1.) Evolution (Gnome / Linux)
Although it may not be the shiniest star, it has a huge feature set and works pretty good for me.
2.) Mailspring
It is a pretty good Mail.app Alternative, but I did not like the restrictions and the user interface was pretty unpolished, although pretty Mail.app-like
The most annoying part on all Mail apps I tested was the search. It was mostly unusable, if you have ever used macOS Mail. The search is so much ahead of every other mail app I tested (and I tested a ton) that I don't know if it is just hard to build it or no one ever tried to rebuild the Mail.app search. The only app that was pretty close was mutt/neomutt, but although I like terminal interfaces, in Mail I often use Mime features like bullet lists, tables, Image previews and other stuff that is hard to do in Terminal UIs.
But I'll take a look.
Pretty much like the touchpad experience, if you tune a few settings, buy a glass touchpad from a Yoga x1y3 for your T480s WQHD[1] and install `libinput-config` to fix the kinetic scrolling on HiDPI :-) But don't use touchpad drivers like mtrack or synaptics. Stick to libinput...
I plan to publish all my findings and research in a `Transition from macOS to Fedora` article in my blog, but 2 toddlers take their time ;)
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/fo6hrc/i_replaced...
It's not equivalent. With QuickLook, I can not only preview files, I can manipulate them. For example, I can crop an image, or add a signature to a PDF, or even edit an image that I'm previewing on my computer with my phone or tablet and the result is on my computer instantly.
Another good (recent) example is Mimestream, a client for Google Mail, which is one of the best mail apps that I have ever used:
Apps like that are not only a testament to the awesome indie developers in the ecosystem, but also the great APIs that make it possible to develop such application as a solo developer.
- Keyboard shortcuts that don't steal ASCII control charactersThe use of Control is the single-most annoying behavior of all these surface-only reskins.
[1] Yes I realize macOS is a flavor of UNIX
There's some drawbacks, though. Wayland support doesn't exist. It's still a "hack" rather than a system wide adoption of MacOS keybind paradigms. It can't possibly account for all edge cases.
I would say if you're looking for advanced remapping of keys in linux you might want to look at Interception Tools[1] since it works on both X and Wayland, though programmable keyboards with QMK or ZMK are still going to generally be a better option.
- Handover (shared clipboard between devices, continuing tasks on another device) - AirPlay (both casting and playback control) - Apps are just self-contained, launchable directories you can copy around, no separate installation step - Application-centric (as opposed to window-centric) task management - Tiny things like <Cmd-tab>, keep holding Cmd, click the app to switch to - Even tinier things, like hold space to move the selection rectangle in the screenshot tool - Extremely consistent support for all basic keyboard shortcuts like <Cmd-q>, <Cmd-w>, <Cmd-,>, etc, going back all the way to the classic Mac OS - AppleScript, Shortcuts, (Automator) - Color management
It's these things I miss on Linux and (Open)BSD the most, not the GUI theme. I actually think the current design (starting with Big Sur) is a huge step backward for accessibility and usability, fortunately this project doesn't blindly copy it.
I can start writing an e-mail on my phone, put down my phone and then continue working on it on my tablet, and then putdown my tablet and immediately finish it up on my desktop in Linux?
Handover is more than a global clipboard.
Even if you save it as a draft, you'd still need a way to sync it between your devices. Handoff makes it simple and convenient.
I also have this same experience with Slack.
I often switch between mobile and Linux desktop for these applications, no special software required.
Now when Linux can do the same thing with a word processing document, with an IM client, with a spreadsheet, with a presentation program, and with my web browser, get back to me.
I've lived in the Apple ecosystem for a few years and Handoff/Continuity can do some impressive things (like the webcam thing of late, or cross device phone calls) that I ended up not using in practice. That's just me though. I prefer the simple way.
When Handoff or associated features don't work when they should, good luck troubleshooting.
I was doing that in the 1990s (thanks to IMAP and auto-saving drafts) without any vendor lock-in.
It is not huge, but it is the opposite of the thousands paper cuts. It’s a reliable features that provides thousands tiny time savings and some small convenience. It was not uncommon for me to send myself emails with URLs of things to have a look at when at home before this sort of things made switching devices much more convenient (Air Drop also helps immensely).
Thanks, but MacOS can keep that. It was one of the more frustrating parts of using a Mac in my opinion.
It would be cool if MacOS offered an option to chose. Probably from your point of view it would be cool if other platforms offered an option to chose.
To have a new way to choose would involve to add a new feature and have all of the developers port the design pattern to do so which is non trivial/
macOS has had virtual desktops for like 8 years [1]. And there are lots of utilities to tweak the windows behavior to pretty much anything you want.
[1]: https://www.macworld.com/article/226448/hands-on-with-spaces...
It might boil down to preference, but - trying to be objective - this paradigm makes more sense, especially as you watch apps on other systems struggle to achieve the same goals (e.g. via tray icons), which usually don't work consistently, or require setting additional preferences. If I close a music player window, I want the music to keep playing. If I close the activity monitor window, I want the app to continue accumulating stats to make a graph - unless I quit the app entirely. Closing the window/tab (Cmd-w) and quitting the app (Cmd-q) are distinct actions. Now why would a note-taking app work differently? This is a more coherent design, that puts less cognitive load on the user.
It works because each app tries to stick to one task - you're switching between tasks, not windows. The counterexample that illustrates how bad can this problem get, is the terminal apps: every window with mutt, vim, ncmpc, top, or irssi looks the same, has the same icon, BUT has different keyboard shortcuts! Madness.
> It would be cool if MacOS offered an option to chose.
I will argue that having a more thought-thru and consistent paradigm is more important than having more options - especially if all the options still can't get you a decent experience.
It's definitely achievable through third-party applications; you can probably DIY something using Hammerspoon.
“Always in an app” design, rendering the concept of a “Super” key moot (I’ve always both loved and hated this).
Automator. Do you have any good examples?
Results of one block are piped to another, and operations range from very high level to very low level, so you can easily make stuff like "take input file, run OCR, and submit the text to this URL". There's integrations with HomeKit (smart home), many system services, third-party apps can also add actions. You can add actions as dock icons, context menus, share sheets, etc. It's also synced between all your devices, you can tell your HomePod: "Hey Siri, shutdown the homelab", and your lackrack goes quiet.
It's extremely cumbersome if you'd try to use it as a general-purpose programming language (I've tried implementing UUID4 just as a benchmark and gave up pretty fast), but very intuitive for simple tasks like that.
That isn't specific to macOS. It's also a feature of BSD, Linux, and Windows.
But for reasons that escape me, software distributors keep adding an installation step anyway. This is something that's gotten worse since the days of DOS.
It really is not.
Have you ever used OS X?
The behavior with high refresh rates is pretty bad, too. A lot of stuff is hardcoded to 60hz, and programs have to opt in. They haven't even fixed Safari properly yet.
Every time I read about the benefits of Wayland, I read shopping list of stuff I don't care about and don't want. I don't give a stuff about techie nerdwank like refresh rates, tearing, video smoothness, triple buffering and other pointless implementation details that it is the entire job of a GUI to make go away.
What I care about is that I plug in a screen, I drag a window onto it, and it stays the same size. That my window can straddle two screens and still work. That I can resize it across as many screens as I want.
I want it to work and I want how that happens to be invisible.
Wayland, as far as I can tell, is about xNix graphics programmers complaining about how hard the job is, I'm afraid.
Wayland is about a bunch of amateur programmers learning for the first time how graphics work, individually and separately all in parallel. Wayland needed to have a bigger, definitive core library designed by experienced developers. What we've got now instead is a myriad of low-level graphics implementations, none of which handle edge cases very well.
What's so special about it? The only difference between my Asus with Linux, and Mac in this regard is that on Mac I have to use touch stripe which is inferior experience compared to physical keys.
I also see no discernible difference in many other things you mention like wifi stability.
Now I'm on an unholy win/linux/ios setup and don't really get use all the Apple integrations, but I have to admit I wish I could, not for gnarly dev stuff, but simply to make my life easier
Btw, any touchpad should be used for a limited time, say in travel conditions. If you use it so much it became a decisive factor of choice - you are voluntarily marching towards RSI.
macOS' weirdness is actually what's preventing me from buying into this ecosystem although I love how it looks. Pretty sure it's not a very 1337h4x0r thing to say but I like nice colors and consistent designs more than tweaking configs and writing cursed scripts. YMMV
I have found fedora's wifi to be significantly better than osx's wifi.
Your other options, I can't say because they are things that I don't use, or never found a use for in other operating systems.
macOS as we know it (not even getting into its NeXTStep roots) has been continuously developed since its Public Beta [1] shipped in 2001.
Many tens of millions of dollars of resources have been invested in macOS development over 20+ years.
So of course I’m not expecting a shell script to turn FreeBSD into anything close to the UI/UX of macOS except in a very superficial way.
I appreciate the effort; it’s already better looking than most default desktop environments for FreeBSD.