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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

Also, by default Finder seems to hide directory structure from you. This seems to be Apple thinking it'll confuse people if they can see 'up' directories, but I think just as often it confuses people like me who are trying and failing to go up.

I use all three major desktop OSes regularly now, and overall Windows just feels like the most user-friendly and straightforward, though of course it too has issues (e.g. various settings/control panel options being randomly split between new style and old style systems).

Oh, and Linux seems to be by far the least stable. I have apps freezing the whole damn computer way more often there than the other two.

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I agree that Finder is somewhat weird in regard to hierarchies, but it all makes sense if you get to know it: basically, you can move around with CMD+Arrow. Up goes up a directory, down goes down a directory (or opens the file). Left / Right go forward / back in history, like a browser.

I'm not sure Windows is such a great example in the conversation about file systems, what with its "collections" and abstract hierarchy which is sometimes upside down and somewhat – but not fully! – circular.

Open an explorer window, click on your name under "quick access". You're in the home directory. You also have a "Desktop" folder there. Go in there. You see your desktop files. So far so good.

Now go back to your user folder and click "up". You're now in "desktop". What?! Only now, there's other stuff in there. How many desktops are there?!

Now go back to your user folder, choose any folder. Click on the address bar. C:\users\your_name\your_folder. Click twice "up", you expect to be in C:\users, right? Ha!

Now type C:\users\your_name\your_folder, or browse through the C:\ in the left pane. Click the address bar and compare with earlier. Now click up. Very intuitive. Depending on how you got somewhere, your apparent hierarchy is not the same.

Back to the "quick collection" thing, there's a desktop entry there. Click it. Looks like the first desktop folder, so no surprise here, right?. Click up. You end up in "my computer"!

Now, do the same operations in Finder. How many different desktops are there? Not sure how Windows is more logical or user-friendly.

I side with the other poster who said that most "common users" just don't understand file systems, and so they put everything on the desktop because it doesn't go away.

> basically, you can move around with CMD+Arrow. Up goes up a directory, down goes down a directory (or opens the file). Left / Right go forward / back in history, like a browser.

This is really helpful to know - it's one of my biggest bugaboos about using Finder & navigating the Mac GUI.

On the other hand, I suspect this kind of obscure key-based shortcut is a big part of why Macs don't feel intuitive to a lot of users. How could I have known this shortcut exists? It's not broadcast anywhere obvious. My options for finding all these obscure shortcuts aren't great. I could scroll through a submenu in the Settings pane, hoping to find something that looks like it says the thing I'm trying to do (and then that I can figure out what keys it means, since Apple key symbology is VERY arcane). I could stumble across a mention of the shortcut in a forum like this. Or I could Google in the hope of finding something - though that assumes I believe it's doable in the first place, which I didn't in this particular case.

It would also help if Apple chose easier / more intuitive keyboard shortcuts. A "shortcut" which both is the only way to do something, and also requires pressing a minimum of four seemingly-random keys, is not a shortcut at all - it's a mental load on the user that they just have to hold in their heads forever.

Yeah, I remember being frustrated about the discoverability when I started using Mac OS.

Shortcuts mostly appear in the menus, but I remember one in particular being elusive: cmd + down. I've found it out by asking a friend.

I think there is supposed to be a method to the madness, though it's maybe less and less clear nowadays, especially with applications that don't implement them correctly (such as MS Office, electron apps, etc) and people being very used to Windows' conventions.

For example, the modifier keys' names are usually an indication of what you can achieve with them.

CMD (the "flower-like" key, directly next to the space bar) is usually the one used to produce... commands. As in Copy, Save, etc.

Then you have your ALTernative / Option, which usually modifies some other key's usual behaviour. You can obtain dead keys with it. ALT+e / e = é. etc. It also works in menus to obtain alternative actions. You can click a menu, press alt, and see the entries change.

And CTRL deals with control characters. ctrl-c in the terminal, line editing (ctrl-a in any text field goes to the beginning of the line, etc). It's not clear to me why right click is obtained with control and not alt, though...

> You can click a menu, press alt, and see the entries change.

That is insane. Who came up with that? Why do some entries lose their ellipsis when you hold alt? How is anyone expected to know any of this?

I think it's in the "mental model". You're kind of "expected" to know that "option" will produce an "optional / alternate" behavior. It's kind of like windows. How are you supposed to know that win+left will move the window to the side?

At least, on macOS, if you press OPT, the entries will change. On Windows, if you click right → delete, the file isn't deleted. It's moved to the recycle bin. "How are you supposed to know that?". On Mac, it says "move to trash" or similar. Now say you don't want that. If you hold Shift and click delete, it actually deletes it. But if you hold Shift while looking at the Windows menu, it still says "delete".

There are quite a lot of "have to know" things in other OSs, too. They each come with a mental model which may be closer or further from the user's.

I think the issues we see nowadays come up because many apps work the same everywhere, and people may switch between systems more often, so figure since <app> works the same, everything works the same.

It's also hard to think that what comes naturally is actually a mental model that's been ingrained and not something "absolute".

I guess this is why computers used to have manuals, but who reads those anymore?

Yeah, I ultimately don’t understand the complaints about unintuitiveness: what makes a system intuitive is that you’ve internalized its conventions. macOS has its own set of conventions and they apply pretty consistently across Apple’s first-party applications and native (Cocoa) applications. I learned most of them when I switched to Macs in ‘08 and they’re now “intuitive” to me and they “just work” in most applications I use. I went through the same learning process when I was about seven on Windows and when I was like 13 on Linux.

> How are you supposed to know that win+left will move the window to the side?

You're not. Shortcuts are a power user thing. If you want to move the window you drag it.

> There are quite a lot of "have to know" things in other OSs, too.

Oh definitely. It just seems to me that OSX is exceptionally bad at telegraphing these things. On windows and even linux most all features have something visible to clue you in to their existence. OSX seems to do its best to hide things instead.

This shortcut is clearly mentioned in the menus.

The filesystem is super confusing to tons of users. The reason people put crap all over their desktops is because they "lose" it if they put it anywhere else, while the desktop always stays "where it is". I don't think anyone's come up with a good solution to that problem, yet (Apple's isn't very good, and Windows' similar moves with its defaults aren't any better) and we're far enough into computers being common that it doesn't look like a majority of users are ever going to get comfortable with the same abstractions and interfaces we're all comfortable with.

A better search functionality would help.

What do you mean? It’s very good. Just have to change the finder pref to only search current and subfolders

And we’re on Hacker News and it’s a Unix system, why are we even talking about Finder.app for searching...? Use mdfind.

Believe it or not, the way the filesystem worked on the original Mac operating system was that things did stay where you put them. Open a disk and the folders on it could be put anywhere in that 2D space, and each folder's contents could similarly be anywhere in their virtual 2D space, and each disk/folder opened in its own window that even re-opened in exactly the same position with exactly the same size as when you last closed it.

Gnome did this in 3.0 and called it spatial browsing. It was awful with a hierarchy 5 folders deep you ended up opening 5 windows.

I don't think the cultural convention of directories in Linux is well suited to spatial filesystem navigation. Still, it'd be nice to still have the option, especially with AppImage doing a reasonably job of approximating the one-file-application paradigm of Macs.

The normal procedure of clicking on a folder result in redirecting the existing file management window to the new directory is the only functional way to operate. The behavior of creating a new window per directory inevitably creates too many window management tasks in terms of constantly closing extra windows.

Also what size your file manager should be is a function of what else you have on the screen which is inevitably variable so you end up resizing and moving windows to fit in with an arrangement that is different than last time you opened that directory. It's vastly easier if you want 2 directories shown side by side is to just use the traditional split view.

The fact that size and position are arbitrarily chosen even if they are per directory means that there is no mental map between position and position in the filesystem hierarchy.

Spatial browsing is a poor metaphor based on nothing that never made any sense whatsoever.

That's a good point—that's probably the closest a file manager has come to being truly usable by most folks.

Relatedly, IMO iOS took a huge step backwards in UX when iOS7 moved away from a highly spatial interaction metaphor for practically the entire OS—by which I don't mean the skeuomorphism, exactly, but things like folders sliding the screen "open" when tapped, so that they had a sense of physical location within the main screen. Or "slide to unlock" looking like a physical slider so you didn't even need to read it to know what to do. The loss of the security blanket that was the physical (or at least faux-physical) home button has hurt it, too.

It was great until you had a disk shared between the large monitors at school and the tiny one you had at home. So long as all screens are the same sized and layed out the same it worked good. However any form of using two different computers and the whole thing started to fall apart. Throw in multiple monitors and it isn't possible to do this usefully.

It also only worked well when you only had a few files in any folder. If you have 100 files that are related in one folder and you can't find anything without sorting it alphabetically. Depending on how your brain organizes things this might not matter.

I think the concept may just need some slight modification to work in more modern cases like this. Namely, by making the interface zoomable.

I think if you leave Finder with the defaults (icon view) it still does this. I think if you change the view, say, to list view, Finder may apply that view to all folders you haven't specifically chosen a view type for. I think if you specifically choose a type (like icons for your a folder of images) it stays that way, but it's not clear to me exactly what happens.

This seems on point. The conversation at the dawn of personal computing would have been:

> Where's file X for project A?

> On the floppy disk for project A.

And that more or less continued for most users through the 90s, but then it got confusing to the entry-level user:

> Where's file X for project A?

> In My Documents, under the folder "Project X".

Which, I'd bet, is one of the reasons why cloud-based editors have taken off - the file is "in Google Docs", rather than in a directory hierarchy on the filesystem. GDocs presents me with a more or less flat view of all of my documents. I hate this - I have to go over to Google Drive to organize them - but I can understand how it'd be much more approachable to the average user.

For whatever reason, I have a really hard time with the Mac filesystem and have resorted to either command line or files in docs or downloads.

> The filesystem is super confusing to tons of users

It's basically hidden entirely in iOS, probably for this reason.

Linux rarely crashes. What it does do is handle low memory situations really badly. Simultaneously browsers have got way more memory hungry.

I have left firefox overnight and had a tab decide it would like to eat all my memory.

Linux does have an oom killer to deal with out of memory situations but it will kick in halfway to the heat death of the universe and you will reboot first.

Oom looks just like a crash the UI is frozen however if the offender is killed everything actually is working.

The solution is a userspace oom daemon like earlyoom that kicks in before you actually run entirely out of memory and knows not to kill things like X.

Distributions ought to ship with it.

I like how the OOM killer stays up to date with its list of the worst possible processes to kill first. Back in the day, it used to prioritize X, bash, and ssh. Now it extends that to include newer pieces of essential infrastructure like "kubelet".

It's careful attention to detail like this that keeps Linux relevant for the next generation!

(I'm kidding, of course. I was recently trying to reproduce some Node test flakiness that only happened on CI, which has limited resources and exposes timing sensitivity. I had trouble getting this to happen on my 32 core workstation, so I decided to run 100 copies of the tests in parallel which definitely reproduced the issue -- and ran the machine out of memory. The OOM killer kicked in, and chose to kill all the extra Node processes without killing my SSH session, which was nice of it.)

I think a much more common problem than OOM is X itself. It ties programs tightly together, making it trivial for one badly behaving process to take down all processes with a GUI.

It seems intuitively true that you would always have SOMETHING acting as a go between video driver and all clients and if this crashed your graphical interface goes down unless you have something that acts as an interface that can in turn restart the component. A buggy client already shouldn't actually take down your X server but a bug in X obviously can.

It sounds odd to me to describe applications relying on a toolkit like QT/GTK which can run in dozens of different environments which in turn run on both X11 and Wayland which in turn can talk to a variety of different GPU drivers as tightly coupled.

> Distributions ought to ship with it.

You mean install it by default? Even good old Debian stable ships with earlyoom (which I'm ofc using, since I saw it mentioned here once on HN).

Yes I mean install and enable by default. Look at the experience TulliusCicero had. People are extremely going to reasonably assume Linux freezes all the time not Firefox ate all my memory and Linux doesn't have a good story for handling oom.

> handle low memory situations really badly

Yeah, I wonder why this happens. I've seen LKML emails trying to address this problem, they even cited Firefox as an example:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/8/4/15

This also seems to be the norm in user space software. I've read a lot of source code where people simply assume malloc never fails. Tried to discuss this on freenode once, apparently nobody knows what to do in case the system is out of memory. Why can't it gracefully degrade?

Arguably they could degrade more gracefully by just starting slightly sooner when they have some resources to manage but they successfully ignored the problem until it became someone else's problem. At this point I don't know that any solution would be much better than simply running a daemon like earlyoom in practice. I'm just surprised that desktop distros ship with Firefox which absolutely can in edge cases leak gigabytes of memory but no good way to deal with misbehaving applications after memory is exhausted.

The inability to easily go to $HOME in Finder is of great annoyance to mevwhen combined with app signing. Hashicorp seems to run into this most often - download a new version of Terraform/Packer/whatever, install to ~/.terraform.d/plugins/darwin_amd64, and MacOS sternly tells me I can't run it, with zero instructions on how to proceed. Manually type the path in Finder/Go, Option+Open the binary, then you're good to go.

I understand the reasoning for protecting the end user, but like UAC in Windows, or Developer Mode options in Android, you should be able to disable these protections. If I want to run a binary, I want to run that binary.

You can actually just goto your home folder. Goto Finder>Preferences, then Sidebar, you'll find your home folder is stashed away in there but not checked. It'll just be your username.

You can also unhide hidden dot folders as well if you wish but by default those are hidden. I don't have the instructions for that right now but a google search can find it for you if you want it.

Yes, that's probably the first thing I do in Finder on a new macOS device. I struggle to understand the reasoning behind hiding it by default, since it only contains the standard folders like Documents, Downloads, Movies, etc.

I suppose it's an attempt to conceal/abstract away the underlying file system structure, which probably makes sense if those folders are already on the sidebar.

> The inability to easily go to $HOME in Finder is of great annoyance to me

You should be able to use cmd+shift+h to always jump to the home directory in finder. I remember having the same real annoyance until I discovered the hotkey.

It’s also on the menu bar under Go > Home. (The menu bar is possibly my favourite thing about Macs. Especially that you can search it from the keyboard and it shows you where the command you want is with a nice little arrow. Even in Excel)

Are you saying that it's not intuitive for the end user to press Cmd-G, type ~, and then click OK to land in a "home" folder where the majority of the important configuration files are hidden by default?

The majority of configuration files should not be edited directly, but changed by changing settings in the app preferences. So that seems consistent with the philosophy on the Mac - don't work with files and the file system directly, but let the appropriate app take care of it as far as possible. Same with music and photos.

Photos existing in the giant photos thing is just a mess. I hate it. I have to export them to do anything. I am not sure they even back up correctly. And this is photos.

You have to customise MacOS to show full file paths and hidden files. Someone at Apple decided that users couldn't be trusted with that super-secret information, but anyone who reads HN is going to find that frustrating.

I go back to Windows occasionally and I still hate every single thing about it. The tiles, the file system, the telemetry, the intrusive updates that guarantee I'll have to wait for an undefined time before I can get some work done, the driver lottery (still...) And many more.

MacOS is more of a workable OS with some really stupid warts. They should have been fixed years ago, but they probably won't be, ever.

Finder is particularly bad, and has needed a complete overhaul for at least a decade.

But Apple's other apps are heading in an MS-ish direction - which is more controlling and constraining, and less intuitive and transparent. It really shouldn't be as hard as it is to export photos from Photos, and the screen grabber should just allow saving to any file location instead of getting in the way with some random-ish defaults, one of which can be customised, if only you remember you need to.

This all reeks of second-rate middle management - untalented PMs trying to justify their existence with poorly-designed updates while more serious issues go unaddressed.

Apple are a weird company. When they're in the zone they can hit it out of the park, like with the M1. But - ironically - desktop UI design is not the model it could be. If MacOS 11 ever happens (not holding my breath...) it would be just as likely to be a step backwards as forwards.

> the intrusive updates that guarantee I'll have to wait for an undefined time before I can get some work done

This is a common criticism but it's entirely false. Windows offers a lot more way to delay or refuse updates than macOS. When macOS wants to update, the best you can do is "Ask again tomorrow". And pray you see the popup before it reboots in 60 seconds.

I'm confused. If I click "ask again tomorrow", it asks again tomorrow.

But, I still haven't figured out how to delay Windows updates (granted I haven't looked into it seriously yet since I only use it for casual gaming).

The point is, the default UI allows users to delay they update on MacOS easily, while Windows does not.

Windows Update has a clearly displayed "delay for 7 days" button. There's also advanced settings with more knobs.

macOS just nags you everyday.

Not on my system. I just get the updates. Shrug.

"Fix The Effing Finder" has been a constant refrain from long term users all the way back to 10.1.5, they're never going to do it.

FYI the most recent version of macOS (Big Sur) is v11.3; but I know what you mean.

Agreed on the defaults, if you want to improve this there are a few related options to be aware of:

1) Edit the toolbar and add "Path" dropdown

2) View menu -> Show path bar

3) Cmd + up/down arrows to navigate up and down the path hierarchy

But of course, when talking about how intuitive Macs are, having all that hidden by default doesn't exactly make it easy to understand where you are in the filesystem. It feels a bit like the Mac side of their desire to just not have a user visible filesystem on the iPad, which thankfully they've given up on it because shooting documents back and forth between apps via Share buttons was terrible.

Interesting.. integrate through the filesystem vs peer to peer.

But not peer to peer in any sort of automated syncing way. You'd end up with different versions of documents in different apps as you sent it from one to another.

> Also, by default Finder seems to hide directory structure from you. This seems to be Apple thinking it'll confuse people if they can see 'up' directories, but I think just as often it confuses people like me who are trying and failing to go up.

Kind of ironic considering all the research Apple did that led to the spatial finder.

> Oh, and Linux seems to be by far the least stable. I have apps freezing the whole damn computer way more often there than the other two.

How often is that? What hardware do you run it on? What distro do you use?

Not OP, but I run elementary OS 5.1.7 Hera, built on Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS, Linux 5.4.0-65-generic.

Its more stable than it used to be, but the desktop manager still keeps hanging every fortnight or so. Changing the brightness, right after unlocking my laptop is a recipe for getting frustrated, and eventually having to hard restart the computer. Other micro issues pop up every now and then.

Basically every laptop is unsupported or best effort / best luck on Linux (except System 76 and the like.) My brightness control keys use to work or not according to the kernel and the NVIDIA driver versions. I configured two hotkeys to increase and decrease backlightining with X11 and forgot about the original ones. However I never got a crash because of them. Maybe the screen froze a couple of times since Ubuntu 20.04, probably a video card crash (lots of windows.)

Oh I didn't install (on purpose) the NVIDIA drivers in my computer this time around. Last time, the brightness control would stop working, and the GPU would run a 100% of the time my computer was on. Drained battery in about 45 minutes.

Not OP, but I've noticed the same with Linux over the past year or two. Stability has taken a distinct dive for the worse.

Two different Ryzen APU based computers I've built running whatever Ubuntu happened to be the latest. Tried both KDE and XFCE and they freeze about 1-2 times a week. The computers haven't crashed and if you ssh in everything seems to be running fine, but mouse/keyboard/screen are completely frozen. One computer dual boots Windows and I can run Windows for a month on it without rebooting and it never misses a beat.

When you ssh in is memory nearly exhausted because firefox or Chrome have decided to eat all your memory?

By default, windows hides file extensions and pushes Office to be OneDrive first.

The problem with these features is that people have varying needs and don’t understand or respect what they are! Filing is a great example, everyone keeps files, but most people have no organization. That’s why once upon a time companies hired people to file things. It’s also why Apple tried to kill the file metaphor for iOS.

MacOS has the wacky finder UI, but the search is best in class and once people discover it, they just go away and do their thing.

Yes, much as I dislike Finder, I must admit that it's search is fantastic, and nearly instantaneous.

> trying and failing to go up

Cmd-click on the folder in the Finder window title, and go up as far as you want?

This is the way. However, I only found out about this after years of using Macs, I think by randomly happening to notice that functionality one day.

It's not obvious in the slightest. No affordance indication, no tooltip, no flashing indicator or walkthrough demonstration when you get a new Mac, nothing happens if you hover over it or click it, no real reason to think there'd be extra functionality in an unadorned window title, etc.

I like the hardware and I like the advantages of a *nix OS for dev stuff (compared to Windows - at least pre-WSL), but the only thing MacOS has going for it is looking graphically decent and having decent performance (as far as I can tell). The actual UX is quite odd and arcane in many ways. Definitely not intuitive.

Correct. But that's one of those hidden features that someone has to tell you about. Not intuitive certainly.

This is the thing about Macs - people think they are intuitive because they have learned how to use them over X number of years. Including, I believe, those building the OS at Apple. But for a person who isn't familiar with them, they are absolutely not intuitive.

And any time there is a complaint, the community is like "Oh, dummy, just do this thing that is not obvious at all, how could you not figure that out?"

>This is the thing about Macs - people think they are intuitive because they have learned how to use them over X number of years

You can say that again. I never had to interact with a Mac in my life (Macs weren't popular in Eastern Europe so I grew up with Windows and Linux) and later in life at one job interview, the tech lead gave me his Macbook and told me to code a sorting function in JS and stepped out for 10 minutes. Within that time, I accidentally performed some swipe gesture on the trackpad which hid my code editor away with me unable to find it as I had no visible taskbar and all I had visible was a Chrome window so I started googling how to get my code window back. When the tech lead came back I apologized and told him I couldn't finish the task since I hid the code editor by accident and had to google how to use the OS.

I'm biased here of course, but IMHO for someone new to the OS, MacOS UX discoverability is worse than Windows or major Linux DEs.

I hate that stuff, it seems like every other minute I've moved my mouse too far and I'm suddenly in one of several completely different screens or views, I then need to figure out how to get back to where I was and perform the appropriate action, and then remember where I was beforehand.

I've annoyed a couple of people by disabling all their hot corners when I've used their Macs lol.

It goes both ways. I agree cmd click on the title is definitely less intuitive (hell, I just learned that now). If I were guiding a new user to macOS, I would instead show how to reveal the Path Bar on Finder which requires less memorization from the user. Not sure why that isn't enabled by default.

That or explain the arrow-key centric keyboard navigation, which has fewer exceptions than Explorer.

But there are plenty of shortcuts on Windows that are the way they are for historical reasons, not because of user-centric design.

And how is someone supposed to figure this out? It doesn't say this anywhere in the interface, and there is no manual.

Are you looking for 'Go', and 'Enclosing Folder'? Or if you navigated to a folder from its parent, you can click the back button, just like a browser, which is probably what most users expect. It's like navigating links.

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