But having used it for a few weeks now I can confirm it is a strict downgrade over Sequoia for me. I use none of the new features it has introduced, and the changes to existing features are just worse.

Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro. The Finder has gone from fine to janky once again, especially with horizontal scroll. The window corners and mouse interactions are indeed annoying (I'd assumed the many complaints were at least slight hyperbole). Left-aligned window titles are unbalanced and ugly. I've had weird (visual) app duplication issues with the Application smart-folder in the Dock. Cross-device copy-paste SEEMS to be more flaky than usual. And most petty of all I really don't like the new icons - especially the Trash icon for some reason.

- simply decline/reject the TOS on install. It will auto uninstall the installer and go away.

Life has been good since.

    defaults write com.apple.SoftwareUpdate MajorOSUserNotificationDate -date "2030-03-03 12:00:00 +0000"

Linux + KDE surpassed Windows many years ago, now I find I also prefer it to the Mac laptops, which are otherwise better only for portability.

Apple need to get their software act together. Such a shame because the hardware is awesome. A near perfect inversion of the era of Tiger on the G4.

Weird, I haven't seen that once. I wonder what explains the difference?

I analyzed the GitHub repo. The main files are three short shell scripts, and I confirmed:

1. No network calls — doesn't download anything from external sources

2. No background services — no LaunchAgents or daemons installed

3. No data exfiltration — doesn't send data anywhere

4. Reversible — provides an uninstall script

5. Transparent — all code is plain bash scripts and XML

6. Uses official Apple APIs — only uses the /usr/bin/profiles system command

7. Standard security practices — includes CI validation, shellcheck linting, and SHA256 checksums

Folks who are tired of the update notifications can use this with confidence.