And I think that is the main point here: Linux might lack design graphically, but the Linux command line is about the most beautiful thing out there. There is an abundance of elegance there is probably only rivaled by some Lisp machine.

Who knows, maybe, I will switch from OSX to Linux because of that at some point. It is certainly tempting.

Explorer? Versus finder? That's a pretty low-hanging fruit, I can't remember ever preferring finder to explorer and I've been using OSX as my main dev machine (and Windows mostly for the game box) for 6 years now. I prefer OSX overall, but the finder still isn't a good shell.

But Finder really is bad. Then again, I wish ANY other OS would implement the column view Finder has. As bad as Finder is, column view is awesome.

But many of the great things on the Mac have been subverted in the last few years.

Have you tried dragging a proxy icon from the title bar of an OSX application to an external disk lately? It creates a new alias there. An ALIAS. On an external disk.

Or HFS+, which still has a global lock whenever ANY application wants to write to the file system. A GLOBAL lock. No other program may access the hard drive while one is writing. Insanity!.

Or the complete lack of uninstallers. I am continuously baffled by that. How can you have a "modern" operating system without uninstallers?

Desktop apps are really fine though. It's just the foundation that is getting rusty. Not a good thing, that.

Well, the dream is that you don't need one. Drag the app from Applications to the Trash and... ta-da! Of course, that never happens with anything more complex than the most superficial of apps.

Well all of my applications are superficial apparently, because apart from Little Snitch I can't think of one I'll need an uninstaller for. And LS is a special case.

Happened to me several times in the last two weeks alone. I vaguely remember it took me ages to get VMWare or similar off my machine.

Hmm, Wikipedia lists a bunch of file managers with column view support[1]. Here's it in Konqueror: http://www.konqueror.org/pics/konqueror-file-manager-col-vie...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_managers#Ma...

Could that be the reason I had to disable Spotlight's indexer to prevent bouts of extreme unresponsiveness on my 2011 Mac mini?

Sometimes referred to as "Miller columns" BTW.

However, there's still Cygwin which is reasonably good.

Well, I use msys and eshell instead, which I find less jarring.

I'm not sure. Windows has some overall design, but also has tons of design neglect.

One example: due to static compiling and linking, you often get programs (and lots of them) that still use Windows 98 like Open/Save File dialogs, instead of every program automatically getting the latest OS standard widget with late binding.

Or things like the Metro/Windows dichotomy in the latest version.

Windows always feels design by committee to me, and one where some manager can have idiotic ideas and no developer/designer can shoot it down.

Software compiled in 1998 has no problem using the newest common dialogs if they used the standard API without installing their own hooks and customisation.

I'm not sure what this means though:

"it's because they chose a particular style of dialog which is deprecated and cannot be updated without breaking backwards compatibility."

So you mean something like the Windows API featured 2-3 different dialog styles and they set some option / flag in their code to use one that was subsequently not updated by MS?

Could be. But at least the dialog style could change, it seems in Windows API all drawing is hardcoded, so the dialog also comes with the old style buttons etc.

MS should have continue to offer the dialog styles they once had as options instead of deprecating them. But even failing that, they should at least made it so that their graphical elements (sub-widgets like buttons, text fields etc) are kept updated. That doesn't involve changing the API or binary compatibility will the calling program.

Also, seeing those dialogs in old shareware/commercial programs when run on modern Windows is one thing. But one also sees them in some very-rarely-updated MS applications that MS ships with Windows. At least you did, until Vista (haven't used Windows since).

Another infuriating thing from Windows dialogs of old --that still appear in apps: when the size of text-entries, icon fields etc is too small, but the dialog is not resizable.

IIRC, the particular style allows applications to paint on top of the system dialogs, add controls, etc. The API call cannot know when or where drawing will take place (or whether it will happen at all), so it cannot use any other screen real estate than what it always used. That means controls must stay the same size and exact location. That rules out shadows, font changes, etc, so the control must forever stay as it was in the dark ages.

On the positive side: I understand that the Windows 3.1 "Add Font" dialog is gone in Windows 7. Unfortunately, not everybody seems to be happy about it: http://www.sevenforums.com/backup-restore/42035-restore-inst...