Any chance of at least a summary of your complaint? Having listened to the first the if service of the videos they don't seem relevant to a general point, more that you just don't like Emacs which I'm not something 45 minutes on YouTube to confirm (I don't like Emacs either, but that doesn't make all Unix software limited nor limiting).

My complaint can be summarized in: I'm a human, my desktop must be my digital companion. Since I have a single brain, that do anything, without compartments, my very same hand caress, steer my car, take a fork, use a hammer, type on a keyboard etc, I do not want a "compartmentalized" tool.

For instance I want to take notes about a contact, for instance a colleague with whom I have work and friendship relationships, so I want to have in a single place contacts details like phone numbers, addresses, perhaps birthday and other anniversary reminders in my agenda, projects we are involved included eventual reports, mails, with some relevant/on-the-table easy reachable/highlighted etc. For what masochistic reason I can't have all those things together on my desktop? For what masochistic reason I can't have also others views of similar information together on my desktop, like see grouped all issues of a project coupled with relevant peoples involved, personal notes etc? Why I have to find "dedicated" apps for anything, non integrated, sometimes almost impossible to integrate, with duplicated and separated contents if for me, for what I do, for my brain all information are the same?

That's my complaint. An OS must be a single "application", under it's own user control, flexible, moldable, easy to bend to our desire without demanding a gazillion SLoC for anything. Emacs offer that. Classic SmallTalk workstations the same, modern systems do not. They are just cargo ship for individual containers, because that's positive to sell individual container, service etc, while depriving the user to handle and manage his/shes own personal information.

Unix already offer a small flexibility, thanks to CLI/scripting composability of individual simple commands, but graphic systems on unix have essentially a sole IPC: manual cut&paste. Nothing more, so even early unix GUIs violate unix principles. That's why unix is limited and limiting respect of classic Xerox workstations or LispM or modern Emacs. Emacs itself is a GUI, but being text based that GUI can be manipulated as the user want, easily, at runtime, modern widget-based GUIs or WebUIs can't, WebUIs can be customized a bit injecting js/css etc but that's not that "easy" nor "live", nothing a casual user can do.

While I'm not an Emacs person, I do agree with you to an extent. Make no mistake, I'm no unix evangelist; I like Plan 9, especially its rejection of unix's horrendous TUIs.

I used shell scripts because I was already very familiar with them. I use Linux because I find it to be the OS that's the least terrible of the big three that are usable for everyday tasks. It could be a lot better, but I'll still take it any day over Windows.

I appreciate the integration of Emacs, but I don't know Lisp, and dislike the idea of living inside a single monolithic program. I prefer to create my own (usually graphical and text-oriented) tooling where I can even if it's very hacked together and limited, because I'm very opinionated on how I want things to behave and present.

Emacs is not the paradise, in the sense that have many issues, but I use it because even with them it give so much back that's worth it, the real point is the concept: an operating system as a single, graphical environment where anything is reachable and moldable by the end user.

Personally I'm born on unix, I'm still far more familiar and quick scripting things in zsh than in elisp, still using zsh on a real terminal emulator for many things, because of habits, but Emacs have completely change for good my digital life and that in a super-short period of time.

A stupid personal example: for more than a decade I've kept my files in a hyper-curated home taxonomy with relevant symlinks, even TMSU as an experiment, in just few months (and with big hesitations) I wipe out that taxonomy for a cache-like storage accessed via org-mode (org-attach + linkmarks at firs, then org-roam), now accessing (almost) anything is just hit-a-key, type something, tab/enter to open. Not only: thanks to the fact that org-mode notes, accessed normally via search&narrow UI (like modern "dash-like" menus / google search in the end) act as a kind-of metadata super-rich directories I can select them via org-ql queries constructing different views of my files like putting paper files on a physical desk in a snap. Anything is integrated, now I open my landline provider note and there I have all monthly bills BUT also recorded bank transactions, longs (for instance about outages) so I immediately see why a month have an unusually high or low price, I can easily craft things like a quick graph of price evolution etc. Being on mostly textual storage means being on a kind-of data lake more or less easy to process in countless forms.

Another example: for many years (unfortunately not anymore) few utilities have sent me invoices as pdf attachments, they are auto-paid by the bank so normal procedure is just archiving and casually check that anything is ok. With Emacs (and a bit of scripting) my MailDrop pipe those utilities messages to uudeview that extract the attachment, save it with a proper name in a proper place (that's the unix part) AND add an entry to my org-agenda witch are my entire note collection, that means adding in the relevant heading in for instance my electricity utility an entry like:

    * WAITING month X, amount Y, invoice xxxxxxxxx
    
    Received via mail on <yyyy-mm-dd>, due for <yyyy-mm-dd>

the "mail" is an actual notmuch: link to the relevant message I can open in a click, forward it, reply to if (ok, are all noreply but you get the idea), dates are "active dates" that means my org-agenda show the entry at that date in log mode.

A day after the due date if the relevant transaction does not appear in my ledger an entry get automatically added to my agenda "something is wrong" with all details. That's automatic. In Emacs is easy to do since anything is exposed, accessible and moldable in unix the easy part is mostly limited to extracting and archiving the attachment. At maximum I can craft a check script with ledger (CLI version) that update my motd on a certain day but it's not the same thing and not as easy.

Slides? Well the linked videos in my precedent post show how easy they are, no need to work with modern GUIs for hours just to get something nice and inside the presentation I have my fully integrated environments, for instance adding a link that change my windows layout, run some software, ... it's immediate and simple, no need to "switch app" and "switch back" etc. And I can go on for long.

That's why we need a single, graphical, open and fully moldable environment for end users.