This is an informative and interesting comment but I would like to reply to a few points.
> Programmers typically do not know desktop tech well. They could out-program me drunk, but they were not techies. It's a different skill.
As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s this comment is strange as hell. In the first place possibly because if you weren't at a point in time a techie you weren't liable to be a computer user let alone be programming one. But honestly compared to programming being an expert computer user is such a microscopic topic comparatively. It's like saying although he was a master automotive engineer who oversaw the development of countless cars he never actually learned to park one. I know a lot of people are rather bad at it but its really a microscopic topic.
Regarding finder and cut and paste I was curious so I looked this up thinking to find people complaining instead I found this. Seems like you can "move" something to another folder with a only slightly different shortcut. This doesn't seem much different than cut and paste. It's not like the cut operation instantly deletes it from the present folder on any other desktop interface. If not paste follows it just doesn't get moved.
> Therefore most of the desktops for Linux are half-baked rip-offs of Windows that don't implement the clever stuff
Gnome seems more like a rip off of Mac, and the majority of other environments have their own "clever stuff". If anything Windows 10 looks more like a rip off of some of the better features from Mac/Linux after they tried and badly failed to go their own way with Windows 8.
> As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s this comment is strange as hell.
I was working from the late 1980s, and living with a professional developer by about 7Y later.
It surprised me a very great deal as well, but I 100% stand by this observation. Your follow-on statements are entirely on the same theme:
> But honestly compared to programming being an expert computer user is such a microscopic topic comparatively.
To quote Pauli, "that is not only not right, it is not even wrong."
It's also highly patronising and frankly offensive.
As a professional tech-support person from the late 1980s for about 25 years, I and my peers and fellow pros in this field knew many many times more about the general spread of desktop and server OSes, their compatibilities and more to the point their differences and incompatibilities, than 95% (not a random guess, a genuine estimate) of the developers I ever met.
And the majority of those developers though the reverse too. Many developers just assume that they are the gods of IT, shaping the raw clay into systems.
They are mostly completely wrong, but it is the pervasive belief.
> It's like saying although he was a master automotive engineer who oversaw the development of countless cars he never actually learned to park one.
That is in fact almost correct, yes.
One, yes, it is the case, yes, if overstated. It is more equivalent to saying "most car designers are not also racing drivers" while sneaking in a dig that says that racing isn't a job and racing driver isn't a real job, but just a stupid hobby for idiots.
Hi. In this metaphor, I'm a racing driver. Nice to meet you. I know how to get your car to do things you never dreamt of, I know how to customise it, and I also have spent longer than your lifetime fixing up other people's cars, teaching them to drive, and winning races.
No, in fact, I do not think it is reasonable for you, as a car designer, to mock my work. I think it is rude and ignorant.
Yes, I know many car designers. Yes, I know more about how their cars perform than the designers. Yes, I know how to drive those cars better than their designers. Yes, I can fix them too, but I would not presume to tell a professional mechanic that they are doing it wrong.
But if you wanted to know what was wrong with a car, then YES I would definitely rate the opinions of racing drivers and pro mechanics over the designers, yes. 100% of the time, by far.
In fact, if I wanted to know what was wrong with a car, I'd never ask the designer and wouldn't be terribly interested in their opinions.
Sadly, FOSS is the domain only of amateur designers-cum-builders-cum-racers-cum-repair-bodgers. There are almost no pros in this entire sector and they have zero respect for the real pros in the commercial market, who know 1000 times more than anyone in FOSS.
> I know a lot of people are rather bad at it but its really a microscopic topic.
More patronising rubbish.
Newsflash: the paid professionals deploying any complex machines know more about that software, how it works, how it doesn't work, how it fails, and how it breaks than the people who designed it.
This is true of everything from bicycles to cars to operating systems to desktops.
> Regarding finder and cut and paste I was curious so I looked this up thinking to find people complaining instead I found this.
Good. Glad you took my suggestion.
> Seems like you can "move" something to another folder with a only slightly different shortcut.
Deep sigh
The reason I suggested people reading my comment look this up is because I already knew this, and that's because I do in fact know my job and what I'm talking about.
I know you can move stuff. I know this because I've been deploying, training on, and fixing Apple Mac kit since 1988, and I was good at my job. I left it because 25 years of dealing with rather stupid customers is too much for anyone to have to bear.
I picked this example because it is a good example. Macs do have the functionality and have done since 1984.
However Windows only got a poor version of it in 1995, but that is all most users know, and when they find Macs don't do it that way, their response is not to find out the Mac way, it is to complain that Macs don't work.
> Programmers typically do not know desktop tech well. They could out-program me drunk, but they were not techies. It's a different skill.
As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s this comment is strange as hell. In the first place possibly because if you weren't at a point in time a techie you weren't liable to be a computer user let alone be programming one. But honestly compared to programming being an expert computer user is such a microscopic topic comparatively. It's like saying although he was a master automotive engineer who oversaw the development of countless cars he never actually learned to park one. I know a lot of people are rather bad at it but its really a microscopic topic.
Regarding finder and cut and paste I was curious so I looked this up thinking to find people complaining instead I found this. Seems like you can "move" something to another folder with a only slightly different shortcut. This doesn't seem much different than cut and paste. It's not like the cut operation instantly deletes it from the present folder on any other desktop interface. If not paste follows it just doesn't get moved.
https://www.howtogeek.com/735756/how-to-cut-and-paste-files-...
> Therefore most of the desktops for Linux are half-baked rip-offs of Windows that don't implement the clever stuff
Gnome seems more like a rip off of Mac, and the majority of other environments have their own "clever stuff". If anything Windows 10 looks more like a rip off of some of the better features from Mac/Linux after they tried and badly failed to go their own way with Windows 8.