"that stuff runs UNIX"
osx and ios have an very old UNIX legacy but as they currently stand are extremely restrictive walled gardens completey controlled by a single giant avaricious corporation. If you were true to your ideas you'd be running Linux which is open, open source and btw is most popular in Europe, eg. being the OS used by the public sector in Germany.
"doesn’t disrupt one’s concentration with modal windows"
What? please give an example. Linux's UI can be configured however u want.
"and runs circles around Windows desktops performance-wise"
That is just nonsensical. To talk about performance you need to be comparing 2 specific things. Which things are you talking about? As an example, heres two things I'm comparing; For fun once at work we compared benchmarks between two new laptops each costing about €1400. My colleague had a macbook pro, I had a msi gs60. My laptop scored about 3 times as much in cpu performance and 5 times as much in a unigine valley graphics becnchmark.
"The early ‘90’s computing paradigm with a lone desktop PC user and application isn’t cutting it any more" Sure things are going that way, but if you think most users are ready to do everything via web-apps now then u are living in a very rarefied bubble. photoshop, autocad, 3dsmax, ableton, an endless list of specialised, high performance demand, software for professionals, theres a long way to go before that kind of thing can run in a browser.
Also how is iOS os OSX somehow more web-app friendly? Youre much more restricted on them on what browser you can run and how u can configure it than on linux or even windows. html5 canvas doesnt even work properly on iOS.
If you were true to your ideas you'd be running Linux
I would rather drop dead. I’m a UNIX guy, Solaris guy to be precise and that means illumos and SmartOS in particular. I value stability, formal specifications, the ability to introspect the system, a system which can self heal and is paranoid about correctness of operation and data. A system which is always engineered to be backwards compatible. Exactly everything that SmartOS is and GNU/Linux isn’t! illumos and SmartOS are using CDDL which is by and large less restrictive than the GPL, so GNU/Linux stands for everything I fight against. There are no words in any of the languages I speak which can express my hate of GNU and GNU/Linux.
As for macOS and iOS, I don’t care about open because I neither intend nor want to tinker with it: I want to pay, bring home, turn on and use. As long as all the hardware works, the thing is responsive and I have xterm and ssh to log into my SmartOS datacenter, I’m good to go. Not going to waste my life with GNU/Linux, I do that too much at work aleady. Simply not going to happen.
What I mean by responsiveness is that my 2013 MacBook Air is usable instantaneously while my barely a year old work laptop with Windows 7 needs half an hour to get to the point where it is able to launch an application. Then I launch it, but since it has other apps starting in the background as I’m working they keep popping up their windows and taking the focus away, interrupting my thought and workflow. A macOS app will never appropriate the focus, nor will subwindows be modal, forcing me to close them first if I want to get at the data in the main window. Windows is just crap.
