MacOS vs Windows, XFCE4, Plasma, & Gnome
VPN Script for FreeBSD, Debian, & Ubuntu

This is an opinion piece.

We live in a free society and it is our right to question what quirks manufacturers force upon us to use their equipment.

On the issue of navigation. 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.

The other difference which I consider a severe fault is 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 one was different would be the annoying one :)

If you need to get the "normal" menu at the top of the screen you have to either close the application upi are using or click the finder again, its just an extra unnecessary click. It's just clunky. Clicking on the red button doesn't shutdown the app completely, you have to use close or right click and close on the dock. Let's not bring up android :)

I do like the fact 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" they control us. 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.

Variety is the spice of life and if everyone did things the same way the world would be a less interesting place and improvements wouldn't be made (though I still think the Apple desktop is on the wrong track).

There are probably an equal number of annoying quirky (it just stopped working) things about Windows. For example if you add many VPN connections in Windows it doesn't sort them alphabetically, seems like it would be easy enough to do. I have more than 40 different VPN profiles that I use to assist clients and I wrote a vpn handler for my unix systems. The VPN list is sorted and entering a partial string that matches a name if it is a unique match connects. It works on FreeBSD, Debian, and Ubuntu once the vpn dependencies are installed, and generates an ovpn file to connect to Mikrotik routers and the ovpn file can be modified for other routers as needed. The code is a bit messy but it works MULTIPLE VPN PROFILE MANAGER, modify as needed. I just put it in my home/bin directory and chmod 740.

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