Do you have some example searches that you made? I’m not a heavy search user and not a programmer but I’ve still found the experience on par or better for all of my general searching.
I fresh install to give myself a different perspective when I feel like I have too many 3rd party solutions to problems that no longer exist. Spotlight is better and I only casually use my macbook nowadays, so I don't need the power of Alfred. I don't need dock extensions because Stage Manager is mediocre but works well enough for the browser, chat / music apps, and whatever document I'm working with at the time.
Lol this is the same thing that's been repeated about DDG for over a decade. I had the same exact complaints and eventually switched back to Google since I was using !g bangs so often, and that was when I was in high school. Which is why, when I learned about Kagi I switched and never looked back. Even as a "casual" user I still find value because of the lack of obnoxious ads and control I have over boosting or blocking sites from my results completely.
There's always a compromise for me when adjusting scaling. UI doesn't scale correctly, bars get too big when I only want the text specifically to be increased, etc. I've settled on adjusting the text manually because at least that's user-adjustable.
That was the first thing I noticed when I recently went back to messing with Linux distros after 15 years. Booting into Ubuntu and having to use Gnome Tweaks or whatever it’s called for basic customizations was incredibly confusing considering Linux is touted as being the customizable and personal OS. I doubt I’ll ever give Gnome another try after that.
For years I was begging to get better multitasking and more powerful apps, especially after they introduced the magic keyboard. They can take it all back now. I'd rather they stick with 0 multitasking, if this is the best they can do.
Doing a fresh install of Sequoia was the best move for me, too. I had an unnecessary amount of third party apps installed for no reason. I don't even use Ice for the menu bar anymore, I realized the icons that I had hidden I didn't need in the first place so I completely disabled them, in whichever apps it's possible.
I gave up on the normal iCloud tabs for over a decade now. But the Safari Tab Groups implementation is by far the best I've used. If I need to share a window, I just open it in a tab group and those have synced flawlessly for me so far.
Mine is set to Kimi K2 specifically and it does that. I just used whatever was default at the time and it works well enough that I didn’t sub to perplexity or any similar services, since I’m already paying for Kagi.
I don't even think Google has particularly good integration and they make Gemini. Although it was early when I was still using my Android phone, I went back to the old google assistant instead of letting Gemini take over because it didn't add anything of value for the basic functions that I need from a voice assistant. Hopefully that's changed and I'm simply uninformed, but I doubt it.
I feel like the only people who say that still are people that don't actively or daily use Apple products because macOS Tahoe is a joke. Jelly scrolling on the iPad mini was a noticeable issue that should never have shipped. Antenna-gate on the iPhone 4. iOS 7... etc etc
I have to switch to the black / white outline cursor or I will guaranteed lose my cursor. I also bump up the size significantly. Any time I use a coworker's computer station I lose the cursor for a second.
Out of the box on CachyOS with KDE Plasma, I don't even have windows remembering their positions across a multi-monitor setup. That was shocking to experience with a current-day DE. And I believe it's not KDE's fault specifically but Wayland not having that feature yet, but that makes 0 difference to the user. If OP is hesitant to switch because of superficial hardware complaints, they're going to have a hell of a time actually using it as their main operating system for any significant amount of time.
I also settled on CachyOS after distrohopping a few times in the past month. I had Brave at first but it doesn’t play well with shutting down on any Linux distro IME so I switched to LibreFox, but I might switch back and simply deal with the Brave issues instead because everything else feels better using Chromium-based.
I thought the auto-complete in that shell they use was neat, but I made a typo and it kept autocompleting that typo and I’m about to do the same as you lol.
I’m having wifi issues with my setup for some reason when it’s perfectly fine in Windows, so I need to diagnose that or switch back to windows until I build a new PC with a more Linux-friendly hardware.