It's basically impossible to have crisp fonts without a high DPI integer scaled monitor. The target monitor hardware for Windows and MacOS is vastly different.

> The traffic light window controls look way too far into the app's header. Find a happy medium, copy macOS's spacing.

I noticed that too on the screenshots page. And it's weird cause it looks right under the "features you'd love" section on the main page. It looks like most of those images (the traffic light buttons, global menus, folder icons) are faked to look like macOS but then the screenshots don't actually look like that.

There used to be Infinitaly that somewhat helped with that.

If you find your fonts rendered to thin compared to macOS you may try changing some of the freetype settings, such as:

    FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="truetype:interpreter-version=35 autofitter:no-stem-darkening=0 cff:no-stem-darkining=0"

1. Doesn't macOS turn off font antialiasing for retina displays? I believe retina displays (with desktop scaling) is the real solution to crispy fonts.

apple was using grayscale shape-acxurate smoothing, it works on any display with any arrangement of subpixels

windows clear type is using pixel-accurate subpixel smoothing, it works only in one direction with correct subpixel pattern

what people (including me) dislike about windows fonts is aggressive hinting, that is snapping font shape to pixel grid, it made sense in displays around VGA (640x480) but does not make sense on FHD screen

I think what you are used to has a big impact. I use a 22" 1200p screen and still like the aggressive hinting; I've tuned my fontconfig to be more like windows. Mac style rendering just looks fuzzy to me.

As an aside the PPI of my screen isn't that different from the PPI of my 15" CRT running 1024x768 (both are about 100). Note that there was less than 15" of usable space since CRTs were rated based on the tube size, not the visible size.

It is interesting how you only have purely visual "signs" on your list ). It can't be only this for a tech crowd. There is so much more about the way software is shipped, configured & used.

Also, the hardware. (It is much harder to make it work reasonably well across so many platforms without an army of full time devs.)

Do you mean that for a tech crowd, you'd expect people to have a more robust list of desires?

That's a genuine question, I just read yours in a few different ways.

However, I'd argue that relatively small details just fall into the category of overall interface polish. Not just aesthetic people polish, but the category of things that make you put your hands to your face and scream in frustration.

But yes, there are definitely important details in other layers that are worth considering. I think that when people make comparison's though, beetween macOS' level of finesse and something else, that finesse is defined by polish at most levels of interface with that hardware and so on.