Comment by retrac

Applications tend to stay open on Mac even with no windows open. As a KDE on Linux user, I tend to open and close apps as I use them. Very few applications take more than a second to load on a modern machine with an SSD, anyway.

I find that many desktop GUI programs are slightly misbehaved for whatever reason, and consume some small but real amount of resources when idle in the background. When a dozen are open response time will be poor.