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As much as we have a lot of contempt for Apple's walled-garden thing and refuse to buy another Apple product again if we can help it, we are forced to admit that macOS is a really, really nice operating system for a power user, and in ways you need years with it to appreciate.
It's also, you know, full of weird quirks and issues, painful in all sorts of ways, just like all the other operating systems. We're… almost ambidextrous, we are equally used to macOS, Windows and various flavours of Linux, we alternate between them constantly, they all suck.
But tragically I think we like macOS the best of all of them, because it just has so many little things that are really fantastic if you're a creative user? Even if Apple's entire App Store strategy and attitude to backwards-compatibility strangle creativity, so it's love-hate.
Today, this was brought to you by QuickTime. A word you probably have contempt for if you're a Windows user, with good reason. But on macOS, this is a bundled app, and it is simply the best no-frills built-in audio/video/screen-recorder app on any OS we have used.
Imagine the old Windows “Sound Recorder” app, if it:
• also recorded video
• also recorded your screen
• made it easy to select which video/audio sources you want to capture
• had useful editing (good UI for trimming the start and end of a clip)
• was… pleasant?
One of the reasons macOS has such a strong footing among creative users, by the way, is that its audio subsystem “just works” and has the high quality and low latency needed for creative applications. Linux users will be shocked by the former, and Windows users by the latter.
(Obviously audio works by default on Windows, but the Windows audio subsystem sucks so hard for creative use that if you actually want to do music production, you have to buy special hardware and use special software that, together with special “ASIO” drivers, bypass it entirely)
There's of course a hundred or a thousand other things we like about macOS that make it all feel joined-up. Like… the touchpad/laptop experience is the best of any OS, the high-DPI experience is the best of any OS, the Terminal, Finder and basically any app play well together…
Like, did you know that on macOS, every single app you have open that has some kind of “file” it's editing (text, video, image, DAW project, even a folder, whatever) represents this with a tiny little icon in the titlebar that you can click and drag into other apps? It rules.
This particular thing is so goddamn useful. You never have the problem of “oh goddamnit how do I find this file/directory/whatever that I have open in some other app”. It's especially useful if you're a heavy Terminal user, like we are of course. You really suffer without it!
Right, also: the Mac keyboard layouts are different to the standard Windows “PC” ones and the weird proprietary Linux ones, and not only are they the most comfortable to use on a laptop-sized keyboard, they are full of modifier-key goodies that make being non-monolingual liveable
@hikari are there weird proprietary linux keyboards? TIL!
@esoteric_programmer linux users generally just use standard PC layouts, physically speaking, but the default bindings for e.g. the Alt Gr key do weird things on a typical Linux distro, different to what they do on Windows and macOS, and there's a laundry list of weird keyboard layouts that are supported because i guess some guy somewhere wanted them once, it's a real mess