As much as I hate Windows and MacOS, they just both run circles around Linux when it comes to graphics, GUI design and user experience and that is why they have such a big market share. It's this old delusion of some Linux fanboys that Linux would spread around the globe if the evil Apple and Microsoft would just allow them. There are few people who CAN use it and much fewer still that are willing to use it as a desktop system.
But, it's the overall experience that sucks in Windows (and most linuxes imho).
Regardless your last point is why I stick with macOS. I don’t really care that much about the laptop aesthetic.
That was the only Linux pain point for me, having to manually toggle out of multi-screen mode after unplugging an HDMI cable. Obviously, that was some kind of kernel thing and not an XFCE-specific bug (I think?), but even the native XFCE tooling has improved in the last few years, despite the lack of a newsworthy major version release.
Fedora has been my daily driver for 8 years now. It keeps getting better. The last flaky distribution, for me, was Fedora 19, released in the summer of 2013! (Here, flaky is described as "difficult to get working the way I wanted" and "occasionally would do something weird and force me to reboot it to fix the problem")
That's funny because it's exactly the way I feel about macOS where they obviously design things based on the way things look and sell over how usable they are. This is actually part of Apple's DNA as we've read in the past: The only reason they stuck with the Dock was because of how well it marketed. You can read about it from the guy who developed Apple's first HIG - https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html
Meanwhile my preferred Linux DE (XFCE) gives me perfectly tasteful design and coherent usability. Instead of having things look or work the way Apple wants, I am able to do things the way I want to, which means that things fit into my opinion of what is tasteful or usable. It's a ton of little things you know? Like being able to quit an app with a single gesture (a middle click on its pane icon, similar to how you close a tab in your browser) - built into XFCE and not even available in macOS unless you're Apple and you have some access to their private API.
That's because most Linux desktop environments take after Windows, which has by far a better system of usability than macOS. To point out just one small thing: In macOS the keyboard shortcuts are an insane jumble of incoherence with no pattern which is why you simply cannot navigate the entirety of macOS with just the keyboard, something that I can do all day long on Windows and Linux.
If you think you can, I'll challenge you: Open the About this mac dialog, then switch to another program. Now try to switch back to that window with just your keyboard, without using one of your special usability-fixing programs that you have to install to fix such things on your Mac, like Witch.
Many years ago people would complain about even getting things installed, have stories about driver problems, missing software, incompatibilities. If today's strongest criticism is "the clock widget sometimes does not rotate automatically", I think that is a great endorsement.
That said, I consider XFCE great and all bugs I encountered while using it were minor.
That's not strictly true. The resources were (and are) there, but they have been pointlessly squandered.
KDE3 and GNOME2 were great desktop environments. I would argue that KDE3 was the pinnacle of all desktop environments to date. Polished and usable, it was absolutely fantastic to use. Great UI, great design, and having KParts embedded in Konqueror made it really flexible and extensible. I used it for many years, and took advantage of its functionality unlike any other DE. I also used GNOME since the 0.9x days, and it also became very polished, if not less sophisticated overall. GNOME2 was definitely its peak.
What happened though was CADT. All the effort expended to build up these DEs was carelessly torn down to be rebuilt in an inferior form. Today, both of the major DEs seem to be busy aping mobile UIs instead of creating desktop UIs. GNOME/GTK have scrollbars with zero buttons and sized about 4px wide; totally unusable on a 4K display. They even broke the old paging and panning behaviours, which were excellent. They have almost completely lost their focus on the desktop, and with it, the developer base which formed the long tail of contributors.
Part of the problem is that the upcoming generation of developers have predominantly known mobile UIs; they haven't fully experienced or understood the sheer breadth and depth of rich desktop UIs. The other is that with the switch to mobile devices, there simply isn't the money in desktop UIs nowadays. While this isn't strictly a bad thing, in practice it's the loss of diverse commercial inputs which has driven GNOME off the rails and made it an insular echo chamber of bad ideas.
- Unity puts multiple dots next to an app on the dock when you have multiple windows open. On the mac you have one dot even if you have 10 windows.
- Clicking a dock icon on unity when you have multiple windows and the app is already on top, does an expose' style selection; On a mac, you need to use expose (among all apps), right click the dock icon, or find the "Window" menu on top -- and that's assuming you know that there are multiple windows ... see first point.
- I have unity set up to make the active window 5% brighter than any other window (or dim the others to 95%, don't remember). Hardly visible, except you instantly and intuitively know which window is active, even if it's on another screen.
This is a kind of polish that OSX is missing, and that once tasted, it is painful to go without. On the other hand, when I occasionally have a chance to use Unity, there is nothing from OSX that I miss.
Almost every piece of software that I really need to use was in the package manager for one thing. It’s also made being a developer fun again because I feel like I’m actually in control of my desktop OS! I can make it do whatever I want and have been doing just that for over a year now on 3 different machines. I have it on one work desktop, one home desktop and on a laptop, a beautiful and cheap 15” Acer/i5 unit with 16gb, expandable up to 32gb of RAM if I want... and the desktops are 5 year old HPs both with 32 GB of RAM and i7s that run circles around macOS on the newest MBPs due to things like it being a sane nix environment and not having to jump through hoops to be productive…
I also set it up for a couple of my coworkers and they love it too. Furthermore we occasionally do some ASP.net and SQL Server work and have had no problem doing so right on these same machines was nothing more than Docker and Azure data studio.
Honestly the only thing I’ve ever needed a Mac for is to compile stuff for iOS and I’ve been doing that for years already. Mostly because I just can’t stand the UX on macOS...like at all. So before Manjaro, I’d mostly stuck to Windows and virtual machines or Docker. But I had been trying desktop Linux on and off since the late 90s and this is the first time it ever stuck. I think it’s also because it’s not that hard to make cross platform apps anymore as it used to be when all you had was C++.
You can add Windows 10 as an option too. WSL2 and Ubuntu is a nice combo. It’s pretty close to native.
Breakages across Windows updates, atrocious filesystem performance, broken file permissions, so many rough edges buried deep in the issue tracker. I strongly recommend trying it but, but I can't possibly recommend it for professional use.
It's impressive, and from what I recall a small team working on it, who deserve tremendous kudos, but it's no replacement for real Linux.
I was severely disappointed. UI scaling for high resolution displays was terrible. Configuration still spread in a billion places, badly documented, and with the polish of a gravel road. Still no smooth scrolling, and no good remote access solution, unless you think VNC is still considered good. It's not.
Apart for some pretty logos, it felt almost exactly like the system I left 10 years ago. I actually felt rather sad that day.
It's rather shameful, but not unexpected how all those massive companies that built their businesses on Linux can't be bothered support what is - in a sense - the "origin" of that success: That people wanted a decent OS with a nice GUI where we also wouldn't have to be prisoners of Microsoft, Apple, or anyone else.
> Configuration still spread in a billion places, badly documented...
Not quite a billion, but hey at least you can configure things the way you want very much unlike macOS where you have absolutely no choice whatsoever.
I can't remember the last time I even used official documentation for macOS or Windows. Don't you just google everything? Aside from that, what resources do you have for mac/win that are better (more detailed?) than the Arch Linux website (which applies to Manjaro)?
When I first setup Manjaro, I looked at all the remote access solutions as well and I found that X2Go was the best performing solution. Did you give that a try?