Top menu does sound like a reasonable compromise until one has to switch between the bottom left corner of the screen and the menu in the top left enough times. I'm all for efficient use of vertical space - I am one of those who still remove the top tab bar and use tree-style-tabs, but in practice I think there is a reason why most of the world allows the menu to follow the thing it is linked to.
Also note that these menus doesn't add up on other systems either. I only "waste" space for one menu line on my Linux or Windows applications too.
> snap/flatpack/Docker
Meanwhile on Mac I still have to use AppZapper.
> A feeling that the desktop/Finder and UX is evolving and respecting habits rather than being restarted with every release
You are probably comparing to Gnome and Unity here I guess, not KDE 5 or Windows?
> State of the art commercial apps for media production rather than 90s apps struggling for compatibility as devs turn to new playgrounds
This varies with job description I think. In my field one of the reasons why I still hesitate to get a Mac next month - despite its many advantages - is the fact that so many open source programs I use looked ugly on Mac last I checked and some weren't available at all. Meanwhile on Linux I can just ap-get them or in Windows I can apt-get them in WSL and run them, GUI and all inside Windows. That is kind of magic!
> Top menu does sound like a reasonable compromise until one has to switch between the bottom left corner of the screen and the menu in the top left enough times.
A top menu was reasonable for the original 9” Macintosh display of 512×342 pixels. (The original Macintosh could not even multi-task, and the visual components of the operating system were not designed for multiple programs at once.) The top menu was always close enough, and famously used Fitts’s law to its advantage. The NeXT system (17” display, 1120×832 pixels) realized that something even closer to the mouse pointer is wherever the mouse pointer happens to be right now, and added a right mouse button to the NeXT mouse; this button was completely dedicated to showing the menu, and was not used for “right-clicking” anything.
Top menu does sound like a reasonable compromise until one has to switch between the bottom left corner of the screen and the menu in the top left enough times. I'm all for efficient use of vertical space - I am one of those who still remove the top tab bar and use tree-style-tabs, but in practice I think there is a reason why most of the world allows the menu to follow the thing it is linked to.
Also note that these menus doesn't add up on other systems either. I only "waste" space for one menu line on my Linux or Windows applications too.
> snap/flatpack/Docker
Meanwhile on Mac I still have to use AppZapper.
> A feeling that the desktop/Finder and UX is evolving and respecting habits rather than being restarted with every release
You are probably comparing to Gnome and Unity here I guess, not KDE 5 or Windows?
> State of the art commercial apps for media production rather than 90s apps struggling for compatibility as devs turn to new playgrounds
This varies with job description I think. In my field one of the reasons why I still hesitate to get a Mac next month - despite its many advantages - is the fact that so many open source programs I use looked ugly on Mac last I checked and some weren't available at all. Meanwhile on Linux I can just ap-get them or in Windows I can apt-get them in WSL and run them, GUI and all inside Windows. That is kind of magic!