Unfortunately the modularity of Linux, despite being it's strength means that it can never possibly provide a UI/UX as coherent and interoperable as the Mac.

How can you provide things like spell checking, font rendering, copy/paste, drag and drop, password sync, across every widget and text field in the OS if every framework an application is built with and every part of the OS chain can be swapped out for something else and they're all made with distributed teams with no one at the helm to be the one to say "Drag and drop is broken in your app, you might not use it or care but others do, you need to fix it". or "Why does the text look weird in your app?"

This worries me because "M1 feels like Apple actually care about the Mac again" I completely disagree with this, I think Apple is aiming to have Macs running mostly iOS applications in the near future and MacOS will eventually be deprecated once we hit critical mass of that.

Not to mention the specific things I point out here that make the Mac great are being eroded away as more and more Mac apps are just electron wrapped React with custom text field components that disable OS spell checking and things like that.

I don’t understand comments like this because iOS apps as well as macOS apps are built using macOS devices. While it may come to pass that iOS becomes a viable platform to develop iOS and macOS (?!) apps, Apple cannot proceed by removing the ability to develop apps on both platforms.

Apple has proved itself a canny organization with regard to the development and maintenance of its platforms (bugs and pain points notwithstanding), so it seems highly unlikely they would move forward in a way that prevents the development and maintenance of those major platforms.

They’ll be running apps, but the lines between iPhone, iPad, and Mac will be blurred and I think this is fine. Similar to how apps now may have different features or layouts as you switch from iPhone to iPad.

I’m a little less worried about them deprecating macOS. They could do it tomorrow really but there doesn’t seem to be a need to do so. I think the goal here is to actually make the Mac stronger by unlocking access to the iOS App Library. It’s a good goal. I know some will complain about the iOS apps not being open source or something but probably 95% of users (myself included) don’t really care. I find open source software extremely valuable, but I don’t care if Flappy Bird or Office 365 are open source. I just need to use the software and get on with my day.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/scott-hanselmans-2021-ultimat...

The Mac sits in an awkward position indeed, especially with Apple giving a touchpad and keyboard to the iPad Pro.

I have to do a lot of PDF manipulation for my work, and after some time I accepted, grudgingly, that there's no substitute for Acrobat Pro.

Why do they do this? It's not good for anyone. I can understand this concept of "just do what's intuitive - try it!", oh what fun - but nobody is going to risk messing up the important files they're working with by randomly dragging things onto other things just to see what happens.

Just tell us how to use it.

Almost every (third-party) iOS app or game by comparison seems to have understood this basic concept of educating the user on how to use the product, but Apple falls far behind especially on macOS.

It's a bit ironic that the Mac is now the epicenter of multi-touch, while its use on mobile platforms has seen some of a decline.

Also, I full-heartedly consent to the praise of Preview.

It is annoying that many web pages and apps can’t zoom in/out on iOS. On the Mac it’s trivial to zoom the whole screen.

The only multi-touch gesture that is in widespread usage across all mobile platforms is pinch to zoom. The rest of the multi-touch gestures are probably used 100 times less (maybe less, I can't even remember the last time I used 2+ fingers to do something on my Android devices, except for pinch to zoom).

Massive citation needed. When I bought the first iPod touch (at the time it was a gen 1 iPhone without the GSM modem) it was because it had a real web browser and not the BS 'mobile' browsers on my Windows Mobile smartphone. I could actually visit a store's website and find their hours, check if an item was in stock, etc. There wasn't even an app store back then... IIRC multitouch was only used for zooming into photos in the photos app.

Smartphones had been around for years (e.g. devices like the SE P800 and P900 series) before the iPhone, but these remained niche and required specially skinned websites for full functionality (XHTML and CSS stylesheets with `medium="handheld"`, which is now dead). It was really the iPhone's capability to render normal websites and to navigate them via pinch & zoom, which was considered the killer-app of the iPhone (esp. before there was an App Store with a wide variety of apps available.) The success of the iPhone was built on the much acclaimed multi-touch feature. And this is now, with responsive web-pages set to `meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"` as a standard, practically disabled and dead. (In other words, with a grain of salt, responsive killed multi-touch – or, at least, rendered it disposable.)

(Moreover, I do not see any wide deployment of two or three finger gestures or similar multi-touch interaction on usual web-apps, especially, as these lack any standardization, but this may be just my own observation and anecdotal. That said, there's probably a niche use for virtual controllers for web games. But it's really the Mac trackpad and maybe the Magic Mouse, where multi-touch lives on with any significance.)

This is my biggest roadblock to Linux as well. I don’t sync to 1Password.com though and that’s all that is available, so it’s more than just a poor experience for me.

I thought about trying to share a Keepass database but that’s had some issues. I tried sharing via Keybase and had a weird issue that when I edited something in Keepass, it was unreadable in Linux. I didn’t have a problem if I shared it via USB drive though.

This might be a bit of a lazy solution, but it has been working well enough for me.

And on Android I use Keepass2Android, which also syncs to the same Dropbox folder, it works seamlessly.

Next time you give linux a try, you might want to check out https://kdeconnect.kde.org/ and https://syncthing.net/. I'm not a Mac user but I'd be surprised if between these you'd be missing any features.

The desktop app is pretty good now, and if you’re using the Beta browser extension, it can talk to the desktop app to unlock. This feature is still in development, though, and has some restrictions.

I haven't seen tearing in longer than I can remember, and can't remember anyone even mentioning it, so I think you're overplaying this point JUST a tad. I tend to use older laptops with Linux, and older screens (VGA, DVI), so maybe that's the reason.

I hate touchpads.

I don't do PDF editing.

Everything's a tradeoff.

I do indeed have a portrait monitor for throwing terminals on to, and it's the worst place for making tearing visible.

I rarely use my external monitor, and I can't even remember the last time I had used it in portrait mode, so these comments made me realize there could be use cases (and not just hardware or drivers) that trigger tearing that I just hadn't encountered. But I just took a quick shot at it, and I didn't see tearing, at least not on YouTube, nor when moving a window around.

I'm on Wayland with Intel graphics.

>is gnome still less customizable than even macOS?

Gnome has been more flexible since 2003, seeing as I haven't seen someone successfully replace the MacOS stylesheet. On Gnome, it's a 2 minute process, tops.

Evolution is fine, but I really wish Gnome's Mail and Calendar apps would get more love and development as they look modern and minimalistic. The accounts management is lacking support for the general case, sadly. And GPG...

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbkey...

This add-on will allow you to customise (remove!) the very annoying single-key shortcuts

If you're not a mailing list based developer, I would recommend MailSpring, which is both snappy any polished.

https://getmailspring.com/

What the...

As far as phone integration, KDEConnect is quite good, though it only works if the devices are in the same network.

How is the generation of 2D bar codes that many (government) forms use when you enter information into the various fields?

Previews capabilities are much better than any any built in tool or Adobe reader.

Have you tried Mailspring?

> My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly awful linux experience

Maybe a good time to try something open-source such as Bitwarden? The fact that 1password is closed-source is a major disadvantage.

You're looking for Nextcloud.

The parent poster is clear on what they like (or don’t) and even prefaced everything with “and these are super subjective”. Personal preference doesn’t become invalid when another disagrees, nor does parent seem to be fishing for agreement.

But answers to a few specific points:

- Okular fails to render weird PDFs for me - things like NXP datasheets are notable for this. It is my usual PDF reader on Linux though. Additionally, the few features I called out were not an exhaustive list, just examples. Preview also makes it very easy to do things like combine PDFs or remove pages from existing PDFs, or do things like crop all of the pages in a PDF in one operation - this is surprisingly useful!.

- tearing is something I have never managed to actually completely eliminate. I can get rid of it for the most part on single display setups (although setting TearFree introduces video stuttering on intel), but on multi-display setups I have never managed to lose it - on both intel & amd's OSS stacks, and on nvidia's proprietary driver. I fully admit this is something that disproportionately annoys me and that others may not care about, but it's a solved issue on Windows and macOS and has been for years. Using wayland instead of X11 resulted in a lot of apps getting very poor performance or flat breaking when rendering - but every time I try wayland it has gotten a lot better since the last time. But replacing a 30+ year old windowing system with a new one is a pretty huge undertaking, so I'm not surprised it's taking a while!

- things like kdeconnect/gsconnect etc don't support integration with iOS. It's not their fault - iOS is restrictive and Apple keep it that way very deliberately, but it achieves their aim very well - it keeps people tied in to Apple's ecosystem. Losing all of the niceties at once is pretty jarring - and even if I replace everything at once, eg going macOS -> linux and iOS -> android, etc it still doesn't end up as fully integrated.

2) tearing is typically video driver related. Solution for many is to use intels video drivers

3) if you are tied to the apple ecosystem its always going to be easier to stick with it.

4) Most linux users focus on vim shortcuts or terminal/bash shortcuts. Thus the ecosystem will be behind

edit: and desktop distro of choice is generally Arch for me - it's been a long time since I used ubuntu.

That you got used to using crappy software doesn’t mean I want to do the same.

Linux does have a lot of crappy and quality software. Using the better ones changes the experience a lot. Not all software on the macOS is top notch either. There are some amazing apps, but most of them can be replicated on Linux or have better equivalents.

I think you're dismissing something here.

And it's this sort of absolutism that continues to solidify the "cult" like impression of the Apple consumerism culture.

Having said that, i have all the tools I need on Linux, excepting office, which I run via wine. I wish I didn't have to, but what can you do.

I also find a lot of people complain about to be simple habit; I've been using Linux 25ish years, and was an early (too early) adaptor of GNOME 3, and MacOS just pisses me off. I know that most of my complaints are simply me not being used to it though. I could learn to live with it I'm sure, but I'm not moving to a platform that's as hostile to users as MacOS. I'd rather move to Windows.

Why then, is brew still considerably worse than apt, and Finder worse than...anything on Linux? You don't need the source code to replicate functionality. Additionally, some tools are better adapted to the philosophy of their 'native' desktops,so they have a challenge architecturaly and with the users mindsets/muscle-memory when ported across platforms.

This is all to say, I agree that it's pretty subjective: I'll take keyboard shortcuts over mouse gestures - so I won't "get" why Mac lovers emphasize trackpad performance so much, and I guess they won't "get" why I rave about system-wide shortcuts and configurability either. I use MacOs for work, but all my home computers run Linux. GNU core-utils are better than the BSD versions that ship on Macs - I will die on this hill

Is that the one that used a MySQL database on the desktop? The disaster known as akonadi? That would frequently lock up requiring restarts? When I used KDE back in the day one thing I'd make sure was to remove PIM/akonadi/kmail completely and use Thunderbird or whatever else instead.

It's been a few months since I gave up, but IIRC Akonadi has a few storage backends.

I was looking for a GUI mail client to replace using my various webmail based interfaces. As much as I love Plasma, KMail and its ilk were painful. Akonadi still has issues all these years later, and gave me trouble setting it up. The messages produced are less than helpful.

Once KMail was running, it was fine to use, albeit with an occasional crash, just at the wrong times so it got annoying. I stopped using it.

I don't remember seeing tearing on my Linux for a heck of a long time.

Aside from Netflix, I'll sometimes see tearing even on YouTube, when I put it on fullscreen. Luckily, there is mpv with builtin youtube-dl support, which solves this problem. But I haven't found a solution for Netflix, other than rebooting into Windows, or switching to my Mac.

I can’t remember ever seeing tearing on my MacOS machines. And I’m even using a cheapo $15 DisplayPort adapter for my third monitor.

My recent experiences have been exclusively with Intel integrated GPUs on a laptop, which seem to be a fairly reliable option in terms of desktop compatibility and integration nowadays. I don't know what the current state of e.g. proprietary NVidia drivers is, but I wouldn't be surprised if you ran into more problems in terms of compatibility with the rest of the desktop system (including stuff like tearing) with those than with some of the better open source drivers.

Workstation-class machines might thus actually be more prone to tearing if they require using proprietary drivers.

That doesn't make it any less of a problem if your coworkers' machines did exhibit problems, of course.

[1] I've seen tearing e.g. when playing a web video in the Steam client, but I find that more of a corner case than browsers or general desktop use.

Subjeectively, being attached to an email client feels odd to me. That's what the brower is for; same for a PW manager. If Bitwarden has a client, I wouldn't even know. The browser ext works just fine. I used to use LastPass.

Ya can't have change without change. It's not necessarily easy. But it's always true: No delta, no glory.

I self-host my mail server and use an IMAP+SMTP client to talk to it - I don't use something like gmail. $work uses gmail and the web ui frustrates the hell out of me (and I pity anyone whose only experience with a native email client is being paired with gmail, because their IMAP implementation makes it rather painful!).

For password manager, 1password has a native app and browser extensions that talk to that local native app. There are browser only ones too, but I prefer the native app integration because it shares unlock state between all of the extensions and the full desktop client all in one go.

But you're right, you can't have change without things actually changing. It's a tradeoff between convenience and what you're used to, and the benefits of what you get from changing. For me, for now that ends up sitting on the side of macOS. For others, that might be Linux or even Windows. I don't think any of those positions are wrong, it's all about what works for each person.

Humans adapt. It's what we do. Yet so often we mistake wants for needs.