I feel like there's no integration between the macOS UI stuff and the Unix underpinnings.

I agree that it's annoying how much apple tries to hide the Unix nature of the OS. I have no idea why they hide the home folder from Finder by default, it's on my list of "things to change immediately" when I do a fresh Mac install/setup, as well as things like installing newer versions of Bash, Vim, etc (via Homebrew). But overall I think the pros of the OS vastly outweigh the cons. For the most part, all of the things I don't like about the OS can be turned off or tuned. And I value how things work under the hood too much to give that up.

I will admit I have never tried WSL - because I've never had a need to. I've considered trying it, but then I just tell myself I'd rather just use Linux.

Open finder then cmd-shift-h or cmd-shift-g, "~"

Both of these work right out of the box, what would you rather macOS do to be easier?

Put Home on the sidebar by default like Thunar, Nautilus, Dolphin, Caja, earlier versions of Mac OS X...

I just need control, alt, and a meta button ("Windows" button).

What is this option and command nonsense?

I'm used to switching between Mac and PC layouts every day, but I personally prefer the Mac keyboard layout. Command is easier to press with a thumb compared to Ctrl, which requires the pinkie. Option allows you to input special characters with far more ease compared to any PC operating system (e.g Opt + Shift + - for an em-dash compared to some crazy incantation on Windows). Control is still available as an additional modifier if you want it.

A great side-effect of using Cmd as the primary modifier is that shortcuts inside your terminal become simplified. E.g Cmd + C to copy rather than Ctrl + Shift + C, or Cmd + T to open a new tab rather than Ctrl + Shift + T.

In an ideal world, Windows would switch to using the Win key as its primary modifier instead of Ctrl. That would make life so much simpler.

Funnily enough, the command key and many of those popular shortcuts (eg cut copy paste) predates windows by several years. The story goes that windows wanted to use the same shortcuts, but PC keyboards lacked a command key - so they used control instead. Since windows was backwards compatible with lots of hardware, they couldn't require a key that didn't exist on most keyboards.

Prior to that of course, Control has a long history of interacting with command-line based applications in Unix/family (eg Ctrl-C to cancel a running CLI app). Of course those same things still work in MacOS like they did in the older Unixes.

From 15 years ago!

> all of your favorite *nix commands will be available

Except that they are the BSD variants, not the GNU ones.

Does BSD varient vs GNU varient matter when we're considering if something is unix-like? No one would say that the BSD distributions are not Unix derivatives. As they say, "GNUs Not Unix..."