I recently went through the experience of having to adopt OS X after switching employers coming from primarily using unix flavors and Windows my entire career, avoiding OS X at every turn.
My summarized conclusion is that: OS X isn't that great. It's not "bad," don't get me wrong, but it's nothing marvelous. Perhaps at one point in time there was some advantage over a Windows or linux environment but at this point in time, unless you're tied to some package tied to a specific environment for some reason, just work with the environment you're most comfortable with. I don't know how much time I've had to waste adjusting to the OS X environment (especially muscle memory keyboard shortcuts I'm accustomed to), finding replacement niche applications that were environment specific, figuring out how to do basic tasks that are simply different.
On that note, avoid committing to a specific environment unless your application really needs to squeeze out every cycle of performance. It's 2019 and we have portable options now for most application demands.
Your experience is just you finding what you like and then running up against something doing it differently. This is like moving to another country and complaining the culture is different.
In which case, move home or somewhere else more to your liking? There's nothing inherently wrong with the way things work on Mac.
I think the point was missed since this reiterates what I stated. The analogy isn't correct.
I have nothing against OS X but why switch if there's no justification other than for the sake of doing it (unless it's to satisfy your own interest, in which case: don't complain)?
Using the above analogy: why would I move from... NYC to HK if there's no reason to do so? Why push someone or promote a change from X to Y unless there's a justified rationale for it? Change for the sake of change isn't inherently justifiable in-and-of-itself.
Pushing OS X as being generically inferior (or superior) needs justification because I don't necessarily see it.
1. I think we can agree that making a switch of OS imposes quite some costs. You made the switch to macOS and found it all right. Now imagine I'd make the switch from macOS to some other OS - I'm quite certain that it would be worse.
2. I've used Windows and macOS concurrently, and was always amazed at how bad the Windows experience was (though, yes, it has improved, and unfortunately, as alluded to by Gruber in his piece on the new MBP [1], Apple has paid too much attention to looks and not enough to functionality in the last half decade).
3. I found most "portable" options (eg Electron, qt, etc.) generally worse than native apps. Exceptions are pure CLI tools - they're great (use homebrew on the Mac to manage those!)
Disclaimer: My apple experience is pretty much limited to trying to figure out why Safari is the only browser once again not doing things right, to helping my mother with her iPhone and to trying to make iTunes work in an (imo) sane way.
> Now imagine I'd make the switch from macOS to some other OS - I'm quite certain that it would be worse.
My impression of everything Apple has always been "There is one god-given way to do a thing. And it’s wonderful". But as soon as you don’t want to do it that way, things become weird or impossible.
If that’s even close to the truth, it would make a lot of sense that the opposite road is hard as you are trained to do things one certain way only.
> Apple has always been "There is one god-given way to do a thing. And it’s wonderful". But as soon as you don’t want to do it that way, things become weird or impossible
Interesting, I find hacking and automating and customising on macOS much easier than on Windows, with the UNIX underpinnings and command line tools and Automator and script support etc.
My summarized conclusion is that: OS X isn't that great. It's not "bad," don't get me wrong, but it's nothing marvelous. Perhaps at one point in time there was some advantage over a Windows or linux environment but at this point in time, unless you're tied to some package tied to a specific environment for some reason, just work with the environment you're most comfortable with. I don't know how much time I've had to waste adjusting to the OS X environment (especially muscle memory keyboard shortcuts I'm accustomed to), finding replacement niche applications that were environment specific, figuring out how to do basic tasks that are simply different.
On that note, avoid committing to a specific environment unless your application really needs to squeeze out every cycle of performance. It's 2019 and we have portable options now for most application demands.