"Just let Apple decide everything for you, they know best!" is exactly the sort of attitude that is causing us to lose this war.

I don't know if Apple know best or not - I didn't say I thought that anywhere and I'm not sure who you're quoting - the point is the opposite - I don't care. As long as the system is usable, get on and use it and actually focus on your work rather than tinkering for the sake of tinkering.

The only war I'm fighting against is wasting my time with system setup.

I think, rather, that parent posts were complaining that these manufacturers defaults were:

1) constantly changing Willy Nilly

2) less than useable, né breaking functionality

A proprietary OS has no obligation to care about your needs, but more importantly, does not allow you TO do anything about it.

This is why I am moving everything to FOSS over the long haul

Defaults are designed for common users, who barely know how to copy and paste.

Their setup is really not working for me.

I want my desktop designed for me, from me. And if the OS thinks, it knows better than me, how to handle things and regulary rearanges or reconfigures, than screw this OS.

> I want my desktop designed for me, from me.

Right but when you write it out like that can you see how it doesn’t make sense to expect that from a company? Not reasonable to complain when you don’t get it.

Why can't I expect from a company that they give me the tools I want, if I give them money?

"Designing the desktop" is also just aranging icons. That works since decades.

> Why can't I expect from a company that they give me the tools I want, if I give them money?

Well you could expect it but you probably wouldn’t like the price they quoted you.

To make the price realistic they have to design something which works reasonably well for millions of people, not perfectly for one person.

Or not remove the configuration utility, in some cases. No one here asked for telepathy and amazing defaults, but take away my configurability and I get upset.

Think about it like this - every single extra simple boolean configuration option doubles the configuration state space of the program. Add just ten option checkboxes for a feature and you have made the system three-orders of magnitude more complicated. Everyone pays for that complexity.

In reality this added complexity is not always so dramatic, when you have a solid architectural base.

And I believe Windows for example has one. And windows still runs fine for me without cortana for example. But I have to resort to hacks, to make that change. So I do not demand more features here.

I demand just more control, what features I want to use. That was there and is getting removed for other purposes than complexity of developement.

Ha, I stopped changing the wallpaper when I realized I would never be looking at it.