I'm not a mac user (but a linux user who chooses desktops with the windowing paradigms of like windows 2000 or so plus multiple desktops) so have no idea how it's like in practice, but:

These days it's very common for more than half your work to take place in a browser, with many browser windows, each having many tabs

Every window of the browser almost is like its own application for the user, yet they're all from the same application with the same name for the OS

How does an application switching interface, rather than window switching interface, work out for that, if a lot of what you want to switch between is different windows of the same browser?

(and what if in addition there would be also many terminal emulator windows, each also with many tabs, and maybe some code editors, spread across multiple virtual desktops)

I can't get used to the fact that I can't alt-tab to a minimized window. Nor can I figure out how to switch to any particular minimized window. You have literally no way of knowing that a minimized window exists other than right-clicking the dock icon, or going to the "Window" menu after you switched to the application. The dock was fine 20 years ago when they released OSX, but they've literally done nothing to make it better since then.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft has moved more towards an “application switching interface” with Windows 11. Multiple windows for a single application are always forced to be grouped in the taskbar. I hate it.

OP here. I like this perspective, I never thought about it this way!

Having used the very first Mac, it made sense on that tiny screen. One application per time was almost more than it could accommodate. The monitor got bigger after a few years and the menu on top and the full screen interface started not to make sense compared to the Windows PC next desk.

In addition, the classic user interaction method for Macs has always been drag and drop between multiple on-screen windows, while Windows users have traditionally kept every window maximized.

Personally, I think it goes back to early Windows originally supporting very low resolution graphics cards where you simply couldn't display more than a single widow's worth of content at once.

Remember that EGA was only 640×350. You had to have a user interaction method that worked at such a low resolution.

Having things optimised for drag and drop between multiple windows is the reason for Classic Mac OS to only maximize a window enough so that the entire contents of the window is visible, instead of taking up the whole screen.

This reminded me of a post on Macintosh Folklore[0] about the early development of application switching on Mac OS. It certainly gave me some insight into why things work the way they do in the Mac world.

[0] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Switcher.txt

The switch-by-application is the only thing I have not let go when starting to exclusively use Linux on the desktop. Switch-by-window is too hard to get used to.

the Mac OS model just doesn’t work for my ADHD brain. I much prefer the Windows model, it feels much more natural fit for how my brain works :)

I believe you are making a generalization to apologize for the author of the article for not figuring out, or not immediately knowing already, how to use keyboard short cuts to cycle through selecting windows. [1]

You're both being silly, but the author is being especially silly to evaluate an operating system mostly based on how he feels about the user interface.

macOS is more than just a user interface, more on that in a bit. That being said, there is no Universe where any Linux user interface nor any user interface developed by Microsoft is superior to Apple's Aqua. Sure, Aqua sucks, but nothing, anywhere, approaches its ease of use (developed for everyone, not just the nitpicky self-proclaimed power users with weird tastes), and the feeling of solidity, like windows, menus and icons have some gravity and aren't just weightless and flat sprites ready to fly off the screen or fail to interact with other graphic elements properly. Frankly, every gui ever has been chasing Apple's guis since 1984. Truth hurts, I'm sure, but those are the facts. NT4 and 2K, very similar, were collectively the best guis Microsoft ever released, and gui-wise, everything since has been an absolute disaster, visually and with interaction, XP and 7 included, just absolute crappy junk of guis, and 10 and 11 are no better. In Linux, I always liked every gui I saw, Gnome and KDE, and really it can be tailored to whatever the user's desire is, can even run WindowMaker for the NeXT feel. But therein lies the problem, no consistency whatsoever and it's not for everyone; it is only for the tinkerers, coders, and Linux admins.

Back to the operating system. macOS is rarely given the credit it deserves for being such a solid stable gui running on top of SUS UNIX. Come' on, the author merely mentions this and says nothing about it, but right there is nearly everything that matters: more software available than any other platform ever plus all the best professional apps (printing, photography, audio, video, etc.) run better on macOS, and massive security benefits right out of the box, default config, but of course it can also be hardened, trivially, and then pretty much forgotten. You can never forget to attend to the security of your Windows machines, update, upgrade, constant, ceaseless, never ending scans, but that is in addition to its catastrophe of a user interface, so there's that.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-switch-between-window...

I wonder how much of the difference between Windows and Mac comes from the 1980s look-and-feel lawsuits. Microsoft couldn't clone the Mac directly so they had to make it gratuitously different and worse.