I had been using Windows my entire life and using a Mac in 2009? was awful. How do I get to the menu bar? Ctrl-F2. They keep changing the behaviour of the menu so that cursor keys don't wrap at the bottom of a menu so you have to know which direction you want to go to get to a menu item - make your choice! Up or down!

How do I get to the dock so that I can open the Applications menu? Ctrl-F3. left left left left left up. Then the popup menu doesn't respond to any letters.

All of this contrasted with Windows which had Alt + key for the menu. I learned it from Windows 3.11 for incredible speed:

- Alt space - show the window menu

- Alt space x - maximize

- Alt space n - minimize

- Alt space r - restore

- Windows key - start menu

- Windows key > P > right cursor > N - notepad (the right cursor = accessories)

This was broken in later start menus. The modern start menu is absolutely useless and takes forever. Up until XP this worked fine.

- (with Quicklaunch): Windows + N (number) - launch that item. Eg. Windows + 3 will launch the third item across. No idea if they broke this in Windows 11.

Under Windows 98 all of these were lightning fast. Explorer behaved as you'd expect too.

None of this was possible on the Mac and using it was very very very slow with a mouse to wave around the screen.

I'm surprised you feel that way. I fight with my mac every day for one reason or another. At least it's not as bad as the days where some software used Cmd + letter and some used ctrl +letter, but for instance Cmd tab will switch to the wrong window when I go back and I have to use the mouse. Window switching in general is a lot harder if you only have the keyboard because the laptop is docked without a magic trackpad

Specific applications sure, but the base OS interface is unusable without a trackpad.

Really? I find that on MacOS apps are very inconsistent about whether popping open a menu shows me hints for selecting items in that menu. Those same apps are consistent about it on Linux.

And then there's the bonkers window manager which can't move focus directionally (e.g. Super + left) and so you have to fall back to Cmd + tab tab tab tab but even then there's no consistency about whether you're switching between app instances or windows instances within the same app...

“Flawless” is absolutely the opposite of how I’d describe the third class keyboard navigation in MacOS.

It’s actually more intuitive to use a magic keyboard on the iPad than on the desktop OS.