I used to use Windows Backup with One Drive years ago but it just really pissed me off, especially with how My Documents is handled.
There was that time I discovered several GB of screenshots had been automatically saved to My Pictures from some setting they snuck into the printscreen screen grab tool and then that of course those were automatically uploaded to the cloud. After disabling the option it would sometimes reenable itself.
And game devs throwing random shit into My Documents was also fun. Ubisoft were terrible for this, after playing a game I'd notice a bunch of cache files they dumped into My Docs being uploaded. I mean putting save games and config files inside my docs is annoying enough, random cache files is just taking the piss.
Also windows backup would mess up my desktop between systems on occasion which was also very fun!
I disabled most of the shit but it was still annoying on occasion. Then a year or two ago I solved the problem by just using Linux for 90% of things, Mint at first but now Fedora, and grudgingly booting back into Windows for the other 10% of my needs.
I've been a Mac & Linux user since about 2007 or so, and I had no idea what Windows had become. Then a couple weeks ago I caved and built my son a Windows gaming PC. Egads, Windows is annoying! Even more so than I remember! I'm amazed that people actually put up with it for their daily driver. Right on schedule, my son came to me yesterday evening and asked what he should do about the backup warning. It didn't give any option other than enabling backup or telling it to remind later. WTF.
Not to say that MacOS isn't occasionally very annoying as well. It is. But as a tool it's also much more useful than vanilla Windows, which helps a little.
My Mac tells me 5+ times per day that it's unable to backup something or another because I'm not logged into the Apple cloud or whatever it's called. And there's not obvious way to make it stop.
If you don't want to receive notifications from iCloud, go into Notifications in the System Settings and uncheck the box next to iCloud in the list of what is allowed to send notifications.
How do you do you block One Drive on Windows from nagging you constantly?
You can't turn off notifications on MacOS AFAICT, but you can set "quiet hours" to 24 hours a day. So now I only see any notifications if I happen to be using my computer at exactly 10:00 pm.
If you have any notifications you actually do want, this isn't a viable solution. But personally I have yet to ever see a notification on my computer which I considered important.
I don't run into that, but I do have an iCloud account and I'm logged into it, which probably helps. I'm logged into my Microsoft account on Windows, too, but it is still pushy.
The only, as per personal exp, way to properly setup a Win11 machine these days is strictly via LTSC release and WinUtil from Chris Titus + local account - clean and no "feature" updates for almost 10 yrs. Add to that Chocolatey for package management that takes away the "every piece of software adds it's own autoupdater crap"-pain and the OS is suddenly very capable for almost all computing needs.
We're a niche, but at this point most people I see around are spending the majority of their time in unix/linux through whatever layer feels right for them, be it the Darwin system or WSL2 or straight docker/container. The overall maintenance being linuxy is par for the course.
Good timing to plug this other article on the top page, Exactly om that paradox:
It's worth mentioning that 10 also has LTSC variants, the IoT LTSC version in particular will be supported with security updates until 2032 if I recall.
Is buying the Enterprise version another method? I heard someone suggest that, but without any explanation other than it allowed you to use Windows without a Microsoft account. Is there something that makes it unsuitable for gaming?
I started out with WinGet but found the coverage lacking and ended up sideloading stuff which then soured the whole thing for me.. Choco basically has better coverage in my experience.
On their own devices, lots of non-power users probably just accept whatever Windows suggests. Enterprise versions of Windows either don't have a lot of the crap or they allow it to be disabled by company IT.
Techie users might just find tweaks online that allows disabling dark patterns on their devices.
I don't know how people who care but aren't techie enough to install workarounds (or to tell good ones from bad ones) deal.
> Enterprise versions of Windows either don't have a lot of the crap or they allow it to be disabled by company IT.
Generally if the company is deploying Windows they are using OneDrive, although the exact configuration will vary.
Windows has always been designed with corporate customers in mind. That's true more than ever today, the whole Azure ecosystem is very lucrative for them. Personal Windows users have always been an afterthought, but starting around Windows 10 they became less important than their own data. Which Microsoft has been getting away with brazenly claiming as its own.
You install it onto a fresh Win10/11 install, and it strips out the dumb crap that MS forces on everyone. It's especially targeted towards people doing gaming on Windows, and seems to work pretty well.
People dont care about their operating system. Most Mac users never learn Mac and most Windows users never learn windows. They use their computers for emails, some presentations and occasional gaming. They dont want to learn different kinds of software. Which is fine. For most people its just a power tool they never read the manual for. They dont even know what other tools there are so they dont know that life could be better, by not using windows.
I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).
Even Linux allows such basic customization.
If Apple allowed this type of user-friendly customisation on MacOS, I suspect a lot of Windows users will migrate to Mac.
> I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).
Classic Mac OS was released first, with well-considered, consistent design standards. Windows arrived almost 2 years later, and in the interest of not looking it like copied Macs, Microsoft essentially flipped the positions of everything, including window controls, toolbars, desktop icon placement, and button order. (Yes, both copied Bell Labs).
Windows has no standards, so maybe they could provide that kind of option instead.
They tried once - they released interface guidelines with Vista and for a while it worked but soon they started to flip everything over as usual. W7 was relatively a polishing up release but they mangled everything with W8 - not only because it didn't had Start button but also because they tried to combine Aero with Metro and it just look awful. It's hard to not see similarity in Apple's Liquid Glass on top of flat elements from previous releases.
All in all, Windows still comes with that 90s-early 00s flat 9x widgets buried deep beneath fancy W11 interface for compatibility reasons. Because Microsoft never could have their OS9 to OSX transition equivalent. They swapped DOS based 9x line but interface was still same - hell even NT got sprinkled with 9x and dropped old 3.x one
I have extreme doubts that there is any meaningful number of windows users holding out on trying macos based on such a thing.
The users are much more simple than this. Most have never even tried Mac. If they want to, they will just buy one the next time they need a computer and accept the new experience as being the new norm.
> I just wish MacOS would allow me to have the Minimize, Maximize/Restore,Close buttons on top-right corner (default in Windows), rather than top-left (which is counter-intuitive for right-handed users, using the mouse).
> Even Linux allows such basic customization.
Does Windows allow such customization? I think that's the relevant comparison. Both macOS and Windows are trying to be "user-friendly," which more and more means "take what we tell you and like it." I personally am a techie and like the Unix way of exposing everything that one can imagine to customization, but I do know that I'm often lost when I want to learn a new piece of customization-minded software and have to decide how to, and whether to, twiddle lots of knobs before even getting into just using it. I think that there's definitely a reasonable place for an OS that spends its time getting those settings right so that the user doesn't have to worry about them.
(Whether any particular setting is right or wrong is, of course, going to depend on the user. I'm a Mac user, there are some defaults I've always hated, and others that I think used to be good but are moving in the wrong direction. But, so far, I stick with it at least in part because there are lots of other things it gets right, and it doesn't feel fundamentally hostile to me in the way that Windows does.)
Windows allows third-party software (e.g., Stardock's suite of programs) to customize its GUI.
Linux has such customization options built in (e.g., Gnome/KDE GUI settings).
I couldn't find such third-party apps or inbuilt options for MacOS for my Mac Mini 2012. It's one of the reasons I stopped using the Mac Mini, but the main reason is that Apple made it too hard to swap the old HDD in the Mini to a new SSD I could purchase, and the Apple service center guys refused to do such upgrade even when I offered to pay them extra for it. There are YouTube DIY videos to do such SSD and RAM upgrade for the Mac Mini, but I was scared to brick the Mini attempting to do such upgrade myself.
> I'm amazed people actually put up with it for their daily driver
Bit of an overreaction, the majority of the world is on Windows (I use both as my daily). I'm sure as a Mac user you remember the days around 2007 where there were a lot of compatibility issues on Mac, it has come along way.
Your annoyance with Windows is likely due to what I see a lot of which is simply that the operation system works and does things differently, which requires you to do things in a way you might not be familiar with. We use operating systems almost instinctively once we're familiar, jumping to another OS is going to rock your boat.
I used all three every day for years. Until I dropped Mac because I got sick of apple's opinionated design. Linux with KDE of course because gnome is even worse than Apple.
That kinda solved the only big issue I had switching OSes constantly, the copy paste shortcuts. Apple is command-c/v and if you constantly switch you never get used to it.
Yeah, would not recommend. From my experience tweaking three OSes to be similar enough to be able to form muscle memory for efficient use is not trivial.
Unless you spend 99% of time in terminal, then it can be done, but in that case OS doesn’t matter. That is what I personally ended up doing.
I didn't really have any issues except for the control-C/V problem. I still use Linux and windows intermingled (windows for work and gaming and Linux for everything else)
I've faced many fewer hiccups on CachyOS/Arch in the past few months than on Windows. In the first month of owning this hardware, I had an unexplained BSOD that actually bricked my whole Win11 install. And this is pretty recent/funky 2-in-1 hardware, not an old ThinkPad I've cherry-picked for good Linux support. This is an important moment for free software; the big platforms are finally cinching down on users hard enough that we have a shot at convincing regular people to join us. Please don't blow it with vague complaints.
Yep, I dual boot Linux Mint & Windows 11 and only bother with the latter when I need MS Teams, or some other proprietary software that tends to be more reliable on Windows. In terms of performance and user experience Mint wins easily.
I only rarely need to use Microsoft Office or Paint.NET and a Windows VM on Linux has solved the problem entirely for me. I don't know if videoconferencing would work as well, but I'd really recommend giving it a try! I've already gone without a proper Windows install for almost 2 years.
Since MS is making the office UX web based, I'd suggest people try just loading 365 in a browser like edge (It's generally flawless for MS products). Especially apps like Teams.
Once you realize that the dedicated app is basically just a browser shell, using a real browser becomes somewhat of a no brainer.
Edge even supports PWAs on linux which can give you the "app" experience without the app.
But the browser versions of Office products royally suck. I still actively use the 'open in app' option over the default action of opening a document / spreadsheet in a browser window. I wholly disagree with It's generally flawless for MS products
The Office-in-browser experience is laggy and slow and long-learnt familiarities are gone.
Additional old-man whinge: Outlook keeps wanting to open in a browser window now. I have enough things open in a browser that are difficult enough to manage that I don't need Outlook getting lost in that forest as well. It's convenient having a separate Taskbar icon that will definitely open my Calendar or Email.
When everything's a browser tab, what's the point of the taskbar?
When everything's a browser tab then the browser is the Operating System.
Every day I'm forced to use Microsoft at work, I'm increasingly glad I ditched it at home.
I've tried this many times and my conclusion is that it still lacks many features available in the native apps (by the way, these are absolutely not webviews). Using office online also requires signing in which many people, including myself will avoid.
I don't know how it is today, but about 3 years ago I worked in a shop that used MS Teams. I was sneaky enough to get myself a Kubuntu install when everybody else was on Windows, but I had no problems using Teams on Kubuntu back then.
I use Windows 11 exclusively for games. When will we get steamOS with nvidia support!!
Just want out of the box 4k hdr 120hz vrr and 5.1 surround sound over hdmi on nvidia gpu, it can boot straight into steam for all I care. Performance should not be worse than windows.
Is this possible? Install and it just works out of the box; of course games will have to be compiled for this... but if this becomes a major market.... then games will support it.
I would LOVE this.
Would be drop in OS replacement for my dedicated windows gaming PC on LG OLED tv. ps: These things are amazing for gaming due to fast pixel response times. Great for couch co-op!
The Open Source ecosystem is a bit weird in that your system can be as reliable or not as you want, depending on what projects you follow. It really truly is a mixed bag in the sense that you can actually have a solid setup if you are happy with it being boring.
I’m not sure what the good kind of boring is, if we could define it, it might be tautologically true that that’s the thing people want.
> Look at how popular Ubuntu VMs are with research chemists.
Are they? I actually have no idea.
> And successful chemists tend to be highly technical.
But not necessarily in any IT sense. STEM skills are very specific.
Sorry, it looks like I’m just being petulant and saying “I’m not sure” about your every sentence, haha, that wasn’t my intent but it is what I ended up doing I guess.
> The Open Source ecosystem is a bit weird in that your system can be as reliable or not as you want
I'm going to dig into this a little. This feels like shifting responsibility onto the user when things don't go well. E.g. comparing the platonic ideal of Linux when analyzing practical options. I make lots of mistakes in all aspects of my life. I know historically, and projecting into the future that I will get into trouble with Linux, so I don't daily-drive it. Yes, there are always ways to fix things when a system gets in a bad state, but there is a time and effort cost to this.
Saying it's my fault for breaking it doesn't help restore the system. e.g. "Should have used the LTS release", "Should have only installed software from the package manager", "Shouldn't have used sudo", "Shouldn't have edited a system file without knowing what you're doing". If I was doing those things, it probably seemed like the best of available options, e.g. the only way to make a certain piece of hardware or software work.
I think it is an accurate description of the situation. I agree that responsibility is accumulating at the user’s feet in an unfortunate manner.
But somebody must be responsible for making your computer work, who should it be?
The companies that sell operating systems don’t seem to be fulfilling the obligation to make a bug free and user-friendly OS. The Open Source community never really had accepting that responsibility as a “business model” because they aren’t businesses.
But that's how it works with every other tool you own? Nobody is complaining about the pencil manufacturer when you choose to draw an image, which you later don't like. Same with using software to modify the state of the hard disk, which you don't like later.
In Windows or Darwin you are not responsible, because you can't tell the computer what you want to do, but in a free OS, you can and do order what the computer is doing and that's why you also need to deal with the consequences.
I agree! My thought is this: The mechanical pencil is drawing that image because there are a combination of settings on it don't work well for a given use case. When adjusting the settings, I get poor results, or something breaks. The schematics are available and parts are available for the repair, but the job still takes a while, and I don't know how to do it. My friend has fixed something like it before, but his pencil's controls were different, and some of the tools are no longer available for the way he did it. I would prefer if the pencil worked out of the box, because I'm an artist; not a pencil engineer.
I instead buy a pencil from a different brand. It doesn't come in the color I want, but it's good enough, and lets me focus on the drawing. The pencil engineers and enthusiasts keep telling me the customizable mechanical pencil is much better. They love it, have learned its intricacies, and take pride in this.
MacOS and Windows might break[1] less often than Linux, but when it does I stand less of a chance of fixing it. Linux is usually more fiddly, but if does something I don't want its usually only a few minutes to find the config file or a plugin for the Desktop Environment to alter the behavior.
[1]: "Break" here meaning "behaves in a way I don't want"
He's saying its not very good if thats the case. Which is not the case. I am satisfied with GNU+Linux. It doesn't work against me. It would be great if there were FOSS alternatives to the remaining proprietary software on my computers. Making it sound like linux is almost just as bad, does sound weird. Also nothing about what's actually that bad about "linux".
I’m giving the Asus Proart P16 a try, if I was trying for maximum battery life I’d probably avoid the discrete gpu (e.g. a zenbook or similar). I am not a full time road warrior so battery life is important, but not absolutely critical. There may be some options out with better battery life, but I haven’t been focused on this metric too closely.
I just don’t want to be sidetracked by overly aggressive and pushy decisions by my OS vendor anymore. I’ve been happy with the stability of my Debian/Ubuntu systems for getting work done. I have been using apple laptops for 10+ years, and I still like their build quality, but I don’t like the direction macOS (or Windows) is heading.
My 2c. I agree with the parent and article: OneDrive can be a major problem with Windows. They push it on you, your personal documents can be moved to OneDrive without your permission etc. Confusing and user-hostile design.
Linux has its own idiosyncrasies, which may or may not make it worth. E.g. ABI diaspora, installing things can be inconsistent and high-effort, the cycle of copy+pasting CLI commands and system file edits from old forum posts or these days LLMs to fix something, treating your PC like a multi-user system that has an admin by default, etc. My general experience is that installation and things work smoothly with the built-in or package-managed software, but gradually degrade as you start installing software and drivers.
> treating your PC like a multi-user system that has an admin by default, etc.
I think I have the opposite orientation: In the past when family and friends needed help to install/rescue their machine (on Windows versions that supported it) I always ensured there was a separate "Manager" admin login and then made their main account "limited", albeit with UAC popups.
If nothing else, it made repeat visits much easier.
Do you think it looks like a toy just because of how it looks, or because of how it works?
Spotlight got a major update in macOS 26 where it can now perform actions. I can open spotlight and type "run <enter> <some terminal command or script>" and get the output right there, selecting it will put the resulting text into my current window.
16:16 up 23:27, 1 user, load averages: 1.72 1.78 1.90
There is my uptime posted in HN with only Spotlight and my hands never leaving the keyboard.
Spotlight is also context aware... Say I run across some text in another language:
Spiegami come funziona questo coso.
I can highlight, invoke spotlight, type translate, it will recognize I want to translate the selected text, translate it inside of Spotlight, and if arrow down and press enter, it will paste the translated text over the original text, if editable, or copy it to the clipboard. There is also a built-in clipboard history.
I'm not a fan of all the UI choices that have been made, but those will get ironed out over time. Meanwhile, I get some more powerful out of the box features without needing to resort to 3rd party apps.
It is very serious. I love the way Catalina and Mojave looks; dark mode or light mode, it just screams "professional" at the top of it's lungs.
Big Sur is, somehow, the exact opposite. Corners are rounded off as if they could hurt someone, and margins are padded more than a cell in solitary confinement. Space is wasted everywhere. It's Fischer-Price design philosophy and I'm hardly the only one to point it out.
Agree on all points. Tahoe ruined macOS for me. Not only does it waste screen real estate, but it’s not performant at all and my M4 pro is no slouch.
Just feels like I’m using an iPad now.
Here’s a fun exercise. Look at how huge the window borders are to achieve that insane corner radius. The cursor changes to the resize arrow at the corner before it even touches the window, the bottom arrow is a good 4-5px away from the window lol.
I think that "serious" is not the right word here. But rather, saying "it's like a toy" is not constructive. When someone says "it looks like a toy" that tells me nothing about what they don't like about it. Saying "I don't like the rounded corners and wasted space" is something concrete you can have a discussion about, so it's better to use that kind of phrasing.
Toy design isn't objectively bad. Windows XP has many colorful, misshapen buttons and they're amazing for the vision-impaired, same goes for Apple's Aqua UI. Fischer-Price design language is arguably why the iPhone is so popular, when you deploy it with intent the results can be spectacular.
What is the intent of dumbing-down the Mac design language? iOS superfans already have devices to use, the Mac has to compete in the professional segment of the market, not the casual one. The only motivation I can see is to enforce solidarity with VisionOS, which by most accounts seems to be a professional flop too. An ecosystem shouldn't aim for superficial similarity across devices, each experience should enforce their unique strengths/weaknesses in the UI and then network their state to each-other in the background. Apple used to know this.
It's also weird because Microsoft has some excuse for wasting screen real estate - Windows is used on touchscreen devices and has to at least adapt to them. But Apple stubbornly refuses to put touchscreens on laptops, at which point what excuse do you have to not build good information density?
Sure, that's a reasonable technical criticism. Wasted screen space is, in my opinion, an issue in modern interface design trends. Good design uses space in a thoughtful manner. The designers of macOS clearly don't agree with us, but we can have a reasonable technical discussion about that. We can consult the data. We can consult the users.
> It's Fischer-Price design philosophy
You're mixing the two again. Fisher-Price was not consulted in the design of modern macOS interfaces, and complaining about not liking the design language cheapens all your actual points. No real discussion can be had around this taste garbage. You're rage baiting.
It doesn't seem like a toy to me. Therefore, it is not objective but is just your subjective opinion. Which is fine, but don't overstate your opinions as being objective when they aren't.
It enables in non-consensual manners, break apps and games(because paths change and APIs work differently), clings onto your files even if you tried to save them from the OneDrive folder, and throws a tantrum and irreversibly delete your files if you dare unlink the PC and disable it.
I don't know why they commit to especially the last part. To me, it feels like that is why Microsoft's Windows efforts are getting a lot of negative press lately; there must be lots of writers and media individuals who had lost data to that exact behavior who are now perpetually biased against them for that reason.
I think it's the curse of windows being attached to a tech company, and a tech company seems to want to keep pursuing cool things™ instead of boring maintenance on a utility. Over the years lots of little extra non-essential functionality has crept into windows to where you could almost compare it with a lightweight linux distro, or that it's hard to draw the line where the OS ends, and then you're getting into territory where everyone relies upon a different subset of what's available which MS has been increasingly able to use to justify adding more 'essential' features for modern computing.
> cool things™ instead of boring maintenance on a utilit
You can't re-sell a boring utility every one/two/three years.
Nobody wants it - not the top management (bonuses for the revenue growth), nor the middle management (bonuses for the succesful new projects), nor the guys who implements the things (reconginition for the new projects).
Or talking simpler - KPI. And there is no 'we improved the stability for 0.0000002% of clients' indicator along with 'customers are happy with the thing we sold them in 2017'.
And don't forget what it was some fruit company what even wasn't in the corporate which made it fashionable to have a 'totes new and refreshing experience (along with a hefty price tag)' every year or two.
I think what they think is that power users and above are rounding errors, so damages are always negligible. And one thing I know as a longtime MS "customer" is that things that would allow their employee to collect and display a decapitated head of another employee gets done lightning quick, otherwise never happens. I guess I should be trying to find a way to cause it, weird thing to do, though.
It's interesting how ChromeOS respects your choices more than Windows here.
There is a setting to disable Google Drive and it just works. It won't auto-enable, no popups or nags or anything. Even Google Docs/Workspace falls back to a trimmed down offline version.
On the other hand, Android keeps nagging me about enabling backups in Google Photos. I'm always one accidental click of the huge "Okay!" button in an unexpected popup away from having my data being uploaded to Google.
I've solved this long ago by disabling the app. Sadly, that means I can't view videos in the gallery, but I believe it's a fair compromise. I'd recommend taking a look at open source alternatives like Lavender Photos [1] or Fossify Gallery [2]
The PMs can't start out being aggressive, though, that comes after dominating the market, right? ChromeOS and Google Drive are generally good products which are probably so as to get penetration and stickiness.
Perhaps Gmail is a better example to see the incumbent acting as it wishes, enabling and disabling features without worry about the end user's POV.
After setting up an Android phone for someone recently, I think it's stuffed with dark patterns. The amount of times that OS was pushing me to enable or opt-out from syncing different things to their cloud and generally sabotage the privacy via various settings was staggering.
Windows is certainly on the same path but I'm not sure how far ahead or behind they are in the competition to screw their users over with these dark patterns. They only have to trick you once.
I just bought my first windows 11 computer. Why are my personal folders like pictures and documents under a OneDrive folder? This is insane. Going to see how Ubuntu runs on it and hopefully never look back.
In Win10/Win11, you can move your user folders to another partition or folder path.
Right-click on them in Explorer, go to Properties, click on Location tab, and type/select the new path for them, click Move... then that folder and its contents will be moved to new locate.
I've movier following to D: partition as root-level folders:
Contacts, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Links, Music, Pictures, Saved Games, Searches, Videos.
Prepare to have software and games break or not run at all if you do this. Too many devs rely on the users folder being in default place. Too few use %USERS%.
The proper way to do it without breaking everything is via a symbolic link or junction.
I stopped using these long ago because every other app you install puts something there so it becomes a landfill automatically.
Just create an additional partition and put all your non-OS files there. This is a classic idea people have been using since the DOS days, still working great.
This is the reason I don't want to use a Microsoft account within my operating system. Microsoft never asks and I cannot have my data synced to a (very slow) cloud randomly.
No time to check every Windows update if I got surprise features like that. In my opinion Microsoft has lost it completely when it comes to user demand and their main OS.
But if you don't have an account, MS cannot just sync the data anywhere... at least yet...
The list of mind-boggling design decisions MS has made at this point is so long at this point that I don't blame people any more for saying 'MS bad'. Just pointing at the start menu search and Everything tells you everything you need to know, and more or less sets the tone you can expect from MS decision making.
Then Microsoft can do the exact opposite sometimes. The drive cleanup option used alright, but then I noticed that it now wants to clear the Downloads library. I don't know about everyone else, but I put more than temporary files there.
Maybe, but not by default. But games as a rule don't give you the option to change this, so you're stuck with that one game and that one program using My Documents as a dumping ground without your consent, and now My Documents is no longer really your folder any more, at which point people make a folder on their desktop or whereever else called My Documents But For Real This Time or whatever.
> And game devs throwing random shit into My Documents was also fun.
I hate this problem with all OSes. We have folders that started out being places for users to put things like Pictures, Documents & home, but over time they get filled with crap from software and it's difficult to find your own files. We should have had a "program-files" subfolder or something by default in all these places to separate things that applications put there vs. things that you put there.
We do! On Windows, it's (user profile)\AppData. And to be fair, most software does use that. But there are always bad citizens that don't care and clutter up the user's documents folder.
That's nice, I think Linux/XDG has some standards around this too, but they too are not enforced - and many people have no idea these standards even exist unless the OS warns or enforces these things. I think there might also be some gap between "these files are only internally needed by this software" vs. "these files are created by this software, but may be good to show them to the user". It's nice the OSes are making efforts to do that though!
Speaking for myself, but I would my game saves and config in the cloud if I were using OneDrive.
That is however a separate issue from whether those files should be in the hidden appdata or in the visible my documents.
There was that time I discovered several GB of screenshots had been automatically saved to My Pictures from some setting they snuck into the printscreen screen grab tool and then that of course those were automatically uploaded to the cloud. After disabling the option it would sometimes reenable itself.
And game devs throwing random shit into My Documents was also fun. Ubisoft were terrible for this, after playing a game I'd notice a bunch of cache files they dumped into My Docs being uploaded. I mean putting save games and config files inside my docs is annoying enough, random cache files is just taking the piss.
Also windows backup would mess up my desktop between systems on occasion which was also very fun!
I disabled most of the shit but it was still annoying on occasion. Then a year or two ago I solved the problem by just using Linux for 90% of things, Mint at first but now Fedora, and grudgingly booting back into Windows for the other 10% of my needs.