Yeah I'm gonna walk that back. But not the part about the elitist cult he created.
Discussion
So people who don’t like windows UX are an elitist cult? Help me understand how making nicer products makes you a cult member?
Steve Jobs was heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism in the direction he took Apple products. He wanted simple elegance and intuitive use. You really didn’t have to teach someone to use an iPhone - it was very natural.
Windows does all the things. It is an OS seeking to be everything to everyone all the time. UX has massively improved in Windows 11, and I think WinUI 3 has been overall successful. I’m very pleased to see Microsoft as a whole embracing open source as well. Most of the good things to come out of MS are a result of that (WinUI, .net being useful for cross platform, WSL, VSCode, etc).
Linux does whatever its users are passionate enough to make it do. There’s an economy of ideas that reminds me a bit of a free market. The decentralization of development adds complexity as an inevitable result, causing rough edges for new or inexperienced users, but it is the best in many use cases that have the most passionate user base.
I really think the OS elitism ought to die the way the dinosaurs did. Each of the three fill an important and unique role in the ecosystem, and I am glad to have all three as daily drivers depending on my objective.
I can't stand using either macos, which is even more long winded to do anything, and doesn't have a decent "maximise" or "split pane" functionality, or windows, which as I mention in a previous reply, like Mac, has a really large number of keypresses for the simple, frequently needed operation of copy/paste. I mean, on both systems I very often find if it's less than a sentence long I can retype it faster than do it with the mouse.
See, it’s a difference in approach and a difference in openness.
I’m not sure what you mean about copy paste, as I do that the exact same on all three. I don’t use the mouse, so perhaps that has something to do with it. But ctrl+xcv works on all of them.
macOS simply hasn’t bothered with something most OS power users customize for themselves. Personally I use Rectange on macOS. I have nearly the same tiling power I do on i3 in Linux, again without the mouse. Raycast also has window management, but I don’t use it for that (although the things I do use it for have further dropped my mouse usage). Stage Manager has further enabled window management in a totally new paradigm.
That’s what I mean by different but equal. I mean Gnome doesn’t have proper minimize either. You have to install tweaks to even get the button for it back 🤷♂️. I use i3 so I’m unaffected.
I tend to be very open to learning new ways to do things, so it’s never bothered me. I even prefer my Chromebook for a few things.
No, putting a ridiculous, monopoly enabled higher price on products that are about 10% better is cult and elitist. It's part of how they lock people in, mentally.
I don't agree that the products are nicer, either. Sometimes they have been, other times far from it.
Neither Windows nor MacOS have ever adopted a really obvious and simple UI design element used in X, that is so poorly known, despite its utility, that many Linux UI toolkits leave it out or make it default disabled - the "primary buffer". A buffer that copies when you select, and pastes when you click "button 3".
Most people barely even realise the scroll wheel on mice is usually also a button.
When I use either of these two popular UIs, I chafe severely at the number of keypresses and clicks required to copy and paste. This is doubly annoying when you have to enter 2FA TOTP codes, or type stupid words to confirm stuff (eg github repository delete). With X, I select the thing, and then bam, clicked. And thankfully, at least, many web UIs recognise and check if a complete input has been given for them and automatically proceeds.
On windows, select, right click, move mouse, select copy, move to paste location, click to move cursor, right click, select paste.
On mac, select, long click over select area, click copy, move mouse to paste area, click to move active location/window, long click for menu, select paste.
On trad X windows, select text, move to location for paste, middle click.
The only thing that makes the X way of doing it annoying is like the Java based UI used in Intellij that senses the small movements that inevitably are caused by clicking the clunky middle button scroll wheel and selecting something else and forcing me to start over.