And I feel the same way when I look over the shoulder of my collegues who are seasoned mac users. Things which I would do in no time on PC seems to take many additional clicks and more time for them as well.
That’s really strange, can you give some examples? Just curious what things are easier to do on Windows (assuming that’s what you mean), I just have never had that be the case. Maybe it’s cause I’m a webdev and most tooling for web stuff is tailored for *nix systems?
But the thing that really works me up is when I ask people about the hardware issues. The answer is always “you need to buy apple hardware”.
Uh whaaaaat that’s crazy. Yeah I’m the same way, I’ve cycled through a lot of different mechanical keyboards and whatnot to find the one I like now (Ultimate Hacking Keyboard, dumb name but nice features lol). But I can’t say I’ve ever had an issue with a keyboard having hardware compatibility like that… I guess I don’t really use function keys. Again I use Karabiner to remap that kinda stuff to a different layer, which works universally so the same layering works on my laptop as my mechanical keyboard and I don’t need to have different muscle memory for different work-zone setups.
This is the article that got me introduced to Karabiner, even if you hate Mac I do recommend giving it a look. One of the best things I ever did was use Karabiner to modify my layout and reduce hand movement/chording. It completely fixed my RSI issues. My current layout treats the JKL; home row keys as arrow keys when I hold down Capslock, and Capslock + CMD turns them into jump-by-word so I can navigate really fast. Rarely use a mouse when writing code these days. Oh, and Capslock + ’ is delete, surprising how often that is a common hand movement. Plus plenty of other small optimizations. Really couldn’t live without it.
Hard disagree, I’m a huge fan of the way spaces work on Mac. Windows is a nightmare, and linux is good but takes a lot of time to tune and maintain. I honestly haven’t ever noticed the hidden files issue because I use a terminal for launching anything that would need them, though it does sound annoying if you do.
Where MacOS shines is being able to customize the important parts of your workflow, while ignoring the basic parts because those all “just work” in a standard way. The biggest win is all of the a11y APIs they’ve added for apps, they really let you get in there and change almost anything. I use Karabiner to layer on custom keymappings, capslock is an extra modifier that turns my home row into arrows/delete, hold down command is jump by subword, and many more optimizations. And that is system-wide, it works the same in every single app. I basically have Emacs style macros universally across the entire operating system, every app, and it’s awesome (oh, and I don’t need an external keyboard for it, so I can work on the train and have the same keymaps).
You might not like the base OS’s UX, but it does “just work” for what it is, and that lets you focus on layering on so much more.