The low-friction you mention is probably one the thing most non-Apple users don’t get as, when it works (which is not always the case but often is), a Mac is like butter smooth and help so much getting things done. Linux is not there yet but when I started considered and testing it I was was surprised how usable it was already and, at least, in exchange of that tad more of frictions we do get back that control we have lost to Apple. And that’s a compromise I willing to live with — and so are my older eyes that can’t read ant-sized texts anymore ;)
Yeah, even though the older I get the more I appreciate how macOS for the most part “just works” while still being a UN*X system at heart, I’m just so fed up with how each release is more opaque and less documented than the last, with more services that collect your data and send it to Apple even if you opt out. Also, because fixing bugs and incremental development isn’t sexy and marketing needs something cool, each OS release comes with an oodle of half-finished and buggy whizz-bang features that ultimately never really get polished, and end up sort of quietly abandoned and left to gather dust once Apple’s dev teams move on to working on the big OS release’s whizz-bangs, which often sort of overlap with previous whizz-bangs without actually leveraging them. So for example, instead of incremental improvements to Spaces and Mission Control – the two window management systems we already had – we got Stage Manager which initially didn’t even work with Spaces, and which nobody seems to have found a good use for yet, all the while multimonitor support somehow manages to get worse with every release, color calibration support was completely fucked much to the chagrin of visual arts folks, that audio balance drift bug is 10 years old, visual accessibility’s gotten worse, and so on and so on.
It never was great, imho. For some time, I even considered using Windows in place of macOS (since it worked better to make text larger), I even invested in one of Microsoft laptop but I ended up giving it away as I just could not stand all the incoherence within Windows itself (it is such a sad state of affair). Also, I’m not a fan of their telemetry.
The one issue I have not decided on so far, in regard to a full switch, is the phone.
Hah, yeah, as much as I gripe about problems with macOS and Apple’s data collection habits or the occasional jank in Linux, using Windows feels so painful and intrusive that it should probably be covered under the Geneva Conventions, although part of that definitely just comes from the fact that I haven’t owned a Windows system since Win8 was a thing so my Windows encounters are pretty sporadic. It’s honestly surprising that the accessibility story is actually better in Windows, I really wasn’t expecting that.
I’m in the same boat as far as phones go. Android’s UX somehow manages to irritate the everliving fuck out of me, so even a “degoogled” Android version is a non-starter for me, but there aren’t too many choices out there anymore (yay consolidation.) Sailfish OS is one that springs to mind, but as a project it feels more undead than really alive, and it’s closed source too.
Oh yeah, and I just realized I’ve been a dum idjit and completely forgotten to mention the slightly hacky way you can enlarge some UI fonts that might help y’all @feoh@lemmy.ml & @Libb@jlai.lu.
You may be familiar with this already, but by editing some system preference keys “manually”, you can crank up the default font sizes that apps, the OS, and some native UI elements use beyond what System Settings lets you do – both allowing for bigger font sizes in apps and the OS itself (but which can lead to UI bugs), and allowing changing eg. label or tooltip font sizes separately. This can only work for native apps, but even then sometimes it only sort of works at best and especially SwiftUI seems to just completely ignore these (because of course it fucking does).
You can either use Tinkertool which also allows you to export and import the current state of all the configs that Tinkertool manages, and that’s pretty handy when you’re fiddling with your configs. It does eg. limit the system font size to max 24 for whatever reason though, so if you want to go over that limit you can hop in the Terminal and use
defaultsto add/change the preferences:(All of these take an int value)
NSFixedPitchFontSizeNSSystemFontSizeNSMessageFontSizeNSLabelFontSizeNSToolTipsFontSizeNSTitleBarFontSizeNSPaletteFontSizeSo for example to set the system font size to 15, you’d use
defaults write -g NSSystemFontSize -int 15If you want to restore the default value I think it’s enough to just delete the key(s) you’ve changed: eg.
defaults delete -g NSSystemFontSize.Caveat emptor, though: this is of course completely unsupported and you’ll probably run into UI funk depending on which sizes you change and by how much. For example
NSLabelFontSizedefaults to 10, and I’ve increased it to 12 which mostly works but some labels can get truncated if the label’s container doesn’t scale with the label font size which many apps assume will never change. It’s definitely not an ideal solution or even a good one by any means because UIs do kinda start borking once you change these too much, but might be worth a shot anyhow?