> In my view, Windows 10 is still miles away in consistency across the entire system
In my view GNU/Linux distributions are still miles away from Windows 10 in consistency across the entire system.
In my view GNU/Linux distributions are still miles away from Windows 10 in consistency across the entire system.
Give Elementary a go, you may be surprised.
I wrote "consistency across the entire system". I immediately believe that they did a lot of GUI polish and polishing of the default apps. But polishing the GUI of a POSIX-like system does not deliver consistency (only GUI polish). There is still the whole UNIX-like subsurface (like it or not), which delivers completely different abstractions than the GUI does (this is clearly not consistent).
For example rio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_(windowing_system)) implements Windowing as private namespace (a central element of Plan 9) - very consistent.
BeOS (for which currently under the name HaikuOS they try to reimplement it in an open source way) is another example of an OS which was designed from beginning on to have a GUI and is thus also very consistent.
I do think they try a bit too hard to look like macOS, but if you're going for the best desktop Linux experience, why not copy the best commercial ⁎nix desktop?
I agree completely about BeOS/Haiku; BeOS was my daily driver for several years until the death of the company caused me to have to move on. I have yet to find a modern OS that even comes close to that kind of cohesive, sensible, practical approach to desktop computing. Haiku is coming along well, but it's still not stable enough for daily use beyond dogfooding for Haiku devs.
I have never seen a GNU/Linux distribution where I didn't have to configure some things via modification of configuration files in a text editor. Even these two differences (GUI vs. text file editing) is much more different than a few different design styles in Windows' control panel. Also the way settings are set in configuration files is IMHO even more different among different GNU/Linux applications than the different design styles in Windows' control panel.
It's a bit of a blemish that there are two control panels, but almost no users are ever exposed to Win32. You can do virtually everything (from updates to domain join to adding/removing Windows components) from the modern Settings app. The legacy control panel is just that, and is irrelevant for most users. I'd love to see it modernized, but there are many much better uses of resources (security! performance! battery life!) than modernizing 90s-era utilities that few customers are ever exposed to.
Windows 10 isn't a good example of consistency, but every GNU/Linux distribution I have seen is much worse.