I'm not sure I agree with that. Frankly, I don't find macOS's GUI to be particularly polished, or even pleasant. Of course, people that like macOS usually do, but, well, that's somewhat self-selecting.

I honestly think thinks like Cinnamon or KDE are nicer that the macOS GUI.

Well that is entirely subjective. To me OS X is a cluttered, distracting, cold-grey mess.

Yes. It has probably the worst UI of any desktop OS. The window management sucks, the global menu is stupid and annoying and the file management sucks. Trying to operate the OS with just a keyboard is absurdly difficult. They don't give you any options to work the way that you want, they only give you one option to work the way Apple wants. You're also severely limited in hardware choice. Just about everything is wrong with the Macintosh Operating System IMO.

This is subjective. I think the MacOS UI looks and acts like a toy. My Linux machine has a solarised theme (I can toggle light/dark) with minimal window borders (i3, polybar). I think it's much more tasteful than MacOS. GNOME looks better too and it's themeable, unlike MacOS. But this is all of course just my opinion.

Eh, does it? I find it to be incredibly unintuitive, and so do many people I see try to use it with no prior PC experience.

I'm on the developer side and I don't know if I count as traditional macOS user but I've personally bought 3 macs (including the current M1 one) and use another mac from my company to work.

IMO I have almost 0 interaction with mac user interface. My time are either spent in terminal or in a browser. There's little need to 'interface' with whatever UI mac comes with.

I love mac mostly because of its hardware form factor and its shell. I can't tell you any GUI gimmick despite using it as my main driver for years.

maybe some of those conventions are outdated

The main gripe i have with macOS, for a company so focused on accessibility it's disappointing the lack of UI scaling options.

You really can't do much compared to Windows. Linux also suck at this in terms of the basic options available.

Any examples to why macOS isn't much better?

I think an OS as prolific as macOS having such shit UX kind of implies it is garbage though.

The year is 2020 and macOS still doesn't have a location/address bar in Finder.

Basic native UI interfaces still completely lack keyboard controls.

Window snapping is still non-existent.

I understand Apple strive to be different, but lacking these basic features (among many others) makes macOS have an arguably inferior workflow to Windows or Linux/BSD DEs.

Excluding these things are not unique and quirky subjective design choices Apple can continue get away with. They are baseline expectations for a workstation computing environment to meet, which macOS does not. The way I see it, macOS is increasingly falling behind in UX. Not only have Apple failed to make their own improvements and innovations; they've failed to keep pace with Microsoft and the Open Source community.

Posted from my 2019 MacBook Pro

Let's see my currently running apps :

Chrome - no

Firefox - no

Slack - no

intellij IDEs - no

VSCode - no

Spotify - maybe kinda sortof ?

VLC - no

WhatsApp - no

Telegram - no

Steam - no

What is this consistent UI you speak of ? Most of these apps look the same on windows.

The only reason I own a MacBook is because I wanted a single device and I occasionally need to do some osx/iOS work - would be happier with windows laptop for sure

It’s buggy AF and Apple is dumbing down the UX/UI every year and customization options are almost non existent.

Also compared to Windows multi-display support is thrash, no window snapping (?!) and Windows seems to be generally more stable.

This isn't exactly a high bar...

Even Windows destroys MacOS in usability.

That's because the GUI is not a part of the OS. The GUI is not an integral part of macOS - it's just that Apple sells one bundled, the same way that Canonical and Red Hat bundle Gnome. We had a number of other OSs that made a similar decision, on Lisp machines, Smalltalk workstations, Apollo's DomainOS, and a couple others I can't remember. None of these survived to this day.

Yeah, your tolerance for inconsistent UX is much higher than longtime macOS users.

I'm right there with you on that one. So is most of HN I imagine.

But the Apple ][ really brought the PC home for so many more people than it's competitors purely because of it's relatively simple GUI.

Command prompts scare the average user.

Curious. Have you tried Gnome Shell or recent KDE or some modern Linux desktop like that for a while?

Because I always assumed MacOS as a Unix with shiny UI as well, however once I worked on one for a year or two I realized it long lost its uniqness. In many ways the UI is closer to Windows 7 than Windows 10 is. And things like Unity/Gnome Shell or even win 10 long went in a more productivity focused UI concept.

I'm having a hard time understanding this, even with your examples. It might be possible that I simply haven't figured out the primitives, or an underlying logic to the OS?

In my experience, MacOS is the worst offender (excluding Windows) of inconsistencies. MacOS is filled with UI elements that, as far as I can tell, only appear once. (For example, the green 'status light' when activating SSH, compared to the slider buttons used everywhere else in the OS.)

My experience is roughly ~5 years MacOS (mostly as a child), ~10 years Windows, ~10 years Linux.

In all, it feels like Apple demands a "larger" language one needs to learn, compared to various Linux distros.

Hmm ...

The user just started to use the OS: of course they have little knowledge of customization plus they are using a computer subject to corporate policies. Not a fair criticism.

However, the critique of the window snapping mechanics is correct. Very frustrating to have the window go full screen when removing one half of the previously split screen.