Agreed. While I loathe the current system preferences app, look at what Microsoft started with Windows 8 with the Settings app. Almost a decade later and there is still stuff strewn between Settings and the original Control Panel. At least Apple ripped the band aid off and for better or worse there is only one for them to focus on, and no "legacy" piece loitering around giving them an excuse to not keep improving the new system preferences.

Also I was amused at his notch hostility - I shared the same view; until I used a new Mac with the notch and discovered that I don't notice it. At all. I thought I would hate it, and I can't remember a single time it surfaced other than it coming up as a topic and then I notice it.

I'm trying to think of any of the recent changes they made and none of them are fatal enough to prevent me from working with macOS as I have for decades now, and can think of none. He doesn't like stage manager? Big deal. Spaces is still there and window management still works the way it always has without it - that one was really telling. It's not like they forced it to be the only way to manage windows.

TBH the only thing pushing me away from macOS is that there’s a bunch of stuff running on there by default that I don’t understand, and I don’t really trust Apple’s direction wrt respecting user privacy.

When I’ve been using Linux in other contexts lately it’s been awesome being able to fully understand exactly what each process is and why it’s running (and to be able to remove it if I want to). On my macOS (and windows) boxes I end up trusting Apple and Microsoft a lot more than I would actively choose to.

That's quite amusing to me, because when I "ps ax" on my Linux machine I honestly could not swear that i know what half of them were doing. The names look plausible (dbus, systemd stuff, etc) but it would be easy to get one past me.

OpenBSD is a bit of an ice cold shower, but it's the only OS I use regularly where I can point to every process and know exactly what it's doing.

It is just a matter of getting used to it by studying each process one by one. There is no magic behind it.

Could you not do the same for a standard MacOS install?

Not easily. A lot of the processes don’t have man pages or any other documentation. And they’re closed source so you never really know what they do.

In the past some of these were flaky and would hang using 100% cpu, I’d google “fspind 100% cpu” or whatever and find 20 other people with the same problem and zero info about what the process actually did.

Try sampling the process next time, I find it to be far more useful at finding the root cause.

same with netbsd. Not much is running by default and you can quickly figure out what's what. I guess it's kind of true with linux as well....especially as it becomes gnu/linux/systemd......

My reasons for getting off of Macs were ~100% OS-related. I still think they're making the best hardware out there, but most days of the year I want to open my computer and use it. Having weird busted shit, prompts for 3 month free trials of Apple Music, accidentally closing things because of command+q (Why is a shortcut to close things, something that you do literally once per application run, bound do something so easy to hit? [0]). Then a lot of incidental stuff in the ecosystem (brew breaking things when I would boot up), the bundling of bug fixes and security updates into application updates with the OS upgrade model...

I would still recommend Macs to people in general, but I think for people trying to get work done, the OS upgrade strategies that Apple chose in particular are extremely disruptive and lead to many team members at a previous job just breaking their setups over and over again. It's not fun to be using software beholden to marketing timelines, if you're fiddly with your machine.

[0]: I switch between QWERTY and AZERTY. "Select All" becomes "Quit App". My solution was to bind Spotlight to Command+Q , which would almost always work.

>Why is a shortcut to close things, something that you do literally once per application run, bound do something so easy to hit?

This doesn't seem weird? I find it really useful. There are similarly simple keyboard shortcuts assigned to functionality of most applications that I use much less than quitting. To quote you, I quit the application every time I use it! It's also the default on Linux.

IMO a lot of these UI "degradations" that love to people complain about absolutely pale in comparison with the sorry state that Windows is in

I basically agree though I can't figure out how to get system preferences to show me the list of wifi networks I've used so I can edit it.