> Most people don't want to deal with this

There's nothing to "deal with". You can skip all of that and have a nice KDE/plasma desktop. On the other hand you have the builtin option to do things that require 3rd party apps on MacOS (caffeine, magnet, etc.)

The default macOS is much nicer and coherent than the default KDE, year on year.

This is obviously a personal preference of yours or you have never used KDE Plasma.

Well looking at the numbers it's a preference of a very sizable group of people.

Being many or a majority doesn't necessarily mean being right though. They are completely unrelated. It's a very weak defense of Apple design choices versus KDE (or anything else).

It’s astonishing to me that one can claim that any Linux-on-PC is beautiful, polished and easy to use. I have bought a Dell XPS for an employee, which is supposed to be the best mass-market laptop before System76s which are way more expensive; and the overall experience is appalling compared to Mac:

- Before even starting, you open the laptop, the bottom stays stuck with the lid, so you raise a little more and shake it and it smashes against the desk. It’s comically unpolished experience. It requires a decade of seniority as an engineer to know that it’s a criteria that you should include to your purchase, whereas with Apple you buy any of them and the quality is uniform.

- I’ve had my macbook for 8 years and still watching movies on batteries, not a single PC laptop can reach such performance.

- It would wake up at the office and play my employee’s music, and I don’t have his password and the sound buttons don’t work without login. Why oh why?

- The GRUB at startup and the workflow for full disk encryption… What is there to defend on the polishing of the various Linux experience?

If you have to be an expert to know that some distribution or another is better, then it’s not an expertise I want to be good at. My job is delivering experiences to my own customers, and software needs to get out of the way.

True, but it is a decent argument against "it is just your personal preference".

When it comes to to usability they are not completely unrelated

A very sizable group of people is not making an explicit choice between MacOS defaults or KDE defaults. There's a lot more going on here to make this claim.

I have never understood why people felt the need for all this desktop customization and setup. In a long career in tech I have never seen someone more productive than another because of how they configured their desktop. I am sure people might argue on here that they are infinitely better because of it, but I have never seen it.

An OS is a platform to run apps you need and manage resources of and on the machine. If it does that effectively and reliably without a fight, it does it’s job.

I use a Mac for the simple fact that in the last 13 years…I have had precisely 2 MacBooks and one of them was my daily machine that I used for 10 years. Battery swelled and I retired it. I could have probably replaced the battery and kept using it. My latest machine will likely last me another 3-5 years.

> I have never understood why people felt the need for all this desktop customization and setup.

Compatibility with existing muscle memory.

In 1989, I took a .twmrc file from a friend, which mapped alt-mouse1 to move, alt-mouse2 to resize and alt-mouse3 to iconify. Those mappings became muscle memory over the next 17 years of twm and ctwm and KDE use.

At that point, my whitebox died and I decided to get an iMac because I was very busy with work and personal life, and didn't want to spend a lot of time building/configuring a new whitebox. MacOS was *nix, so how bad could it be? Well, I ended up fighting MacOS tooth and nail, as I could never get my mappings to work reliably. That lead me to use X11 for a lot of things, but that inter-operated poorly with native apps. After about 9 months, I gave up on Mac as a desktop and gave the iMac to my then-inlaws and built a whitebox.

So I feel strongly that the ability to tweak things like this, even if they are never used, can be crucial to some people.

In fact, I'd very much like to covert to using my M1 mbp as a desktop with a dock, but I simply cannot function using Mac's window management on a deskop. I've tried all kinds of tweaks and add-on to get the behavior I want, and they all fail in some way.

I understand the muscle memory argument. Over 30+ year career, I’ve bounced back and forth between Unix, windows, and MacOS a few times and as such lost that subconscious level of system operation you get from that muscle memory for a period of time. Definitely it can be a pain in the ass. I think my difference is that in most cases when I was doing a platform shift, I was doing an app shifts at the same time. So it just became necessary to relearn anyway. I can see if your app platform stays the same and your OS changes, that could create some frustration where tweaking would be more important.

Back in 2008 when I made my last shift the MacOS caused me some frustration because I was expecting window management to work like Windows. Took some time to get past it, but now how it works is my expectation. Lately I have found with moving to iPadOS more and more for non-business computing needs, that when I work on my MBP, I maximize everything and just alt-tab between it all. Windows management needs are almost nil.

I have a _huge_ problem where if I can endlessly tweak something, I will waste hours doing so. I used to do the same with my Android devices, flashing newer nightly rom builds every night for cyanogen. My macOS/iOS devices "just work" and I have very few gripes with their chosen defaults.

Exactly this for me. Why spend hours tweaking something to look and work a certain way when all I am going to use it for is to launch some other program that I will likely run maximized?

Where did I blame the Desktop Environment? Nowhere did I state such, so please stop putting words in my mouth. I find the interoperability of my devices _great_ and I can't get that with Linux. I'd rather spend those hours tweaking servers, or projects, than some pointless (and typically subpar) Linux DE. I don't want to deal with that, as others have pointed out.

It's this thing you keep saying where endless tweaking is necessary. That is not true as I have stated multiple times. If you feel the need to constantly tweak things when you have the option to and can't help yourself that is purely a personal behaviour thing and nothing to do with any technology.

I only said this once, but I know I am not the only one. You asked, and you got an answer, on why people prefer systems where people get what they consider sane defaults. I have an endless curiosity, and if the way I need to deal with it is by making limiting decisions on purpose (while still getting a perfectly capable set of operating systems) then I will. Does my choice to limit what I know I have a weakness in mean I lack self control? I could still go after Linux and the endless dream if I wanted, but I chose not to?

An environment that encourages rabbit-holing is going to be an environment less preferred by people who don't want to rabbit-hole.

You can say that about KDE. You can also say that about "running Linux on a computer with a discrete graphics card".

I do it. (I'm posting this from a Thinkpad with a Quadro, running Fedora, and I have to uninstall a kernel module when I go traveling in order to disable it so I get more than two hours of battery life.) I chose to. Maybe you did too. That doesn't mean you need to Leap To Its Defense every time somebody says it's not for them.

> I have to uninstall a kernel module when I go traveling in order to disable it so I get more than two hours of battery life.)

Holy moly…more power to you for this, I read it with horror. I just close my MacBook lid and throw it in my bag. I hope you don’t have to travel much.

I don't love MacOS, but yeah, I bring an M1 Air with me when I travel on a plane. And my desktop runs Windows with WSL for work stuff.

Truth be told, the p52 doesn't run Linux as much anymore because it's a huge pain. Windows+WSL is good enough, and the primary reason I have a desktop replacement machine for my day job is for video processing.

Options beget choice. Choices need a decision, which requires energy. We can reframe what is called in german Innerer Schweinehund as our innate, hardwired wetware program to conserve energy. Lions and all other cats sleep most of the day, because hunting, which succeeds 1 out of 10 times, requires a lot of energy. We now live in an environment where food is abundant, no running after gazelles till think break down from overheating required. Now it becomes apparent why many people prefer convenience without thinking over choice.

That's nonsense. Having options doesn't mean you have to pick one. Having 1 choice or 10 with a default set is the same unless you start digging into options. This smells like "Apple Knows Best".

That's not true, for many people. If you increase choices then people often feel less happy.

Having more varieties of mayonnaise at the supermarket doesn't necessarily make us happier--it just forces us to expend energy choosing, or worrying that we've made the wrong choice. If there's just one variety then we don't have that issue and we're probably happy with the mayonnaise that we get.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

I don't use Apple products

Please read those: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We want to have an open, respectful site, where we can discuss differing opinoons respectfully.

I’m both Mac OS X and Ubuntu user. There was no need to change anything in OSX because there was no need (defaults are good enough) and I use some tweaks on Ubuntu. I understand that this is anecdotal but I guess this is how OSX users feel.

>If you can use a computer to do basic tasks, it's really not hard. If you can't navigate some menus that have confusing titles like, desktop settings and themes and display options and widgets and you can't click and drag things around, whatever OS you use will be a struggle.

I did the Unix porn thing for years, it got old. Not a single bit of that sounds appealing at this point in my life.