I'm came from ~18 of Windows & Linux usage and everyone always told me macOS is THE OS with the best usability.
But I can't confirm this.
Minimization of windows is shitty and maximization even more.
When I maximize, often just the height is changed, when I go back to "normal" the height and the width is changed, so I always have to adjust the width manually.
When I minimize a few windows, it's impossible to get back the right one without luck.
And there is no proper UI element for checking if you have anything open in a different workspace without opening the switcher.
Some days I still really miss dwm, but having Photoshop, Ableton, and several other things Just Work™ makes it worth it.
Perhaps it's a setting or was the behavior in an older version of macOS?
System Preferences > Mission Control > Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use
Motherfucking maddening as hell.
and if you have many windows open (in win 10 at least) you don't have to press alt+tab 10 times in a row to choose your desired program, you can hold alt+tab and use arrows.
I mean it's perfectly usable once I got the basic gestures down and installed the app that let me independently set the track pad and mouse wheel scroll directions, but will go so far as to say that both xfce and MATE are objectively better at window management.
Partly I think their hands were tied by the too late to change decision for the always there contextual top menu bar. Or this is just 25 years of using win95 clones talking and I'm set in my ways.
You wouldnt judge i3 or other completely different approaches after only a few minutes.
absolutely :)
What i like the most is you are just a super key tab away from basically everything so focus on a single thing feels natural and right. There is no way to lose anything either, its all there. Always.
The last time I tried it, I got frustrated when working with a lot of pdf sources - hitting the super key just presented me with a myriad of white rectangles where open windows would frequently rearrange requiring a slow manual search to find the file I was looking for. This can be less of a problem with a taskbar, as the filename is the main identifier, and being 1 dimensional it is easier to scan and preserves its position better.
Another frustration is trying to view two apps together on the screen at the same time, if one of the apps itself contains multiple windows. I'm not at my desk to try this but let's say you have multiple chrome windows open, all with their own tabs, and you want to view your current chrome window overlayed on a window from another app. To do this you have to manually minimise all of your chrome windows one by one so they will all move of the way, to allow you to switch between apps and view them both at the same time.
Somehow it is able to open up the device manager and THEN give the window in the background focus when I switch to my editor and back to Xcode with cmd+tab.
So I have to move the Xcode window down, to grab that backgrund thing what seems to be part of Xcode.
Four fingers up, expose. Drag the windows you need up top into a new desktop. Command (or control? Or option? Or a combination?) Plus the right arrow to switch desktops. Try all the combinations until I get to the right desktop or throw the damn thing out a window.