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Comment by jamil7 | Hacker News Reader

Ah I went through this, then trying to get the trackpad to work as nicely as macOS and then trying to get universal shortcuts that work nicely across the whole system... and then realised I'd created a crappier version of macOS inside Linux and switched back.

Edit: just to clarify I'm not bashing Linux, more my usecase.

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There's a project working on exactly that, improved trackpad designs. Support varies between trackpads, but from what I've seen there's a lot of progress in this area.

As far as I know, shortcuts are already pretty much global. Keyboard navigation, copy/paste, open/close/save, it all pretty much follows the same Windows standards. It takes time to learn to use all the shortcuts though, and a lot of them aren't intuitive. I've had the same experience when I tried macOS, none of the shortcuts made sense and behaviour was often non-intuitive coming from a non-Apple platform.

If you're happy with macOS you should totally stick with macOS, but luckily there's people working hard on solving the most glaring issues with modern UIs. Once trackpad support improves, a lot of people might feel a lot better at home than they do right now.

I've actually seen the trackpad project which is really cool. The issue I had with shortcuts was finding consistency across different software, the basics but also all the text manipulation shortcuts that exist globally on macOS, it felt as though everytime I downloaded something new I needed to set it up again. It's quite possible I hadn't configured everything correctly though.

Command+, to bring up preferences is surefire, does linux/windows have the same yet? I remember Command+W not working as consistently as well.

Word and like jumps in Windows also felt backwards to me, doing the equivalent of w instead of e in vim, and couldn't be consistently combined with shift.

Support for Alt+Dpad(+Shift) and Command+Dpad(+Shift) is important IMO. As well as Double/Triple-click+Drag: it should select additional units not letters.

These last paragraphs are OS-level but the features were missing or inconsistent.

> Command+, to bring up preferences is surefire, does linux/windows have the same yet?

I just tried this in macOS (Catalina), in Chrome while I happened to be looking at a design page in figma.com and nothing happened.

Not so surefire I guess. To be fair - I assume the web page was capturing that shortcut. It worked on the new tab page.

The point though is that this is an app thing, not a macOS thing. If every app on Windows and Linux decided to use the same exact shortcut for opening preferences, then we'd have that. On macOS, Apple does not strictly enforce Cmd+, for opening preferences - any macOS app can use that for whatever they want.

> Word and like jumps in Windows also felt backwards to me...

Jumping words is done with Ctrl+left/right arrow in Windows and Linux. On macOS it's Option+left/right arrow. On all systems, it can be combined with Shift to highlight the word.

> Support for Alt+Dpad(+Shift) and Command+Dpad(+Shift) is important IMO. As well as Double/Triple-click+Drag: it should select additional units not letters.

Not sure what this means, but on my Linux desktops I have absolute freedom to make my keyboard and mouse to do just about anything I can dream of. Meanwhile, in macOS I am often told that if I am not loving the way that Apple has chosen for me to behave, then I must be expecting the wrong thing...

I really miss the compose key functionality from X11 whenever I use Mac or Windows. No need to remember weird number codes or open applets.

Have you checked out Karabiner[0]? I've read[1] about how you can do some pretty neat things with it.

0: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

1: https://blog.jkl.gg/hacking-your-keyboard/

You can do very similar things on macOS. `Option+E, A` generates á, `Option-U, U` yields ü, and so forth. There are tons of alternate characters available like this using the Option keys, generally covering the most used glyphs I've needed. Beyond that, the Rocket app is fantastic for finding and inserting emojis and more complicated emoticons by human-friendly name.

That’s not the same, that’s basically just AltGr. In X you can do ‘Compose, o, o’ → °, ‘Compose, C, o’ → ©’, ‘Compose, s, o’ → §, ‘Compose p o o’ → «a character HN doesn’t allow (U1F4A9)» and ~6000¹ other combinations. X also has a “mac” layout variant I’d like to hear a macOS user’s opinion of (haven’t ever wanted to use it myself).

[1]: ± some depending on if you count multiple ways of creating the same character, etc. Eg. ‘≠’ can be made by combining / and = in either order. Also ‘Compose, number, s’ for footnotes, ‘Compose, +, -’ → ±, ‘Compose , <, '’ → “‘”, ‘Compose, -, >’ → “→”, ‘Compose, =, >” → “⇒” are nice. And υɳⅰеηⅽоⅾе.

I just tried Cmd-, in both Safari and Chrome, and in both cases it brought up preferences. That a website might interrupt that doesn't prevent it from being a MacOS standard.

it all pretty much follows the same Windows standards

This is why I don't use Linux on the desktop. (About half of my servers are Linux.)

Every couple of years I'll bring out my old HP laptop and spend most of a week installing all the newest desktop environments to see how they've progressed. I'm always disappointed.

I've been counting on Linux to be the big disruptor for two decades now. But more and more it's just becoming the poor man's Windows, by aping Windows conventions.

If I want Windows, I'll run Windows. If I want macOS, I'll run macOS. What I want is something different, not something that tries to be a watered-down version of both.

There are so many possible graphical environments on Linux. Gnome for all its faults isn't really windows lite. KDE has a LOT more functionality built in than windows is liable to just with kwin. With KDE + compiz + plugins the amount of functionality explodes, if you enable the close animation where all windows break into pieces and fly off screen literally.

In 2009ish I had a ui where you could zoom out to a giant wall and rearrange all the windows on your virtual desktops and use a macish expose to bound to a mouse key to pick from the windows on the current desktop. The visual metaphor was better than macs and windows and to boot there were so many knobs you could tweak virtually anything.

Tiling window managers like i3wm and 17 more are both minimal and powerful. Notably i3 has MUCH more powerful keybindings and treats individual monitors as virtual desktops.

With xmonad your window manager is a haskell program with awesome a lua one.

If you want to go all in on emacs you can make it your window manager too.

Honestly its only windows lite if you want it to be so and really everyone is basically xerox lite to some degree or another because we are basically using the same basic metaphors described therein.

I'm using Linux distros for like 10 years now and recently I (again) didn't even know how to close a window. Is it Super+W? Super+Q? Alt+F4? All of those 3 might work. How do I access app preferences? Ctrl+Alt+P? Ctrl+Alt+O? Ctrl+Alt+S? You know, because "preferences", "options" and "settings". All those shortcuts work depending on the app.

At least Linux and Windows shortcuts are easier to remember as they start with basically words, not a combination of weird symbols you never learn cause you never look at them (cause who looks at the keyboard when they type).

Not everyone is English speaking. Mac shortcuts are very easy to remember because they are consistent. I'm not sure what weird symbols are we speaking about? Cmd and Option buttons? They have both a symbol and a name. What about Ctrl and Alt? What's the difference?

I used to hate Mac shortcuts, because I never really spent more than 30 minutes with the system. I think there is nothing to hate - they are just different and IMO better.

That's kinda been my experience, too. The amount of detail Apple has put into their drivers and software is truly underrated (and overshadows by their more recent scummy business practices).

The surprising thing to me is that most of the small details I rely were in OS X 10-15 years ago. If a Linux distro were created to mimic OS X 10.4 I would be perfectly happy using it as an everyday OS and recommending it to others. I keep hitting dead ends in my research, and it seems like the major desktop environments have a lot of architectural problems preventing them from implementing some basic UX improvements.

The barrier of entry to help develop these features also seems high to me, coming from web development.

What recent scummy business practices did Apple do?

Their products are manufactured by literal slaves in concentration camps.

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-forced-uighur-labor-ip...

The linked Business Insider piece falls into a category of stories that come out fairly regularly which could be described as "exposes on truly bad things about the global supply chain that many technology companies benefit from but we've learned we get way more attention if we say 'APPLE <sub>and also many others</sub>' and focus on Apple specifically." This is a pretty classic example on BI's part. The NGO in Australia that the BI piece links to describe their own findings with "The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has identified 27 factories in nine Chinese provinces that are using Uyghur labour transferred from Xinjiang since 2017. Those factories claim to be part of the supply chain of 82 well-known global brands." BI puts the focus specifically on one of those 82 well-known brands, writing, "Although the report highlights that the displaced Uighur workers are present in many different companies' supply chains including Nike, BMW, and Amazon, Apple features prominently as a case study." That's both true and misleading -- they could also have written "Nike features prominently as a case study" or "Adidas features prominently as a case study." The big Apple suppliers mentioned in case study #3 also contract for Samsung, HTC, HP, Microsoft, Oppo, Nintendo, Sony, Oculus, and others.

None of this "excuses" Apple; it's just that there's something faintly disingenuous about focusing on them as if they were a unique source of this problem. We could just as easily say "your Nintendo Switch is manufactured by literal slaves in concentration camps," but we don't, because... it's not as satisfying to be outraged at Nintendo, I guess?

At any rate: I strongly suspect the OP was referring to recent controversy surrounding the way Apple runs the App Store.

82 global brands are profiting from Chinese slaves would be even more accurate and doesn't in any way diminish the guilt of both Apple and literally everyone who bought a phone manufactured by slaves.

By which you mean a single organization has claimed that many Uigher people were forcibly moved to new areas, where they found work in factories making goods for a variety of western companies, including Apple.

Apple and Foxconn both claim to be unaware of any irregularities, and Apple said they're investigating.

I rather think the OP meant something more like their practices surrounding their App Store than this not-quite-substantiated and hyper-sensationalized claim.

We have many credibly reports that slaves have been placed in concentration camps virtually entirely because of their ethnicity and or religion where they are obliged to work for free. The malfeasance of China in this regard and others for example using religious minorities as literal organ banks to be slaughtered for parts has been discussed for years. Anyone who claims at this point to be "investigating" is entirely dishonest. Characterizing this as one report is entirely incorrect.

They haven't changed because moving away from china would cost them billions and they as most people would rather keep themselves warm with a pile of money than worry about the ethical implications.

Nobody here is disputing that China is abusing Uigher people.

But now you've shifted from the part I found dubious--that companies are knowingly engaging in slave labor--to a more clearly established pattern. One can be both horrified by China's treatment of Uigher people and skeptical that Foxconn, Apple, or any one of the 82 companies to which you've referred are complicit.

Trying to run and enforce a monopoly on repairs, for once.

The keyboard shortcuts are a major pet peeve of mine on Linux. It wouldn't be technically hard to make the default text editing/WM keys use Super, but I think that Windows-style and Emacs-style shortcuts are too much of an ingrained assumption at this point for it to be feasible to offer system-wide Mac-style keybindings too.

The trackpad woes are a clear priority for some members of the Linux community and I can visualize a future in which trackpads work nearly as well on Linux as they do on macOS. Offering consistent Mac-style keybindings everywhere (maybe through a GTK setting, like switching between Windows-style and Emacs-style?) seems like a harder problem, especially because of the politics and ingrained assumptions.

Yea, I went down that path, too. Super puts less strain on my fingers, and feels more natural (also, I've been using 95% Macs for half my lifetime, soo...it's a lot of retraining).

It surprises me that there isn't a distro or easy to use tool to use Mac-style keybindings, given the overlap of Macs and Linux systems in tech.

You should look into kinto, it completely remaps the modifier keys system-wide and worked pretty well when I tried it (I switched to i3wm so I use super for i3 shortcuts now)

https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto

Ooh, that's really cool. I hadn't even thought of dynamic rebinding as a potential solution—it seems a little more hacky than proper native functionality (especially since application menus will still display the CUA/Windows shortcuts), but it sounds like a great way for people used to Macs to comfortably use Linux and Windows. Thanks for sharing!

I for one would love for [a version of] Linux to use the keybindings of macOS (in particular emacs bindings in all text fields) and really good trackpad support.

There are many subtle things that works amazingly well on macOS. Most immediately, scrolling with the trackpad is smooth, responsive, and smooth. On Ubuntu 20.04 (XPS 15 9550), my experience was pretty much the opposite and with visible tearing. I'm not trying to bash Linux, I want to move to it, but these are the things holding me back.

The shortcuts thing stung me at first too, but I pushed through it and I'm glad I did. There were two places I used Mac-style, super-key bindings; text navigation and copy/paste. For copy/paste, ctrl really is fine. I don't use it much and it was just a matter of retraining muscle memory.

For navigation (end/beginning of line/word) I just learned Vim bindings, which are better anyway and work on any OS for pretty much every text editor.

Even if I wanted to relearn (I don't), you still have the problem of inconsistencies. In terminal copy is Shift-Ctrl-C, in Firefox it's Ctrl-C, and you don't have all of the emacs bindings my muscle memory relies on (which is a big deal for me - I use them all and all the time).

Or just highlight the text and middle mouse button to paste. A standard in X11 for a long time that drives me up the wall on Windows and MacOS when I wonder why the text I just "copied" isn't pasting.

Literally the only app I've every used in all my years of Linux that doesn't have Ctrl-C/V is the terminal (for obvious reasons). But that's so easy to re-map that it's not worth complaining about:

https://github.com/pkulak/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/alacr...

I had no idea that Mac used emacs bindings all over the place though. If I was used to using them, that would probably have been a deal breaker for me too.

That is amazing. Pray-tell, what exactly do you use the terminal for?

All the control characters have pre-existing meaning, for example in bash Ctrl-C sends SIGTERM to the foreground process, while emacs uses it a prefix command, etc.

This is the crux of the problem. You _cannot_ steal the control characters if you want the terminal to be a terminal and that means you either end up with an inconsistent mess or you pick a new and neutral (say, Cmd) modifier for your UI needs. Apple got it, Microsoft didn't (because they didn't do anything Unix like). That Linux chose to imitate Microsoft is equal part historical and tragedy. EDIT: typos'R'Us

Hmm... not sure what you mean. I just swapped ctr-c and ctrl-shift-c so that copy would be the same in every app.

Not to drag us too deep into philosophy, but you can make a pretty good case for the Linux way as well. On my machine, the super key is mapped exclusively to window manager shortcuts. It's how I move, close and resize windows, change splits, open apps, switch workspaces, pop open temp terminals, emojii choosers, a calculator, all that quality of life stuff. Copying and pasting is an app thing, and apps get ctrl and alt as their modifiers. It does make sense to me.

You clearly aren't an emacs user. Remapping the control and alt key will make it very difficult to use. Same goes for a few other "TUI" applications like it.

No, not at all. I won't use Mac-only software. ;)

I don't want to sound snarky or overly skeptical, but I've seen a lot of people say that the trackpad under macOS is a lot nicer than that under linux, but I don't see what they mean. I have a ~6yo linux laptop as my primary machine and I pretty regularly help my mother-in-law with her ~1yo macbook pro and, other than the mac's trackpad being quite a bit larger, feel no difference between them. I grew up using macs, so I get that they often have that extra bit of quality that's not always easy to put into words, but I just don't feel that with the trackpad. Just curious what the difference is for you?

In a word, precision.

PC laptops are catching up lately for sure though. Almost there. (I havent even tried some of the latest stuff, I heard Razer has really good "Precision" trackpads?)

There isn't much difference nowadays. I think it's just a matter of preference as long as the trackpad is made of glass, which aren't hard to find on PC's anymore.

I even prefer my PC trackpad on Linux vs my Mac trackpad on macOS because on Linux there are many more settings I can configure to get it working exactly to my liking.

Personally, I don't like the cursor acceleration profile in macOS by default. You can change certain values through the terminal, but the Synaptics and libinput options on Linux are way more in depth and packaged in a nice GUI (at least in KDE Plasma).

I haven't used very many laptops, but I am one of the people that will say the mac trackpad is better. I can only give anecdotes, but I have thought about what feels different.

2012: Sony Vaio, running linux: Trackpad was infuriating, so I used an external keyboard + mouse. I'm not sure what it was - the sensitivity of the trackpad was very high so it was hard to point at things, combined with separate buttons.

2015: Macbook pro. The trackpad was so good, and gestures so well done and supported, that I _won't use a mouse_ anymore on my work machine. (Five years later, still feel the same.) Clicking was as easy as tapping on the trackpad, and scrolling with two fingers (as well as two-finger click as right-click) works flawlessly.

2015: My wife has a windows laptop, and its trackpad is infuriating. While in theory it can be clicked anywhere, I always have to _Very Deliberately_ click (significantly harder than on my macbook's trackpad) before it can reliably register.

2018: Using a newer (2016) macbook, with touchbar and a larger trackpad. This has a larger trackpad, but it somehow doesn't register incidental thumb-bumps on the trackpad as clicks (an issue that my older mac sometimes would do).

2020: I moved to a 2020 macbook pro, my wife has a new windows laptop, and we have a Chromebook. I've used them all -- and still notice a strong preference for the mac's trackpad.

Windows trackpad handling has improved a TON since her old laptop, and it no longer feels like I need to press super hard to get clicks to register, but it still feels more finicky about recognizing clicks than the mac does, while still being harder to get the pointer where I want it to be. It also seems to react to accidental touches on the trackpad that the mac would ignore while typing. The chromebook's trackpad seems better than I expected for a $300 machine, and is better than her old laptop's trackpad, but it still doesn't seem quite as responsive as the mac's.

I'm not sure how much of this is hardware versus drivers. Windows laptops seem to be Very Good, in fact, these days. I still prefer the mac's trackpad behavior better, though.

Theres a level of precision and responsiveness that I wasn't able to replicate. I even installed Arch on a macbook pro once and attempted to replicate it but it never felt right no matter how much I fiddled with parameters. This was years ago however and I know theres been some more work done in this area and someone with better linux skills might be able to do a better job than me.

What gestures were you missing?

I have libinput-gestures working just fine with 2, 3 and 4 finger events, although I vastly prefer a 5-button vertical mouse (Evoluent) and keeping my fingers on the keyboard over a touchpad...

With some small scripts I was able to have things that macOS can't do out of the box at all, like maximizing windows, snapping windows - pretty much anything I could script, I could do with a touchpad gesture.

One thing that really matters - you have to have the right brand of touchpad for it to work. Mine is an Elantech (ELAN0501).

>trying to get universal shortcuts that work nicely across the whole system

Did you succeed? For me that was the point where I gave up and just went back to OSX

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