I then had the realization that what I really wanted was a Mac. I was fortunate enough for my family to purchase me one which, with an AppleCare exchange for a unibody model, lasted me a whopping 11 years (Tiger to Mojave). I also still have that iPod nano from the back-to-school promo they used to have.
My personal machines have been Ubuntu or derivative for a long time now. To the point that I don't even know what I'm missing in alternatives, anymore. Used to be it was games, Steam has been a blessing there.
I've had a couple dual boot windows and I couldn't even figure out how to code on it effectively. (web dev js stuff)
To this day I don't understand if I am meant to have git bash, command prompt or powershell, or all of them or what.
Mac's are reliable, but I personally find them clunky for standard development.
Ubuntu is my safe place, the UX/DX makes the most sense to me.
The point being that this very short list of options is extremely thoroughly-worked-out, which is a level simply not available today in a stock Ubuntu distro and its themes. I can choose elementary, or Mint, bitbthat is essentially an OS distro level decision. I can download some themes, but its not interchangeable at will, and the depth of implementation of gnome or kde themes is very shallow.
I expect that to truly do this would require not just graphical styling but also switching lots of packages around (eg a file manager). Maybe the path there looks like a giant Nix config to capture all the dependencies?
Linux adoption, in my view, is held back by the existing community's lack of desire to deliver what the average user wants. Things are obviously better on that front than they used to be but Ubuntu is still quite bad at doing what non-technical users want from a computer. Most Linux users seem perfectly fine with that.
And I agree with you, the community (most of it) couldn't give a rat's arse what Joe Average wants. Heaven forbid you ask one of them how to do something that goes off of the One Linux Way(tm).
The Windows 7 UI has aged pretty well too, even if the glossy visuals have become somewhat outdated (though personally I think they look better than modern flat stuff). I rigged up an old laptop of mine with 7 not too long ago and plugged into a modern monitor and it was striking how nice it was compared to 11.
High-fidelity 1-click reproductions of XP/7 for Linux would be very popular, I think. Bonus points if they can use the hundreds (thousands?) of XP and 7 msstyle themes on sites like DeviantArt.
The latter of those is actually the more difficult of the two. Last I knew the GTK plugin that provides application menus through dbus was broken, and many GTK apps don't have a menubar anyway (anything that doesn't fit into a hamburger menu gets binned). Qt apps are better here but there's some bug under Wayland that prevents menus from being pulled from those.
There really ought to be an XDG standard for UI toolkits to provide their menubars to system bars, HUDs, accessibility utilities, etc with.
Perhaps I'll try it in a VM on a M1 MacBook Pro, with Nix, to really have fun! I think personal computer software can be improved a lot with lessons from the Infrastructure as Code world, notably the ability to create reproducible, version controlled computing environments!
However, I spent significant amounts of time using Arch Linux. Compared to stable released Ubuntu etc., I like opportunity to jump on bugs in open source packages and fix them, they have taught me a lot. Using open source software but not its bleeding edge version is a missing opportunity I would say.
GNOME looks like macOS as KDE looks like Windows
I'm not using a macOS theme, but all of the buttons are in the same places and it works great with my macOS muscle memory. Same thing with key shortcuts, KDE has a customizable shortcut system for practically anything you'd want to do.
I tried doing the same in GNOME and it seems that they want you doing things the GNOME way, which is just different enough to be an annoying experience, personally.
Where macOS has always been about progressive disclosure with tons of little power user affordances hidden in plain sight, GNOME is more about paring everything down to the bare essentials in a polished way.
While it's been a couple years since I last used a Mac and I thankfully haven't had to use Windows 11 (only 10, sparsely), I've used all four platforms within the past 3/4-ish years and I'd say it's a pretty accurate blanket statement.
KDE is really intuitive to use as a previous windows-user, and gnome... well certainly feels like they're _trying_ to be MacOS, not sure how familiar it'd actually feel to a recent MacOS convert though.
The similarity is more vague with GNOME (3) and Mac OS, IMO.
Windows is guilty of this too - what a mess of different user interface styles and a patchwork of stuff being stitched together.
MacOS by comparison is a beautifully consistent GUI well thought out and logical and things just work.
Every time I go back to Windows I am reminded of how broken the whole experience is - multitasking is not smooth, tasks don't end when asked, the system won't shut down, applications freeze.
And if you think I['m just an Apple fanboy, I'm not - I spent many many years as a hard core Windows fanboy and I love Linux and use it as a server OS daily.
The thing is - making a consistent, easy to use well thought out operating system experience is a gargantuan task and it must take gargantuan time money and effort to do it well.
Not really: Apple did it long before they were as large and rich as they are now. The key is forcing limitations on everyone, including independent software vendors, and mostly ignoring backwards compatibility. Apple has always controlled their environments to a large extent, and used that to push their vision of how a UI should work. And having a highly centralized company with a dictatorial and perfectionist CEO contributed to this. MS, by contrast, seems to have long been a company that more closely resembled an organized crime syndicate, with different factions constantly fighting or backstabbing each other, and the central leadership not strong enough (or perhaps not caring enough) to enforce a single vision unless it was about monopolizing the market and putting competitors out of business.
>MS, by contrast, seems to have long been a company that more closely resembled an organized crime syndicate
I think we all need to give more credit to Microsoft for being the only one who cares about backwards compatibility, and to an insane extent at that.
We take for granted the sheer convenience of running something written 30+ years ago today almost seamlessly.
I think you just need to stop crappifying your Windows installs.
A lot of what you said did happen in the days of Windows 9x, but all the Windows NT releases including Windows 11 have been rock solid.