I went into the article expecting someone else to eloquently echo my own thoughts and issues with Apple fucking with my album art, but this is so tame compared to what I’m experiencing.
Basically, anyone who’s ever had a greatest hits compilation seems to get their “actual” studio album art replaced with the art of that compilation album at random.
For example, off the top of my head, when I’m in the album section for Low, “Heroes”, or Lodger (three David Bowie albums with iconic cover art and even better music), the only image on the page is for a different, shitty compilation album that I’ve never owned, listened to, or have any interest in whatsoever.
But things somehow get worse as you’re listening to the album. Each song gets a different cover, seemingly at random. In fact, on “Heroes” alone, an album originally with ten songs (my reissued version has two extra), I have FIVE (5!) different album covers, (one of which is the original, attached to only the fifth, tenth, and bonus songs).
I’m so baffled by this decision and literally cannot conceive of anyone, sane or otherwise, asking for this or even thinking that it’s anything other than the worst possible way to handle album art.
If anybody at Apple Music is reading this, please prioritize the song from the actual album in search results. It kills me to be bumped into Greatest Hits or compilations so often.
Eh, I see this more as a shift in consumer design patterns overall.
At the launch of the iphone, everything was skeumorphic. The cover flow clearly emulated flipping through a stack of records or CD books.
Now that people don't have physical media, the metaphor changes. The new design treats the cover art like an avatar on a forum or social media site -- a small thumbnail to identify the music.
Additionally, the original iPod/iPhone typically used internal storage in your Library. Under the Apple Music era of streaming, this may be a decision to shave a few % off of bandwidth costs by only pushing lower-resolution images. And then the choice being made to not upscale low-res to screen-width and incur blurriness.
Besides, what in the digital realm is not skeuomorphism to begin with?
Every single item in the digital world down to a pixel (off of the `pt` points system) we see online is skeuomorphic inspiration off of something! Typesetting and the alphabet is skeuo off the typewriter systems/foundry, buttons––of course skeuomorphism, web-page and scrolling follow from pulp and physical scrolls, header, footer, body inspire off of letterheads.
Anyone who claims 'skeuomorphism this, but !skeuomorphism that' is a digital noob and doesn't quite understand where the world has been and how it got here.
Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021. I couldn't care less what the album art looks like when listening to music on Spotify or YouTube.
What I do care about is a current "About" tab in Spotify, a WikiPedia page, or maybe a well-maintained webpage for/by the artist.
Not meant to be an indictment of visual art of this type, just suggesting that perhaps the "vector" needs to shift elsewhere.
I think this all ties back to listening habits. I find individuals who share this opinion are typically stream-primary listeners who mostly listen to playlists, singles, and generated "radio" stations (which is entirely valid! Not to mention that's the way most people listen to music, nowadays.)
However, there are nonetheless lots of people like myself that primarily listen to albums, maintain their own digital libraries, and use streaming platforms as a glorified "trial" platform for new music. I find those who tend to listen to music like I do really care about high resolution album art (and by extension the quality and accuracy of track metadata).
Frankly, since both needs are so widely different, I'm not sure there's any one solution for both. Goodness knows Apple Music tries, but to OP's point, it's clearly not succeeding in this effort.
Like this comment [0] elsewhere on this post so very well points out, everything digital is skeuomorphic....
> use streaming platforms as a glorified "trial" platform for new music
... and it seems like the skeumorphism has changed from being a digital analog of a personal record library, to being of a record store. The "library" aspect of it has become more like just the featured section of the store.
> Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021.
Maybe cover art is less meaningful *to you*. FTFY. To the author it is meaningful.
Today UX/UI teams are making decisions for everyone and not allowing anyone to deviate from those decisions. Less and less apps offer users a choice via a settings UI. To me the fix is simple allow users to customize their UI.
The author mainly has an observation. To me, it looked like they were writing for emphasis and not as an indictment about Apple's view of artists or anything.
Cover art is no longer useful for music discovery or intriguing fans when an album "drops". Those were UX/UI things last ... century. Now they aren't. They're vestigial embellishments at best.
> Maybe cover art is less meaningful to you. FTFY. To the author it is meaningful.
The author admits they're in a niche:
> The fact of the matter is that nobody cares about cover art.
So they're aware that really most people don't really care any more. Like most people these days I listen to music for the music, not the physical media artwork.
> Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021
This might be too broad of a generalization. I find a lot of cover art quite interesting, and I hope it remains prominent. I think a (dis)like for cover art might just be a personal preference.
Covert art is also... art. It's a shame that we've pretty much lost the concept of video-game cover art these days, it'd be a bigger shame to lose album art for the same reason.
When I listen to music on Spotify or whatever, I do still pay attention to the cover art and spend a moment to just admire it if it catches my eye.
Fair enough -- I was really trying to say that I think album art needs a reconceptualization, starting with the manner in which it's delivered to the listener.
In an abstract sense, the association of visual art with music, is, of course, a good thing that I'm sure is here to stay.
UPDATED TO ADD: Perhaps the abstract concept of "album" is what needs to go the way of the dodo.
We only began thinking of it as 'album art' in the iPod age, 20 years ago. That's because digital products could only show the front cover, and not the liner notes that accompanied it.
I think the last CD I bought was in 2005, and there was a 7 year gap before I bought my first vinyl. I had completely forgotten that albums used to come with lyrics, trivia and pictures of the band.
Yeah my first though on reading the article title was "neither do I." I'd find a little information about the album (date; what number album it is from that artist; collaborators) way more useful than the art.
> Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021. I couldn't care less what the album art looks like when listening to music on Spotify or YouTube.
Do you listen to full albums or just mixes/random?
I see it much less important for the latter but significant for the former. For a lot of the albums I listen the cover art complements the music/message of the album. I really like it and it enhances my music listening experience.
I grew up in the 70s, and spent most of my life listening to music as albums, but that time is pretty much passed. What percent of new music is even released as albums any more?
Maybe this is my fault for not moving to Apple Music, but the iOS Music app, subjectively, is total crap ever since iOS 9.
The app no longer cleanly and easily divides music into Songs/Artists/Albums/Playlists as top-level tabs, instead shunting them into menu items within one such tab. The older apps (pre-iOS 7?) even let the user customize which top-level tabs they wanted to see (e.g. Composer).
Again, I bet a lot of this pain would go away if I started using Apple Music, but I'm bothered by a loss in UX.
It is basically three thing, Pre iOS 7, Post iOS 7 Music, and Apple Music.
Pre iOS7 was done under a person who understands and is passionate about Music. Steve Jobs.
iOS 7 was the first major UI redesign Apple had with iOS, all lead by Jony Ive. Going from Hardware Industrial Design to everything "Design". Throwing out everything that Apple UX, UI, HID had over the years. Basically Jony Ive hated Skeuomorphic design ( Previously Lead by Scott Forstall ) so much he throw everything out. Not sure if he just hated Scott or the design. Or possibly both. But it took Apple years to finally walk back on all those decisions. ( The same to Apple Store, but that is another story )
Apple Music was initially just Beats. The whole App design was about that stupid "Next Song" they keep promoting, also from Beats. It was Jimmy Iovine's idea that the computer / iPhone would magically know your mood and play the next song. And somehow Eddy Cue was sold into it. If you ignore the marketing crap, what Jimmy Iovine wanted was for people to discover new music. By either using AI, curated playlist or Apple Radio. For a long time Apple Music doesn't even have repeat the same song button. And the whole UI was designed for you to "discover" music. As a true music nerd this may have been OK, for normally user this is just stuffing random piece of music in front of their face. It wasn't until a few years later they finally accepted defeat and accept the fact the users knows what they want to listen. And what song or artist they are looking for, as well as repeating the same god damn song hundreds of time.
That is how we arrived at today's Apple Music UX. Which might have been OK for any other company and consumer / user. But in my view, still a bloody pile of crap. Instead they are so focused on the social justice aspect and keep telling the media how Apple's paid out to music labels are 10% higher than Spotify. And continue to push Free Trial hoping to push for higher services revenue.
> Again, I bet a lot of this pain would go away if I started using Apple Music, but I'm bothered by a loss in UX.
Nope, I just finished a 3 month trial and it never got any easier. There is no way the person in charge of this app actually uses it day to day (or maybe they've just never used Spotify?)
My biggest grievances:
- Wouldn't be ready to play what I was last listening to immediately, esp if data service was low (Spotify seems always ready to go, even if I haven't explicitly downloaded a song to cache)
- Awful recommendations -- Kept playing songs from the first Tyler, the Creator album when I was listening to vapor/synthwave radio (I like that album but they do not go together!)
I've tried Apple Music and Deezer and both just suck at keeping moods. Apple will go from calm piano to noisy experimental hip hop within 2 or 3 tracks.
Spotify recommendations, while still flawed (really every recommendation algorithm should let a user tune some parameters based on mood, like how much new stuff should be included), are by far the best I've heard.
You can still add (under Library) Composer as one of the selection options, click Edit in the top right.
However, my problem was (was it in iOS 9?) when they moved Downloaded from a permanently set toggle switch to a folder you selected. Which brought you to the exact same view as Library but with only the music on your device. And if you leave the app you may or may not end up in that same view when you return. It made more sense as a setting that you had to deliberately set or unset, not as a "view" of your content where the default was to use more bandwidth and play things you'd deliberately deleted.
It doesn't go away with Apple Music, they just shove their explore features in your face, and the experience for listening to your favorite artists still sucks.
Tesla can read your music from USB flash drives. This is wonderful, because they have a premium audio system (used to cost $2500) and you could play high-quality music.
You could load a drive with FLAC or Apple Lossless music and play it back without MP3 lossiness and artifacts.
Yet album art? they do not care.
Here's a thread on how the USB player is a buggy unsupported mess. It recently lost the ability to display album art, but there are plenty of other problems (like no playlist support or any number of other problems)
Probably not in a car, but playing back 320kbit MP3s on a large sound system (eg djing in a club) is noticeably different to lossless or even to better lossless formats.
Glad to see one of my pet peeves finally get some notice!
I too bought an iPod Touch back in 2008 because of how the player UI treated album art: as actual 'art', and deserving of a full-width display on the screen. I would meticulously tag my music library with the correct album art files precisely so that they would be displayed nicely on my portable player.
I think one reason the art got smaller is due to phone screens getting larger and higher-res. A full-width image spanning the iPhone SE would be 214 x 214 px. But on the iPhone 12 it would be 390 x 390px.
That would take up a lot of the screen's real estate, perhaps leaving less available for UI controls. Also, if digital album art tends to be low-res to begin with, it would look pixelated if displayed at full width on a high density pixel screen.
As screens have grown they’ve mostly grown vertically. If anything it should be easier to display a full-width album cover and still have plenty of room for controls and other UI chrome.
> Apple quality and design, especially in UI, has been steadily declining for over a decade.
Remember when you had to make software updates through iTunes? This was probably the worst piece of UX ever in a mainstream OS, even worse than clicking "Start" to shut down the computer in Windows. So quality steadily declining is not an accurate description.
Debatable. They are harder to repair than ever, they eat disk IO for breakfast as swap and there's no native Linux yet because Appe can't be bothered to move a finger to help in that front.
That's just an unfounded blanket statement. There have been wild jumps in quality as well as incremental improvements and incremental deterioration in places.
Take, for example, iOS 7 which came out 7 years ago. On the one hand it brought some sorely needed modernity, on the other, it replaced a well-polished, albeit dated, style. However, on its own UI-wise it was really bad. Subsequent releases have had tremendous improvements to its many faults while introducing others, and I can't see how that could be called "a steady decline."
In addition, I hypothesize that as existing users tend to age[1], that they typically desire less change. However, newer and/or younger users entering an ecosystem may desire other things, such as the appearance of modernity or newer stylings (eg. "Not your parent's OS"). MacOS 10.x has been around for 20 years now. iOS for 13 years. Even if you were to assume that the "core segment" was 20 to 40 year old working professionals (just an example), a huge cohort has moved into, and another out of, that segment over the past 10+ years!
This is seen in many areas outside software, so I would imagine it exists here as well.
[1]: Both age as in their physical age, as well as age as in a "have been users in this ecosystem longer" sense.
Steve Jobs would also have been a relatively old man, whose favourite artists are still recording music the same way the were in the '60s and '70s. His design choices are unlikely to resemble that of the average consumer today.
I think this is becoming less and less true. I think Mac OS isn't as good as people say it is and Windows is better than people say it is. I can't speak either way to desktop Linux.
I was just uninstalling a program on windows. So I find the icon in the start menu, right click to open the menu and uninstall. That should run the uninstall process, right? WRONG! It opens the dated and derelict control panel. And it has a bunch of icons for all the programs I have on the computer. And the one I just right-clicked to uninstall? Not selected. Oh, but let's find it, where is it in that icon list? There is no search box to type in the name, I try typing to filter but nothing happens. I need to visually find it myself and select the icon. A new panel appears at the bottom with some nonsense info about the app. But how do I uninstall? Oh, the uninstall button actually appears at the top of the icon list, distant to the icon itself. Such and old ux paradigm, contextual buttons that appear in a random part of the interface (looks like a quick prototype by a programmer and they never bothered to get a ux person to design it).
Windows works for people because they are used to its idiosyncrasies. You know how people think their browser icon is to open the internet? It's the same with Windows, to most it's what makes the computer, they don't know otherwise. And these idiosyncrasies are taught in schools and universities in computer classes. How to use a computer has become how to do stuff in Windows and MS Office. Brings back memories from my childhood when I was the "computer expert", helping my parents and their friends fix problems in old Windows 98 and XP. At least the old windows ui was somewhat consistent.
Windows is constantly turning on features for me like I searched for a file on my computer, and it went ahead and reached out to Bing and did a web search. I had to go into Regedit and do some arcane incantations to get it to stop. I feel like it has turned itself back on several times. Thank god I got it to stop downloading Candy Crush and Bubble Witch Saga or whatever nonsense they’re hoping my kid will click so they can get some sweet sweet ad impressions or whatever.
My OS is supposed to be a tool, and windows is super annoying unless you literally download Enterprise edition. Mac is okay, and I’ve been pretty pleased with how capable Linux Mint is, as long as things don’t randomly get broken (looking at you, package manager corrupting and acting weird for weeks before I finally googled and fixed it).
Windows has been improving steadily. You can only tell by the decrease in the amount of high-profile coverage of UI gaffes. No one wants to write an article about how a new OS release just does what it should.
mac seems to unfortunately be on the path to selling iphones, ipads and chromebook type devices running ios. i really wish steve jobs had believed in modern medicine. if he had, i believe we’d have much better machines.
Another minor beef: Rounded corners for an album cover image don't make sense, either historically or aesthetically. Just give us the full image please, Apple.
Readit News
Basically, anyone who’s ever had a greatest hits compilation seems to get their “actual” studio album art replaced with the art of that compilation album at random.
For example, off the top of my head, when I’m in the album section for Low, “Heroes”, or Lodger (three David Bowie albums with iconic cover art and even better music), the only image on the page is for a different, shitty compilation album that I’ve never owned, listened to, or have any interest in whatsoever.
But things somehow get worse as you’re listening to the album. Each song gets a different cover, seemingly at random. In fact, on “Heroes” alone, an album originally with ten songs (my reissued version has two extra), I have FIVE (5!) different album covers, (one of which is the original, attached to only the fifth, tenth, and bonus songs).
I’m so baffled by this decision and literally cannot conceive of anyone, sane or otherwise, asking for this or even thinking that it’s anything other than the worst possible way to handle album art.
If anybody at Apple Music is reading this, please prioritize the song from the actual album in search results. It kills me to be bumped into Greatest Hits or compilations so often.
At the launch of the iphone, everything was skeumorphic. The cover flow clearly emulated flipping through a stack of records or CD books.
Now that people don't have physical media, the metaphor changes. The new design treats the cover art like an avatar on a forum or social media site -- a small thumbnail to identify the music.
Additionally, the original iPod/iPhone typically used internal storage in your Library. Under the Apple Music era of streaming, this may be a decision to shave a few % off of bandwidth costs by only pushing lower-resolution images. And then the choice being made to not upscale low-res to screen-width and incur blurriness.
I happen to enjoy both and treat them as different experiences. I'm fine if the expectations around digital change as long as it's still accessible.
Every single item in the digital world down to a pixel (off of the `pt` points system) we see online is skeuomorphic inspiration off of something! Typesetting and the alphabet is skeuo off the typewriter systems/foundry, buttons––of course skeuomorphism, web-page and scrolling follow from pulp and physical scrolls, header, footer, body inspire off of letterheads.
Anyone who claims 'skeuomorphism this, but !skeuomorphism that' is a digital noob and doesn't quite understand where the world has been and how it got here.
Absolute dynamo of a medium.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
What I do care about is a current "About" tab in Spotify, a WikiPedia page, or maybe a well-maintained webpage for/by the artist.
Not meant to be an indictment of visual art of this type, just suggesting that perhaps the "vector" needs to shift elsewhere.
Good example is the backgrounds created by Cryo Chamber for their YT postings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbKDlzQgIwc
However, there are nonetheless lots of people like myself that primarily listen to albums, maintain their own digital libraries, and use streaming platforms as a glorified "trial" platform for new music. I find those who tend to listen to music like I do really care about high resolution album art (and by extension the quality and accuracy of track metadata).
Frankly, since both needs are so widely different, I'm not sure there's any one solution for both. Goodness knows Apple Music tries, but to OP's point, it's clearly not succeeding in this effort.
> use streaming platforms as a glorified "trial" platform for new music
... and it seems like the skeumorphism has changed from being a digital analog of a personal record library, to being of a record store. The "library" aspect of it has become more like just the featured section of the store.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652389
Maybe cover art is less meaningful *to you*. FTFY. To the author it is meaningful.
Today UX/UI teams are making decisions for everyone and not allowing anyone to deviate from those decisions. Less and less apps offer users a choice via a settings UI. To me the fix is simple allow users to customize their UI.
That's not really relevant. The author might find any random thing meaningful, including keeping an ant farm at home.
The point is whether it's meaningful enough to many people, justifying the claim that Apple should have given it some special prominence.
Cover art is no longer useful for music discovery or intriguing fans when an album "drops". Those were UX/UI things last ... century. Now they aren't. They're vestigial embellishments at best.
The author admits they're in a niche:
> The fact of the matter is that nobody cares about cover art.
So they're aware that really most people don't really care any more. Like most people these days I listen to music for the music, not the physical media artwork.
It's not like he can customize the UI in the 2012 version of Music app. He just by chance liked it like that.
This might be too broad of a generalization. I find a lot of cover art quite interesting, and I hope it remains prominent. I think a (dis)like for cover art might just be a personal preference.
When I listen to music on Spotify or whatever, I do still pay attention to the cover art and spend a moment to just admire it if it catches my eye.
In an abstract sense, the association of visual art with music, is, of course, a good thing that I'm sure is here to stay.
UPDATED TO ADD: Perhaps the abstract concept of "album" is what needs to go the way of the dodo.
I think the last CD I bought was in 2005, and there was a 7 year gap before I bought my first vinyl. I had completely forgotten that albums used to come with lyrics, trivia and pictures of the band.
Do you listen to full albums or just mixes/random?
I see it much less important for the latter but significant for the former. For a lot of the albums I listen the cover art complements the music/message of the album. I really like it and it enhances my music listening experience.
The app no longer cleanly and easily divides music into Songs/Artists/Albums/Playlists as top-level tabs, instead shunting them into menu items within one such tab. The older apps (pre-iOS 7?) even let the user customize which top-level tabs they wanted to see (e.g. Composer).
Again, I bet a lot of this pain would go away if I started using Apple Music, but I'm bothered by a loss in UX.
Pre iOS7 was done under a person who understands and is passionate about Music. Steve Jobs.
iOS 7 was the first major UI redesign Apple had with iOS, all lead by Jony Ive. Going from Hardware Industrial Design to everything "Design". Throwing out everything that Apple UX, UI, HID had over the years. Basically Jony Ive hated Skeuomorphic design ( Previously Lead by Scott Forstall ) so much he throw everything out. Not sure if he just hated Scott or the design. Or possibly both. But it took Apple years to finally walk back on all those decisions. ( The same to Apple Store, but that is another story )
Apple Music was initially just Beats. The whole App design was about that stupid "Next Song" they keep promoting, also from Beats. It was Jimmy Iovine's idea that the computer / iPhone would magically know your mood and play the next song. And somehow Eddy Cue was sold into it. If you ignore the marketing crap, what Jimmy Iovine wanted was for people to discover new music. By either using AI, curated playlist or Apple Radio. For a long time Apple Music doesn't even have repeat the same song button. And the whole UI was designed for you to "discover" music. As a true music nerd this may have been OK, for normally user this is just stuffing random piece of music in front of their face. It wasn't until a few years later they finally accepted defeat and accept the fact the users knows what they want to listen. And what song or artist they are looking for, as well as repeating the same god damn song hundreds of time.
That is how we arrived at today's Apple Music UX. Which might have been OK for any other company and consumer / user. But in my view, still a bloody pile of crap. Instead they are so focused on the social justice aspect and keep telling the media how Apple's paid out to music labels are 10% higher than Spotify. And continue to push Free Trial hoping to push for higher services revenue.
Nope, I just finished a 3 month trial and it never got any easier. There is no way the person in charge of this app actually uses it day to day (or maybe they've just never used Spotify?)
My biggest grievances:
- Wouldn't be ready to play what I was last listening to immediately, esp if data service was low (Spotify seems always ready to go, even if I haven't explicitly downloaded a song to cache)
- Awful recommendations -- Kept playing songs from the first Tyler, the Creator album when I was listening to vapor/synthwave radio (I like that album but they do not go together!)
I've tried Apple Music and Deezer and both just suck at keeping moods. Apple will go from calm piano to noisy experimental hip hop within 2 or 3 tracks.
Spotify recommendations, while still flawed (really every recommendation algorithm should let a user tune some parameters based on mood, like how much new stuff should be included), are by far the best I've heard.
However, my problem was (was it in iOS 9?) when they moved Downloaded from a permanently set toggle switch to a folder you selected. Which brought you to the exact same view as Library but with only the music on your device. And if you leave the app you may or may not end up in that same view when you return. It made more sense as a setting that you had to deliberately set or unset, not as a "view" of your content where the default was to use more bandwidth and play things you'd deliberately deleted.
Tesla can read your music from USB flash drives. This is wonderful, because they have a premium audio system (used to cost $2500) and you could play high-quality music.
You could load a drive with FLAC or Apple Lossless music and play it back without MP3 lossiness and artifacts.
Yet album art? they do not care.
Here's a thread on how the USB player is a buggy unsupported mess. It recently lost the ability to display album art, but there are plenty of other problems (like no playlist support or any number of other problems)
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/comprehensive-usb-bu...
This thread has > 2000 posts going back 5 years and it is updated almost daily.
The comparison should really be usb vs phone+bluetooth, the radio and streaming.
A USB flash drive is: bigger, holds the music you want to play, skips and seeks instantly, and "theoretically" can be organized how you like it.
I say "theoretically" because there are plenty of other bugs with tag grouping and sorting that disorganize your music for you.
I just wrote a python script to retag all my music. As to FLAC/Apple Lossless - it's nice not to have to resample the music too.
I too bought an iPod Touch back in 2008 because of how the player UI treated album art: as actual 'art', and deserving of a full-width display on the screen. I would meticulously tag my music library with the correct album art files precisely so that they would be displayed nicely on my portable player.
I think one reason the art got smaller is due to phone screens getting larger and higher-res. A full-width image spanning the iPhone SE would be 214 x 214 px. But on the iPhone 12 it would be 390 x 390px.
That would take up a lot of the screen's real estate, perhaps leaving less available for UI controls. Also, if digital album art tends to be low-res to begin with, it would look pixelated if displayed at full width on a high density pixel screen.
Digital album
Unfortunately the alternatives are even worse.
Remember when you had to make software updates through iTunes? This was probably the worst piece of UX ever in a mainstream OS, even worse than clicking "Start" to shut down the computer in Windows. So quality steadily declining is not an accurate description.
Take, for example, iOS 7 which came out 7 years ago. On the one hand it brought some sorely needed modernity, on the other, it replaced a well-polished, albeit dated, style. However, on its own UI-wise it was really bad. Subsequent releases have had tremendous improvements to its many faults while introducing others, and I can't see how that could be called "a steady decline."
This is seen in many areas outside software, so I would imagine it exists here as well.
[1]: Both age as in their physical age, as well as age as in a "have been users in this ecosystem longer" sense.
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
I think this is becoming less and less true. I think Mac OS isn't as good as people say it is and Windows is better than people say it is. I can't speak either way to desktop Linux.
Windows works for people because they are used to its idiosyncrasies. You know how people think their browser icon is to open the internet? It's the same with Windows, to most it's what makes the computer, they don't know otherwise. And these idiosyncrasies are taught in schools and universities in computer classes. How to use a computer has become how to do stuff in Windows and MS Office. Brings back memories from my childhood when I was the "computer expert", helping my parents and their friends fix problems in old Windows 98 and XP. At least the old windows ui was somewhat consistent.
My OS is supposed to be a tool, and windows is super annoying unless you literally download Enterprise edition. Mac is okay, and I’ve been pretty pleased with how capable Linux Mint is, as long as things don’t randomly get broken (looking at you, package manager corrupting and acting weird for weeks before I finally googled and fixed it).
Linux desktop is still a tinkertoy.