Granted, fortunately lots of that book is now obsolete and mostly just good for laughs about the bad old times. And most of the predictions it had about future innovation never turned out that way either.
The usability issues are mostly "I'm used to X, so I don't like Y".
I've started out on dos, then went from win3.11 to XP/7 and switched to Linux fully when 8 came out. They all suck in their own ways, but nowadays I just prefer Linux because it has become "it just works" for me. Mostly. Because while there is the occasional technical issue with some software or hardware, I personally just prefer the technical problems of Linux over the bullshit problems over on windows. Edge jumping in your face, the "office key", updates interrupting when you don't want them, ads in my start menu, telemetry, major UI changes between versions that seem half-baked and take a decade to be completed,...)
I feel the same with Win7 - for me "it just works" and I don't want to upgrade for as long as possible. I even don't install updates - especially since several of them contain telemetry. I simply don't have the time to fight with Linux. There were other good OSes (e.g. BeOS or OS/2) which were simply killed instead of open-sourcing the code. Haiku seems to be the successor of BeOS but it has too few donations.
You can support them by buying merch. I got a Haiku tshirt last year. I bought it purely to support out of nostalgia (I was on MacOS when Be was making waves and installed it to kick the tires once).
I am broadly from the same tech background, but a decade earlier. (ZX Spectrum and CP/M at home, then DOS at work; "I switched to Linux when XP came out.)
But I disagree with:
> The usability issues are mostly "I'm used to X, so I don't like Y".
I think that's true of some of them, but the usability issues of Unix and C are real, its programmer focus makes it worse for non-programmers, and its legendary lack of user friendliness hasn't changed over the decades -- it's just been wrapped in shiny GUIs.
