[1] https://www.apple.com/macos/continuity/

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?