The new settings are half-baked and terrible. The OS pesters me constantly to update to the latest revision and I can't turn those messages off, not even close the notification without displaying the settings app. And I don't want the latest revision, because it is buggy, breaks a number of apps, and introduces the "AI" features that I do not want or need.
More and more often good apps get broken by the new OS policies (SuperDuper is a recent example).
The old style of system apps that did wonderful things is gone (think Quicktime player, or Preview), these apps are mostly neglected. The new style is half-baked multi-platform apps like settings, that do little, and what they do, they do poorly.
Unlike your parent comment I do think that Mac favored lockdown all the way.
But it does a wonderful job at doing so.
Macs feel less like a personal computer and more like an appliance. Which works great if you do things that don't require tinkering, like office tasks or even webdev.
And I do love Linux, specially the more hobbyist OS's like Gentoo or Nix.
But at some point in my life I decided to spend more of my time (aside work) with other parts of my life. And in result, having to spend a weeken to solve some weird usecase, be it the package manager or the WM, is a pain.
The compromise would be to use non-hobbyist Linux.
I have never spent a weekend fixing a problem. The worst I can remember was when an update early version of Ubuntu broke X Windows and the update had run on multiple machines in a small office so needed to be fixed multiple time, and there was a delay while they fixed the problem IIRC. Still, it was a few hours.
Even now, using Manjaro which is relatively likely to have problems, I have had no major issues so far.
I have not used Macs so cannot compare, but IMO Linux compares very favourably with Windows.
Mac users I know rave about it, but every time they come up with a specific example of why they are better it turns out to be something like functionality other OSes have. Sometimes Macs have the advantage of being preconfigured (e.g. copy and paste between devices required installing software on both and pairing - but a 10 min one off when you buy a new device is acceptable to me).
- Virtual Desktop per monitor? Nope, because Xorg didn't support it back then. And now it's a 10 year bug on the Kde bugtracker.
- A Dock? It worked ok. Until Wayland came and everything broke. It's supported now, but you have to clone the latest git commit of the biggest dock project which is not almost abandoned. And it breaks while compiling. A lot.
- Global Menu? The support is all over the place.
- Fractional scaling? It works. But in MacOS (with the help of an app, I admit) I can have incredible granularity.
On top of that, add the generally inferior hardware revolving a laptop, aside CPU, storage and Ram.
The MacOS desktop feels like a Gnome2 in an alternate universe where the devs never made bad decisions, and things like Wayland (1) never occurred.
(1) Not because the project itself, but the act of breaking compatibility and passing blame to other people has sent decades of FOSS development and manpower down the drain.
I know Linux since Slackware 2.0, have used most well known commercial UNIX systems, and rather use GNU/Linux on VMs, instead of laptops, as I had enough of this.
Last attempt to try otherwise was a UEFI bios, without fallback to legacy BIOS, that just couldn't get along with whatever top distro from Distrowatch I would try to.
Apple, Google, Microsoft walled gardens are more confortable to stay on, and as long as I can have some kind of ISO C and ISO C++ support for everything else that depends upon them, I am good.
That said, my current laptop came with Linux preinstalled so I knew I would not have hardware issues.
I would also rather have one off issues to install than unpredictable issues later on. Subjective preference, of course. I have had lots of issues with Android. Never at the start, but with app upgrades.
My ASUS 1215B EEE PC, the netbook generation, came with Linux as typical of them, had wlan problems, and after the AMD driver was replaced by the open source one, it never achieved the same OpenGL capabilities as it had originally, and hardware video decoding never worked after Flash was gone.
The new settings are half-baked and terrible. The OS pesters me constantly to update to the latest revision and I can't turn those messages off, not even close the notification without displaying the settings app. And I don't want the latest revision, because it is buggy, breaks a number of apps, and introduces the "AI" features that I do not want or need.
More and more often good apps get broken by the new OS policies (SuperDuper is a recent example).
The old style of system apps that did wonderful things is gone (think Quicktime player, or Preview), these apps are mostly neglected. The new style is half-baked multi-platform apps like settings, that do little, and what they do, they do poorly.