Thanks for taking the time to compose such deep feedback. :-) I appreciate it a lot. I didn't go deep into why Linux didn't work for me because the article was already too long and I felt no one was going to read it. I'll summarise here and if you feel it deserves a longer post, I'll try to add it to the blog.

First it is important to contextualise that I am talking about desktop workflows, even desktop development workflows, not server stuff. I think that Linux makes a terrific server and platform to develop industrial and hobby stuff.

It just didn't click with me for desktop usage for the following reasons:

I come from MacOS. I used Macs all the way back to MacOS 8. I enjoy Mac ways of doing things, looking for MacOS in another system is recipe for frustration. That is true for any kind of looking into a system wanting it to be something else. Someone who loves Linux and keeps trying to find it in a Mac will be equally frustrated.

I feel that desktop applications on Linux are not as polished as the ones on a Mac. That is not true for every single application of course, there are many gems on Linux, but due to the way that native Mac apps are built and able to leverage an Apple provided collection of features and "components", they tend to look and behave in ways that feel more in tune with the system.

On Linux it feels like a patchwork of technologies and toolkits that not necessarily talk with each other well. I like the integration of MacOS and what we used to call Cocoa, how apps would adhere to a HIG and you could trust features to work across them.

I never liked the battery life on any Linux machine I had (mostly macs running Linux including PowerPC ones, some PCs). To be honest, BSDs always worked better on a Mac for me than Linux.

I wholeheartedly agree that Linux is a wonderful base to build something. GoboLinux is a great example of that, it solved one of my pet peeves with Linux which was the messy filesystem. WebOS was the best operating system for mobile devices I have ever used, I had all the devices, they were wonderful.

But on a desktop it always felt short in my subjective experience. I don't have the same love as the majority of the developers for a terminal. I'd prefer to use it only as a last choice, Linux is built in a way that it rewards command line usage and composition of command line based tools. That is the correct way to use it, just look at how much loved minimal tiling setups are these days and how much of terminal activity happens in them. I prefer rich gui apps.

I also am very fond of some old ways of Apple third-party development, when apps would all ship with AppleScript support and I could do my workflow pipelines by connecting them instead of writing a shell script.

It boils down to desktop apps being the star of the show, and the OS vendor shipping a toolkit for developing the that bakes in a lot of features which makes it easier for said apps to integrate well with the OS and each other. Linux has a lot of choice in that and choice is good, but it often leads to apps that feel like they were built for different systems running side by side with totally different UIs, menu placement, and in the horrible past different clipboards (that last one works fine now).

Anyway, it circles back to what I said at the beginning, it didn't worked for me because I kept trying to have the kind of experience I have in MacOS in a different system. As I said on the original article, I'm happy that people enjoy Linux. I'm not trying to get them to change. I run it for many years as well, I just prefer something else. It is OK to prefer something else.

As for "pro-Linux", I'd rather let people chose whatever they want to run. If it is Linux, I'll cheer them all the way, if it is something else, I'll still do the same.

I find a bit disingenuous the section where you say:

> everyone's going to pick what everyone already saw in the world, and no one is going to invest in learning Linux. You have to want to be able to go further.

It felt a bit like subtexting, it might not be the case, but in my personal case I gave it a try. I'm quite decent Linux user. I still maintain my Linux servers, I still have Linux machines. It is not that I didn't invest in learning it. I learned it and decided on something else.

If I was to run something other than macOS and wanted to go the FOSS route, I wouldn't pick Linux. I'd probably try to stick with Haiku which for me is a much better desktop experience than Linux. I actually have a Thinkpad x230 with Haiku these days instead of Linux, it is my secondary machine.