>unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop

Lol, that's what Microsoft tried 10+ years ago and everybody gave them shit for it, especially Apple fans. Now Apple is "inventing" this again.

Commercial OSes (both Windows and macOS) are also both American, and lots of people are trying to de-Americanize.

Mac feels like it is constantly trying to sell you on their cloud services. A few times a day it will tell me that I haven't backed up to the cloud.

Windows is strangely less direct, but will regularly automatically try to save something to onedrive and force a subscription. Plus, it is just full of ads and nonsense.

Even within the range of Linux distros there are some that feel more agenda-driven than others. That's the absolute wonder of it. One can sidestep the flamewars and just use another distro that suits likeminded people.

On the other hand I think this makes it difficult to provide a perfect experience - you have to stay closer to the herd if you want trouble free computing. You have the choice.

I've been using macOS since 2020, but for the last year I have seriously considered switching to Linux. macOS Catalina felt really fast, easy to use, and lacked the useless features they kept adding and the ipadOS like interface they began implementing. In 2020, the feature set felt much more intentional.

It's interesting to think how incredibly clunky, unintuitive, difficult, unpleasant to the eye, and just generally painful the Linux desktop experience used to be. These days Linux has proved it's usefulness on the desktop, both to novices and power users alike. I have no doubt that 2030s will be the decade of the Linux desktop. Perhaps until 2038 anyway.

> Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate

I used Claude to define some CS exam computers using NixOS; it was just GNOME, but with a few tweaks made via dconf. For example, add a maximize icon next to the X (close) in the menubar, make the dashbar behave like a dock with smart autohiding. On a Tailscale VPN so I can service them. And with a few programs preinstalled, preconfigured and pinned to the dock. System users for every student. And with mirroring the screen at a certain resolution by default.

Anything I hadn’t tried before, I just asked it to make. The dconf tweaking in particular was so much easier than when I tried to do this manually.

Windows is a bizarre product at this point; it is what the company is famous for, but it is small beans next to Azure, right?

Nobody would get into the Operating System business to make money I think, the going rate is $0, subsidized by something (an ad company, a hardware company, or general kindness and community spirit).

I am curious about how you are improving the Linux experience with claude code. Can you dive into that a little?

Windows and macOS are now sales funnels for the various subscriptions Microsoft and Apple offer.

> and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent transition

They've already fumbled it.

> the way they did with mobile.

It's the exact same way they fumbled with mobile. They were very late to the party and decided to buy their way in. It _never_ works.

I feel like cli agents are the main benefit of going back to Linux. It’s such a joy to have all the solutions to customizations and fixes I want completely automated, using an agent that can control anything I permit and understands my OS completely.

You paint a very rosy picture of Linux.

It's a mess of disparate highly inconsistent systems.

The Linux user experience matches what it is - a random bunch of developers developing random software in the way they like with a very thin patina of consistency failing to hide the mess.

It's nowhere near as fabulous as you are making out - it's fanboiism to say otherwise.

I turn on my computer, the desktop shows up…and that’s it. No random windows, no popups about some bundled software I don’t use or how my subscription for X service I don’t want isn’t activated. A chime and a blank screen. Bazzite made my computer fun again.

I find it so odd that Apple put so much weight behind the VisionOS design, rolling it out to all platforms, considering so few people have Vision Pro. The justification for bringing some iOS ideas to macOS made sense, because everyone knows how to use iOS and is familiar with those conventions.

I’m curious if we’ll see another major shift with the new deign lead, or if the higher ups will want to run with Liquid Glass for a while after so much investment, and not wanting to alienate users by radically changing design direction too often. Or if Liquid Glass is here to stay as long as we have Vision Pro, because VR/AR demand that style of UI, so everything else needs to fall in line for consistency’s sake.

I think I’d be more apt to switch to Linux if it wasn’t for all the mobile integration macOS and iOS have. Giving that up is a tough sell. It also means finding new solutions for managing photos, music, notes, and a bunch of other things. I also struggle to find non-Apple hardware I find acceptable. I’ve used Linux on and off for over 20 years, and in the past few years is gotten to the point where I think I could daily drive it with little to no compromise, in a bubble. But mobile really bursts that bubble.

I agree with you. Microsoft really has gotten bad in this regard. In the past, the operating system was kind of semi-useful. Now one has to wonder what the real agenda is. For me the quitting point was the recall-sniffing on everyone; I don't care if this can be disabled. To me it means that the USA wants to monitor me non-stop. That's a no go. (I was already using Linux before, so I don't depend on Microsoft anyway, but it now meant that I also need to stop using secondary computers with a Microsoft-tainted operating system. I can not trust the USA in any regard anymore with the TechBros in charge. They killed all goodwill and reputation.)

As if Linux was/is not agenda driven. People really forgot I guess.

> No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be

I wish I could agree, but the recent push for Wayland only, or GNOME deciding to deprecate middle-click paste, or further reliance on systemd, comprise a non-exhaustive list of examples of things I don't want, and which may end up pushing me off the platform again on the desktop. There are definitely opinionated agendas in Linux (and open source more broadly), and the relative instability of Linux as a target makes forking and maintaining a project + dependencies often unrealistic for a single person... which is how these big projects are able to exert so much influence.

Windows has evolved into the world's highest security risk. MacOS feels like Eye Candy due to its increasingly inaccessible price for people with low resources. So, price and security are the reasons why I switched to Linux.

It's typical business logic. It's not enough to focus on making the product better than the user, you must have a "big" product vision and you're only allowed make changes that align with that product vision.

So when that vision is something that users are ambivalent on (3D TV, AI operating system, etc...), well tough, that's still all they're getting until it hurts the company financially or the next executive has a different "big idea". :(

Commercial OS's are terrible, but theres nothing that gets me on guard more than someone claiming theres an "agenda". The word has lost all meaning.

I’m stuck in a world of AirDrop and expecting my phone to know the Wi-Fi password on my laptop, so I’m not gonna leave MacOS but it absolutely does suck. It used to be that Spotlight file finding was broken, but as of the last today Finder file finding is broken too. This is on multiple new Macs.

Windows 10 and Sequoia are the last two versions before the complete and utter enshittification of these operating systems.

Come back when I can run Linux on a laptop that has 12+ hours battery life, runs fast, that’s lightweight, quiet and doesn’t cause infertility from the heat when I put it on my lap….

Using an x86 laptop in 2025 is like using a flip phone 6 years after the iPhone came out.

Of course if you are a gamer, ignore everything I just wrote.