> There isn't really much waste in federal spending
I do not believe anyone who has consulted in federal IT or worked on contracts is capable of making such a statement. All of the motivations for all parties are heavily bent towards waste, and in fact any attempt to make things more efficient (reduce headcount, for instance) would be recieved poorly by department heads and contractors.
As one example, a department head who reduces staff by 20% has just reduced their own next year's budget AND kneecapped their resume.
When did the industry put the onus on the user to understand how the computer works? What happened to the old days of Xerox PARC's HCI studies putting the user first? The computer is in service of the user, not the other way around!
If I need to build a mental turing machine to understand your application, it is a bad application. It is rather the engineer's job to build a mental model of the user and their needs, and if you can't do that you should not call yourself a software engineer.
> I dislike how it is 'developers first' and not 'users first',
There are user-centric and dev-centric Linux distros. Windows is "Microsoft cloud onboarding" centric, and the experience has been dramatically degrading for years.
If that were not the case, why would senior executives at Microsoft say things like "we've heard you" and "we intend to reverse the suck in the coming year"? Even their management knows users hate the Win11 experience, and have placed it on their backlog....
> I dislike how janky its various GUI desktop managers are...igh pixel density, different audio setups, multi-touch trackpad support
These things are objectively better on a modern KDE linux. Out of the box I can output youtube videos to a dual-Sonos / Airpod setup by... clicking the sound icon, which pulls up an interface reminescent of "Windows 7, when the mixer wasn't terrible".
The reasons not to use KDE these days are because you need Windows software (usually: edge, teams, Office), or especially because LibreOffice is terrible. The core desktop experience, however, is notably and demonstrably less jank than the mess that is Windows 11.
The arguments in this thread-- amounting to "it's a good general practice because I happen to like it" (rather than "it is a sane / discoverable / usable default") are precisely demonstrating why these issues exist.
UX design is treated as a subjective matter, as if it is equally valid to clearly label UI elements as it is to have magic, nondescript UI pixels that serve as vital control surfaces.
Go watch videos of the research Xerox did on UI/UX and HCI in general, and weep for what we have lost...
Because it seems to me that a chief indicator that waste likely exists is an inability to show ROI.