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Comment by breakfastduck | Hacker News Reader

You get that. And about a million tradeoffs in terms of usability. No thanks.

Edit: To those downvoting. If you genueinly think running linux isn't a UIUX downgrade on macOS you are totally deluded. Its more open. Cool. It's also a UX nightmare.

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Nah. It's great. You can view hidden files in the file manager without memorizing a keyboard shortcut or terminal command. Most Window managers don't rely on track pad gestures and so the mouse feels like a first class citizen. Window management in the big DEs is better than macOS. MacOS is a frustrating mess to me.

To each their own, I guess; in case anyone else is wondering:

"keyboard shortcut": Command-Shift-period

"terminal command": defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles yes

The vast majority of users (the U in UX) do not ever need to see a dotfile. In fact, you'd not want them anywhere near one.

So piss off the users that do? For a while there wasn't even the keyboard shortcut. Throw up a scary warning if you need to but I feel like it's a basic system function that should be included. Some how Windows manages to allow users to toggle hidden files through the GUI and I haven't heard of too many disasters because of it.

I would argue it's actually worse with the keyboard shortcut on OS X because it's completely possible for someone to trigger Cmd+Shift+. accidentally whereas in other OSs it's a clear toggled option in the GUI.

No because 99% of users will never need to look at a dotfile.

99% of users don't need remote SSH login on their Mac yet that has a GUI toggle...

There are many differences between Linux in general and macOS, but I wouldn't name UX as the first advantage of the latter. One of the first things I do on a fresh macOS device is to install Rectangle (previously Spectacle).

I have many gripes with Linux, but not about UX. I use preemptive kernels on the desktop for example, because the vanilla kernel is geared towards more general usage, which practically speaking means servers. Sometimes I need to spend more time when installing some new piece of hardware (and sometimes I don't, it works automatically).

One of the biggest advantages for me personally is that I can diagnose occasional problem myself, down to a single character in the source code if I want/need. I know what is running on my system and why, and if I want, I can remove it. (Or, I can make it very hard to remove.) I know what is getting in and out, and I can block it if I want, without any built-in exceptions for the vendor. When you come to think of it, this should be the default for all systems, but we're heading in the opposite direction.

Rectangle is pretty great, thanks for that pointer. I've been trying all kinds of tiling wms on MacOS, but they just don't quite work in this world -- since they're unable to do everything that's needed. But Rectangle allows me to make the decisions, which works a bit better here.

What's still missing with this setup is a shortcut for easily moving a window to another desktop. Any clues how to achieve that?

And finally there's the irritating MacOS UX "feature", that selecting an application with cmd-tab doesn't switch to the desktop where it is, or doesn't unminimize it if it's minimized.

I don't think anyone should downvote expressing an opinion, at least when it's done without toxicity like you did. Ok, that "delusion" remark was a bit toxic. But anyway.

Here's my opinion: i3 is vastly superior to anything macos is offering in the desktop space in terms of usability. Sure, wrestling with minutae like proper font rendering and DPI settings is a huge pain, but a) some distros do those things for you and b) if you're not a serial distro hopper / manic reinstaller, those things don't have to be done too often.

I genuinely think it's an UX upgrade. And I've been using macs almost exclusively for 5 years now.

The bad things of Linux are still bad: subsystems get replaced all the time (often with just minimal technical justification), and the replacements are usually (if you compare them to Macs) alpha quality for a long time. And the integration is lacking. Notable contemporary examples: oss/alsa/pulseaudio/jack/pipewire and x11/wayland. This is something I truly don't miss when using macs. Almost everything else I do miss.

To me Mac OS has a nicer looking UI, but i3 has better UX. For instance, the animations on Mac OS are annyoing. There is nothing good about adding a delay to basic operations. On i3, I can switch between workspaces in an instant, on Mac OS, I have to wait for a stupid 200ms animation to finish - and that is after already fiddling in system settings to disable fancy animation effects (the default was slide-in, ugh).

Fair, but it's not vastly superior for the majority of computer users, whose experience revolves entirely around the mouse. That's what I was getting at with macOS being better - generally, obviously not for every person.

For a new job I've switched to 100% Ubuntu from Windows and I'm not missing much.. What would you be giving up?

You're not missing anything. Because we're talking about switching from two fundamentally different OS'es.

office365 support? That's about it.

Recently the hard drive in my Mac became inaccessible to MacOS even after formatting and a lot of other things. Somehow it was able to install Linux though, so I did that while waiting on the new drive to arrive. I tried a number of different distributions, and I had the experience you describe. It was death by UX papercuts and I could not wait to get back to MacOS by the second day. I hadn't used Linux in a decade outside of ssh to remote servers, and I really had high hopes for improvements in the UX since I last used it.

Playing with a distribution for 10 minutes and then installing another one is not going to make you understand it. It took me a while to take to KDE too. After you start actually working on it you'll find things that annoy you, start looking and find that there's actually a wealth of configuration options (which macOS absolutely doesn't have).

If you want something more Mac-like, Gnome is a thing of course but it's too opinionated like Mac for me.

Being dismissive of the UX of Linux isn't going to improve the market share of Linux for ex Apple people. I wish Linux was more on par because I don't like where Apple is taking MacOS.

It wasn't ten minutes, and there were way too many configuration options that I couldn't fix (like the terrible trackpad scrolling) despite best efforts that it wasn't worth it, and too many that I didn't want to bother. The point is that out of the box, the UX of the Linux UIs has historically and still does suck compared to tools that have a UX focus, and that's a deal breaker for a lot of people that I know.

> If you genueinly think running linux isn't a UIUX downgrade....

You've betrayed yourself with this statement. There isn't one Linux. I know this might just seem like more of the complexity non-Linux users want to avoid, however users are free to install whatever desktop environment or window manager they like. You could even opt for a desktop environment that resembles MacOS in most ways.

I use MacOS in my professional life, and Linux in my personal. My Linux PC has my own personalised setup built around the i3 window manager. I can say without question that I'm much faster and more productive on Linux than MacOS.

But that's part of the problem. There isn't a single DE which means that any applications that aren't specific to a DE will provide a UX that is inconsistent.

That's not really true. Outside of tiling window managers, pretty much everything is designed around the same, familiar model of minimise/maximise/close buttons in the corner of the window. Just about every mainstream OS supports different UI toolkits, and for the most part everyone lives with this.

Even tiling window managers don't really have any problems. They provide a very niche UX, which is almost entirely keyboard driven. There's not a single general application I can think of designed for use with this kind of window manager. Still, you get a pretty consistent user experience for the most part.

Apple's own UI is far from consistent either. They're always breaking their own UI guidelines. And many apps are electron which don't integrate well visually either.

This entire comment proves my point. To you - a developer / tech pro, you feel Linux has a better UX.

My point was generalised, and I think generally the average computer user is going to have a better UX on macOS than linux. If they can figure out how to even set up Linux of course.

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