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?
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.