MacOS vs Windows, XFCE4, Plasma, & Gnome

My favorite desktop is xfce because it is easily configurable and lightweight.

I have two Dell servers one running FreeBSD the other Debian both with xfce4 desktop, plasma is ok, gnome heavy and not as configurable. As I work in IT I also frequently work on Windows and Apple devices, and on all of these desktops the mouse direction is opposite of Apple's natural scrolling. I turn off natural scrolling, and I can understand how some would want their track pad to go in the direction they are accustomed. Track pad scrolling should be configurable independent of the mouse in MacOS without needing to add other software.

I don't like the way Apple does menus. When opening an application the application controls should be on the application window (close proximity for convenience) rather than the at top of the screen. I was trying to root my virtual mac yesterday, following the steps outlined by apple, all the step were "within the window", and then I spent 20 minutes hunting around for the next step till I realized it was in the menu at the top of the screen. I find this annoying and I haven't used any other desktops that handle menus this way, though I guess if they all did it the apple way and the one that was different would be the annoying one :)

If you need to get to the "main" menu at the top of the screen you have to either close the application or click the finder again, its just an extra unnecessary click. Also clicking on the red button on the window decoration doesn't shutdown the app completely, you need to use close or right click and close on the dock. I would rather have more resources free at the expense of slightly slower app startup. I do use the "close all" button on android :)

I like that MacOS is based on *nix but I don't like the fact that many things are locked down and not configurable. In the name of "safety" access to the OS is limited unless you go to extra effort. I have a macbook running Catalina with raid0 .. took me a long time to get that to work because "it is not supported" - but it is.

There an equal number of annoying quirky (it just stopped working and then started working again) things about Windows. For example if you add many VPN connections in Windows it doesn't sort them alphabetically. I have more than 40 different VPN profiles that I use to assist clients and wrote a vpn handler for my FreeBSD and Debian systems. The VPN list is sorted and entering a partial string that matches a name if it is a unique match connects.

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