS X 10-15 years ago. If a Linux distro were created to mimic OS X 10.4 I would be perfectly happy using it as an everyday OS and recommending it to others. I keep hitting dead ends in my research, and it seems like the major desktop environments have a lot of architectural problems preventing them from implementing some basic UX improvements.
The barrier of entry to help develop these features also seems high to me, coming from web development.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-forced-uighur-labor-ip...
Apple and Foxconn both claim to be unaware of any irregularities, and Apple said they're investigating.
I rather think the OP meant something more like their practices surrounding their App Store than this not-quite-substantiated and hyper-sensationalized claim.
They haven't changed because moving away from china would cost them billions and they as most people would rather keep themselves warm with a pile of money than worry about the ethical implications.
But now you've shifted from the part I found dubious--that companies are knowingly engaging in slave labor--to a more clearly established pattern. One can be both horrified by China's treatment of Uigher people and skeptical that Foxconn, Apple, or any one of the 82 companies to which you've referred are complicit.
None of this "excuses" Apple; it's just that there's something faintly disingenuous about focusing on them as if they were a unique source of this problem. We could just as easily say "your Nintendo Switch is manufactured by literal slaves in concentration camps," but we don't, because... it's not as satisfying to be outraged at Nintendo, I guess?
At any rate: I strongly suspect the OP was referring to recent controversy surrounding the way Apple runs the App Store.
The trackpad woes are a clear priority for some members of the Linux community and I can visualize a future in which trackpads work nearly as well on Linux as they do on macOS. Offering consistent Mac-style keybindings everywhere (maybe through a GTK setting, like switching between Windows-style and Emacs-style?) seems like a harder problem, especially because of the politics and ingrained assumptions.
It surprises me that there isn't a distro or easy to use tool to use Mac-style keybindings, given the overlap of Macs and Linux systems in tech.
There are many subtle things that works amazingly well on macOS. Most immediately, scrolling with the trackpad is smooth, responsive, and smooth. On Ubuntu 20.04 (XPS 15 9550), my experience was pretty much the opposite and with visible tearing. I'm not trying to bash Linux, I want to move to it, but these are the things holding me back.
For navigation (end/beginning of line/word) I just learned Vim bindings, which are better anyway and work on any OS for pretty much every text editor.
https://github.com/pkulak/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/alacr...
I had no idea that Mac used emacs bindings all over the place though. If I was used to using them, that would probably have been a deal breaker for me too.
All the control characters have pre-existing meaning, for example in bash Ctrl-C sends SIGTERM to the foreground process, while emacs uses it a prefix command, etc.
This is the crux of the problem. You _cannot_ steal the control characters if you want the terminal to be a terminal and that means you either end up with an inconsistent mess or you pick a new and neutral (say, Cmd) modifier for your UI needs. Apple got it, Microsoft didn't (because they didn't do anything Unix like). That Linux chose to imitate Microsoft is equal part historical and tragedy. EDIT: typos'R'Us
Not to drag us too deep into philosophy, but you can make a pretty good case for the Linux way as well. On my machine, the super key is mapped exclusively to window manager shortcuts. It's how I move, close and resize windows, change splits, open apps, switch workspaces, pop open temp terminals, emojii choosers, a calculator, all that quality of life stuff. Copying and pasting is an app thing, and apps get ctrl and alt as their modifiers. It does make sense to me.
I even prefer my PC trackpad on Linux vs my Mac trackpad on macOS because on Linux there are many more settings I can configure to get it working exactly to my liking.
Personally, I don't like the cursor acceleration profile in macOS by default. You can change certain values through the terminal, but the Synaptics and libinput options on Linux are way more in depth and packaged in a nice GUI (at least in KDE Plasma).
2012: Sony Vaio, running linux: Trackpad was infuriating, so I used an external keyboard + mouse. I'm not sure what it was - the sensitivity of the trackpad was very high so it was hard to point at things, combined with separate buttons.
2015: Macbook pro. The trackpad was so good, and gestures so well done and supported, that I _won't use a mouse_ anymore on my work machine. (Five years later, still feel the same.) Clicking was as easy as tapping on the trackpad, and scrolling with two fingers (as well as two-finger click as right-click) works flawlessly.
2015: My wife has a windows laptop, and its trackpad is infuriating. While in theory it can be clicked anywhere, I always have to _Very Deliberately_ click (significantly harder than on my macbook's trackpad) before it can reliably register.
2018: Using a newer (2016) macbook, with touchbar and a larger trackpad. This has a larger trackpad, but it somehow doesn't register incidental thumb-bumps on the trackpad as clicks (an issue that my older mac sometimes would do).
2020: I moved to a 2020 macbook pro, my wife has a new windows laptop, and we have a Chromebook. I've used them all -- and still notice a strong preference for the mac's trackpad.
Windows trackpad handling has improved a TON since her old laptop, and it no longer feels like I need to press super hard to get clicks to register, but it still feels more finicky about recognizing clicks than the mac does, while still being harder to get the pointer where I want it to be. It also seems to react to accidental touches on the trackpad that the mac would ignore while typing. The chromebook's trackpad seems better than I expected for a $300 machine, and is better than her old laptop's trackpad, but it still doesn't seem quite as responsive as the mac's.
I'm not sure how much of this is hardware versus drivers. Windows laptops seem to be Very Good, in fact, these days. I still prefer the mac's trackpad behavior better, though.
PC laptops are catching up lately for sure though. Almost there. (I havent even tried some of the latest stuff, I heard Razer has really good "Precision" trackpads?)
I have libinput-gestures working just fine with 2, 3 and 4 finger events, although I vastly prefer a 5-button vertical mouse (Evoluent) and keeping my fingers on the keyboard over a touchpad...
With some small scripts I was able to have things that macOS can't do out of the box at all, like maximizing windows, snapping windows - pretty much anything I could script, I could do with a touchpad gesture.
One thing that really matters - you have to have the right brand of touchpad for it to work. Mine is an Elantech (ELAN0501).
Edit: just to clarify I'm not bashing Linux, more my usecase.