I guess it because, quite many people can rely on Mac or Windows for their daily work. All required things have pretty polished interface where as Linux distros have getting better, but there are still lot of unpolished, or missing interfaces.
With Windows there is too much and ugly chrome around everything, slow and buggy views.
Apple's view on the maximize button is that it should maximize the window to the width of the available content, and not to the screen. Today lot of the widescreen resolutions and screensizes are much bigger, so doesn't necessarily make sense to maximize every app. It's designed that way, even you might disagree.
So what's the excuse for no decent window management, then? That even despite making 27" displays, and not letting us maximize a program, they want us to only use one program at a time?
With Windows there is too much and ugly chrome around everything, slow and buggy views.
Apple's view on the maximize button is that it should maximize the window to the width of the available content, and not to the screen. Today lot of the widescreen resolutions and screensizes are much bigger, so doesn't necessarily make sense to maximize every app. It's designed that way, even you might disagree.