That’s not the correct solution. The correct solution is for the monitor manufacturer to stop reporting an EDID that identifies their monitor as a TV (and thereby forces the OS to default to YUV rather than SRGB.)

macOS here is just following the EDID spec to the letter. (Linux does too, as it happens.) Windows is the one “doing it wrong” (i.e. not to spec), by falling back to SRGB whenever it’s unsure, rather than falling back to YUV. This results in a lot of TVs being unhappy (no signal) when plugged into Windows PCs, but working fine under macOS / Linux.

It is far from obvious to me.

It would be useful to know what brands to avoid.

Though it was a little frustrating to me that I had to monitor shop in the first place. I bought an MBA to start some iOS projects. I wanted to use my still great 1080 IPS Dell screen that I had used for years with Windows and Linux. But MacOS looked absolutely horrid on it. I know MacOS prefers higher resolution screens, but I was surprised it couldn't manage to handle a ridiculously common resolution.

Of course, I avoid HDMI like the plague. I only use DisplayPort unless I have no other option, and then I don't hold out much hope that the display maker did anything right.

[1] https://embdev.net/topic/284710

However, I think the original complaint is still valid. No highly-technical one-off solution solves the fundamental issue of general usability.

This is not to say I couldn't learn, if forced to. That's what happened when I started using windows, Linux, and Android after all.

For general usability you need agreement on one way of doing something. Cars are this, you can drive pretty much any car because of the standard way the interface is put together.

My main issue with people responding to any criticism of Apple is that Apple fans (especially hardcore) can't accept that the Mac OS/iPhone interface isn't perfect and doesn't work for everyone.

Job's insistence on a one button mouse for decades, then a one button phone bordered on the absurd as devices grew in capability. Yet it did serve a portion of the market well enough. Even if it kept advanced features virtually impossible to discover with being taught. Doubtful my boomer parents will ever learn swipe gestures, yet my 4yo is doing them now.

Not a great solution though - seems like a UI option to turn this off if it is as widespread as it seems.

"You're holding it wrong"

I understand the monitor manufacturers are at fault but the OS tries to be as compatible as possible and handles the hardware.

Note how I didn’t say that the TVs are not-to-spec; that’s because the EDID spec allows TVs to just not report an EDID (TVs are low-margin, and that’s one fewer chip on the signal path), where the video source then must assume some standard default modes (e.g. 1080p@60 YUV 4:2:2.) But monitors, meanwhile, must report an EDID. Why?

Because all this only applies over HDMI; and HDMI is a protocol for talking to TVs first-and-foremost, which is why the EDID spec assumes YUV as the fallback.

Monitors generally have DisplayPort inputs; and if you plug Windows or macOS into a monitor over DisplayPort, it’ll always go SRGB, because YUV isn’t a video mode the DisplayPort protocol can even carry.

So when a monitor has an HDMI input, it’s essentially doing “TV compatibility” over that input—and it needs to report its capabilities with an EDID, lest the video source think it’s a TV and send base TV spec signals to it.

Which all makes the situation even more ridiculous: there are TVs that Windows can’t talk to over HDMI, despite the HDMI connection implying. and the EDID spec explicitly stating, that Windows should make the fallback/safety assumption that it’s talking to a TV.

Also keep in mind that this is a prisoner’s dilemma: the only reason that monitor manufacturers are able to “get away with” being nonconformant to the EDID spec is because of Windows’ leniency. Windows is the “defector” here. If Windows stopped allowing it, then nobody would be allowing it, and so the monitor manufacturers would have to shape up.

Is this an EDID issue? OP didn't specify what the "non Mac monitor" is, but I'd expect it to be a lower DPI one. I get the blurry text on an Apple Thunderbolt Display, too.

I think this is related to the removal of sub-pixel antialiasing in Mac OS a few versions back.

I believe that subpixel font rendering being removed several years ago is the cause.

Nobody cares if Apple are following a spec, they care about the experience of using their hardware. And it's awful.

I can never find anything in word or excel or any other application that use windows style menus. On Mac you at least get a real menu.

I never got used to macOS’ alt-tab when I switched more than a decade ago, but now that I’m back on windows I find that their behavior works even worse. So maybe that’s a “don’t ever try to learn another alt-tab behavior than what you already do now”

> Why are 3rd party applications distributed as Disk Images? Then some as package installers? It's weird and nonsensical.

As if the installation experience on windows is consistent. Some things come as a zipped exe, some as an msi, others as a zip file that extract to an exe which runs an install program.

> Mac hardware feels great, but I just cannot understand why it's the preferred developer platform.

Isn’t that because it comes with a Unix shell? I’m using wsl and only like 1 or 2 gui programs can talk with my Linux files in a reasonable fashion.

I’ll never understand why it’s so common for Windows and Linux GTK apps to go so far out of their way to avoid using a tried and true menubar. Hamburger menus are probably the most common substitute, and they’re strictly worse in every way, being basically junk drawers in software form.

That’s one of the things I love about the global menubar on macOS: because it’s owned by the system, third party devs can’t try to delete it out of some misguided pursuit of minimalism. Several cross platform apps that lack menubars on Windows and Linux have proper menus on macOS as a result.

I've been using Linux (KDE Plasma) now as my primary system for 5 years now, and it's practically impossible to build up a system-wide muscle memory. On Linux and Windows menus are all over the place. Things in the menus are all over the place. Shortcuts to them are all over the place. It's crazy making.

However, I've resisted going back to a Mac because it's getting perpetually worse year after year too. The "golden era" to me that I wish had been refined and iterated incrementally on is probably somewhere around Mac OS 10.6

The spastic chaos of keyboard shortcuts across various OS and application functions I cannot forgive however.

It is kind of funny that we either use macOS or Windows/WSL because our target deployment environment is Linux. We can't use Linux because something eventually goes wrong and people with deadlines don't have time to fiddle with their dev machine to get it working again.

I think the one big benefit I notice of OSX style program management vs Windows style is: with OSX, you have have a program open, but without any windows. Whereas with Windows, if you close all of a program's windows, that typically kills the program.

Really, this mostly shows up when I want to create a new incognito browser window when I don't have any browser windows currently open. On OSX, I just tab to the browser and open up a new window. On Windows, I have to start a new regular window and then open a new incognito windows. It's pretty annoying.

Can you elaborate? I've been using WSL1 as a tool to operate on files on my Windows file system and haven't had any issues. (As an aside, I'm actually very pleased with this approach.) Are your issues specifically with GUI programs running through WSL? I'm just checking to make sure I don't get locked into a workflow that causes me problems down the road.

That all being said, for me a non Windows desktop at work has become a requirement. If an employer would force me to use Windows I would most probably ask for much more money or more likely leave for another company.

I haven't seen that many macs outside design departments in any big European company I have visited.

Some big companies such as Sony actually have Linux as their first choice, windows second.

I know this sounds silly or wrong, but most dont think of those as "Tech" Companies. Modern world uses of "Tech" now mostly means Software.

I think you are living in a bubble.

I am not, considering I am the only defending 5G and Ericsson on HN. But you should say that to the rest of HN.

Software companies do skew extremely into Mac territory, I really don't recall anyone ever using a Windows machine and very few run their ThinkPads with Linux, the vast majority have a Mac as a daily driver.

In fact our Java folks get macbooks as option, and eventually many of whom end up migrating to ThinkPads with Red-Hat/Windows, when starting to deal with complex workloads.

On the .NET teams everyone is on Windows ThinkPads.

I suspect you’re in a self selected bubble. Which you sort of allude to by saying “developers you know”, but I don’t see how that extrapolates to the continent as a whole.

That is why parent post called mac 'counter intuitive'.

Finder is definitely not great. It's improved over the years which is kind of sad as it's not a whole lot better. You still can't cmd+x a file to move it to another location. I'm not sure when it happened (probably a while ago) but you can actually rename files in open dialogs now! I didn't notice when it happened because I gave up trying many years ago.

Anyway, I like macos as it gives me a linux-esque command-line experience out of the box without having dive into managing a Linux installs (although that's probably not as big a deal as I think it is), because the hardware is nice, and otherwise because it's just what I'm used to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For non-developer reasons, Logic, even though not the best, is so insanely cheap for what you get, and as a light gamer, Minecraft runs decently well on my Mac Mini.

Copy as usual with Command-C, then at your destination move the file with Command-Option-V. This allows you to change your mind about whether you want the file to be duplicated or moved without having to first navigate back to the source and perform an additional action.

In a way I actually like this better as in Windows I used to cut and every-so often I'd blow out my clipboard somehow (at least, I have memories of that... it was like 20 years ago).

And yeah, the Mac way makes more sense to me too. It's a lot less likely for Command-Option-V to be fat-fingered than both Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V.

Shortcuts like this are all over the place in macOS, and have been for decades. They're usually discoverable by glancing through menus while holding down various modifier keys.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20151128115451/https://support.a... [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

It's totally nondiscoverable (I read about it here), but once I learned that, it felt amazingly intuitive to separate the concerns of application-switching and window-switching. And Command+` works consistently on MacOS, unlike on Windows where every app reimplements its own multiple-document interface and so Ctrl-Tab hardly ever works.

Like, when I swipe three fingers up and see all the open windows, my current window flys to a random part of the screen and all the other windows appear. I can't move these windows, much less get them to stay in an area to find easily later. Is there something I'm missing? I am learning to like other parts of the interface, but this just baffles me especially when I have 20 browser windows open.

Or is there an app that helps with this? I find there are tons of app and tweaks that, as a new Mac person, I have no clue about. I don't even know what I don't know!

This seems to come up with every argument about operating systems. People say it sucks if you have to use third-party applications, but I vehemently disagree. The fact that you CAN use third-party applications, the fact that they have sufficient access to make the experience better, the fact that the community exists to make them... I think that's a major pro in favor of an OS.

This seems like a strange standard to me. I can’t think of an OS across any and all I have had to use over a multi-decade career that didn’t benefit from some third-party app to improve some “stock” feature of the OS.

With the great attention to detail of macOS third-party developers, you can be sure those apps will give you a seamless experience.

If you're using multiple monitors and you're not using the rectangle app... that's kinda on you. I switched to Mac after using windows for decades and in less than a week I solved my windows management issues with this extension.

This attitude strikes me as snobbery. People aren't born knowing the best 3rd party alternative to their OS's shortcomings, and some have no control over what apps they can run.

Windows 10 has pretty good built in window management. IMO better than MacOS. I say this as a Mac and Rectangle user. (Though only Mac because of Safari exclusively working on it. I prefer Linux.)

It’s free and involves approximately 2 minutes of effort. Heck, that’s probably less time than it took you to write your comment.

I'm a long time Mac user with an 25" 21:9 ultra-wide display that constitutes two regular office displays. A single ultradwide display is way superior to a couple of displays. Performance wise for your workstation and config wise as well.

Nothing is blurry to me. To manage windows with keyboard or mouse I use moom[0].

I've worked on Windows for 2 years at a large corp, and the blurriness of fonts I experienced with mid-range 27" monitors was unprecedented. Having invested considerable time to make the problem go away, I gave up.

Even modern Ubuntu does better job at font rendering with displays made by the same manufacturer.

[0] https://manytricks.com/moom/

The key is that with macOS, you don’t really manage windows. Just let windows be where they will, like papers on a desk, and then manage desktops. While I’m working I’m constantly flipping between desktops on both my primary and secondary displays, with the primary display being set up with desktops of primary windows and the secondary display being set up with desktops of secondary and tertiary windows. The ability to mix and match sets between displays is powerful and way more natural to me than cobbling together some kind of overcomplicated window snapping setup or something like that.

I've tried multi-monitor setups before with both Windows and OS X, and I just don't like them. I moved to a 43" 4K TV, and I like it much better, especially with a window manager like Rectangle. If I need extra screen real estate, OS X has pretty good support for virtual desktops, but I haven't felt the need yet.

One of these days, I might feel cramped by my setup, but I suspect that I'd rather go up to 50" than get multiple monitors. Especially if I could go 8K by then.

How many different bespoke ways of installing windows applications are there again? Is it even countable? Is installshield beloved by anyone untainted by just dealing with it for decades?

I'm no longer a fan of Windows, having moved along to Linux on my personal machine, but both Windows and Linux are in a completely different universe to MacOS when it comes to bare minimum competency.

* M1 compatability issues.

* Problems surrounding containers. Yes, I have used Rancher Desktop, yes I have used Colima. Neither is a first-class citizen. (As-per usual with Mac dev tools).

* Dual monitor.

* External keyboards, keyboard shortcuts, and customizations.

- lack of degradation of performance due to bloated registry, fragmented disks (probably out of date but still hurts my soul to think out) - a control panel that doesn’t suck - several things due to its unix heritage which are far better then windows imo (case sensitive file system, bash/zsh terminal) - lack of concern regarding bloatware installed by vendors - don’t have to crap like dot net c++ extensions and other nonsense just to run something - a more stable, less crashy experience, this is anecdotal but true to me - reliable warranty and support policies, Apple absolutely kicks ass here

I just want to get shit done with minimal auxillary stuff involved. And that’s why I use ios, macOS. Every aspect of it was designed thoughtfully, and not slapped together. I stopped liking windows at version 8 and have never looked back.

I can't find any (non-anecdotal) evidence that a "bloated" registry impacts performance at all on a modern system. If you have benchmarks or something, I would love to see them! (not being a jerk, I really would). If you think macOS applications cleanly uninstall when you drag them to the trash, that definitely is not the case. Check out ~/Library and see the ghosts of applications past.

Disk fragmentation isn't an issue on SSDs. Anybody still running Windows on a spinning drive has worse problems than fragmentation.

The settings situation does suck, that's absolutely true.

APFS and NTFS both allow you to choose case sensitivity depending on your preference, so I'd say they're on equal footing there. PowerShell isn't that bad, but you can still use bash with WSL or cygwin if you really want to.

I've always clean installed Windows, so I don't know about vendor bloatware. The bloatiest thing I can think of are shortcuts in the start menu to install ridiculous things like Candy Crush, but those are just shortcut ads, not actually installed things. Distasteful, sure, but easy enough to wipe out with a script.

Anecdotally, I've had way more kernel panics in macOS than I have blue screens of death in Windows 10. The T2 fiasco alone has caused me more crashes than I can count.

Anyway, I think in 2022, operating system choice is more of a personal preference thing than a technical one. They're all equally bad, just in different ways.

IMO powershell is amazing, I even use it as my shell on Linux when I have to use a Linux machine. It’s just “different” so a lot of people don’t bother to learn it or expect it to be bash.

I like most of your post since I agree with a lot of it, but I'd like to try to convince you that it's never been better to be a computer user. OSes are _mostly_ stable, have a clear design goal for users, have multiple well supported shell environments for power users, extremely strong cross-system software (i.e., you can use Firefox et. al., on basically anything), plugging in hardware very likely will "just work" for most hardware, the list goes on.

Most importantly, UI/UX conventions are pretty well established regardless of the OS you pick; for example, while I'm rarely in an actual UI on the linux boxes I work with, more or less it works the way I expect based on Mac/Windows. Hitting the CMD/Meta key brings up a system search utility (this is partially happenstance from MacOS as I believe it's the default hotkey for spotlight...but I use quicksilver on ctrl+space so I might be mistaken) Even the mobile space between major Android releases and iOS are very consistent, Android having a slight blemish in the regional minor releases that lack major Android features.

The point is that I think a lot of established UI/UX defaults for OSes are mature enough that edge cases or test cases are the rough edges. There are elements from each OS I miss, elements they share which are equally frustrating (truly, I wish MS and Apple would document the registry/defaults command respectively in full. Both let you tweak the system to an amazing degree to make a perfectly customizable experience, but you basically have to hope someone else has posted it on stackoverflow/reddit/whatever if you want to discover it).

I grew up starting with Mac OS6 and didn't touch a Windows computer until well into my teens or use one daily until I was 20, and the adaptation period was literally a day or two. My friend was windows/linux for his entire life, saw me using my Mac for browsing tabletop PDFs when we were in university, and was intrigued by the way the UI/UX worked and has been a convert ever since, learning the UI in a few days and only a few questions.

It's really never been better to be a user, and I'm kind of amazed that OS wars continue in 2022. Computers are great. Software/Tech Companies are another story...

> I can't find any (non-anecdotal) evidence that a "bloated" registry impacts performance at all on a modern system. If you have benchmarks or something, I would love to see them! (not being a jerk, I really would).

have to comment on this because I agree, it's a non-issue, but the number of registry cleaners that exist or people's self-invented solutions cause far more problems than they solve. Which is a pretty easy task as typically they solve 0 problems directly.

Most of the performance degradation on Windows comes from all the bloatware used to spy on you (remember 'Compatibility Telemetry'?). In this regard, I find MacOS even worse (whateverd is using 100% CPU again), and it's even harder to get rid of all the spyware. I think this is one of the few ways Linux beats the competition.

The UNIX heritage thing is eh. MacOS does a very cursory job of pretending to be UNIX, with usually just the very basics working. In contrast, WSL2 is mostly equivalent to working on Linux.

The filesystem stuff is weird. Sometimes MacOS is case sensitive, sometimes not, sometimes it does the weird file locking thing Windows does, that I hate, sometimes not.

I think each OS is crappy in its own way, and I definitely wouldn't put MacOS over Windows.

On a Mac ai have had the beach all of death many times, even recently on M1 Macs.

By default it is not case sensitive. It is a counter intuitive case remember system. You can't have File.txt and file.txt in same directory. But you can have FiLe.tXt file.

I regularly use both Windows and MacOS, though I started with Windows king before MacOS... and I just fine MacOS so unintuitive, ugly and clunky!

Also, it regularly crashes when plugging/unplugging an external monitor. Actually, it crashes every now and then for no discernable reason too - feels like Windows back in the day when BSOD was common!

And not MacOS' fault, but I absolutely loathe my MBP's touchpad! Even on the highest sensitivity setting, presses take too much force. And it just feels... weird. Nothing I can put my finger on, but using it still feels unnatural somehow. Plus, it regularly registers phantom touches, which is incredibly irritating.

TBH, the crashing when plugging/unplugging, HiDPI issues and general ugliness and clunkyness are far more annoying tho!

It took me awhile to configure my monitor correctly, and the color is still off. I got my wife the 24” 4K that Apple recommends and it has been much better for her (as a designer, she wouldn’t have put up with wrong colors).

2 is something I haven’t experienced. I guess maybe you’re using low resolution monitors? I find Windows to be incredibly blurry or text painfully sharp.

3 is something where I think the Mac mindset is to not really use full screen windows. I personally always have part of my desktop visible and most Mac users I’ve seen in the wild seem to do the same. Probably a consequence of the drag and drop mindset (which Windows is painful to use due to it doing the opposite of MacOS when it comes to drag and drop)

Enable the file path setting in your finder options. Super easy to navigate up then.

Disk images are nice in that usually they contain a drag and drop application install process, while windows often has some messy installer that leaves a trail of shit in its wake that’s sometimes impossible to fully remove when you’re trying to uninstall the program. But… I think a zip file would do all a disk image could and make more sense to people. Sometimes I do encounter zips, though.

The monitor is a ultrawide LG that works perfectly on windows. A Google for "blurry text external monitor MacBook Pro" turns up many people with the same issue (edit: it's a 1440p monitor)

Thanks for the finder tip, that will help.

That's good, because usually in this kind of debate there's an undercurrent of "I've been using X for decades (and so know it inside out). When I try Y, anything that differs from X is objectively wrong"

I agree that it shouldn't be this way though, I'd have preferred to set the native res and be done with.

Zoom just sits around devouring CPU while it's not even on a call.

If I ever walk in and my MacBook sounds like a jet trying to take off and is hot enough to cook dinner on, I know it's because Slack wants to update. I have no idea what it's doing to show me that "needs to install a helper" dialog.

It depends probably on what you are developing, but when you are doing stuff for backend, it will very likely end up running on a Linux box. This means having your platform, terminal and so on closer to Linux is useful (e.g. you have bash).

Windows has WSL now, so this would be a way as well.

From all UIs I like KDE Neon the best. It is truly a good experience.

I never Alt+Tab on macOS because I am used to using Exposé and the Windows equivalent frustrates me to no end with its extremely slow animation, same things with virtual desktops which feel very clunky on Windows but works fine on macOS.

Not natively but Rectangle.app is a FOSS app that has them.

> jump to spaces

Control+(left arrow|right arrow) does it for me. It doesn't hop across destops but it gets me where I want quickly without moving my hand off the keyboard.

> fullscreen windows being their own space but then returning to a previous space when fullscreen is exited

I'm not sure what you'd consider superior to this. If I have a window on Desktop 2 and make it fullscreen, I usually want it to go back to Desktop 2 when I exit it.

You can create desktop-specific shortcuts in Keyboard → Shortcuts → Mission Control → Switch to Desktop N

———

Going from fullscreen App A to App B back to fullscreen App A:

Brain on Windows:

1. Alt-tab -> App A

2. Alt-tab -> fullscreen App B

Brain on Mac:

1. Cmd-tab -> App A

2. Cmd-tab -> Random App C

3. Cmd-tab -> back to App A

4. Cmd-tab -> other App B window you weren't looking for

5. Cmd-` App B windows a few times, nope not here either

6. Triple finger salute -> fullscreen App B

Why. Why?

The only thing going for MacOS is the linux-like terminal. Now that Windows has that too (WSL) I see no advantage.

However, the hardware is nice. Way nicer than any windows dell or Asus or whatever I've had.

Macs fucking suck.

I guess I’m the opposite a single command+tab switches between apps then command+~ to cycle through the windows in the app is very intuitive to me. Cycling through dozens of windows on Microsoft is laborious a confusing in my experience.

Because it’s natively UNIX-based and this well-supported by the tooling.

Sure, Windows has WSL and it’s great and it’s gaining developers but IMHO it isn’t quite there yet.

And it’s really important to acknowledge that there are a metric crapload of real world devs on Windows. I wouldn’t be surprised if the vast majority of programmers were on Windows.

(Aside from the monitor issue - not sure what that’s all about!)

macOS could do with some work on window management and I’m not convinced that what’s coming in Ventura is what we actually needed.

I'm primarily a Linux developer, but am now forced on to an M1 mac for work, and it's hot garbage. They force their own half-assed unsupported ways of doing things and break the standards that work on both Windows and Linux.

The state of gaming is actually worse than on Linux.

you can right click on the folder icon at the very top of the window to get a drop-down of all folders going down to the root.

Maybe you use a lot of paid software?

I just use homebrew for everything, and it just works(tm) 98% of the time. Which is way better than my experience with Windows. I tried using a variety of Nanite, Chocolatey, etc. And none of it seems particularly mature.

> Mac hardware feels great, but I just cannot understand why it's the preferred developer platform.

In my experience, Windows is developer hostile if you aren't using Visual Studio. Almost everything is deployed to Linux, and OS X is close enough that most stuff just works, but the drivers and UI are also completely dependable.

OH God, I hate that so much. Can't understand the reason behind this behavior.

I find your feelings really interesting here. Or, I grew up with Windows, but realizing that on Mac OS X was an "a-ha! brilliant!" moment for me. I really loved that it was available on Pop!_OS.

Depends what the word developer means....

In the context of Apple ecosystem developer is quite good, in the context of Windows or game console developer not great, for embedded developer depends on the luck of hardware vendor support for macOS, in the context of certified UNIX developer, it gets the job done.

Strengths:

1. Really nice trackpad. It tracks smoothly. Really well integrated trackpad gestures. It makes a difference.

2. It is literally UNIX

3. Native-app developers that care (eroding year-by-year, but software companies like Panic, Omni, BareBones make first-class software that belongs on the platform). (Windows certainly has more apps, and probably more high quality apps by volume, but Mac apps tend a bit more toward high-quality-density in a more limited application pool)

4. Drivers. I swear, I get laptops from manufacturers with bad Windows installs, glitchy drivers, poor configuration, etc. I also hate cleaning crapware off of new machines and fresh installing OSes.

5. Lack of options. Few people explicitly value this, and sometimes, the Mac way is dumb, but since it's often the Mac way or the highway, it takes some cognitive overhead out of computing.

Overall, I find the Mac less of a hassle. Most things are pretty good, and you mostly can't fiddle with them too much, so you get the strength of that on the whole, not in one particular dazzling thing (except the trackpad.) Garbage window management and multi-tasking indisputable, though.

I won’t speak for others but for me endless customization of everything supposedly for optimization was just another form of procrastination.

I also appreciate that it mostly either works or it doesn’t. Either it’s broken and I need to swap it for a refurb or it works. Not much staying up late reading obscure stack overflow posts (in the old days webforums, in the old old days newsgroups) and trying this one more thing to fix the problem de jure.

For the longest time there was no such thing as WSL so Mac had a serious advantage for us who migrated between Linux and Mac.

And as you've mentioned I've had so many quality control issues with Windows computers including Dell and Asus that eventually I just said fuck it I'd rather spend 3 to 4 grand on a machine that I know will work flawlessly.

Hear hear !

You have to install them yourself, just like Java was removed a while ago. Honestly it’s great news, since Apple has always shipped very old versions, and you always had to be careful when linking against the system versions. Ruby is particularly batshit insane to manage multiple versions, at least for me.

I absolutely believe that the ascendancy of Homebrew is single-handedly responsible for the removal of those languages. Homebrew is magnificent, and with its recent change of the default install location to the correct Unix location, it’s a nearly perfect package manager for macOS.

I've always preferred this to Windows' approach; as soon as I have more than dozen open windows I find it very difficult to find what I need on Windows, whereas with macOS there's an extra layer of hierarchy to speed up the search. They really could add it as an option though, you shouldn't need a third-party app for this.

> I attach a non Mac external monitor to a new MacBook Pro from work and the text is super blurry

No idea what the virtual display thing is, and the issue may be the EDID thing that another commenter mentioned, but macOS' handling of "non-retina" screen resolution is absolute ass since they removed subpixel antialiasing a few versions back. You can still disable the gross "font smoothing" via a terminal command which helps a little, but since subpixel AA was removed, text on "low resolution" displays -- i.e. sub 150ppi -- looks like shit compared to Windows.

Compared with the rather primitive way macOS handles UI scaling, the almost total lack of available > 4K displays for > 21.5" screen sizes to suit said scaling, and the fact that a good number of their most popular computers still ship with a non-integer scaling mode by default, getting an optimal image from a Mac is far more difficult than it should be. I know it's all good enough that most people don't care, but this is supposed to be the company where "good enough" isn't enough.

> Why is there 2 modes of "full-size" windows? Regular style "fill the window", then another wierd one that sort of takes over the whole screen

The "take-over" one was added during the peak of the iPhone and iPad exploding in popularity, when Apple was copying many iOS features back to the Mac. I don't begrudge it being there (my wife uses it almost exclusively for some reason), but I do wish I could switch the default behavior. I strongly dislike the notion that windows should be full-screen unless sharing with another app -- I prefer windows to be the size of their content, which is what the green button on macOS used to do (and still does, if you Option-click it). Windows makes this annoyingly difficult, though the new expanded snapping options in Windows 11 are very nice.

> Why does finder sometimes open in a sub folder as the "top level", then it's a total pain to move up to where you want

I've always found Finder to be the worst part of the Mac. Who knows why it does what it does. What determines the default window size? Why is it always far too small? We may never know.

> Why are 3rd party applications distributed as Disk Images? Then some as package installers? It's weird and nonsensical.

.app bundles are actually directories with metadata to make macOS treat them like files, so they can't be shared as-is. Sometimes you get them in plain zips, but I think the .dmg thing is a holdover from classic Mac OS. .pkg installers are usually used when the app needs to install extra stuff outside its bundle -- just like how sometimes Windows programs are an .exe and sometimes they're an .msi.

I love macOS as a platform, but I completely agree with everything the person is saying in the linked Twitter thread. No-one at Apple seems to be equipped to steward the platform anymore, so the software decays even while the hardware is going through a renaissance.

Unfortunately, the investment that is being put into it is largely to give application parity with new features they add to iOS. Things are superficially changed every year (often for the worse), but the actual base OS doesn't seem to be getting much in the way of features or improvements. Why do I need a third-party app to get reasonable window management? Why do I need two third-party apps to make a mouse usable (one to make the side buttons work, another to fix the scroll momentum and have a separate scroll direction to the trackpad)? Why do I need a third-party app to get a calendar in the menu bar? Why do I still get yelled at for yanking an idle USB stick without ejecting it first?

That turned into for more of a rant than I intended.

No, I’m also using windows, having many years experience with all of the mainstream OSes.

Mac hardware feels great

Does it?? Maybe, if you cover the price with your hand and close browser tabs with same-price pc configurations. Also their aluminium edges are pretty sharp, I can remember few times when I damaged that thing around my fingernails with display or keyboard edges.