ALL other user interfaces by ALL other vendors suck. I don't understand your enthusiasm for aqua (I've got a mac) but I understand what you're sayin in a gener

ALL other user interfaces by ALL other vendors suck. I don't understand your enthusiasm for aqua (I've got a mac) but I understand what you're sayin in a general sense because I came to a similar conclusion about ten years ago. If this is a big thing for you, I'd recommend the path I took after Be folded. Accept that complex user interfaces have bad tradeoffs (platform dependence, inflexibility). Find a full-screen tty you like (I use iterm because with apple+key + enter it goes full screen and gets rid of aqua) and return to living in the habitat of your ancestors! A few things are inherently visual: paint programs, 3d games and movie editing. Everything that is not can be done effectively on the console. These interactions are often far superior to GUIs. There's a learning curve. But once you're over it you'll have enormous power at your disposal and won't ever get locked in again. Two things make this far easier than it has been previously: 1) Python. The standard library contains everything you'd want to do to push a system around. You can hammer out powerful tools in python in a casual manner and at a speed that has not been available to mere mortals before. You can get it on a variety of platforms. 2) Web browsesr. It's now easy to get high-quality web browsers on any platform you'd want to use. Where you do need to produce a GUI, you can knock up a trim webapp with html and forms.