So besides dpi-scaling issues linux is known for, whats the draw? Some hotkey that does a thing? Some visual candy? Smoothness in transitions?

Whatever it is, it's hard for me to imagine it being worth the tradeoff. I can't even name desktop workspaces on a Mac!

I'm reviewing the "new features" section on Monterey: https://www.apple.com/macos/monterey/features/ and I'm not seeing much other than a few known areas (multi-device support if you bought fully into the apple ecosystem, etc).

With most "I tried linux desktop" people it's a problem of DE/WM, but you seem to be beyond that so I'm genuinely curious.

A more cohesive experience across the desktop and applications, eg.:

- The look and feel is uniform. Admittedly somewhat less so, these days now that the Apple Human Interface Guidelines are largely ignored.

- Mac apps and generally more stable.

- Mac apps generally have more features.

- The Mac apps I use generally tend to tie into the hardware (hw acceleration, drivers, etc) much better. The benefit of controlling the vertical, I suppose.

- The keyboard shortcuts both exist and are the same across apps.

- The design patterns.

- The AppleScript/x-callback-url, etc).

- Third party apps generally tend to fit well into the above.

On Linux, almost everybody seems to have their own ideas on how an app should be arranged. With full desktop environments, like GNOME and KDE lessen this, but it's still really, really common.

That said, my money is still on Linux and other open source OSes, because I don't want a single company telling me what I can and can't do.

A few things that stand out about it to me vs GNOME 3, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXDE, and whatever the Windows interface is called:

- The consistency of the menu system, and being able to search and use the menus of any app from the keyboard with shift-cmd-?. This is like having Emacs M-x or Sublime/VSCode shift-cmd-P in every desktop app.

- Being able to assign custom keyboard shortcuts for any menu option in any app.

- Emacs keybindings for editing text in every text field (including on the web). I believe GNOME Tweaks is supposed to do this, but I could never get it to work reliably and universally like macOS.

- Native app ecosystem. Third-party Mac software is generally the most polished, though not quite as much exists as for Windows.

- System animations. This is a small one, but it makes things more fun and makes the whole system feel fluid and “organic,” for lack of a better term.

People who do that generally don't use Gnome, but i3/swaywm/xmonad and multitude of tools where you're in control what happens.

Firefox crashing is probably a Firefox problem.

You can set the scaling to be anything you want on X, just set the Xft.dpi number in your .Xresources file.

One problem with your Hackintosh install is that it’s closed source, no? As far as you know it’s exfiltrating your financial information to China.

Does the OS hard lock or completely crash? No... unless you have graphics drivers issues, which isn't unlikely. Then, oh man, yes, lots. X/Wayland crashes that restart the window server? Yep. Applications crashing pretty regularly or glitching out so badly they have to be restarted, including the basic applications distributed with the heavier DEs? Yep. And it turns out that your windowing environment crashing or the main program you're currently using crashing is really close to as bad as the whole machine blue-screening in Windows, from the perspective of the user. Using Linux makes me anxious, even though I very much know WTF I'm doing with it. MacOS and even (spits) Windows don't do that to me, any more. Now that I've experienced not feeling that way, I can't go back. I go years between work-lost crashes of any sort at all on MacOS. Linux, one month without such a thing would be miraculous.

If you build up from almost nothing and keep things very minimal and have very boring and stable old hardware, and do as much as possible from the command line, it can be kinda OK, but it's a lot of work to set something up like that, and ongoing effort every time you do something manually that'd be automatic or trivial on a more full-featured GUI desktop. If you start with something like Ubuntu or Fedora standard desktop installs, though, there's just too much that can go wrong, and it will, with some frequency.

I could tolerate some hardware or workflows not working and things generally being a little less convenient, maybe, if it were rock solid, but it's very far from that. The main problems seem to be that its entire graphics stack is incredibly fragile (Wayland doesn't seem to have done much, if anything, to fix that) and it's way too easy for a glitchy driver to screw up the whole system.

The only issue I had recently were audio issues which were both due to my buggy soundcard and a bug in Pipewire. Excluding that, I've had almost no issues with desktop Linux since 2017.

Grass isn't always greener.

Edit for an example, I'm stuck on Catalina because they tried deprecating functionality my firewall uses. And the window shifter shortcut key program I use won't work in Big Sur.

I use Linux as my daily driver and the apps I use (GNOME Terminal, other terms, Spotify, Slack, Brave and Firefox, and the GNOME desktop itself) crash multiple, sometimes several times a day on my two (work, personal) machines.

This happens across diverse machines, as well as across multiple distributions (though again, pop!_os, so far seems much less trashy for whatever reason).

No, that's Microsoft Windows. Apple only does it annually.

Microsoft really only tries to preserve basic compatibility for well-behaved applications that aren't tightly integrated with any OS components or specific hardware/drivers and aren't doing anything that Microsoft disapproves of. Anything that strays outside those boundaries will run into trouble, and a lot of software ends up falling outside those boundaries even if it didn't really need to.

Both operating systems are pretty bad at letting you wield control over your own computer. But macOS doesn't try as hard to obscure the BS or obstruct your attempts to tame it, and macOS actually lets you refuse updates that you don't want.