As for Microsoft, I've never found it to "just work". I've daily driven Windows machines because work has given them to me but I always try to get a Mac instead

As for Microsoft, I've never found it to "just work". I've daily driven Windows machines because work has given them to me but I always try to get a Mac instead. Windows just breaks constantly and with silly things like using Windows Hello breaks Outlook and can cause it to go into a log{in,out} loop. For OSX, I mostly agree but think "just works" is a bit too strong of a statement too. There are definitely fewer errors but they aren't non-existent. These seem to have dramatically increased with OSX 26 as well as the fact that the UX has significantly changed and in ways that contradict how things worked before. I get frequent calls from my parents. We'll set aside how often I'm searching how to do things and my absolute hatred for how little support there actually is online (good fucking god how utterly useless are support.apple.com and discussions.apple.com?!?!)[0] I've also handed them linux computers. Truth is that they can't tell the difference. But it also depends on what type of user your parents are. Mine just browse the internet so they already know to use Firefox and they're good to go. Probably the most confusing thing for them would be to navigate the app store (I have no expectation for them to use the CLI) and understand what apps they need because the names are different from what they're used to. I think people under-appreciate how big of an impact this type of lock-in actually is. Search is still a pretty difficult problem and frankly older people don't even understand very basic search. (My mom still types in www.google.com every time she wants to search. Yes, I've showed her she can just type her query into the url bar...). That said, they also switched to DDG on their own accord (I did not tell them). [0] On linux 95 times out of 100 I can find what I'm looking for with a search. But that's biased by years of experience and knowing what to search. Though I can use the same patterns as I would with linux, swapping out the tool for the OSX version and I will not get good results. If you want to see an example try searching for how to print out your network SSID from the CLI. You can even ask an LLM! In fact, I no longer know how to do this, even with sudo. I specifically mean "no longer" because I used to be able to... And let's be honest, what fucking reason is there to prevent one from seeing the SSID in the CLI? It's not private information. I can see it from the GUI no problem!