It was a time when tech companies were trying to make computers a common household item, so they did tons of user testing and we made great strides in UX as discoverability became king.
Then, starting about 10 years ago, they started throwing all that research out the window in favor of minimal, clean, flat, "sleek" UIs because the screenshots are easier to market.
They started appealing to the lowest common denominator. We've lost choice and customizability in favor of allowing Apple and Microsoft to decide what our desktops should look like because some people might be confused if they open up an options panel.
I hate nearly every single thing about the MacOS UX. The dock is awful, and so many insane defaults all over the place. Hiding scrollbars is a bug, not a feature. Pointer acceleration is a bug, not a feature. The scroll wheel operating in reverse is a bug, not a feature.
At least with Windows, I can make it tolerable with third party software to make my task bar and Start menu look and feel like the Win2K days. My biggest complaint about the modern UX is coalescing multiple windows from one program into a single item and not having text. If I have 3 Firefox windows open, that should be 3 items on my task bar. It makes it so I can switch to any of them in a single click. It also means that I can use a window as a widget to monitor something by having the status as the title of the window.
> I hate nearly every single thing about the MacOS UX. The dock is awful, and so many insane defaults all over the place. Hiding scrollbars is a bug, not a feature. Pointer acceleration is a bug, not a feature. The scroll wheel operating in reverse is a bug, not a feature.
I disagree with every single thing you've said here. And I'd be willing to bet most Apple users do too.
That being said, I do think there's some charm in simple, "outdated" UIs.
Most people barely use their computers in a way that different from mainframes/terminals age. They only have a couple software they use (and web apps) and have routines for them. Most don't even care for preferences. The applications, the OS, the hardware (if it's not a laptop) don't really matter.
MacOS is a bad bet if you like to adjust your computing environment to make it more pleasant, like disabling animations, or having different motions for scrolling with mouse and trackpad.
> I hate nearly every single thing about the MacOS UX. The dock is awful, and so many insane defaults all over the place. Hiding scrollbars is a bug, not a feature. Pointer acceleration is a bug, not a feature. The scroll wheel operating in reverse is a bug, not a feature.
Yeah, me too. And I kinda hate how Gnome followed that path and made the same mistakes what Apple did. I am in trouble every time I need to use the UI. It is just very unintuitive and I get quite annoyed with it if I need to use it for longer periods. The small scrollbars, the dock, how useless Finder feels like after Dolphin...
When I was playing with WebSerial, I ended up using XP.css because it reminded me of configuring with old serial modems - I think the aesthetic works quite well.
