I have to disagree that macOS has a good GUI. I have used Ubuntu with KDE Plasma (Ubuntu) extensively in the past, but when I started a new job a year ago I was supplied a 2019 MBP. This year has been my first Mac experience.
I find a lot of things annoying. I'm mostly used to it now and don't mind the day to day experience, but it was jarring and I know it's not ideal.
* If I want to maximize a window, I have to hover over the green button and then select 'Zoom' from the drop down menu. So it takes multiple seconds to maximize. (I have noticed for a long time throughout university and employment that it is common style for Mac users to have many windows floating around, and to never maximize.)
* If you decide to use 'Full Screen' / 'tiling', notifications don't work while you are in full screen mode. Maybe there is a way to change this or maybe some people find this desirable.
* Because of how long the green button hovering takes, I tried to setup keyboard shortcuts for maximizing windows and also for "Move Window to Left Side of Screen" and move to the right. The shortcuts randomly don't work for me, so I no longer use them.
* If I drag a window to the left edge of the screen, it doesn't snap to take up the left half of my screen. Again, have to do the annoying green hover.
This is all in contrast to KDE where it was simple to snap windows onto sides of the screen, or into corners, or to maximize windows. It never failed. Continuing...
* On KDE I could setup a separate 'task bar' for each monitor with those boxes/buttons that show up on the bottom of your screen for each window you have open on that monitor. So I can switch between windows independently on each monitor. On MacOS you can only have one dock. When you click a dock icon, it brings the window to the front on each display, possibly blocking something you had in the front on a display.
* When you have multiple displays on MacOS, moving your mouse around in the bottom area of the screen can move the dock to that display. This is easy to accidentally trigger, and sometimes it's hard to do this 'mouse wiggle' on the other display to put it back. That is, I have spent 10+ seconds wiggling my mouse in different ways to put my dock back on the display I want it on.
* Oh, back to full screen mode. If you are in full screen mode and you try to do something toward the top of the window, the macOS menu bar drops down and blocks you, and you have to wait for it to go away and then carefully go for the button you were aiming for. (Imagine flinging your mouse up to the address bar of your browser and then being blocked by the menu bar for multiple seconds each time.)
By the way, about your list... Emacs is good and works great on the Mac. Mapping the Caps Lock key to be Ctrl (in the system settings, not just for Emacs) and using sticky keys has completely mitigated any 'accessibility' concerns / sore pinky for me.
Lisps I like a lot too. I did the first few chapters of SICP quite a while ago, which gave me a great feel for recursion and probably some other things. I like Clojure a lot and learnt it super quickly by reading this book free online. The Emacs setup works pretty good. https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and-true/
The MBP display was my first high-res / high-dpi. It looks great. Then I tried plugging my mac into multiple different 1080 monitors I wanted to use with it. Looked absolutely terrible. I thought it was broken. Couldn't find any fix online. Now I do notice how much worse (than retina) 1080 looks on Windows and Linux, but I'm pretty sure on Mac it is much much worse for some reason. I bought a 24" 4k monitor from LG for $300 bucks, and it looks about identical to my MBP display. I'm very happy with it. The smaller screen size helps keep high DPI, so I definitely don't see any pixels. Happy Holidays!
Fully agree that MacOS is not great. It relies too much on hidden knowledge. It claims to be intuitive, but IMO the discoverability of things is just broken. I don't stumble on a nice way to do something I have to google how do I fix this annoying thing.
It may be fine for people who literally have used macs their entire lives, but as a windows and linux user before using a mac, it is super frustrating at times.
Sounds like you really need an app called Magnet ($2 on the App Store). It completely solved the snapping/window maximization problem for me. I think it should ship as part of the OS.
I find a lot of things annoying. I'm mostly used to it now and don't mind the day to day experience, but it was jarring and I know it's not ideal.
* If I want to maximize a window, I have to hover over the green button and then select 'Zoom' from the drop down menu. So it takes multiple seconds to maximize. (I have noticed for a long time throughout university and employment that it is common style for Mac users to have many windows floating around, and to never maximize.)
* If you decide to use 'Full Screen' / 'tiling', notifications don't work while you are in full screen mode. Maybe there is a way to change this or maybe some people find this desirable.
* Because of how long the green button hovering takes, I tried to setup keyboard shortcuts for maximizing windows and also for "Move Window to Left Side of Screen" and move to the right. The shortcuts randomly don't work for me, so I no longer use them.
* If I drag a window to the left edge of the screen, it doesn't snap to take up the left half of my screen. Again, have to do the annoying green hover.
This is all in contrast to KDE where it was simple to snap windows onto sides of the screen, or into corners, or to maximize windows. It never failed. Continuing...
* On KDE I could setup a separate 'task bar' for each monitor with those boxes/buttons that show up on the bottom of your screen for each window you have open on that monitor. So I can switch between windows independently on each monitor. On MacOS you can only have one dock. When you click a dock icon, it brings the window to the front on each display, possibly blocking something you had in the front on a display.
* When you have multiple displays on MacOS, moving your mouse around in the bottom area of the screen can move the dock to that display. This is easy to accidentally trigger, and sometimes it's hard to do this 'mouse wiggle' on the other display to put it back. That is, I have spent 10+ seconds wiggling my mouse in different ways to put my dock back on the display I want it on.
* Oh, back to full screen mode. If you are in full screen mode and you try to do something toward the top of the window, the macOS menu bar drops down and blocks you, and you have to wait for it to go away and then carefully go for the button you were aiming for. (Imagine flinging your mouse up to the address bar of your browser and then being blocked by the menu bar for multiple seconds each time.)
By the way, about your list... Emacs is good and works great on the Mac. Mapping the Caps Lock key to be Ctrl (in the system settings, not just for Emacs) and using sticky keys has completely mitigated any 'accessibility' concerns / sore pinky for me.
Lisps I like a lot too. I did the first few chapters of SICP quite a while ago, which gave me a great feel for recursion and probably some other things. I like Clojure a lot and learnt it super quickly by reading this book free online. The Emacs setup works pretty good. https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and-true/
The MBP display was my first high-res / high-dpi. It looks great. Then I tried plugging my mac into multiple different 1080 monitors I wanted to use with it. Looked absolutely terrible. I thought it was broken. Couldn't find any fix online. Now I do notice how much worse (than retina) 1080 looks on Windows and Linux, but I'm pretty sure on Mac it is much much worse for some reason. I bought a 24" 4k monitor from LG for $300 bucks, and it looks about identical to my MBP display. I'm very happy with it. The smaller screen size helps keep high DPI, so I definitely don't see any pixels. Happy Holidays!