What DE are you using? Some of the higher profile ones (Gnome, KDE) try to be all smooth and polished and feature-full and in my opinion just introduce more complications and bugs that get in the way of just being a good desktop. I like XFCE because it's just a really good, simple window manager, desktop, and set of basic utilities. Other than that it just gets out of your way and doesn't make you relearn how to do things every few years. It's like if the Win98 desktop got another 30 years of gentle refinement.

I’ve tried XFCE, i3, Pop Shell and plain Gnome.

But it doesn’t really matter, since the DE doesn’t determine how individual apps behave.

My baseline is OSX from decade ago OSX with native apps where everyone was following the Apple HIG so consistently that using a Java app felt like waking up in the twilight zone. macOS these days have fallen quite a bit from its UX glory days but there’s still quite a bit to go before it hits the level of Ubuntu or Windows.

On Linux it feels to me like every app exists in its own parallell dimension where you never know if even the basic laws of physics still apply.

Fair. I guess I haven't had that experience, but so much stuff is web-based these days that probably 90% of my computing time is just spent in a browser and the rest in just a handful of applications that I know well.

I'd guess that I am unusually picky about UX for being a techie. The story would probably have been very different 20 years ago when fiddling with my computer was more of a hobby than a chore.

Yeah, could be. You mentioned elsewhere in this thread having to tinker a bunch to get scrolling in Firefox to be smooth and I don't even know what that means :) I just put 2 fingers on the touchpad and move them up and Firefox scrolls the page down and I'm happy, haha.

Anyway sounds like you've already done what I suggested and it didn't out work you. I hope for your sake Apple comes to their senses soon!

I'm completely with you on this. Everything from scrolling to how windows behave makes a huge difference in the feeling of quality and responsiveness.

Once you're spoiled by a macOS machine's smoothness, it's hard to use anything else, where cursors feel like they're literally lagging behind your trackpad movements and land somewhere imprecise, and scrolling feels like opening a rusty car door as it catches on itself and you feel the friction.

macOS on an Apple Touchpad is like using a well-oiled machine by comparison. These things really matter!

I'm in the same position and understand your complaints about the lack of uniformity across applications in Linux DEs. But I use the Linux desktop as a daily driver because I absolutely despise the lack of customization in macOS, especially as it relates to "virtual workspaces" or "virtual desktops." In Linux, I can have multiple different desktops, each named intuitively, and each with its own set of applications. In macOS, I can't even _name_ the virtual desktops. What's more absurd is the "logic" around when an application has focus when it's minimized, and how its window behaves when you Cmd-Tab to it. Utterly exasperating that Apple, a company who has long prided itself on HCI, falls so far short of the mark in intuitive interface behavior.

”Intuitive” means very different things to different people. Personally I don’t see anything intuitive about having named workspaces. In my desktop where I have a 42” screen I use pop shell with tiling and unnamed workspaces. On the MacBook I’ll just use fullscreen and exposé. Even though I’ve used the concept for decades I still do not find floating windows to be ”intuitive” except for dialog and similar transient UI.