I like having an intuitive, easy-to-use WIMP system for my common tasks. I don&#x27;t want to read my e-mail in a terminal window, or use some X11 chat app with a programmer-designed UI.<p>I also like being able to get a terminal window to fiddle with the guts when I want it. Some tasks are better suited for that interface, and some powerful tools are only available there.<p>During those better days, Apple fully embraced the UNIX nature of their OS, without compromising the usability of their GUI layer. They got Mac OS X certified by The Open Group. They started opensource.apple.com and distributed enough of the OS&#x27;s guts that you could actually get a full Darwin OS up and running entirely from source, even if the result wasn&#x27;t super useful. They gave out a full suite of developer tools free of charge that you could use to build powerful apps for the system, and were in fact the exact same tools that Apple used.<p>Then iOS came. No more open source, except the absolute bare minimum they&#x27;re required to distribute for open source licenses. (Their open source archive for iOS 9.0 contains a whole six packages, of which five are various parts of WebKit.) No more visibility into anything. Everything runs in a sandbox that you can&#x27;t bypass by any means except finding a security vulnerability. The developer tools are still free, but if you want to actually <i>use</i> them to ship anything, or even run anything on real hardware locally, you have to pay and agree to their terms. (The &quot;run anything on real hardware locally&quot; bit has changed with Xcode 7, which is what f.lux was briefly taking advantage of, but this is new as of just a couple of months ago.) Apple suddenly wants to play gatekeeper to everything; if you want to ship apps to your customers, you have to first let Apple review and approve it, and they&#x27;ll reject you if you don&#x27;t follow their rules.<p>The Mac retains much of what was great about it before, but it&#x27;s slowly drifting the same way.