On the Mac side, it’s a toss up between the platinum interface of Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X Tiger. With that said, I have a work-issued MacBook Pro running Golden Gate as my daily driver, and Liquid Glass is alright. It’s not what I’d prefer if I had a choice, but it’s not a dramatic departure from previous versions of macOS. A Cheetah or Puma Mac OS X user should be able to navigate Golden Gate with ease, mostly.
Expose + Cmd-tab/Cmd-backtick being separated == a gap that Linux/Windows have somehow never managed to close in 20+ years now.
Apple was actually last to the party on that. Linux had virtual desktops for years at that point, and Windows had them as well through Microsoft PowerToys. I’m pretty sure I was running it on Windows 2000.
In the end you’ll spend a significant amount of your time trying to “get back” to where you just where (that alt-tab, a possible savior for this in all other OSs, doesn’t work at all on Mac just adds to the UX mess)
I get that that behaviour shouldn’t just be changed but I would appreciate it if there were another key combination that would allow cycling through all windows of an app.
In the end though I just feel like it's extra cognitive load to have to think about two different shortcuts to do what is in many ways the same thing.
Say, I've got two browser windows open and a code editor open. I'm wanting to flip through the browser windows to check on things while I work in the code editor. In reality I'm just wanting to juggle the three windows, but depending on if I'm wanting to go from browser to browser it's a different shortcut than if I'm wanting to go from editor to browser. And there's a good chance I'll then need to swap from editor to browser, then issue a different shortcut to go from that browser to the other. When I could have just hit the same shortcut twice.
I've just never really encountered a situation where I've felt like it added something, but I'm constantly having cases where its more annoying.
The 40-year-deep-history Mac answer to workflows like that with a small working set with frequent cross-app-one-to-other-switching IMO is mouse-based navigation + spatial partially-overlapping windows, but this seems to be an extremely foreign concept to Windows/*nix users that grew up on full-screen-maximize or tiling. So I don't think is particularly likely to be adopted by anyone who doesn't already have it burned into their brains at this point. :) There's a lot of these old Mac bones still baked into the OS (e.g. if you have a folder on your desktop, and double click it, and move it, then close it, it'll open to the location you moved it to next time. And that memory is separate from that for another folder on your desktop. Though some of the follow-on behaviors have changed (opening folders in already-open windows used to behave similarly, opening new windows by default).
The 20-year-history version is my own personal lord and savior: Exposé hot corners.
Spaces and no-mouse navigation are still in many ways comparative afterthoughts to mouse-based/spatial workflows. Though as someone with 30+ year of Mac muscle memories in my head, the switching-windows-vs-switching-app concept and awareness of "where" I am relative to it is pretty embedded.
The quantity of requests for how to disable Liquid Glass on Apple Discussions is staggering. [2]
[1]https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/macos-golden-gate-liqui...
This eventually becomes awkwardly precise complaints about information density and general change; but the underlying issue is I want to go fast and the system says no
Like GP, I despise the new design. I'll say the old design was pretty peak design. Windows looked like windows. Buttons like buttons. With accessibility tweaks (for transparency and borders) I could make it very, very usable.
This new thing is a crime against UI. Every icon now sits in a circle, and takes up % more room as a result. Because … it's pretty? It isn't pretty.
I upgraded my laptop thinking I was going to develop an app and that I'd need to be on the latest design. I ended up developing a TUI so I needn't have bothered. Every time I see my partner's laptop, still on Sequoia, I shed a little tear.
I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.
I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.