How does this particular list of very minor gripes get so many upvotes? And it's not just minor gripes, half of them are wrong. Some of them have been addressed by others, but:<p>* Taking screenshots requires to click the preview in order to copy to clipboard, which also causes to save it to Desktop.<p>No, it doesn't.<p>* Surprising lack of apps in the store<p>Says someone defending KDE? But hey, strangely enough I'm typing this in Firefox. I've got Teams running, and Zoom. There really is more than one way to install an app.<p>* The stupid amount of app icons in the "tray" bar. Not collapsible, not hideable.<p>What does that mean? There's no tray bar. Is it the menu? Is it the Dock? In both cases, it's untrue, or the writer means something else.<p>* No easy way to open a path in Finder<p>Cmd-shift-G or Go > Go to folder isn't easy enough? What's KDE's super brilliant solution?<p>* Finder: no side by side view for easily moving stuff between unrelated folders/paths<p>Can't open two windows?<p>And even if all were true, it misses so many other points, it's embarrassing. What OP means is: I've got a fixed workflow, and now I have to learn a few new shortcuts.
Intuitiveness is just what you are used to at this point. If you've been in the Apple ecosystem your whole life, then their UX seems intuitive to you.<p>If you haven't, then it makes absolutely no sense. I first touched an apple device in my 20's, there was nothing intuitive about it. I couldn't do anything and was extremely frustrated. I'm sure the same applies to apple folks trying gnome/KDE/windows.<p>People are getting introduced to touch devices from a young age now days. I bet they will find things intuitive based on the devices their parents gave them. It's kind of like religion at this point, did you grow up using Android or iOS? Switching would be a deliberate effort, like not following your families religion (with hopefully significantly less judgement).
> KDE beats macOS hands down<p>"If you've been using KDE for years and are new to OSX." should be appended to the headline.<p>I'm not going to defend OSX here. It is as obtuse as any other GUI system.<p>My dad was always a KDE fan, I suspect because he had CDE/CDE like GUIs for a long time, and muscle memory is hard to overcome. I never really liked it, however for the longest time it did have more features and polish than gnome.<p>I really don't like modern gnome (>3) its a pain in the arse to make it do what I want. However if you use it as the gods of UX intend, then its reasonably friction free.<p>I've recently come back to windows 10. Its fine, has virtual monitors, keyboard shortcuts and powershell. I imagine that with me bothering to learn WSL it would be really rather quite good.<p>However I have nothing really against OSX, apart from it insists on stacking windows ontop of each other, which is deeply annoying.
To be honest I stopped caring what OS I'm running as long as it is not windows.<p>I have a terminal open 99% of the time and I almost never open finder or Gnome Files.<p>pacman or brew? really I don't care. Both install what I want with one command.<p>VS Code is basically the same on every system.<p>Gnome/KDE/MacOS all of them have there pros and cons.<p>Right now what wins for me is the apple silicon. I can develop stuff without a fan running for 8 hours.<p>Once Framework laptops come with a ARM Laptop were I can run gnome I can consider to switch again.
I had to stop the job interview when suddenly they said that I must use Mac. They ship MacBook to you and you have no choice of using Linux or anything else. Corporate policy. It's literally unusable for me after 15+ years on Linux with KDE (mostly). Tried Mac for 4 months at one of the previous jobs but escaped to a comfort zone. Sometimes habits are too strong, and alternative is not appealing enough.
I hate the Mac*, but even so, nothing on that list of complaints is valid.<p>Here's an example of what I consider a <i>valid</i> complaint: the placement of a Mac's app menubar at the top of the screen, instead of the top of an application window, is wrong. Two pieces of evidence: (1) it leads to confusion with multiple monitors and (2) new Mac users invariably have trouble remembering to look for app-specific choices at the top of the screen. Mac-users rebut this by claiming that Apple's design adheres better to Fitt's law, but time has proven the disadvantages outweigh that. If one chooses a window metaphor for an app, the app's controls should appear in close proximity to that window.<p>In contrast, the list items here are mostly just wrong ("Lack of native clipboard") or superficial ("Can't create new file from Finder context menu").<p>*though imo Mac OS was lovable as recently as a decade ago.
I understand where the author is coming from but after going through the list of complaints it became obvious that they haven't fully read the manual as a few of the things that they say is lacking is simply not true.<p>The rest of the points go about design choices and decisions made by Apple, which is fair enough: some opinions you will agree with. Some others you won't. And that's ok.
KDE is the last bastion of GUI customizability.<p>Everyone else is absolutely horrified by the idea of maintaining a UI option used by less than 20% of the user base. For things that are used by more than 20% of users, they actively make it worse so that people stop using it and they can justify removing them.
funny enough, i just moved back to linux after using macOS for almost a year.<p>i decided to install KDE just to see what was going on and holy damn, it's SO GOOD. the only thing i installed (and configured) was a tiling window manager (bismuth <a href="https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/</a>) and that was it.<p>everything is working perfectly, it looks great and it's suuuper smooth.
People tend to forget MacOS is BSD under the hood, not a Linux distribution. So the way it handles installation software is going to be different. I personally think the way BSD handles software is better, Linux blurs the line between 3rd party software and system dependencies and that causes all kinds of issues when it’s time to update or remove stuff.
I agree.<p>After using both for a long time, I have to say KDE is less painful and faster in operation.<p>MacOS has a lot of inconsistent or weird keyboard shortcuts. There's no proper window management, HDMI volume cannot be controlled, can't launch apps like VSCode or Terminal using keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+ Alt + C and Ctrl + Alt + T. The shell takes like 2 seconds to load when opening terminal.<p>Yes, MacOS is more beautiful OOTB but KDE hands down wins in the workflow and UX department.
Unintuitive things about macOS: the bar at the top is used both for app-context menus <i>and</i> for system-context settings. Wuh?<p>If you want to scan something, you have to go <i>via system settings</i> instead of running an app. Wuh?<p>They keep breaking drivers for important things, especially USB things, especially if it so happens that they decide to sell them themselves (like external keyboards). About a year ago I had an issue where previously functional USB UART drivers stopped working, result being I had to buy a Linux laptop for firmware work. Then, just last week, my Cherry mechanical keyboard stopped working, the windows key had previously functioned seamlessly as 'command' but ceased to do so. No amount of fiddling seemed to fix it. At this point I'll never buy another Apple device.<p>Fixing anything hardwareish requires remembering undocumented key combinations at boot time.<p>No rollback support on config changes.<p>One could go on...
Biggest burn I had:<p>Drag and dropping a named folder on the desktop where a folder with the same name already lived resulted in the desktop folder content being replaced with the dropped folder content and the loss of all its content. I was expecting a merge or a copy/overwrite dialog, not the overwrite of the desktop folder content.
Early this year, I finally made the switch from using primarily using Windows to using Linux. I went with Fedora after hearing good things about its reliability, but was bracing for a bit of a clunky front-end. Needless to say, I was shocked by how far it'd come and how nice it was. The key point I remember feeling at the time is that it felt like MacOS despite not having used a Mac in over a decade.<p>Fast-forward to a month or so ago, I finally decide to get a mac to try it out, and the really strange thing about it was, Fedora felt more like MacOS than MacOS (or at least, it felt more like my vision of what MacOS would be). I do really like my Mac and I'm still using it for now at least, not saying either one is categorically better than the other, but that has stuck with me.<p>I should probably try out KDE now as well, it looks a bit more windows-like but could be interesting
I guess I'd agree with more discoverable shortcuts for context menu items, but damn if 1 more button press for what is actually quite capable screenshotting just doesn't bother me at all.<p>When I use Windows, I notice immediately that the thematic direction of Windows 8 and onward is just a sad and shallow veneer over a mountain of legacy icons and other cruft they don't believe matters, along with spyware and adware built into the stock os image, and the likelihood of needing to completely reinstall at some point. By comparison, this list of issues seems rather petty, and I guess that means macOS is doing pretty well. Nobody likes being forced to use something they're not familiar with or desire though, so I do sympathize.<p>Haven't installed Ventura yet though...
Several of the things listed are false (like the lack of ability to open files with your keyboard, which you can do with cmd-⬇) and app window switching (cmd+~)
None of this has any true value, it's all just taste, human memory and preference. All you can do try try various systems and pick what works for you, while also remembering that you're not the only person in the world, and sometimes a not-as-good experience for yourself can mean a much better integration with the people you live and work with.
Comparing KDE and macOS is weird. One is a DE, the other an OS (and a hardware commitment.) I would never buy a Mac for myself. I can't justify the cost for a new one.<p>I use KDE - it works well, it's full-featured and lighter in resource usage than GNOME. I have a older macbook, but I don't like the lack of default UI features I just got used to in KDE. (Window tiling, robust clipboard, the more than acceptable file manager, the underlying OS's package manager, simple way to put graphs and monitors in my panel(s)). It's not all perfect, but 'perfect' is not a problem to solve. I can't justify using macos with these things that just work well enough.<p>Also, if I had to use a Mac again as a daily driver, the first program I would install is a VM and install like Debian or FreeBSD on it and then setup KDE.
I made the switch from Linux to KDE a few years back. It takes a while to learn all the new keyboard shortcuts—in fact most of the missing bits quoted in the article are present, just not where/how you were used to them in KDE.<p>What really sold me on MacOS though was multi-finger touchpad gestures, like three-finger drag and four finger desktop switch. It's difficult or even impossible to get that on Linux (at least it was a couple years back when I last tried).<p>Then there are other small things like the consistent availability of emacs-like keybindings. I'm using Ctrl-t to exchange ('transpose') two adjacent characters all the time to fix typos in-place. Under Linux this is very much hit-and-miss and depends on the app toolkit.<p>Bottomline: one you're used to MacOS it's not worse than KDE (which is still great BTW).
Maybe from user point of view.<p>It is also missing the whole development experience with XCode, Swift, Objective-C, Metal, Instruments,.... versus KDE Frameworks and KDevelop.
> for the first time in my life I was finally forced to use MacOs daily<p>Okay, thanks for letting us know up front that you went into this unwillingly and you aren't interested in doing a balanced review. I was able to close the tab very quickly!
I've been using computers since Windows 95 and I personally find KDE to be the most confusing and broken DE that I've tried.<p>Simply try to edit/move the bottom bar in edit mode, or change the global theme, and watch it fall apart.
macOS UI capabilities aside, I have to mention that the latest Kubuntu 22.04 Long Term Support (LTS) 2022 release with KDE Plasma 5.24 is a fantastic upgrade. The system is snappy, much more so than under the previous Kubuntu 20.04 2020 release. Moreover, the 5.15 Linux kernel seems to be handling huge memory allocations for virtual machines an order of magnitude faster than the previous 5.4 kernel.<p>If you are tired of macOS, I wholeheartedly recommend giving Kubuntu 22.04 LTS a try. (You can always buy a second GPU and run macOS inside a QEMU virtual machine, 99% stable at native UI speeds with GPU passthrough.)
The article seems ignorant of native tools built right into macOS. For example, it claims macOS is missing:<p>> Missing native Alt+Tab and individual window switching (only does app switching)<p>This is simply false, and the whole list is by someone who just hasn't made an effort to learn how to use a new OS they are not familiar with. For example, I just use Command-tilda, two keys right next to each other, to switch between windows of the same app, and Command-Tab to switch between different apps altogether. Is this not what the author wants?
At work I use Gnome and at home I use MacOS - I am used to both environments. I am a C++ developer and spend most of my time in a terminal. Of course, it took some time over the years to have everything customized for my needs, but at the moment I feel equally productive on both.<p>However, if I had to choose one, I will likely stick with Mac though. The performance of the new Apple Silicon chips is amazing and it's going to get even better.
I mean, sure some of those things are crap in MacOS. Some he is mistaken about or are super niche. He does have some valid points but you can't take a few annoyances and say "KDE beats macOS". I could <i>easily</i> find the same number of annoyances in KDE. Probably many more. He's just made peace with them.<p>> Impossible to create a dotfile from Finder (only terminal)<p>Yeah most people don't need this ever. If you're making dotfiles you know what the terminal is.<p>> Lack of native clipboard<p>Not sure what this is supposed to mean. It obviously has a clipboard.<p>> Finder's weird shortcuts for rename vs open file (no way to open a file with keyboard?)<p>Cmd-Down I think, but I agree the shortcuts are super weird.<p>> Taking screenshots requires to click the preview in order to copy to clipboard, which also causes to save it to Desktop. There is a global shortcut to save directly to keyboard, but it requires 3 button presses. With KDE you can setup the preferred behavior and always copy to clipboard while at the same time saving to a specific path (and not always Desktop!)<p>Mac's screenshot support is really good. Yes it requires 3 modifier keys but I still miss it on Windows.<p>> Surprising lack of apps in the store (Firefox, Bitwarden, Zoom, Teams, VLC are all quite popular, yet only Bitwarden is there). The others require download from the website (basically a Windows-like experience)<p>True but try installing an app that <i>isn't</i> in "the store" (which one again?) on Linux. There are pros and cons.<p>> Finder: no side by side view for easily moving stuff between unrelated folders/paths<p>You can open multiple windows.
I wonder. Does KDE still delete and redraw all tray icons when one of them updates? It was distracting as hell last time I used it extensively.<p>Perhaps that's why the OP needs to hide them.<p>You can find something to complain about with any DE.
> I recently quit a job that made me use a Mac after less than 3 months, and I'm not even kidding, that was part of why.<p>Imagine quitting your job over an operating system.
The only UI difference I find truly maddening is the inability to open a terminal in the current folder. On other operating systems, I can right click in the empty space to open a terminal in that directory; on macOS, I must instead right click on a subfolder, open a terminal in that subfolder, and then navigate up one directory (`cd ..`)...<p>...unless the current folder contains no folders, in which case I have to navigate up one directory (via keyboard shortcut -- this cannot be done natively in Finder) and then right click on the target folder (especially annoying if the parent folder contains many directories).<p>I can only assume that I'm misinformed because the current paradigm makes no goddamn sense.
Now that's funny...come back at me bro when your laptop, desktop, tablet, and mobile handset devices talk to each other. Until then, don't forget to take care of yourself, including showers, vegetables, and sunlight. Toodles!
> Linux is great if you don't value your time<p>Continues to be one of my favorite quotes. Yes I can spend endless hours getting arch installed with only the packages I want/need making sure it's totally optimized and then what, every single other part of my workflow now has to work around the limitations of linux. One day perhaps, but for now, macOS will do.
I tried using Linux for my laptop at Google but it was a torment due mainly to the wonkiness of the trackpad driver. I've been happily using Macs ever since. Linux is for servers.
Most of their concerns are addressable by external apps like Rectangle, AltTab and Maccy. Try those, they are free and open source 10x productivity boosters!