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Comment by stevenjohns | Hacker News Reader

One of the major things I missed (and eventually brought me back to MacOS) were things like maximising a window means it becomes its own virtual desktop, and the touchpad gestures that would let you move between them. I tried a lot of hacks to replicate those features effectively but never came close, and it ultimately pushed me back to Macs.

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Haha. And that is the one thing I HATE about OSX. I would change the default maximize behaviour to be the same add the double-click top bar if I could. The only thing I do with the maximize to VD behaviour is lose the application windows.

This comment shows me how these type of threads are useless and sound as random whining to everyone. Your experience and use case is so perpendicular to mine and 100% as valid as mine. But one person love for something is another person hate.

Does holding down ⌥ when clicking the green button do what you want?

In GNOME you can four-finger swipe to switch workspaces. Maximising won't automatically put the app on a workspace, but you can use a keyboard shortcut to shift the current window to the next workspace until you get to a blank workspace, then maximise it. Or you can drag and drop the window to a new workspace in the overview.

Swiping feels awful in Linux though. Linux still doesn't have proper animation mapping to swiping, so moving workspaces happens after the swipe gesture, not during. Scrolling in Linux using a trackpad feels terrible too. I almost switched away from Linux just because scrolling in Firefox felt so bad.

You’re painting this as a fault with Linux, but it’s almost certainly the fault of a desktop environment. Were you using GNOME? You can adjust the way that trackpad scrolling works in Firefox and in GNOME Tweak Tool, IIRC.

Hey you might be right that has changed recently - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1564238

I'll have to dig into it more

The fact you have to configure anything for scrolling to work smoothly on a web browser paints linux in a bad light itself. The main reason i do not watch to switch to linux [apart from missing adobe catlogue and sketch] is stuff like the track pad, being able to navigate around using various gestures, having little things like invisible scroll bars etc. Subtle animations and visual queues really make the experience smooth. Its not even about eye candy, just seemlessness so your mind doesnt notice the workflow - which is what you want. The latest ubuntu doesnt even let you drag drop on the desktop? i really want linux but it still seems miles away from sleekness of osx

In gnome under wayland the swiping tracks, i think. Its new - might not be in the version in ubuntu yet. Also, wayland has its issues so im not using it yet.

Isn't a F11 supported as a shortcut in most of applications to switch to full-screen mode? I remember it was supported over vast majority GUI applications I used, when I was complaining on small screen, but now personally, I don't understand why somebody would need it make windows be maximized-to-workspace as in macOS. There isn't such huge dock, and application menus were redesigned to be in-app-hamburger-menus and finally displays manufactures now provide monitors with higher resolution than few years ago. If you really notice lack of focus / working space, you shouldn't look for typical GNOME/KDE DEs but for a WM (windows managers) like Sway/i3 or AwesomeWM, which helped me to be more productive, when I dab in multiple applications at once.

F11 works in almost all apps, but it is dependent on the app and not the window manager, so it's not completely universal. All gtk and qt apps will be fine, but I had to configure my terminal (alacritty) to support it.

I'm pretty sure you can bind a key to do exactly that in i3.

Yeah that's the thing about Linux that is both nice and awful.

It can pretty much do anything you want, given enough time and configuration... but when that configuration breaks: good luck.

Some people prefer "it just works" over losing some control.

Personally I dislike macOS's "virtual desktops" and much prefer being able to swap between different desktops in i3, and being able to send windows wherever, control tiling, etc.

Whereas on macOS if you have a use-case not supported by Apple, you're either out of luck completely, or it's going to cost you. macOS still doesn't have even window snapping, nor a decent file manager.

It has an awkward pseudo-tiling “snapping” thing that’s useless compared to a real tiling WM or even Windows. Do macOS users manually drag their windows around and align them just right to fit everything on the display?

I use a very nice utility called Magnet for this.

https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/

That's pretty much what I do. It's a different way of thinking about windows. A tiler is more like feeds from a security camera, where you have everything in focus at once and your gaze shifts accordingly, but your attention is nonetheless divided among however many things you are tiling and compromises are made if you have a smaller screen. A mac desktop behaves very much like an actual desk. My windows are like papers, sized as the devs intended or how the paper is laid out and cut. Sometimes things are in neat little piles or spread around on an external monitor. Overlapping happens but isn't a deal breaker, just like having one paper slightly on top of another on your desk. Swiping with three fingers spreads out all my papers on my desk, and shows me what's going on with my other desks or what I've got stashed in my dock.

On my macbook, most of my windows are shifted to the right side of the screen, exposing about an inch and a half of desktop containing all my aliases to currently relevant files, drives, and folders. Icons are sized down to line height to maximize space. Sometimes I want to keep that stretch open and the files handy, other times not.

I've tried tilers and I could see how some people like them and could get quick with them, but they just weren't great for how I personally manage and think about using my computer. I'm a papers all over the desk kind of guy, not a security guard. I also have a 13" display, sometimes in practice smaller if I want my desktop files exposed, so tiling on top of each other makes windows too short, and tiling to the sides often makes them too skinny. I'm sure on a 17" laptop or a large monitor tiling isn't so constricting. Lots of apps these days are optimized for using most of a 13" display size, and lots of websites turn into a mobile site if your window is too small. I was spending more time fighting with the tiler, cycling through different tiling layouts, and changing parameters than I was just quickly and loosely dragging windows around as needs changed (After all, it only takes <1 second to move a window, and <1 second to resize, and I don't have to think about it at all, just like laying down a piece of paper on top of my desk). And I was using the tiler that was supposedly the best and most like the famous linux tilers (amethyst).

Thank you for explaining so well. I can now understand your perspective much better.

> It can pretty much do anything you want, given enough time and configuration... but when that configuration breaks: good luck.

You can say the opposite of Macs: "the stuff that is designed to work in a certain way by Apple works perfectly, if you want to anything outside of that beautiful box, good luck"

Yeah I understand having same defaults over customization. I just don’t find all the mac defaults to be all that sane. The maximization putting windows in their own workspace at the very end of the workspace list is one of the stranger decisions of the mac UI

You used to be able to disable the sliding animation when switching desktops in Lion. They undid that and for six years switching desktops meant waiting for the animation (finally fixed again in Sierra). That alone was enough for me to stop using OSX.

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