As someone who has used OS X since the switch from Classic 9, i'd disagree snd i'm typing my response from macOS Big Sur. MacOS is no longer the "cats meow" because others have caught up. I personally think Microsoft has done a better job with their OS verses Apple. Windows 10 is just as stable as macOS, the uptime would be insane for Windows if not for Microsoft's forced updates and i'm cool with that as it keeps the OS secure.
Linux is another great choice for those that just want to do the basics. Linux Mint looks and functions much like Windows. Then there's Ubuntu and my current favorite openSUSE.
So no, i'm not dissing macOS but that card of it's because of macOS, no longer holds water. It's just as quirky and buggy as any other mainstream OS. There are some things I like about macOS but Windows is killing it with its Windows to Xbox integration and Windows App store is better as well.
Can't agree with that at all.
Windows certainly isn't as bad as it used to be (good built in multi-workspace support has made it at least usable for me these last few years) but Microsoft are still awful at UI design. OMG, how can anybody who's tried to change settings in Windows 10 stick up for that spawn of hell? It's an absolute nightmare! So many different places to change what seem like the same group of settings, finding the setting you want reminds me of the bit in The 12 Tasks of Asterix with the bureaucracy building.
Linux's (or at least Ubuntu's, that's all I've used recently) weaknesses tend to be in the same area, but are even worse than Windows'. Honestly I can't believe you'd suggest Ubuntu's up to the same level of usability as MacOS or even Windows (I dunno, maybe openSUSE just has a much, much better UI?). You still have settings split across many different interfaces, but this time you have to install some of those interfaces yourself! For example: setting your wallpaper to tiled - you have to install a whole separate programme just do so this, and you now have two completely separate programmes for managing your settings (and of course if you ever want to Google how to change settings the instructions you find won't tell you how to do it in the GUI, they'll all tell you to run something on the CLI, which in many cases can leave your GUI disconnected from the actual state of the system).
You've also got the whole snap vs .deb vs whatever-other-means-of-packaging-applications-exists issue. The built in Ubuntu App Store has two versions of multiple apps, which is a bad UX already in my book, but it gets worse. I've found snaps to be severely disjointed from the rest of the system - eg I use the snap version of Teams (horrible UI by the way Microsoft - why are all settings hidden away by a randomly positioned cog icon visible only on a certain tab?!), click a link, and instead of opening a new tab in the already running Firefox it opens a whole new instance of Firefox.
There are countless other examples like that (I still can't get my VPN working through the GUI, I just gave up on that and did it through the CLI - on Mac it just worked). I really want to like Ubuntu and say it's as ready for a normal user as Windows or MacOS, I've wanted this for decades) but I just can't. I even had my mum using it for a while but the amount of tech support she needed was insane, and most of the time I couldn't help over the phone, I had to go over there to troubleshoot (usually on the CLI). That never happens now she's got my old Mac.
Those issues just don't exist with Mac. It's simply easy to use.
Anyway, the bigger point is even if you disagree with everything I've just written, even if your experiences of the DEs differ from my own, you (or rather the person I replied to and the person they replied to) don't know why we (people who buy Macs, or indeed anybody who isn't you) make the choices we do. Saying "
they're just buying it for the brand" makes you sound like an ignorant PCMR snob (I'm sure they're not, I've long been a fan of Jarred's writing (I was sad when he left PC Gamer), but such ignorant posts do sound that way). People should just accept that people prioritise different things.
Oh, and let's think rationally about how much it costs: the Mac I'm writing from right now is from 2011, so it's ten years old, so if we assume I'm going to upgrade tomorrow then I'm on a ten year upgrade cycle. I did replace its HDD with an SSD, and if there was a technical upgrade as great as that was in the next few years I probably wouldn't be able to do it with a modern Mac, so let's halve the lifespan and say I'll be on a five year upgrade cycle. Let's say a Mac costs £1,000 more than the Linux/Windows equivelent. That's £17 a month for the pleasure of using my preferred OS (with which I interact for many hours a day). Do people really think that an unreasonable use of my money?
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