I really miss the days of a rock solid release every ~4ish~ 3ish years - when it was ready.
This treadmill yearly release cycle of half finished OS's released not because it was a good collection of well built features ready to be released, rather released because it was time for a release, have done nothing but tarnish the OS.
It's still the best UNIX desktop, end of story. The difference between macOS and Windows though isn't as big as it was when I switched 20 years ago, and most of the gap was closed by macOS getting worse and not by Windows getting better. In the current state, given the existence and relative decent usability of WSL2, given the choice today rather than twenty years ago, I may have never switched.
The thing that really gets me is just reliability. In the early aughts when I asked macOS to do something there was no question, it would work. That was the excuse for having far less verbose output of what's happening. You didn't need it because everything worked. Now we still have total lack of output of what's happening, and things just fail silently all the time. It's become a very frustrating OS to try to love.
if we’re going to make nonsequitur Apple comparisons, we should note that it was compatible with almost no existing programs, unlike Apple’s contemporary offerings
There's probably quite a few games and programs that didn't run on NT, but I haven't actually encountered any of those for NT4. I had great memories playing unreal tournament on some NT4 machines in a computer lab (while we were supposed to be taking lessons).
FWIW Win2k (aka NT5) compatibility was great. I lived on it for a while before I completely migrated away from Windows ~2002.
For all their flaws, Microsoft took compatibility very seriously back then, I suspect the "incompatibility" part is a bit overblown and didn't affect as many users as we might perceive..
This treadmill yearly release cycle of half finished OS's released not because it was a good collection of well built features ready to be released, rather released because it was time for a release, have done nothing but tarnish the OS.
It's still the best UNIX desktop, end of story. The difference between macOS and Windows though isn't as big as it was when I switched 20 years ago, and most of the gap was closed by macOS getting worse and not by Windows getting better. In the current state, given the existence and relative decent usability of WSL2, given the choice today rather than twenty years ago, I may have never switched.
The thing that really gets me is just reliability. In the early aughts when I asked macOS to do something there was no question, it would work. That was the excuse for having far less verbose output of what's happening. You didn't need it because everything worked. Now we still have total lack of output of what's happening, and things just fail silently all the time. It's become a very frustrating OS to try to love.