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Comment by neric | Hacker News Reader

I was super excited to receive my new M1 MacBook pro. After a 2 months wait, I get to work trying to setup my development workflow that consist of putting fullscreen windows on different desktops and repeatedly switching between those workspaces.

Well turns out you cannot deactivate transitions between workspaces and there is a small delay before the new workspace is interactive. There is no possible way I can work like that.

Went back to my ArchLinux + i3 on my Gigabyte Aero 15, happy to know that I'm not missing out much.

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I still find my M1 to be a way better experience: the M1 is quick, the fans virtually never come on, and battery life is a total game changer.

I also never use the "Spaces" feature; why not just use 'maximized' windows? I use https://rectangleapp.com/ to easily resize windows with keyboard shortcuts, which works well.

I get trying something new and not really liking it, but if you're going to comment, you should make an attempt to actually try it...

Well you lose full screen benefits of going full screen like no menu bar, no window title bar, the dock hides even if you normally like it not-hidden.

Yeah you can use rectangle or BTT or one of the other dozens of the third party apps to do window snapping but to me at least they never feel quite as nice as the native options in Windows, KDE, Gnome, etc. Not sure why.

Menubar can be configured to auto-hide, though it’s kinda moot on the built in screen of M1 Pro/Max machines since those have a strip of added pixels on the top for the menubar to live in. Won’t hide the titlebar but that’s such a small part of the screen it’s never bothered me…. But then again I make use of titlebars frequently, the hotkey-dragging of tiling WMs drive me crazy.

Yeah the battery life is pretty insane. It's hard to fully describe to anyone who hasn't had an ARM laptop.

Any other laptop I've owned, including the glorious ~2015 MBP, was liable to either hit 2% battery or completely die if I left it unplugged overnight, which I sometimes do accidentally because I like to put on some boring YouTube playlist as I got to sleep.

With my M1 Macbook Air, I can accidentally leave it unplugged while playing YouTube videos all night, and I can wake up in the morning to find that it still has >90% battery left, sometimes even 95%.

Most importantly, it means not having to think about whether the airplane has power available when I fly. I can watch YouTube for a full 6 hour flight with no worries. I once played Halo CE Anniversary through Parallels on my mac during a flight and it lasted 3 hours before hitting maybe 10% battery remaining, which is pretty good considering that's Xbox 360 level graphics.

Have you tried 'Reduce motion' setting from the Accessibility preferences along with these: https://www.chriswrites.com/boost-your-macs-performance-by-d... ?

It reduces motion, but it does not remove that transition.

It is infuriating, as someone who is use to the instant switching of i3, I can't believe that it's not possible in MacOS.

My work arounds are to not use the native fullscreen for anything, and just do my best to remove window-titles/decorations from every app i use and then make them "fake full screen"

You’re not alone. Using i3 allows me to work on muscle memory without going through an observe-interpret-respond loop with every move. It really is a shame that animated transitions in macOS are non-optional. Who decided that transitions help users? It’s like tacky jQuery fade and swipe transitions on everything.

windows 10 also added transitions in a lot of places, quite deep in the UI framework, so much so that Office gets animated everything, including Excel cell focus gizmo.. And you have to cut some Windows UI effect options to stop that (at least it's doable). Such a horrendous idea.

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