Right, I'm sometimes puzzled by how people approach their personal "deal-breakers" that prevent Mac->Lin (or Win->Lin) switch. Many of the issues are presented as though they are bugs or clear-cut missing features, but are in fact subjective preference statements.

In this case the "spacebar to preview" feature might be a must-have for some, but to others it might not be important, and maybe even to some be perceived as an anti-feature. I personally see this particular feature as redundant (given there is already thumbnailing and a means to open files) and unintuitive, and thus just more clutter. But I also don't care too much, since I could always disable it if it came pre-enabled.

The worst cases of this is when some insist that not only is their particular preference the The One Way, but that stubborn Linux DE developers are somehow at fault for not implementing The One Way, and that's why Linux will never be popular. There are plenty of things that might keep "normies" from switching, but random obscure DE features are not them. People tolerate FAR worse UX disasters than any major Linux DE.

If remembers the state globally so if you leave it open it will always be there when you open a file manager window if you toggle it off it will be hidden next time too.

It's not open by default perhaps because not everyone regards it as maximally useful. Say I open a file manager and have it sized to 1/4 of a 24" 1080p screen. On the left hand side of the screen is a panel which lists common and places and other items. This leaves a space for 15 icons on the screen at 48px size big enough to comfortably read and note some details in a preview.

Opening the information pane reduces that to 10 icons greatly reducing the space available for the main purpose of the application.

What if I open it to the full size of the screen? I can now view 56 icons at 80px where now they actually are a pretty decent size to see whats in them in their own icon.

I think most of the time having the info panel shown would decrease the utility of the window.

This was a problem in Snow Leopard and probably the two next releases as well: I always upgraded as soon as possible.

Aside from that, QuickLook remains one of the few examples of a generic extensible document reader in modern operating systems. The way it gains the ability to read new types of files just by virtue of the owning app’s bundle being present on the system (no installation necessary, and it goes away when you delete the app) makes so much sense, and it’s a shame that there’s no equivalent on Windows and Linux.

[1] https://penpot.app/

True for project files, but you can export images and SVGs.

> it’s very much geared specifically toward UI design and prototyping, whereas something like Affinity Designer or Sketch also work well for generic screen-targeted vector work.

That's where the plugin ecosystem comes in. It's quite usable for simple/modern vector work that's more component oriented graphic design than hands on illustration.

APFS isn't writeable on Linux or Windows without additional drivers. Nor is HFS+. It's quite inconvenient. If ZFS was usable in that way, I'd consider it! But for now I still have to keep my boot volume as HFS+ so I can at least read files, and use FAT32 to shuttle data around.