Hard disagree over here. Apple's not always been good but my experience has usually been better than the competition (at least OSX 10.4+). They've been on a downward trajectory, certainly I've whined a lot about how bad MacOS 14 is, but their main competition (Microsoft) has also been working to lower the bar. Linux on the desktop's largely been a non-starter for me due to Apple's ARM stuff and disinterest in spending the effort to find compatible hardware.
I've not used Apple for photo stuff past monkeying around with Aperture. However I recently tried digikam, darktable, and rawtherapee. Darktable in particular was atrocious, and if that's how Gtk apps are on Linux I'd consider that another strike against desktop Linux. All three crashed or hanged repeatedly. You could rather easily dismiss some things like keyboard shortcuts not being aligned (rawtherapee) or partially aligned (darktable) with MacOS norms. Even the lack of app signing (darktable, digikam) and mix of cocoa and gtk widgets could be attributed to big bad Apple.
But once you dig into them it's a rogues gallery. Darktable has two different modules for setting the white balance (ugh). Countless issues have been opened (and then closed) over this on github. The docs explain when each one comes into play. With the default settings if you believe the docs and change the module that's supposed to be active, you'll get an error. Widgets respond to mouse events even if you think the cursor isn't over the widget. Rawtherapee, for some reason, renders the metadata widget as blurry mess to the point of the text being illegible.
To me it feels like open source projects sneer at ease of use (especially after looking at how bug reports are dealt with) vs commercial software companies willingness to fund a UX team.
I've not used Apple for photo stuff past monkeying around with Aperture. However I recently tried digikam, darktable, and rawtherapee. Darktable in particular was atrocious, and if that's how Gtk apps are on Linux I'd consider that another strike against desktop Linux. All three crashed or hanged repeatedly. You could rather easily dismiss some things like keyboard shortcuts not being aligned (rawtherapee) or partially aligned (darktable) with MacOS norms. Even the lack of app signing (darktable, digikam) and mix of cocoa and gtk widgets could be attributed to big bad Apple.
But once you dig into them it's a rogues gallery. Darktable has two different modules for setting the white balance (ugh). Countless issues have been opened (and then closed) over this on github. The docs explain when each one comes into play. With the default settings if you believe the docs and change the module that's supposed to be active, you'll get an error. Widgets respond to mouse events even if you think the cursor isn't over the widget. Rawtherapee, for some reason, renders the metadata widget as blurry mess to the point of the text being illegible.
To me it feels like open source projects sneer at ease of use (especially after looking at how bug reports are dealt with) vs commercial software companies willingness to fund a UX team.