Comment by xp84
> Removing stock apps from the Applications folder is completely safe—nothing will break—and this is your computer, so you should make it your own
This is the part that hits home the most for me.
I get the benefits of the hardened pc-as-appliance that Apple has shoved down all our throats as "for our own good" but using a modern Mac compared to even Mavericks, or Windows XP, feels to me like if someone came into my house and confined me to a coat closet which they've padded and sealed off. This isn't my house anymore, someone else controls everything and only they can give me permission (revocable at any time) to do literally anything. They promise me that I'll never hit my head now, but I never had that problem in the first place.
Echoes of an article posted here [1] some time ago called I Don’t Like Computers which had the same nostalgic vibe about computing in the past. This is exactly how modern OS's and devices make me feel. The Personal Computer used to be PERSONAL. The User was in control. We used to be in the driver’s seat. We used to tell computers what to do. Now we feel like passengers, and the computer is telling us what it's going to do and hedging us into a few small scraps of functionality it deems safe for us.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30851371