> Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.

And this is why many like me prefer Linux. We have our own opinions, and Linux enables us to enforce our opinions.

I've been a Linux guy for 25 years, and used Windows at work for the last 15. I now have to use MacOS at work.

I miss Windows. It wasn't totally better, but I managed to overcome most Windows headaches with workarounds. I haven't found the alternatives yet to MacOS.

From my perspective, both Windows and MacOS suck - but in different ways. I think the problem many Linux folks have with MacOS is that it is the "uncanny valley" of Linux. You get happy that you can use your usual UNIX flows, and then you find out that you can't.

I really want a good tiling window manager. I have yet to find one on MacOS that has the features AwesomeWM have.

It really sucks not being able to rebind keys to use Ctrl instead of Cmd in many apps. For basic tasks (opening/closing browser tabs), I have to use one set of keys in the daytime (at work), and another at night (at home). Why won't MacOS let me change them?

I can give you a few examples:

Packages are not done well compared to linux. Brew is a poor replacement. It feels like the terminal and everything involved is constantly out of date.

The OS just has a lot of weird things, like the ribbon at the bottom taking up so much space. When I made is smaller and hidden except on mouse over it was incredibly rough.

Window management is decades behind windows or linux. It doesn't like maximizing windows and doesn't make partitioning screen space easy. I had to download a third party app to make it better, which was still worse than windows even in windows 7, and miles worse than linux with i3.

Mac has a lot of rough spots. I have two external monitors and occasionally after updates one monitor would be fuzzy or different resolutions, and it wouldn't go back until the next update.

There's something to it.

On that note, is there any GUI tool that allows me to browse my zip archives without unpacking them, and is also free?

MacOs is extraordinarily opinionated about how everything should work and frequently attempt to predict your workflow.

Linux/Windows (historically) were straightforawrd, each tool did exactly what it said it would do, and it was up to you to learn how to use the tools available.

On linux/windows, if a button was "capture image", it would just capture the image on the screen. On a mac a "capture image" button could do anything from displaying the image on the screen, to saving it in a photos folder, to saving and syncing it to an iCloud account. Whatever the apple PM decided the most common use case was, and god help you if you want to do something different.

If you've been in the mac ecosystem for a while, you've grown used to this and don't notice any longer. You may even occasionally express happiness when a function does something unexpected and helpful!

If you're coming from anywhere else, its unbelievably painful.

Not just this. I'm linux/macos user since early 2000's and still sometimes hate macos because they have very annoying bugs that are never fixed, and annoying corpo decisions.

E.g. it keeps opening Music app whenever I connect bluetooth earbuds. I can't delete Music app, it just keeps popping up with imbecile message about "user is not logged in" or something. I run a script that monitors that Music.app is running and kills-9 it.

Or blinking desktop background issue, that's been there for years, accumulated many support threads, and still not fixed.

Random services like coreaudiod that suddenly start consuming 100% CPU for no apparent reason.

Macbook throttling (thanks God, gone with M cpu's)

I can keep going but my point is macos has legit problems that can't be simply shrugged off with "they just hold it the wrong way".

Like any other mass product tbh, except rare ideal products like Factorio game or sqlite.

For me, the biggest pain point is the way it decides which window to bring to the front. If I minimize a window, and then click on the application in the bar, it won't show the window just minimized, instead it always seems to show the older window. Really annoying when using an app with many windows

“I get that it takes some tweaking (MacOS)” How times have changed, it used to be as intuitive as drinking water.

There are an absolute ton of very capable tiling window managers for macOS, posted here frequently. From yabi to aerospace to fully programmable ones like hammerspoon. A quick search will turn up plenty more. I would be shocked if none of them meet your needs.

There's a couple but nothing I've found at the level of i3 or whatever the hyprland equivalent is.

Window wiling is a big one for me. I have tried the third party options, and nothing compares to i3.

Fucking Finder. What a colossal dumpster fire. It drags that entire OS down.

They didn't say they think macOS is worse, though.

Windows is absolute garbage, I agree. But the application windows behave normally, maximize when I want them, will take half a screen, quarter screen, etc. with just a quick hotkey. Mac doesn't have that extremely basic functionality without a 3rd party extension, which is absurd. But I don't use windows other than if my work gives me one, I am purely linux otherwise.

They also decided that they have to capture React devs and everything should use a declarative UI, which has brought us the wonderful new Systems Settings.

See I'm a ends justify the means guy:

The more people forced into the beautiful world of capslock is escape the better!

There's free choice for those OSes to use different kernels, but they don't, they all use the same Linux (rather than say BSD). There's a lot of advantage in getting aligned on things, even though anyone can choose not to.

Well at least Microsoft is a platinum member of the Linux Foundation for many years...

I'd like to use this kind of setup but unfortunately every time I try there's just soo many annoying edge cases that are wasting my time. Especially when I need to do FE/Mobile - but even BE has gotchas. I guess it depends on your environment - I'll try making this setup work sometimes in the next few months again.

It's not really viable

Or you just don't run Tahoe?

Do they still use a paddle trackpad? Framework seems like its nearly perfect for me, even if I would miss Apple's displays on the MBP.