It's crazy how a billion people and millions of developers are using Windows when it's barely usable. Is there some small possibility that you're wrong about this?

Also, does macOS have a Unix shell that you can just start using for your work out of the box or do you have to use something like Homebrew to bring it up to modern standards first?

Usability is certainly an opinion. I can get a Unix shell on any OS, have been able to for decades. But we don't just want a shell do we? We want a decent desktop environment with a good system for managing application windows... We want updates that don't cause problems. We want a good file browser.

macOS has none of these things, not out of the box and not even with third party utilities to fix things and fill in missing features.

"..Windows Update makes Windows barely usable..." I find this claim to be over exaggerated. I'm not exactly sure how their update schedule works exactly but in my case it updates some parts transparently without me needing to stop working. Updates that require reboot definitely do not happen once per week and never when I am in front of computer.

I have no problems with access to working "Unix like" shell either. My laptops and desktop are beastly and have no problem running Ubuntu in VM. WSL works like a charm as well. But I rarely use either since for Linux development work and for running servers I use real Linux computers in headless mode running NoMachine for remote access. Windows being used for developing Windows GUI software duh, and for productivity tools, Video, Photo, CAD, PCB design etc. etc.

To be fair, I think these days Windows has a better auto-update story than OSX. They may both be equally annoying. I have suffered involuntary restarts on both operating systems.

Windows has full linux distros installed from the store. Unlike mac that comes with outdated shell and yout have to trust whoever it is that runs brew.

This is a solved problem now. It no longer does the restart thing (or hasn't for a long time). It gives a 7-day pause option too.

The two things that break Windows are spaces-in-filenames, and max-filepath-length. Urgh.

MacOS is broken in a different way: no more 32-bit (so the death of legacy applications) and notarization (need an Apple thumbs-up to run programs).

Windows updates go out once a month unless there’s a massive problem. If you’re seeing weekly restarts it is not microsoft that’s doing that.

I see a restart prompt about once every two months on my sole remaining w10 laptop, and it hasn’t forced a reboot on me in the middle of my work in over a year. Ubuntu prompts me to restart more often.

I dislike Windows too, but PowerShell is pretty nice if you are stuck in the Windows environment. It's not really a Unix-like shell, but it is comfortable enough compared to the rest of the ecosystem.

That's build 10162. It's now on build 18362.

That's like comparing current MacOS with one from years ago which also has some weird UI things going on. In Windows, certainly some of these have been fixed but aside from being visual anomalies everything works.

The kicker for me is Apple hiding / removing the things I use, such as Keychain in the menu bar. OSX / MacOS is slowly getting worse.