I use windows for ~10 hours per day, 5 or 6 days per week because my team is currently maintaining a legacy .NET framework codebase. I’m sure there are people on earth who use windows more than I do, but I think it’s extremely unlikely that you’re one of them.

Sure.

MacOS is an excellent workspace operating system, largely due to its near-POSIX compliance and the fact that it has access to the enormous body of tools developed for UNIX-like OSs. For development work in particular, it can use the same free and open source software, configured in the same way, that Linux uses. Aside from the DE, a developer could swap between Linux and MacOS and barely realize it. Everything from Node, to Clang, to openJDK, to Rust, along with endless ecosystems of tooling, is installable in a consistent way that matches the bulk of online documentation. This is largely in contrast to Windows, where every piece of the puzzle will have a number of gotchas and footguns, especially when dealing with having multiple environments installed.

From a design perspective, MacOS is opinionated, but feels like it’s put together by experts in UX. Its high usability is at least partially due to its simplicity and consistency, which in my opinion are hallmarks of well-designed software. MacOS also provides enough access through the Accessibility API to largely rebuild the WM, so those who don’t like the defaults have options.

The most frequent complaint that I hear about MacOS is that x feature doesn’t work like it does in windows, even though the way that x feature works in windows is steaming hot garbage. Someone who’s used to Windows would probably need a few hours/days to become as fluent with MacOS, depending on their computer literacy.

People also complain about the fact that MacOS leverages a lot of FOSS software, while keeping their software closed-source and proprietary. I agree with this criticism, but I don’t think it has anything to do with how usable MacOS is.

I’m not going to start a flame war about mobile OSs because I don’t use a mobile OS as my primary productivity device (and neither should you, but I’m not your mom). The differences between mobile OSs are much smaller, and are virtually all subjective.

You’re welcome.

Having the highest market share doesn’t mean that windows uses logical conventions, it just means that lots of people are accustomed to the conventions that it uses. The vast majority of professionals that I’ve interacted with strongly dislike having to work on a windows machine once they’ve been exposed to anything else.

Off of the top of my head, the illogical conventions that Windows uses are: storing application and OS settings together in an opaque and dangerous, globally-editable database (the registry), obfuscating the way that disks are mounted to the file system, using /cr/lf for new lines, using a backslash for directory mappings, not having anything close to a POSIX compatible scripting language, the stranglehold that “wizards” have on the OS at every level, etc. ad nausium. Most of these issues are due to Microsoft deciding to reinvent the wheel instead of conforming to existing conventions. Some of the differences are only annoying because they pick the exact opposite convention that everyone else uses (path separators, line endings), and some of them are annoying because they’re an objectively worse solution than what exists everywhere else (the registry, installation/uninstallation via wizards spawned by a settings menu).

For basic usability functions, see the lack of functional multi-desktop support 20 years after it became mainstream elsewhere. There is actually no way to switch one monitor to a 2nd workspace without switching every monitor, which makes the feature worse than useless for any serious work. In addition to that, window management in general is completely barebones. Multitasking requires you to either click on icons every time you want to switch a window, or cycle through all of your open windows with alt-tab. The file manager is kludgy and full of opinionated defaults that mysteriously only serve to make it worse at just showing files. The stock terminal emulator is something out of 1995, the new one that can be optionally enabled as a feature is better, but it still exposes a pair of painful options for shells. With WSL, the windows terminal suddenly becomes pretty useful, but having to use a Linux abstraction layer just serves to support the point that windows sucks.

I could go on and on all day, I’m a SWE with a decade of experience using Linux, 3 decades using Windows, and a few years on Mac here and there. I love my windows machine at home… as a gaming console. Having to do serious work in windows is agonizing.

Of the three major desktop operating systems, windows is by far the worst.

The only advantage windows has is that Microsoft’s monopolistic practices in the 90s and 00s made it the de-facto OS for business to furnish employees with, which resulted in it still having better 3rd party software support than the alternatives.

As an OS, it’s hard to use, doesn’t follow logical convention’s, is super opinionated about how users should interact with it, and is missing basic usability features that have been in every other modern OS for 10+ years. It’s awesome as a video game console, barely useable as an adobe or autodesk machine, but sucks as a general purpose OS.

That is false.

Cops aren’t investigating misdemeanor thefts for the same reason that they don’t investigate anything that they’re not forced to. They don’t care.

It’s funny that you blame prop 47 for the fact that cops are refusing to enforce prop 47.

Are you mixed up? Prop 47 reduces jail time for nonviolent and non serious drug and property crimes.

Seems pretty disingenuous to represent that as preventing the police from doing their jobs. Unless you honestly think cops’ job is to maximize the amount of time that drug addicts spend in jail.

Which CA ballot initiative are you talking about stops the police from doing their work?

Sorry but it’s very uncommon for the people who are making a place into somewhere that the underprivileged hate to be the same people that are moving to other places.

If you’ve got the power to drive up housing prices in the state that you currently live in, you’re not going to be in the group that’s moving across the country to have a shot at being successful.

Of course when people can’t earn enough to be successful in CA and move to CO for a better life, the uncreased housing demand in CO is going to bring prices up a bit. But those people aren’t the ones who made CA so expensive. In fact, they’re actively making it less expensive by leaving the state.

Those are great examples of why I, as a progressive Californian, am often really frustrated by California’s laws.

California is very liberal, but we are also very wealthy. So we get a lot of policies that seem to tick liberal boxes on the surface, but do so in a way that is heavily protective of the interests of the wealthy. We get plenty of laws outlawing plastic straws and bags, but nothing to discourage property investors from making it impossible for families to own a home.

I love my state and I’m really happy here, but I also make enough money to be comfortable here. It’s sad that even someone earning the median wage is effectively locked out of the housing market, and is likely forced to live with roommates.

Also, the gun laws are largely performative garbage. So many things on the books that only serve to be a stick in the eye to people who want to lawfully and safely own firearms. Making it a legal requirement for me to configure my AR 15 in a way that makes it awkward to use doesn’t do anything at all to prevent someone from taking an allan key to theirs and spending 30 seconds to make it an “assault weapon”. I’m all for gun laws that make the world a safer place (for example, mandatory free safety classes and free registration for handgun), so it’s super frustrating to see all of the laws that we have that don’t even seem like they’re intended to make an actual difference.

I think this answer misses the mark a little bit with regards to the context of what it is about capitalism that causes so much controversy.

People who critique capitalism aren’t usually advocating for an economic system completely devoid of private ownership (though some are). They’re often raising issue with a certain type of capital ownership.

Say you’re the owner of a sprocket manufacturing corporation, and I’m a worker. You yourself don’t work, you just inherited a sprocket empire from your grandfather, who founded that sprocket empire using funds from selling his emerald mines that were worked by slaves.

I put in an honest days work 5 days a week, and in those 5 days, I produce $2000 worth of sprockets. It costs $10 per week to maintain the sprocket machines, $10 per week for electrical power to cover my sprocket making activities, $30 per week to repay the loan that was taken to build the factory, and $50 per week in other miscellaneous expenses needed to allow me to make sprockets.

That means that of the $2000 worth of sprockets I produced, $1900 of profit was generated.

You pay me a salary of $500 per week, and collect $1400 per week from my (and each other laborer’s) work.

The point of criticism is that you’re accumulating wealth, which other people had to work to produce, without doing any work yourself. You’re simply a parasitic freeloader on society because of an arbitrary concept of “ownership” over something that you don’t use personally.

Some responses to these criticisms include the following:

“You should just negotiate for a higher salary, or go work somewhere that’s paying more.”

This is the example from classical economic theory, and there are a whole handful of reasons that it doesn’t work. The voluntary exchange between a worker and a capitalist (meaning one who owns the means of production) isn’t actually (fully) voluntary. A worker who finds his working conditions unsatisfactory can’t reasonably just choose not to work. The threat of financial ruin, homelessness, and starvation act as a metaphorical gun to the head of the laborer giving the capitalist a significant negotiating advantage.

Add to this the fact that it’s been theorized and demonstrated that capitalism tends toward regulatory capture and monopoly, and you have a situation where the means of production become more and more concentrated in the hands of a group of elites, while the workers’ bargenaining power becomes weaker and weaker due to less competition in the labor market.

“The capitalist deserves the profits that they extract because of [this work that they’ve done]”

If the owner of the factory is functioning as a floor manager, they should be paid a fair salary for being a floor manager. If they’re working as a director, they are entitled to a director’s salary. These critiques of capitalism aren’t saying that there should be no hierarchy in an enterprise (though some alternatives to capitalism do call for that). Just that the only people who are entitled to the wealth from something that’s produced are those who are working to produce it.

This same thing goes for other forms of capital ownership too, by the way. Landlords are a classical example. I’ve heard it claimed that landlords are entitled to their rents because many of them work so hard at repairs and managing their properties. They’re totally entitled to be compensated for any labor they engage in, but the wealth that they extract from tenants far exceeds the value of the labor that they supply. Which is kind of the whole point of rental property, if “investors” couldn’t extract a passive income (income in excess of work performed), they wouldn’t be buying homes and then renting them out.