I like macOS but we should be honest about some of its basic functionality being unintuitive. The “traffic lights” were pretty confusing to me for a while. Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that (though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great). Yellow minimizes, fine, whatever. Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window. And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.

The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder, signified only by an arrow, with no explanation of what it’s doing or why. Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it. So sometimes I would end up with an app running without having been installed. Therefor some of my apps wouldn’t show up in Launchpad, etc. Now that I understand the process, it’s pretty cool. And it’s simple, in a sense. But it fails any definition of intuitive.

The scroll direction of a mousewheel cannot be controlled independently from a trackpad. So one or the other is bound to feel wrong to most people.

There are simple things Apple could change to fix most of these, but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.

The keyboard shortcuts are way more inconsistent on Mac. On Windows and KDE (and I presume Gnome though my experience is very out of date), Ctrl shortcuts pretty consistently relate to the window that currently has focus, and Meta/Windows shortcuts relate to manipulating and navigating windows as entities. No such rule of thumb exists in Mac.

The simplest example of that to me is Cmd+T to open a new tab, Ctrl+Tab/PgUp/Dn to cycle through tabs, whereas it's Ctrl for all of them on KDE or Windows. There simply is not a way to deterministically switch to a specific other program/window, where in Windows/KDE you can do Win+1 to move to the first program on the taskbar (and so on with other numbers). And the behavior of Home/End is very inconsistent between programs, with seemingly no consistent way to move the cursor to the beginning of the current line.

I have used a lot of systems, and inside them a lot of programs (I make design choices for a living, even if they are at a lower level, UX and intuitiveness exists also in libraries). I was comparing Mac OS to GNOME and not to Windows because Windows is almost the same as Mac OS relative to my point, just worse.

It being different is a fair point, and when designing a system you always make tradeoffs; what I feel is that Apple tradeoffs and design goals are slowly turning more toward additional monetization after you buy the product than focusing on the product per se.

yeah it took me years to get used to the nuances of MacOS after growing up with windows. Both are fine.

>> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.

> You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.

My first guess would be Linux. Although maybe they used Gnome as a one-off, liked it, and then switched to Windows for some reason.

They are both infuriating, as a long-time user of both.