With all kindness: Compared to mac/ios, android and linux and windows ux is death by thousand papercuts. (I’m not saying apple is perfect either, and maybe we have landed in a digital experience world that is broken for nearly everyone anyway, but I digress. :)

I am already cognitively burdened. I do not need developers telling me at what point the cumulative inconsistencies become a biggie. Copy-paste is a common action and each inconsistency I need to learn is away from my core tasks and ability to focus on those is already scarce as f.

Devs do not get to decide how central a terminal is to my workflow, and whether that terminal app deserves to have the right to tell me that it’s now a special butterfly I need to accommodate my cognition for.

But I guess Linux desktop has chosen its path of being only for tinkerers who are prepared to adopt an entire culture of quirks instead of users focusing on what’s important for them in their own lives.

I’m disappointed this still does not fix the core issue of this being broken for everyone by default.

> Devs do not get to decide

In my experience Apple devs are the _most_ opionated in terms of telling users how they should use their machine. The UI controls are super touchpad-centric, and it's crazy that a community-driven project like i3 is light years ahead to macOS "wm" features (not to talk about the native UI management). Also they decide for you where the icons to close the windows are, you want to change them? Nope, sorry, you are doing it wrong and can't move them. Your keyboard? Also wrong, you should buy an apple one, otherwise your modifiers are all messed up. You don't use the application docking bar? Well, you are doing it wrong, you can reduce it, but can't remove it, it's always going to be there at the bottom.

There are countless of instances in which the only way to do something is the Apple way, so much so that everyone who switched from Linux to Mac I have spoken with essentially concluded that either you bend to how Apple decided things should be done, or you will be constantly fighting your own machine.

I appreciate that this means that if you start with Apple and get used to their way, you have no cognitive burden on how to do something, but when you use your machine every day, you want to decide how things work to reduce your cognitive load (I.e., this is more intuitive for me this way), and Apple really doesn't like that.

I use KDE as a daily driver at work, privately run windows 12 and maintain six modern macs at my workshop. Of the bunch KDE is easily the best, with the least amount of weird unexpected behavior and the most logical, user-centric way to lay out and present system setting. Windows 11 feels like an archeogical research trip into the UI paradigms of the past every time you need to change the settings, and macOS constantly does things you didn't ask it for and disallows/breaks things you did for the past years. And there are small things like: After every software update I have to manually put shortcuts into the dock again on six computers. They make it harder and harder to run software that hasn't been approved by apple. And the small UI papercuts are easily worse than on KDE (I count here stuff that clearly didn't work as intended, not stuff I have opinions about).

> Compared to mac/ios, android and linux and windows ux is death by thousand papercuts

"What you're used to" is a major component of usability. I've had to do short stints on a macOS machine before, and find it a painful experience that I'm happy to be rid of when I'm done. People who are used to a macOS machine sometimes say the same thing about a Linux machine. They can both be right at the same time.

It isn't the only component of usability, to be clear, and it's also possible for applications to be objectively better. But familiarity and usability are often conflated.

Windows UX has many warts too, but the idea of a single system clipboard where I can copy paste between a console and a web browser in either direction using the same shortcuts in both, seems like a really low bar for an acceptable clipboard UX.

I have home key on my external keyboard. While home in combination with any modifiers behaves consistently under Linux, it's an utter mess under macOS. Sometimes my cursor jumps to the beginning of the visual line, other times to the nearest \n before the cursor, sometimes when no text editing is involved, it scrolls the frame, other times it does nothing.

First time I tried macOS I was impressed with the globally (so I thought) respected emacs bindings (^E, ^A, and especially ^N and ^P). But then I have painfully discovered that almost every(?) app just mimics the default scheme, but essentially implements its own handling, which leads to numerous inconsistencies spreading way beyond copy/paste. That's when I realized why most macOS users I've observed use touchpad to manipulate cursor during text editing – there's no reliable universally consistent way of doing this under macOS

macOS is not just "not ideal". It's as messy as other OSes, but with its own bag of unique warts.

But I understand it's easy to ignore them once you get used to them.

With all possible kindness...

> Devs do not get to decide

I'm sorry but developers get to decide literally everything. They're the ones putting in the work. They build the systems they want for themselves. They solve the problems they personally care about in ways they personally feel is best.

If you want them to build the system you want, you'll have to pay them.

> But I guess Linux desktop has chosen its path of being only for tinkerers who are prepared to adopt an entire culture of quirks instead of users focusing on what’s important for them in their own lives.

This betrays your attitude. You think what we do is not important. You don't care about the system, it's just "cognitive burden" to you. Only your "core tasks" matter.

"Users focusing on what’s important for them in their own lives" -- that's us. We just happen to care about and focus on the system itself. We enjoy the freedom to rebuild the system according to our vision of how things should work.

Numerous independent tinkerers developing their own systems naturally leads to inconsistency. It's a very organic process. It's a mess, but that's okay. Our freedom is far more important than conforming to some "standard" in order to "reduce cognitive load".

If solutions converge, let them do so for the right reasons, namely that it leads to a better system for us. Other people don't really matter.

> Devs do not get to decide how central a terminal is to my workflow, and whether that terminal app deserves to have the right to tell me that it’s now a special butterfly I need to accommodate my cognition for.

You must be new to computers. /s

Today's devs do not give a shit about user's needs. They just want change or profit.