Impressions from a first-time Mac user | Hacker News Reader

Impressions from a first-time Mac user

loganmarchione.com

360 pointsloganmarchione728 comments

Despite the warning, I didn't find it nearly as "ranty" as the author cautioned, and instead seemed like a fairly comprehensive and fair take on his experience.

Having gone through the same thing myself several years ago, the UI aspect of it is something that I'd be curious to see how it develops for the author. I think it is not uncommon for Windows folk to find the windowing experience on macs rather painful, at least at first. However, after a while, it sort of "made sense" to me, if that makes any sense at all. There are some clear UX philosophies that are very different, and the initial transition can only be pretty jarring, but I'm curious what the author would say about it after a month or two.

Also, fwiw, I think most power Mac users also marshal the use of some other programs to help along with some of that (or at least to tailor it more closely to what they want the experience to be). Rectangle is one of the first installs on any Mac I put my hands on... makes window management so much more pleasant!

Not that it's right or wrong, but the behavior dates back to the very first implementations of Mac OS and Windows. Mac OS has always been an application switching interface, and Windows has been a window switching interface. Takes getting used to the paradigm shift.

OP here. I like this perspective, I never thought about it this way!

As someone that came from a windows world for the first 10ish years of my career, i found this pretty frustrating too. I honestly still do. Sometimes it feels like I just cannot get to the window I want.

You don’t have to live with it if you don’t like it; open source to the rescue: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

There is a separate shortcut to switch between windows of the currently selected application cmd + ` or ctrl + down arrow to show the windows.

So you alt + tab to select the application and switch to the right window. I personally think it's more reliable than Windows especially if I have a lot of Windows open (I used Windows for the last 10 years). On Windows I regularly switched to the wrong windows because of my fat fingers...

So i actually use these shortcuts all the time! I think im more struggling with some edge case of my multi screen setup, im not sure. I just find myself having to do the full expand of all windows and then find the one i want to get things working again.

FYI, I always load Rectangle on my Macs for window snapping using keyboard keys. It's fantastic!

I wonder how much of the difference between Windows and Mac comes from the 1980s look-and-feel lawsuits. Microsoft couldn't clone the Mac directly so they had to make it gratuitously different and worse.

I can't get used to the fact that I can't alt-tab to a minimized window. Nor can I figure out how to switch to any particular minimized window. You have literally no way of knowing that a minimized window exists other than right-clicking the dock icon, or going to the "Window" menu after you switched to the application. The dock was fine 20 years ago when they released OSX, but they've literally done nothing to make it better since then.

I don't actually minimise windows on the mac at all. I just sling them on a contextual virtual desktop and then triple-swipe up when I need a different one.

Not once have I had to sit there mashing alt-tab and guessing then.

Has Mac changed its default settings?

The Dock shows you any minimized windows on the right.

If for some reason this is no longer default (I don't remember the last time I setup a new Mac and didn't carry over settings) Right Click the dock >> dock preferences >> Uncheck "Minimize windows into application icon"

Well, that did work. But now I just have a massive pile of minimized window icons... and still no keyboard shortcut to switch to them.

I guess like the other person mentioned I just don't find myself minimizing that often on Mac.

That being said there is an option. The first is if you are in an application you can do control-down or (if you enable it under gestures >> more gestures for your trackpad) you do 3 fingers down you will see the minimized windows for your current application at the bottom. I did also just look it up and apparently if you do cmd-tab and press up on an application it does the same thing.

Not exactly what you are looking for, but you can at least do it on a per application level for anything minimized.

While the app switcher is highlighting the app with minimized windows, press cmd+1 to switch to those windows.

On Mac you generally just don’t minimize windows unless you explicitly want that behaviour (sort of hidden and available manually through the dock). It’s just a different workflow.

The few times I've used a Mac, trying to use this workflow just leads to a lot of visual clutter. Everything sits on top of everything else, and every window is sitting somewhere on the screen, a constant reminder that nags at the back of your mind.

This seems like a weird comment, what did people do before macs got virtual desktops (which was relatively recent compared to unix)? As a side note I remember discussion with apple users arguing that virtual desktops are not how one "should work" and are useless, now it's "you should use virtual desktops, obviously".

As someone who used Mac back then: mostly just complain about it and accept that OSX did not have any good way of stashing away windows. I am still not impressed but is less painful now that we have virtual desktops.

Well, personally, I keep a lot of windows open on my screen because I work well that way. It's similar to the "cluttered desk" method—it may look messy, but I've got everything available to me and even if you don't know where anything is, I do.

But I recognize that's more of a personal style than general usage.

I've been a Mac user since before the system even had proper multitasking, and the general answer to your question is that we would keep open the applications and windows that were useful to us, sometimes hiding an application that we're not actively using and don't need to have cluttering up the screen. Once Mac OS X came along, we would also minimize individual windows we weren't using—and if you minimize a window, then hide the application that it belongs to, that also hides its minimized windows in the Dock.

Also note that for every application up until a few years ago, and for some applications even now (and dependent on a System Preference setting), you can keep an application open on the Mac without any windows open.

> Well, personally, I keep a lot of windows open on my screen because I work well that way. It's similar to the "cluttered desk" method—it may look messy, but I've got everything available to me and even if you don't know where anything is, I do.

> But I recognize that's more of a personal style than general usage.

> hiding an application that we're not actively using and don't need to have cluttering up the screen.

So having only used macs very sporadically what is the difference of hiding an application and minimizing a window?

> Also note that for every application up until a few years ago, and for some applications even now (and dependent on a System Preference setting), you can keep an application open on the Mac without any windows open.

So am I understanding correctly that hiding an application is essentially the same as minimizing all windows of that application (into some hidden space), I assumed from the previous posts they would just be moved to some virtual desktop? I guess that would be very nice for some applications but very annoying for others, e.g. do terminals count as the same application?

Hiding an application, very simply and straightforwardly, just takes the application out of the foreground and makes all its windows disappear. They are still considered to "exist", in the same desktops/spaces, and no state is lost—when you switch back to the application, all its windows reappear exactly as they were when you hid it (assuming no background processing changed them, of course). They are just not visible for as long as you keep the application hidden.

The difference between this and minimizing is that a) it affects all windows of the application, not just a selected one, and b) a minimized window either goes into the side of the Dock, or into the application icon on the Dock (depending on your set preferences); hidden windows, as I said, are completely invisible.

There is also a "Show All" option under the application menu (the one just to the right of the Apple menu, with the name of the foreground application) that will un-hide all currently hidden applications.

Virtual desktops are a relatively recent addition to the Mac; this hiding behavior has been around and worked consistently since the mid-'90s, well before Mac OS X.

(As a final random tidbit, one of my most common methods of hiding an application—particularly if it's the one I'm using at the time—is to simply option-click on either the desktop or another application's window, as that is a longstanding shortcut for doing so.)

I never minimize windows at all on the Mac, perhaps because of this behavior. I hide apps with (Command-H) instead, and use multiple desktops for managing different workflows instead.

Yeah I hide stuff all the time and I find myself using Single Window mode a lot too, especially on a smaller screen.

The keyboard shortcut to switch to them in ctrl-down (or whatever you have set to "Application windows") and then arrow keys.

Ok, so you can actually do this but the keyboard sequence is a bit bonkers.

* Hold down Command and press Tab until the application icon representing the minimised window is highlighted.

* Release Tab but DONT let go of Command.

* Now press Option too so you are holding down Command + Option

* Now release Command so you are just holding down Option

* Finally release Option

Amazingly this will then maximise the window whose application icon you selected in the first place.

Sounds crazy but it works. Try it!

You've literally improved my life with this comment. Thank you.

Holy crap. Same here, I never knew this keyboard shortcut existed.

You can also tab to the application, hit the up arrow and use the arrow keys to select the minimized window then hit enter.

In fact, my command-tab workflow is: command-tab to open the Switcher and then arrows to switch application/window

Exactly. Cmd-Tab to open the switcher, arrow-left/right to select the desired app, arrow-up/down to show all windows, then arrows or mouse to select the desired window.

I did not know you could do this, and have been following command-tab with control-down for years now. Thanks!

Also, when it comes to maximizing, the green button changes modes when you hover over it with Option held and switches to tiling the window left/right or maximizing it. In general, holding Option on Mac toggles alternate behaviors for menus and buttons. (Special callout to Option+dragging a window edge)

Thank you. That was super helpful!

This works, but it's (1) completely undiscoverable (how did you find out about this?), and (2) does not work for switching to a minimized window if the app has another unminimized window.

I don't know about natural discoverability, but Apple still has user manuals for its products: https://support.apple.com/manuals

I learned a few things from idly perusing them when I had nothing better to do.

Thanks for this! I had no idea. That said, it doesn't seem to work if you have 2+ instances of an app window, with one minimized and the other not.

That's new to me. I had gotten used to knowing that the first minimised window for something like Messages or Activity Monitor is what I wanted, and used Cmd-0 to get that up.

I do this, it's the only thing I know how to do on a mac and it's in my muscle memory as there's no way I could describe it.

It put me off so much that I really can't be bothered to work out why it works, what the underlying switching philosophy is, or if there are any other commands to use.

I will try this once, be amazed, and promptly forget it.

This will help: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

The solution is simple. Don't minimize windows. Everything fullscreen on virtual desktops. Three fingers up and choose the window you want if it's one you don't use normally. Three finger swipe between frequently used windows.

I do this. It's absolutely insane that it's the easiest way to do window management in MacOS. We have regressed to the point of not having windows anymore.

I do too.

A while back I had the Raspberry Pi 400 computer on my desk and a newish M1 Mac. It was interesting how much better the window management was on the Pi. Frankly, for things like file management, that little computer was Snappy as hell.

And it does dual monitors like a champ!

And don't get me wrong here, I've used a lot of systems, and I'm fine with my Mac. I know how to use it, I get things done and the M1 chip is really sweet.

I generally go with the flow figure out what the flow is and I just don't worry about it past that. I just had to comment on this particular topic because I thought it was kind of humorous.

Amazing that in the era of N+1K external monitors suggestion is still to use fullscreen windows.

This is where snapping comes in. You can make a fullscreen window that is made up of two applications. Really it just comes down to never fusing with your windows once you have them set up to your liking. Once everything is either fullscreen or in its corner of a virtual desktop you should never be changing how your windows work. Nothing should ever be hidden behind anything else, if it is it's time to make a new virtual desktop for it.

I use a variation of this approach. Make all windows exactly the same size (I'm using Hammerspoon). Hide applications (Cmd-H) instead of minimizing windows. Cmd-Tab to whatever app you want. Cmd-` to whatever window you want.

Sometimes the silly shadow around the top window gets too big, but then you can Option-Cmd-H to hide all other apps.

One way of addressing this is to use the intended method, which is to Hide the application instead of minimizing it. Cmd H hides the application away, and it pops back to the front with a Cmd Tab.

Why havent they removed the mostly useless minimize feature?

Open the "Mission Control" settings in System Preferences to see what key sequence you have assigned to "Application Windows". While you are there you might also click "Hot Corners..." and check if "Application Windows" is assigned to a hot corner.

Invoke "Application Windows" and it will show you all the visible windows of the current application tiled so you can see them all, and it will show you all the minimized windows of the current application across the bottom of the screen. (Some applications, such as TextEdit and BBEdit also show recent documents there).

While in the "Application Windows" ctrl-tab cycles between all open apps while remaining in "Applications Windows" view.

I also prefer Windows default behavior to macOS in this respect.

I find macOS alt-tab'ing works better for me with the addition of https://contexts.co/

Same here. I would be so slow on my work Mac if I didn't have Contexts.

FWIW, I never minimise windows, just hide them (Cmd-H). Works fine (and you can Cmd-Tab to them).

Same. I use hide (Cmd-H) most of the time because I want to hide the whole application, not a single window of the application. I also use Hide Others (Cmd-Option-H) to focus on a single app. And I use Cmd-` to switch between windows of the app I'm in.

There is a rare case that I minimize a window, but it's generally because I don't want to work with that window any time soon, but I don't want to close it either, and I have multiple windows open in the app. Since I'm not frequently switching to the window in this situation, its fine if the easiest way to get back to it is to use my mouse.

The most annoying behavior for me is Alt-Tabbing an application whose windows are spread across multiple desktops. Alt-tab will not go back to the actual previous window, it will go back to the window of the previous application closest to the current desktop. Sigh. Luckily I don't have to put up with MacOS for very much.

Switching across multiple desktops (ie spaces) is really annoying. In particular, you switch (Cmd-Tab) to the app you want, realise the window is on another desktop, then Ctrl-arrow-left/right to the desired desktop, but there the windows are ordered as they were when you left, and you have to Cmd-Tab to the desired app again.

Alternative: Cmd-Tab to desired app, arrow up (while holding Cmd) to see all windows of that app, then pick the desired one (with arrows or mouse).

Instead of minimizing windows, put them on a separate virtual desktop. Or close them.

I never minimize windows on purpose. I think the only reason the concept exists is because it predates virtual desktop switching.

Also, instead of Alt-Tab, flick four fingers up or down and select the window of interest.

Yes, under macOS minimizing windows is conceptually more like putting them away in the cabinet for later retrieval whereas under Windows it’s closer to setting them aside momentarily. The level of friction is accordingly different.

Keyboard shortcuts are IMO superior to gestures and are objectively faster.

The whole virtual desktop can get quite clunky fast when you have multiple windows opened or ephemeral programs that you temporarily need.

In the case of alt+tab window switching I suspect it’s only faster if you are going to the last used window. If you’re hunting for an app through multiple alt tabs, you’re almost certainly going to take more time than using the mouse gestures to switch.

Unless I have dozens of app no because the beauty of alt-tab is the fire-hold-release which is always quicker than getting the mouse and clicking.

Not the way I lay out my windows. Most of the time every window is partially visible, and so I switch by clicking on the one of interest. Or I overlay them and scroll the partially obscured one without focusing on it. The only time I actually switch with mission control is when I'm searching for a particular desktop and window, or am reorganizing windows. In those cases mission control is far superior.

All gestures on macos regarding virtual desktops and windows have corresponding keyboard shortcuts.

Still, it's not alt tab with the press-hold-release which is always quicker than doing gesture->arrow to select something->enter.

Completely disagree. Doing three finger swipe x times is just as fast if not faster than keyboard shortcuts that require you hunt down the window you're looking for.

It's objectively slower when you need to leave the keyboard with one hand to reach your touchpad. I'm thinking about a desktop environment here where 1. you might not even have a touchpad and 2. you have your both hands on the keyboard.

I don’t think the literal fraction of a second difference matters.

It matters after a long day and it adds up. On top of the time lost, it's also a matter of ease of use.

I mean maybe if you're using vim all the time, but most of my apps require mouse interface, so my hand is usually near the trackpad. Even when I'm using external monitors I still use the laptop keyboard and trackpad.

Good for you if it works, but it doesn't for me and I find it cumbersome.

The one thing I'll say I like about the weird minimize behaviour is that I do a lot of screen sharing and it's pretty nice that once I minimize a window that it's pretty hard for it to suddenly pop back into view. On Windows I have to pretty much just religiously quit applications before I share screen but on OSX it's usually sufficient just to minimize them.

I minimize windows on purpose if I want to completely ignore their existence but not close the window. For example, Terminal windows that are running background processes that I don't need to attend to, VMWare windows for headless VMs that I only SSH into, and the like. It's nice because they don't show up when I open the app, and basically cannot unminimize without explicit action.

Most of the time, though, I don't bother minimizing windows on macOS, whereas I minimize windows often on Windows. Although they're similar actions, they wind up serving different functions, and trying to treat minimized windows on macOS like minimized windows on Windows is just a recipe for frustration.

1. CMD-tab to application with minimized window.

2. Ctrl-down for "Mission Control > Application windows"

3. Down arrow to select minimized

4. Enter

This even works when all windows of application are minimized.

It's a tradeoff: takes more keypresses to access the minimized window, but prevents the minimized window from getting in the way most of the time. Which is what you want if you've minimized it.

This reminded me of a post on Macintosh Folklore[0] about the early development of application switching on Mac OS. It certainly gave me some insight into why things work the way they do in the Mac world.

[0] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Switcher.txt

Having used the very first Mac, it made sense on that tiny screen. One application per time was almost more than it could accommodate. The monitor got bigger after a few years and the menu on top and the full screen interface started not to make sense compared to the Windows PC next desk.

Nah, I’ll defend the top menubar to the death. Infinite height and top-speed cursor speed makes working with it from the top versus from the window much more efficient for me, and it wastes less pixels (the purpose of high res monitors for me is to use all of the pixels) and gives me a working area on its right side for various utility apps I don’t want taking up space in the Dock (which has enough problems even with a relatively small working app set).

What also helps though is that an under-appreciated aspect of a typical set of Macintosh apps is how good the context menu has gotten. Typically I’m using the context menu and hotkeys much more than the menu bar because it is rare there is an option I want that is unavailable in the context menu.

Additionally, when the menubar is a global system widget, UI designers in pursuit of minimalism can’t take it away. They’ll be there whether the designer likes it or not, acting as a searchable index of the app’s functionality.

While I do appreciate those benifits the confusion caused as soon as there are multiple windows on the screen doesn't seem worth it. I have enough trouble managing keyboard focus I don't need to add another layer (which somehow seems even harder for me to comprehend)

It’s just one of those things that if you want to, you can get used to it, but if you resist it you won’t. Like learning Vi or Emacs or BBEdit. There are tools you already learned to use, the Macintosh user interface is just another.

The alternative is what? Apple changes something millions of people are already used to, their existing customer base, to satisfy switchers specifically when most can easily adapt? Or you just don’t use a Macintosh. Now what Apple does need to do is bring proper contrast back and stop wasting everyone’s time with this minimalist nonsense; even the option in the Accessibility options is utter garbage.

I didn't resist. Although if that was an option I may have considered. And after a year of daily use are work it was still tripping me up.

It's possible for an interface to be widely used and still have sharp edges. I consider this one of macOS's. It doesn't need to change, it may well not be worth it. But at least some people will end up in the menu of the wrong application.

It's easy to run into this situation if you regularly have two windows side-by-side, and switch back-and-forth between them so that the focus could be in either window at any given moment. If you only have windows maximized (as I suspect GP does) it's not something you'll ever run into.

Nah. Many windows, from many apps, but typically two or three at the front side by side. I’ll leave Full Screen videos open as a kind of running queue in Mission Control but that’s about the extent of it.

There’s no secret, I just don’t lose track of which window I’m focused on in software because that’s the one I’m immediately focused on.

> Or you just don’t use a Macintosh

Exactly. The global menu and the top bar have been the main reasons I never bought a Mac.

the Mac OS model just doesn’t work for my ADHD brain. I much prefer the Windows model, it feels much more natural fit for how my brain works :)

> natural fit for how my brain works

and that is a perfectly sensible way of looking at this (and many other) fanboi discussions over the decades.

But then again, if such sensibility ever took hold in the majority of humans, it would be the end of social media as we know it :-)

I'm not a mac user (but a linux user who chooses desktops with the windowing paradigms of like windows 2000 or so plus multiple desktops) so have no idea how it's like in practice, but:

These days it's very common for more than half your work to take place in a browser, with many browser windows, each having many tabs

Every window of the browser almost is like its own application for the user, yet they're all from the same application with the same name for the OS

How does an application switching interface, rather than window switching interface, work out for that, if a lot of what you want to switch between is different windows of the same browser?

(and what if in addition there would be also many terminal emulator windows, each also with many tabs, and maybe some code editors, spread across multiple virtual desktops)

Desktop PWAs and "open as own window" shortcuts help a lot with this, letting you (from a UI perspective at least) run a web app as though it was its own application rather than within the browser.

"Create shortcut" is heavily underrated feature on Chromium. Firefox dropped similar feature. https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/3060053

Cmd+` switches between windows of the same app, and it's actually more convenient (IMHO) than using Alt+Tab to switch between every one of your windows from every app. There are also a handful of trackpad gestures for showing all the windows in the current app or all of your windows.

except windows is still king because the preview shows the instance instead of an application

Cmd tilde instantly switches between windows, so there is no preview and so your comment doesn’t really make sense.

If you’re talking about cmd-tab, personally I’ll take big recognizable icons than thumbnails with minuscule text and such any day.

And mission control will give you windows previews if you want them.

ctrl+up / ctrl+down

Ctrl+Down is useful for navigating intra application, but Ctrl+Up is a ridiculous mess.

As long as you haven't made the active window full screen, or the window you want to switch to, then yes, it works. But it is painful :P

That's one of the reasons I never make windows full-screen.

Except for that annoying quirk, I actually find the interface better (though it definitely took time to get used to it).

I prefer windows to be full screen. Then I three-finger swipe between apps on my trackpad.

I get that. I just use an app that lets me maximize windows with a shortcut (I use Size-up but there are many great options). I then make sure to maximize everything, so effectively all my windows are always maximized.

It's not the same as fullscreen, because it still has the top mac bar, but that's fine, and it gives me the ability to cmd+tab / cmd+tilde through my windows.

> As long as you haven't made the active window full screen, or the window you want to switch to, then yes, it works. But it is painful :P

What's being described as "full screen" windows on macOS is not exactly that, and it's very different than full screen windows on Windows or the standard Linux window managers.

On macOS, when we click on the little green button on top of a window, that window becomes full screen *and* becomes a new single-window workspace.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-apps-in-full-sc...

You can "Maximize" the app (to put it in Windows parlance) by Option+Click the green button (you can observe during the hover state for the green button the change from "full screen" to "maximize" by pressing Option).

Or even just double-click the window‘s title bar. Just like on Windows

Not only trackpad, you can use ctrl+down to show all windows of the current app and ctrl+up to see all windows.

I prefer binding "Move focus to next window" to the F12 key. Since Cmd+` is a hard keyboard combo on non-american keyboards.

I kind of gave up on non-US keyboards.

The Portuguese layout sucks horribly for programming, especially on the Mac (brackets in horrible places), and the U.K. layout (where I’m based) sucks horribly for writing Portuguese in. The US international just works for all my purposes (including writing tiny amounts of other languages besides Portuguese and English)

Have you tried this one ?

http://norme-azerty.fr/en/

That looks like an "AZERTY International", with no advantage over the Portuguese layout for programming, and no advantage over "US International" for typing languages other than French. It does look like an improvement over traditional AZERTY!

My choice is "US International with AltGr deadkeys". The deadkey behaviour in simple "US International" is very annoying for programming: you have to double-tap every key that could be an accent, such as single quotes or backquotes.

> no advantage over "US International" for typing languages other than French

Uh, did you not even bother to click on the link or something ??

The easy access to all Greek characters (and more math symbols) alone is great if you work in a math-related field !

Yes I clicked but didn't notice the Greek overlay. It's neat. I imagine that it can be useful for math, if you're not using something like LaTeX or Emacs already. I even have something similar in my custom layout, although it seldom gets any use. That does not make it any better for programming, nor for typing in Portuguese (or even Greek).

Look, I think it's great that this thing exists and grateful that you mentioned it. I may even suggest it to some of the French-speaking juniors I work with.

It does not, however, address the issues of the person you were replying to. And I know because I'm in a similar position to them.

Just checking you're aware that dead keys for all Portuguese diacritics are available in the UK PC layout - alt+e (´), alt+n (˜), alt+\ (`), alt+c (ç), alt+i (ˆ)

Because I never went back to the Portuguese layout after finding those key combinations.

It's inconsistent compared with alt-tab behaviour.

cmd-tab switches to the last used application (assuming you don't hold down), right now for me that switches from Firefox to Slack.

Pressing cmd-tab again switches from Slack back to Firefox.

However for window switches

cmd-` switches from my HN window to a jira window. cmd-` again switches to a webmail window. To switch from jira back to HN I have to press cmd-shift-`

Exactly, and believe it or not, this strange little inconsistency is the only thing I still can't get used to after using macOS for ~15 years.

If you press Cmd-Tab, then let go, and press Cmd-Tab again, yes, you get back to the first application you were in.

If you press Cmd-Tab, hold Cmd, and keep hitting Tab, you cycle through the available applications.

If you press Cmd-`, get the window you want, and do something in it, then press Cmd-` again, you get back to the first window you were in.

If you press Cmd-` repeatedly, you cycle through the available windows of the active application.

There is a slight difference in how you trigger the two behaviours—and the behaviour of Cmd-` can sometimes be a little opaque, I grant, since "do something in the window" is not always 100% clear, either to the user or the computer—but they do have analogous behaviours.

Press Cmd, Press `, Release `, Release Cmd

You've swapped from window 1 to window 2

Press Cmd, Press `, Release `, Release Cmd

You swap from window 2 to window 3

Press Cmd, Press tab, Release tab, Release Cmd

You've swapped from application 1 to application 2

Press Cmd, Press tab, Release tab, Release tab

You swap from application 2 to application 1

That if you type something after swapping window and the behaviour changes is even worse!

For cycling

Press Cmd, Press Tab, release Tab, Press Tab, Release Tab, you can move from application 1 to application 3, although it doesn't switch immediately, just shows you a menu while you hold down Cmd

Do this with windows and the actual window changes as you move, not a menu

It's poor behaviour and one reason I prefer my linux desktop to my anicent macbook. (Another reason, I've got about 15 opwn terminals, but I can't just raise 1 terminal window above my browser, I have to raise them all. Of course there's no focus-follows-mouse either, it's all very user-unfriendly, at least by default. I'm sure there's some software that might fix this, but back in the 90s when I was using Windows I remember that sort of software was just terrible. The easier option is to finally fix my linux laptop, which died around the time covid started, and thus wasn't a critical path fix)

I filed a big report about this years ago. Please do the same so that Apple knows this bothers people.

Edit: it didn’t behave this way before 2009

And it seems that it doesn’t behave that way in every program. Firefox seems to be doing it correctly (most of the time anyway)

This is where the value of electron wrappers and web apps installed as PWAs comes in. It offloads app management duties from your browser and puts them back in the hands of the OS.

The former of those two can also get rid of redundant menubars (as seen in e.g. Figma) which is a nice bonus.

Exactly. When the Electron-apps-are--awful-compared-to-desktop-apps conversation comes up, I'm always frustrsted to not see this perspective, because it really reframes the real potential value of Electron implementations away from (from this perspective, unfair) critical comparison to implementing internet services and applications as true desktop apps.

I love doing this but my personal hell is when my Google account(s) are constantly signed out of my PWA for Meet, Chat, Work Gmail, Personal Gmail 1, Personal Gmail 2.

I quite like the epiphany / gnome-web functionnality to create "apps" out of separate website. Too bad it doesn't work with msteams and I wish firefox had that function as well so I can still use my extensions on thoses.

I have a few workflow solutions to this, but Control Down-Arrow or three finger swipe down is the most common.

Also, windows are in a stack from least to most recently put in front, so if I know something is toward the back I start with command-~.

I also happen to believe that there is such a thing as having too many browser windows open, so when these strategies start to become unmanageable, I will close some. The Expose for browser windows takes up to twelve before it needs to make the icons really small, that's a reasonable limit for me, especially given both tabs and tab groups (which I'm increasingly making good use of).

To be clear, this is a workflow, not a workaround: unlike focus follows mouse being impossible, I'm content and productive handling the browser this way.

And if you have so many windows open that it becomes difficult to manage, usually you can sort them into virtual desktops

I have 409 tabs open at the moment… (more on my desktop computer)

I agree. While I admit that I have only lightly used macOS but for my last job I find it hard to get used to this multidimensional switching. I think it might have made sense where you had a few documents and a few emails and a few folders. But now I have 3 browser windows and 3 terminals and my brain can't get used to the fact that a video call window is in the same group as my reference docs but my text editor is in a different group with my build output. Maybe I should use a different terminal emulator for my editor but that just seems like fighting the window system.

Or maybe after a couple more years of macOS and I would get used to it.

It's just the difference between a depth=2 tree and a flat list. What's better depends on your access patterns, but at least semantically, the tree makes a lot more sense to me.

I just wish "spaces" worked like xmonad workspaces [0], specifically that in xmonad there are some number of workspaces (9 by default) and each display is a view into _any_ of those. Macos has a checkbox "Displays have separate Spaces", and neither checked nor unchecked gives the behavior I want.

Let's say I have just two monitors. That box being checked means I have spaces A1 A2 .. An and B1 B2 .. Bn, and monitor A can display any of the "A" spaces and monitor B can display any of the "B" spaces. But if I want everything from B2 to get displayed on monitor A, I have to create a new space An+1 and drag everything over one window at a time, like a cave man.

Unchecked means I have spaces AB1 AB2 .. ABn, and switching spaces switches both monitors at the same time! So if I want to see the A side of AB1 and the B side of AB2 at the same time, I'm out of luck.

Xmonad workspaces allow me to do any of the above behaviors (oh, and it switches workspaces instantaneously, instead of this left/right spatial thing macos insists on, I guess because of the trackpad swipe gestures). One of these days I need to try to make Hammerspoon fake workspaces in a way that works for me, because (like the OP) this is by far the least comfortable thing about working in macos for me.

[0] https://xmonad.org/tour.html#using-other-workspaces

Yeah this works because of indexed access. The tradeoff is you get a limited number of spaces, and you require a much larger key binding surface area. Like how indexes take memory.

If your state is A1/B2 (two monitors A and B displaying spaces 1 and 2 respectively), and you're working in A1 and want to switch B2 to B3, how do you "focus" on display B before moving spaces to B3? If you just press mod-3 I assume you'd get A3/B2. Do you have to alt-tab until you focus a window that is currently in B and then mod-3?

In my xmonad setup only one window (and thus screen) has the focus, so I would need to hit the key that switches focus to my B monitor (for me that's Mod4+e, B monitor is Mod4+q) and then Mod4+3.

True about indexed access; some other window managers have natively built in "tagged workspaces" where windows have tags and the "chat workspace" is just "all windows that have the chat tag". You can (probably? I've never used them) bind numbers to tags permanently or temporarily but you wouldn't be limited to 0-9. I never bothered trying to copy that setup in xmonad because I never used more than 5 or 7 workspaces.

> But if I want everything from B2 to get displayed on monitor A, I have to create a new space An+1 and drag everything over one window at a time, like a cave man.

That's...not true, though? Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're after...

When you activate Mission Control (not sure offhand what the default shortcut is; I have mine set to Ctrl-Up, but I might have customized it), you can drag entire spaces between monitors. I do this regularly.

Ah, I had no idea you could do that. I don't generally use the expose / mission control swipe gestures. ... Actually I just realized I haven't bothered using spaces in years (since before Catalina I think), maybe I should try again. Thanks!

You can drag whole screens from one monitor to the next. Open command center and then just drag the whole screen over in the top bar.

For me it's a two-finger double tap on the mouse (I think--not at my computer at the moment.)

The browser really breaks the paradigm. I think the ideal would actually be a browser that had a window per site and an “application” per category of site.

It doesn't work out well. This is an area of macos that grinds my gears daily. It gets even messier if you maximize an app, or use multiple desktops.

Often I need to quickly switch between a particular terminal window to a particular browser window. But it's always a gamble. I don't know what I'm gonna get when I press cmd+tab. It may show the correct window, or it may show all terminal windows, or it may even do absolutely nothing.

So, I have the opposite problem when I go back to using Linux/Windows: I mentally file all my windows into application buckets and it makes the alt-tab switcher for not-macOS seem to pick a random window.

I don't understand what's random about always switching to the last window you were using. It's a simple rule, no exceptions. Macos window/app switching rules are too complicated and full of special cases, which makes it harder to integrate into your work flow.

Because, basically, I don’t think in terms of switching windows, I think in terms of switching tasks/apps and some apps/tasks happen to have a bunch of windows.

It's still easy to understand because it is just one rule, with no exceptions. Comparatively the OSX model is filled with arbitrary rules that depend on many factors (is another window of this app open in a maximised mode?, does the last desktop you were on have no windows?).

Even if, with time, you have become comfortable with it, it is still a more convoluted way to manage tasks.

Simple isn’t the same as convenient.

Sure, but Mac's solution is neither. At least in the modern world where almost everything is done in your browser.

I bet a good percentage of Mac users use actual applications for their work instead of browser-based app facsimiles. That's what comes of having a (reasonably) consistent, stable OS to work from.

So, my workflow basically involves switching between terminal, browser and emacs. With macOS’s scheme, if I switch from emacs->browser, I can always hit switch back to emacs without having to parse the switcher, even if I’ve opened a new browser window for some reason. On windows/linux, when I open a new browser window, alt-tab goes back to another browser window, not back to the other “task”.

I certainly don't do everything in a browser. I usually have at most 2 browser windows open (usually just one). For important browser-based apps, I just pin the tabs.

I actually find the macOS model to be more convenient (even though I didn't like it when I first tried it). It makes it very easy to switch away from an app that has multiple windows.

To be honest, I'm not sure there's an objectively better solution. I think it all comes down to the workflow and habits you've built around the model you use most often.

It's also pretty convenient to be able to switch between browser windows using cmd+`. I don't need to worry about getting other apps in between my browser windows.

I dunno. I just want a focus group on a desktop, where switching is related to the project I’m doing. For example one desktop vscode, iterm, browser. And another desktop about productivity.

The problem with switching is that you quickly get too many windows / apps.

I tried to have a user per group, but that does T work fast enough.

The best setup for me is 2 or 3 machines, linked with synergykvm

This is the problem at root, yeah.

Application switching makes sense in a world where the application is the locus of interest and you tend to spend a long time in each app, only rarely switching to another. We haven't lived in that world for a very long time.

It's definitely not a gamble.

When you press Cmd-Tab, first of all, if you hold it down for longer than about a second, it shows you the icons of the currently-open applications, letting you select which application you switch to.

Whenever you use Cmd-Tab to switch to an open application, it will always foreground all the open windows of that application that are on the active desktop/space.

When I'm doing something like you describe, where I know I'll be switching back and forth between a specific pair of windows of different applications (and I have a bunch of other windows of those applications open), my usual practice is either to size and position them where I can just see both at the same time (large screens ftw), or I'll pull them off into a separate space where Cmd-Tabbing between the two applications will be guaranteed to switch between just those two windows.

As a lobg time on and off Mac user: nnt very well. The Windows/Xfce method of switching between all Windows within the current workspace fits the modern way if working much better.

Yes, Mac also supports switching between Windows in the same application but that is rarely what I want either since I am a heavy user of virtual desktops

It’s worth noting that Microsoft has moved more towards an “application switching interface” with Windows 11. Multiple windows for a single application are always forced to be grouped in the taskbar. I hate it.

Hasn't this been the case since Windows 7? I know 7/10 had the option to disable it, and it sounds like Windows 11 has removed that choice, but it's been clear what Microsoft has had in mind for a while now.

The switch-by-application is the only thing I have not let go when starting to exclusively use Linux on the desktop. Switch-by-window is too hard to get used to.

In addition, the classic user interaction method for Macs has always been drag and drop between multiple on-screen windows, while Windows users have traditionally kept every window maximized.

Personally, I think it goes back to early Windows originally supporting very low resolution graphics cards where you simply couldn't display more than a single widow's worth of content at once.

Remember that EGA was only 640×350. You had to have a user interaction method that worked at such a low resolution.

Having things optimised for drag and drop between multiple windows is the reason for Classic Mac OS to only maximize a window enough so that the entire contents of the window is visible, instead of taking up the whole screen.

The first Mac (actually Macintosh back then) had a 9" monochrome screen with 512x342 resolution, so less than EGA (16 colors). [1] The Macintosh and EGA were released at about the same time. [2]

[1] https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_classic/specs/mac_128...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_Adapter

Remember CGA with a maximum resolution of 640×200 in two color mode or 320x200 at four color mode?

It was also supported in Windows, and given that Windows also kept a separate copy of the menubar as part of every window's chrome, they could have really called it Microsoft Window.

The need for a user interaction method that works at such a low resolution is the origin of Windows users expecting a UI that keeps every Window maximized.

Drag 'n drop has been in MS Windows and different flavour of Linux distros for the last 10-15 years at least regardless whether the application windows have been maximised or not. Or are you referring to something completely different?

Are we pretending that Windows users don't use cut, copy, and paste instead of drag and drop for file management?

File management in the classic Mac UI was always to open a window for the source directory and another window for the destination directory and use drag and drop to move or copy the files.

File management in Windows was to navigate to the source directory, cut or copy the files, navigate to the destination directory and paste.

Just as the classic Mac OS only maximizes a window enough to show all the contents of the window, but no larger than that to facilitate interacting between multiple windows instead of having every window take up the whole screen.

I believe you are making a generalization to apologize for the author of the article for not figuring out, or not immediately knowing already, how to use keyboard short cuts to cycle through selecting windows. [1]

You're both being silly, but the author is being especially silly to evaluate an operating system mostly based on how he feels about the user interface.

macOS is more than just a user interface, more on that in a bit. That being said, there is no Universe where any Linux user interface nor any user interface developed by Microsoft is superior to Apple's Aqua. Sure, Aqua sucks, but nothing, anywhere, approaches its ease of use (developed for everyone, not just the nitpicky self-proclaimed power users with weird tastes), and the feeling of solidity, like windows, menus and icons have some gravity and aren't just weightless and flat sprites ready to fly off the screen or fail to interact with other graphic elements properly. Frankly, every gui ever has been chasing Apple's guis since 1984. Truth hurts, I'm sure, but those are the facts. NT4 and 2K, very similar, were collectively the best guis Microsoft ever released, and gui-wise, everything since has been an absolute disaster, visually and with interaction, XP and 7 included, just absolute crappy junk of guis, and 10 and 11 are no better. In Linux, I always liked every gui I saw, Gnome and KDE, and really it can be tailored to whatever the user's desire is, can even run WindowMaker for the NeXT feel. But therein lies the problem, no consistency whatsoever and it's not for everyone; it is only for the tinkerers, coders, and Linux admins.

Back to the operating system. macOS is rarely given the credit it deserves for being such a solid stable gui running on top of SUS UNIX. Come' on, the author merely mentions this and says nothing about it, but right there is nearly everything that matters: more software available than any other platform ever plus all the best professional apps (printing, photography, audio, video, etc.) run better on macOS, and massive security benefits right out of the box, default config, but of course it can also be hardened, trivially, and then pretty much forgotten. You can never forget to attend to the security of your Windows machines, update, upgrade, constant, ceaseless, never ending scans, but that is in addition to its catastrophe of a user interface, so there's that.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-switch-between-window...

Agreed. The distinction between applications and windows that macOS/Mac OS has always made was jarring at first, but definitely one of those things that after the initial adjustment simply feel different rather than objectively better or worse.

Better or worse depends on use case, but I will say that a tree is a much better semantic fit than a flat list.

Funnily enough there was a time when MDI was a popular and favored design philosophy on Windows, practically leading to the same application/window distinction that MacOS had/has.

What I miss most in macOS is Super + Left and Super + Right to tile windows left and right..

Check out the Mac app "Magnet" on the app store.

You can add keyboard shortcuts to do that in settings if you really want it. It still does that. If you run apps in full screen mode it gives you a rudimentary tiling workspace on each desktop with a tiled app on it.

Just long press on the green button on the window for a tiling menu.

I've used Spectacle with the defaults, for years. It's not actively developed but still works. There are actively-maintained alternatives, but since it has zero times done anything weird or glitchy for me, even with multiple monitors, I've not switched yet.

"brew install spectacle", start it, give it accessibility permissions it needs in the Settings panel, set to start at login (check a checkbox in Spectacle's settings panel). Forget about it until you set up a new Mac.

cmd+option+up/down/left/right for half-screen tile. Cmd+option+F for the equivalent of maximizing a window in Windows (not Mac-style fullscreen). Cmd+ctrl+left/right for upper-left and upper-right quarter tiles. Add shift to make it lower-quarter on that side. That's it. Was all available to me instantly via muscle memory inside a month, don't even think about it now. It's how I do nearly all my window placement/resizing.

I used Spectable as well. The newer version is called Rectangle.

Spectacle is a must have IMO.

I set mine up to be Shift+Ctrl+(QWE/ASD/ZXC).. where Q/E/Z/C are for the corners, A/D left and right halves, W/X for top and bottom halves, then S in the middle for full screen. The mnemonic of the "box" formed by those keys on the keyboard is easier for me to remember.

I've used Moom for years now - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/moom/id419330170?mt=12 - it has all the things, menu access, window snapping, short cuts, custom configuration, and saved layouts

It doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut by default, but you can bind 'Move Window to the Left Side of the Screen' and 'Move Window to the Right Side of the Screen' in Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts.

another thing to note is that you can add shortcuts to any application as long as it has a menu title... you just have to type the menu item exactly. this also works to effectively remove shortcuts from apps that hijack something that you use elsewhere and don't want available ever. you have to set it to something like control option command shift F15 or something that you'd never use.

I never got used to it after a year. I wasn't even a "new" Mac user as I'd previously used Jaguar/Panther/Tiger/Leopard as well as Classic and even NeXTStep. But while those were better than XP time has marched on and I don't feel like MacOS improved enough compared to the competition (with regards to window management). If anything should have been Sherlocked it should have been rectangle/magnet etc.

I also feel like Apple cripples mice, it's a very trackpad centered workflow and if you're not using one it suffers. Also they really need to have a separate mouse scroll toggle built in.

what do you mean by "mouse scroll toggle"?

Maybe "natural" scroll direction vs the old scroll-bar orientation.

Yes exactly.

I've seen this mention between comments and the article, but there is such an option! Or am I thinking of something else? If you go to "System Preferences" > Mouse > unclick "Scroll Direction: Natural". Am I missing something?

Unless they've changed it really recently you can't have a mouse scroll "unnaturally" and a trackpad "naturally". They're tied together for some reason. You need a 3rd party utility to it.

Yes, you can, both options exists in System Preferences, one under Mouse, the other under Trackpad

But when you change one, the other changes :(

Oh never notice that, thanks for the update

So, I always invert the mouse scroll wheel on Linux now, because the Mac scroll direction just feels right to me. Which is sort of the problem here: macOS’s UI works really well if the paradigm makes sense to you and long-time Mac users often have the same problems “backwards” when they use Linux or windows.

Did it feel natural to you in 2011? It's not that old of a change. You can get used to it no doubt and I almost feel like it makes sense on trackpads but not so much on scroll wheels. Why fight 10+ years of muscle memory for literally no gain and a bunch of pain everywhere else?

I adapted to it in about two days, it made sense to me from the very beginning.

I can't shake off the impression that Apple does not offer options for better window management to make your screen more cluttered and thus sell you more displays.

When using macOS, I badly miss window management options available on Linux. (And don't get me started regarding font rendering.)

> I can't shake off the impression that Apple does not offer options for better window management to make your screen more cluttered and thus sell you more displays.

OP here. This is a conspiracy theory I can get behind!

Apparently font rendering is going to get bad on Linux too with gtk4. I believe at some point they decided to stop supporting subpixel rendering with the idea that everyone will have hidpi displays. Unfortunately the display industry is lagging and 1080p is still the norm...

That doesn’t make any sense at all. Apple didn’t sell an up-to-date display for years. It’s only recently that they introduced the Pro Display XDR and the Studio Display. Before the XDR, there was only the LoDPI Thunderbolt Display from 2011.

I'm now on 7 years since the first MBP provided to me by an employer.

It's just as terrible as ever. I would not use an Apple product outside of work, despite some thousands of hours using one over the last several years. Everything about using a Mac feels patronizing and intended to make me work harder than I should to do the most simple tasks.

I had a similar experience: I was semi-forced to use a Mac for over a decade due to how much of my iOS-focused development work started to rely on tooling people only made for macOS, but when the pandemic started (due to being stuck at a desk all the time)--and now mostly working on non-"mobile" software-- I switched back to Windows and it was relieving.

Same. I have a MBP for work, and run Arch Linux on a Dell laptop for personal use. Before that it was Linux on a ThinkPad. The hardware on the MBP may be better, but not in any way I care about, and I'd trade it all to be rid of the touch-bar and have my function keys back. The MBP is fiddly as heck to get it to drive my ultrawide monitor at full resolution, while both Linux laptops "just worked". Personally I just can't find any reason I should prefer the Mac.

I've been using a Mac as a work machine for 2 years and I still think its painful to use.

I've been on Mac for 10 years now and I still consider the way Windows handles windows vastly superior.

The fact that cmd-tabbing to a app will place all of its windows on top means that I might be forced to move a window with the mouse to see what's underneath it which I find infuriating. The fact that two windows belong to the same app is an arbitrary distinction to me. I group things by mental "projects", and I prefer to maintain my window z-order based on that.

I never liked using virtual desktops and I just downloaded altTab which I've read about in threads here, but it seems to flicker weirdly and it has already crached on me once within a 1/2 hour timespan so I don't foresee myself keeping it.

Same here. After 3 years of daily macOS usage I snapped and finally installed AltTab too. I though I’d get used to it’s way of doing but it’s really not good. I’ve also installed Rectangle a while ago to get easy screen splitting.

macOS does a lot of things very well, just not that.

My first Mac was the first Intel iMac. OSX Tiger was better than Windows XP. Expose felt better than the alt tab of xp- and more fun. And Tiger pushed to have windows take up the space of their contents rather than the whole screen, so most windows were visible on screen all the time making switching between them easier.

In the time since, I brought another iMac and had 2 work MBPs.

In that time, MacOS got worse. It now wants to make windows full screen. Mission control is awkward if you use an ordinary mouse.

My workflow has changed. I'm more likely to have 2 windows of every app- 2 vscode windows, 2 terminal windows and 2 browser windows. As stated many times over, MacOS handles switching between those configuration of windows badly (and I gave it plenty of time to become intuitive).

I now use the Gnome desktop. I have windows that snap. I have alt tab that cycles through windows (it needs configuring). And it has an Expose like effect (gnome overview).

I feel like I have the best of all worlds. Great window management. Great hardware support (none of the MBPs supported daisy chaining my displays). The Linux command line. The same apps I'd be using on any other OS.

I think the bit on window management reads a little too much like someone who sort or made up their mind upfront. I use windows in my professional life, because that’s how we roll in Denmark, but back in 2015 I bought my first personal MacBook and it’s been a great relationship ever since.

On windows I need to install tools for things like snapping pictures because the default snipping tool isn’t quite good enough. I also hate window management, especially on multiple screen setups where you can’t move the mouse from one screen to another if the resolutions are different (4k screens and an open laptop as an example). Mean while a lot of the things the author complain about are things I find decent on a Mac. The fact that you can easily auto-size windows so that you have 1 full screen, 2 half screen apps, and x csized windows on 3 different window spaces is just awesome.

The biggest issue is that even after 7 years I still have no idea how many little tricks I still don’t know about Mac OS because it never tells you how to use it and pressing shift command (or maybe it’s option) 4 to snap a screenshot isn’t exactly intuitive.

> especially on multiple screen setups where you can’t move the mouse from one screen to another if the resolutions are different (4k screens and an open laptop as an example)

What do you mean by this? That is absolutely possible.

If you're a tinkerer and miss i3, try Hammerspoon [1].

[1] http://hammerspoon.org/

> I think it is not uncommon for Windows folk to find the windowing experience on macs rather painful, at least at first. However, after a while, it sort of "made sense" to me, if that makes any sense at all.

I always feel like Apple optimises UX very heavily for laptops (small screens, fullscreen-first makes a lot of sense), where Microsoft optimises more for desktops (large screens, multiple apps sharing the screen makes more sense). I find windows really clumsy on small laptop screens, even though it works great on my desktop :/

I concur on "it sort of made sense to me" in regard to the windows management and I don't think this is due to the fact that I am getting used to the ways of macOS, at least this part.

When I use Windows occasionally, I miss the command+` to switch between windows of the apps, especially when they are far separated out in the Alt+Tab preview.

Another increase for the number of times I discover that a feature I dislike in gnome has been copied from macOS

Most recent newcomers to Mac and ex-Windows users get tripped up by the fullscreen windows, which are honestly pretty bad.

The way to use MacOS is to use the Spaces to group windows by theme / task. For example, I have one space where I have Slack, Skype, Teams, Discord, Mail and Outlook currently open. Another one has my main "browsing" Chrome window. Another one has my iTerm (the only fullscreen app). And the last "permanent" one has my "debugging" Chrome window. They're always in the same order (none of that "reorder automatically" nonsense), so I can switch tasks using the mouse (2-finger swipe left/right on the Magic Mouse), trackpad (3-finger swipe) or keyboard (ctrl-left/right). Inside a Space, I switch between windows using Exposé (swipe on trackpad, double-tap on mouse or F3 on keyboard).

I've been using macOS both in my personal & professional life like this since Leopard and I think it works pretty well.

> rather painful, at least at first

I get that some people prefer that, but I've been on macOS daily for 10+ years and still can't find the top level OS paradigms (window switching, over reliance on mouse/extremely poor keyboard support, lack of proper "maximized" windows) anything but painful.

It might be that growing up with windows ingrained certain gestures on my mind that I can't let go, but I feel like I've decidedly given it a shot. And I still hate it.

Yes, there are workarounds, but they're workarounds that require third party applications. I expected more from the OS.

As a lifetime windows user that just recently joined a macBook company, i have to say i am indifferent overall, but there have been many alternating moments of delightful surprises and annoyances of unmet expectations in my journey to learn the MacOS UX.

I'm a month in now and i have to say that attitude is everything when it comes to learning something new, and, especially when you know something "kind of like this", you have to be very careful not to let your unmet expectations of something similar sour the experience.

When i started with Windows as a kid i didn't have a "choice" in the matter, it's just what we had, and i had to learn all those tricks and tips along the way to improve my user experience. If i used that to temper the curve of getting a good user experience from my Mac i'd have to say that Mac got it closer to the target by a magnitude.

So, when you don't get the experience you need, instead of defaulting to "this is dumb", ask yourself why they did it this way, and why you expect it that way, and then if you still want it that way after considering a new perspective, chances are there's an app for that.

Stay curious, my friends.

I think the thing that was hardest for me to learn is navigating the folder systems. Luckily I can use a terminal.

This, I'm not sure why people don't talk about as much but Finder is awful and I've not been able to find a replacement.

Yeah I've been surprised no one cares about this. It is great going forward from your cwd but hard to move back and where is home?

Back is left. (In column mode, at least). Home is cmd-shift-H, or using the general purpose path navigator with cmd-G it's just tilde

Use cmd-up to go up a level. That button is the main thing I missed. The columns view is actually very useful. One thing I miss a lot on Windows: quick look with space.

Sorta late to the discussion, but hope these help you:

Path Finder https://www.cocoatech.io/

ForkLift https://binarynights.com/

Agreed! It has taken me so much time to get accustomed to Finder. Often it is just the command line and then `open <path>`if finder is needed.

There are some shortcuts to make Finder usage more enjoyable:

- Shift+Command+H go to Home

- Command+Up go to parent folder

- Command+Down go in to selected folder

- Shift+Command+G go to written path

Also Option+Command+P toggles "Path Bar" at the bottom of the window

I spend the vast majority of my non-browser time on the command line, but sometimes for some things for some reason I prefer a GUI file browser - shuffling around 'admin documents', bills etc. rather than programming stuff or anything I've written in a text-based format. Maybe it's just because I grew up with Windows & File Explorer, so that's what I'm accustomed to for that sort of thing.

For that, Finder is maybe the one thing I miss from macOS. Haven't found one for Linux that works well and doesn't have surprising click/select/rename behaviour for example. (I'm using Elementary's 'Files' at the moment (not on its distro) certainly open to any suggestions.)

Dolphin browser is pretty similar except you can find home and go up directories.

My recommendations for Mac Users:

* Put the Dock left or right, vertical space is precious (trust me, do it for a week and then decide)

* Setup Hot-Corners (Settings -> Mission Control -> Hot Corners)

   - Upper-Right Corner as Mission Control (Must be upper right so spaces are immediately shown)

   - Lower-Left Corner as Application Windows

   - just fling your mouse curser into the corner (use std. gestures on the trackpad)

This makes window management a lot better.

* Maximise Windows by double clicking the Window title bar.

* Disable auto-{correction, capitalize, etc}, smart-quotes under Keyboard settings (if you want)

* Learn about the screenshot shortcuts CMD+shift+{3,4}, 3: full screen, 4: select area or switch to window select with hitting space bar once.

* Learn about CMD+space for launching apps

* Set Key-Repeat to fast and shorten the delay

* Disable spotlight for everything except what you want to use it for.

* Enable File-Vault

* Disable "Wake for Network Access" under Energy

* Enable the ssh server under Sharing "Remote Login" (If you want)

* Disable the visual/audible bell in the Terminal profile.

* Install MacPorts/Homebew

And one thing to internalize is that Apple is a little authoritarian about some UX aspects.

For example the snapping and window thing... Apple has a thing with continuos freedom opposed to the discretisation one is used to. I've come around to that view as well actually, free your mind, nature is not a stepped slider.

Cool Utilities:

MenuMeters with a CPU usage graph. this allows you to see if something is killing your battery.

MonitorControl (on github) to set brightness of external monitors.

LittleSnitch ($$) for fellow paranoid control freaks

IINA (github) best video player

UTM for VMs (free on github) paid options are good too

MacPass for KeePass databases

Hope it helps.

> Disable spotlight for everything except what you want to use it for

My friend's mac would "take off" (fan spun up crazy fast) after every boot/login and I disabled full-text search of documents to fix it. There was probably a weird, maybe not-to-spec pdf/docx on the filesystem that spotlight couldn't parse and got stuck. Kinda dumb that it would waste a 100% usage on one CPU core for a couple minutes every boot though.

It's really abysmal. I had a similar situation: every time I'd pull a monorepo, my machine would be flooded with "mdworker" processes. The CPU would spin up and the machine would operate at 85c for a few hours before finally cooling down. The culprit was Spotlight, and the solution was to disable search indexing.

Spotlight is a really good search tool, and it's worth occasionally letting it build its index. You mostly only notice this when you've changes a whole bunch of files or setup the computer for the first time. It really is short-term pain for long-term gain, because Spotlight is phenomenal at finding anything on the Mac in a really short amount of time.

That being said, if you're in the dev-space, I'd recommend using Raycast instead. I've dong some cool things with it, like format my commit messages, generate UUIDs, and search my bookmarks with a command (/w dev -> my company's development application with a really long URL).

It's not worth it if my computer heats up to 85 degrees for an hour and a half every few days. Really throws a wrench in my productivity and has already made me miss a couple meetings. Raycast looks neat, but I'm not interested in adding Yet Another Random Closed-Source Tool to my Mac. At this point I'm mostly using it as a dumb terminal and even that is testing my limits with how annoying Homebrew and the FreeBSD 4.1-ass kernel is.

> has already made me miss a couple meetings.

Congratulations on a novel permutation of “the dog ate my meeting notification” :-)

More like "my computer's CPU is pinned so high that I can't do the screenshare I promised you earlier, because I made the mistake of trying to rebase 15 minutes before I was scheduled to appear"

> Spotlight is a really good search tool

I loved Spotlight until I had to check out several project to my computer. Now with thousands of non-own files it’s really hard to find what I want. Even if I look for my own projects, Spotlight shows the same project as it appears in several node_modules as a dependency. Find out the right one means I have to hold alt on each item. Ludicrous.

> and the solution was to disable search indexing.

It isn’t clear to me from that text, so just in case you don’t know: you can disable Spotlight indexing for specific directories (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchlp2811/mac)

Some really good ones missed: - iStat menu (better looking MenuMeters) - Alfred (MUCH better spotlight) - BetterTouchTools (keyboard, gesture, and other UX customization and macros, oh and window snapping with mouse and shortcuts)

Paid version of alfred includes a clipboard manager and the ability to create workflows like add emojis or integrate with let’s say dash for documentation search etc. very nice, telepathy-like experience.

I've been using Raycast [0] as an alternative to Spotlight and Alfred. Super fast file search, good looking and very extensible with its large community. Plus, it's a YC company :).

[0]: https://raycast.com/

Hot Corners for Mission Control and App windows is interesting! Gonna try that today.

I've had hot corners set up this way since 10.3. I feel lost on a computer without them set up.

I'd also recommend a hot corner for "show desktop".

I couldn't imagine navigating macOS without gestures. Great on touchpad, non-existent on any comfortable third-party mouse (the magic mouse is made for toddlers apparently.. I don't even have particularly large hands).

Thankfully someone made an LUA script for the Logitech G app to use one of the random buttons on my gaming mouse to imitate three-finger swipes, which feels great: https://github.com/mark-vandenberg/g-hub-mouse-gestures/blob...

I also am not a huge fan of Finder. Might be able to tweak so that the list view is default but crazy to me that you'd have folders and files just floating around in space.

All that being said I went from lifelong Windows user to being fully onboard with Mac once I started developing professionally. PC gaming is the only reason I have a Windows machine at all. Windows is just gnarly, from the kernel to the UI.

Maybe this is heresy but I use the Magic Trackpad with my Mac Mini because the gestures are indespensable and the Magic Mouse kinda sucks.

This is my experience as well. I am a 25-year PC user. Got my first MacBook last summer. The gestures just make the whole OS experience fantastic. But I can never leave my PC behind. Without gestures the Mac os is lackluster IMO.

I've been driving gestures since my 2008 MBP. Gestures have become an integral part of my workflow, and using BetterTouchTool [1] I use CMD+4 finger swipes to throw windows to either side of the screen, or to maximize them. CMD+4-finger-click runs ffmpeg on the last captured screen recording, and produces a Jira- and Slack-friendly GIF, which is draggable from the dock.

My Windows machine is for mostly for updating and gaming, in that order.

[1] https://folivora.ai/

> Learn about the screenshot shortcuts CMD+shift+{3,4}, 3: full screen, 4: select area or switch to window select with hitting space bar once.

I just learned about command-shift-5 for screen recordings, which is super nice for showing a visual diff of work done.

Command-shift-6 to take a picture of your Touch Bar, if you Mac has one.

Some alternatives:

An IStats like: https://github.com/exelban/stats very nice looking, highly configurable. Lulu instead of LittleSnitch: https://objective-see.com/products/lulu.html and a lot of others tools from the same developer.

Other pretty much required apps:

* Spectacle - gives you a normal maximise shortcut * Karabiner elements - fix home/end, swap ctrl and command on external keyboards, fix the British keyboard layout etc. Also let's you work around the bug where it forgets you have an ISO keyboard. * Itsycal - an actual calendar in your menu bar * Something to disable scroll acceleration for real mice. There are a couple of paid apps for this.

> * Put the Dock left or right, vertical space is precious (trust me, do it for a week and then decide)

"vertical space is precious" indeed. Yet Microsoft recently decided that this stopped being the case, and now you need 3rd party tools to have the taskbar on the side.

Somewhat unrelated to the wider discussion, sorry. It just makes me angry/sad :/

Autohiding the dock on the bottom works for me. Don’t need it showing full time - mostly use CMD-space to launch apps.

Someone needs to tell him about option-click on the maximize button.

Most of these "rants" really just amount to: "this different OS doesn't work exactly the same way as the OS I am used to." That's why 3rd party utilities exist to give you the functionality you wish to have. That formula cuts both ways.

This is Apple UX in a nutshell. Hidden power tools are not intuitive.

In part it is about progressive complexity. The simple things are exposed, more complex options require extra effort to access. Certainly there are times when it would be nice to make it easier to discover the more advanced features but there will always be a tension between keeping defaults simple for new users and exposing advanced features for the more serious users. Often they do it correctly but sometimes there are misses.

We can argue about them being intuitive or not, but at least they exist.

How is this Apple UX specific? Windows UX and Linux UX work the same way.

I'd argue a lot of power user feature are more accessible on macOS than on Windows. The shortcuts and gestures for macOS can be found in the system settings and you can change the shortcuts. How are you supposed to find them on Windows?

I think people see macOS as more intuitive because it doesn't offer as much customization and is relatively consistent compared to Windows. Also it doesn't have as many nested menus. The system settings on macOS go maybe three levels deep while on Windows you can go at least 5 or six levels deep if not more. Now guess which one will feel more intuitive?

The downside is you have to install some third-party tools if you want some features. But I prefer that to a lot of bloat.

> How is this Apple UX specific? Windows UX and Linux UX work the same way.

Meanwhile the post just below yours: "I have been using macs for 9 years and never knew ...". So, no. They don't. "Power user" things are much less discoverable on macs.

In KDE, you discover features by trawling the settings. :-)

"[x] Enable FooBar mode" oh hey, this tool has a FooBar mode!

In my experience, almost the first thing I do when trying a new program is having a look through the settings.

>The shortcuts and gestures for macOS can be found in the system settings and you can change the shortcuts.

Can they? Where can I find the shortcut to copy the current path in Finder?

Or double click on the window to perform the original Mac Zoom function.

Or double-clicking the window chrome.

That works... most of the time.

I set up a custom "All Applications" keyboard shortcut for the Zoom command, it's really handy.

Yep, as someone who's gotten really really dependent on app Exposé on macOS... it's hard for me to switch to a keyboard for things I'd rather do on the trackpad!

I do have to agree, though, that macOS window management can feel a bit clunky using a mouse and keyboard. That's a user story that the macOS UI/UX team ought to look into, it wouldn't be that hard to create some decent bindings in the OS itself.

I've been using macs for 9 years and never knew about option+click. Granted I've been using apps for window management since forever as the native tools suck or are almost hidden.

Just FYI, holding down modifiers to reveal additional functions is a common theme in macOS. In the Finder for example, try holding down option and shift while looking through menus for a few examples. Holding down option while clicking the close or minimize buttons in apps will also close or minimize all windows for that app.

2 years into being forced to use them for work and this is the first time I even hear anyone mention this. Thanks!, I'll be checking it out first thing in the morning

Absolutely - these ranty invectives are so tedious. The idea that something is fundamentally broken because it doesn’t work the way you expect it to.

I struggle through each of my Windows sessions despite having used Windows since the 80s and having built probably more than 10 PCs over the past 30 years. I don’t blame Windows for that. I daily drive MacOS and that’s what I’m used to. That’s a me problem, not a Windows problem.

These responses are also tedious, in that a negative opinion can't be valid and the user just didn't 'do it properly.' The author went to the effort of providing the rationale for his opinion at least.

Per your second point. Why is that not a Windows problem? Because a lot of other people don't experience it? Just because a whole heap of people can work with Windows might mean they just got used to it, rather than it was good in the first place, which goes back to your first sentence.

No OS is 'good' for everyone, as no OS is 'bad' for everyone.

I can see that my comment did look like it was accusing the author of TFA of engaging in a rant. That’s my bad - I was instead responding to parent’s second paragraph.

As to your second point: I agree. Those specific discussions around what people like and dislike, and why, are interesting and thought-provoking. The low-effort “loll Apple drone” hot-takes that pop up on all of these threads, less so.

Ah ok, I see and yes agreed.

It is frustrating when interesting conversation/debate points are drowned out by the inevitable 'troll' comments that explode the threads into pointless arguments.

No, no, don't worry: Windows is the problem.

“France is really dumb because I can’t understand what they are saying. Look, even England does it the way I know!”

"Impressions from a first-time english speaker"

> A little background on me: I’ve been speaking French and Spanish my entire professional life

...

> The Bad

> I’m accustomed to gendered pronouns in both French and Spanish, so it was nice to see that in English. However, the lack of gendered nouns is awful. French and Spanish both have what I would call “sane” gendered nouns (shown in this dictionary), where you know of everyone's gender based on the adjective you hear.

> On the other hand, English has a weird grammatical system where you need to listen to the pronoun to know someone or something's gender. I want to know if someone is a man, a woman, or a chair based on the adjective, not just the pronoun.

Very fine, you took my stupid comment and made it something good.

A fun parallel. Consider the importance being placed on gender to be in part a malleable cultural factor in part perpetuated by language. Plenty on this in the sphere of ‘gender studies’.

I hate that idea, it's effectively overloading a noun that objectively speaking should only contain information that is intrinsic to the properties of the noun itself. A chair or other inanimate objects do not have genders, and forcing a non-native speaker to conjugate a noun correctly just adds to the mental complexity.

Side note: this is why I love grammatically simple languages such as Chinese.

People on corp hardware can't install third party utilities, though. You're basically saying "it's fine that this OS can't do what you need it to do, because I can customize it for my purposes". Not to mention - even if the author could install those third party utilities, now they're pulling untrusted code into a work environment and potentially exposing trade secrets to random software developers. Any IT department paying attention would not okay most of those tools. The stuff the author complains about missing is built in on Windows and Linux and is not particularly niche or complex.

My job lets me use everything from Contexts to Karabiner and I am so happy. Now I'm afraid to ever switch jobs and lose my productivity.

You don’t even have to use the green zoom button. Just double click the top of the window like in every other OS. The difference is that zooming a window is not the same as maximising. It makes the window as big as the content it contains.

Also you can double click the edge of any window to extend it to the edge of the screen.

I really don’t get the obsession for tiling windows personally. It’s not part of my workflow.

Apple calls the green button “zoom” in their documentation, but its default function is fullscreen, not zoom.

I've always found that a bit disorienting. I guess Apple just decided that "zoom" is better as a name because it's one short word instead of two.

Yes, they switched the behaviour shortly after they added the full screen mode merging it with a separate full screen icon they had introduced. The old behaviour is retained by option clicking the green button. It's annoying and I wish they kept it as was.

It is hilarious that a button called "zoom" only does "zoom" when you use its alternative functionality and by default does something completely different.

The author makes a big deal of lack of snapping. Frankly I've never seen the utility of it on OSs that do have it, infact I've always felt it more of a hinderance than a help (gets in the way, tries to snap when you don't want it to).

The author makes a big deal that you have to do Command+Tab to switch applications, and then Command+` to cycle between windows in that application. Well, frankly I think thats the better way, I'll give you an example:

Let's say (as you do) you have a dozen browser windows open (maybe in more than one browser) ... do you REALLY want to sit there hitting Command+Tab dozens of times ? No. Its quicker to switch to the desired app and then cycle within the app. That way you don't cycle through the browser when you don't need to.

Finally there are some, frankly bizarre, comments in the blog post, such as:

> However, that keyboard doesn’t have the Option (⌥) or Command (⌘) keys like on my Macbook.

Well, yeah, its not Apple's problem if you choose to use a PC keyboard with your Mac. Most people would either use the built-in Mac keyboard or buy an external one (third-party Mac keyboards are available from the usual suspects if you don't fancy an Apple one).

I gave up reading the blog post around that point ("The Undecided" header to be precise).

> The author makes a big deal of lack of snapping. Frankly I've never seen the utility of it on OS's that do have it, infact I've always felt it more of a hinderance than a help (gets in the way, tries to snap when you don't want it to).

It may be useful for users of large external monitors, allowing to make better use of the screen real estate. Then again, Macos lacks per-application menu bars, which means you cannot do a lot of tasks without focusing the app first, so IMHO lack of snapping/advanced windows management is not as big as a deal as it would be under Windows.

> It may be useful for users of large external monitors, allowing to make better use of the screen real estate

OP here. This is exactly why I want snapping (I'm using a 27" 1440p monitor)

There are Mac applications you can download to get this behaviour. Magnet does it and is cheap, and Raycast (spotlight alternative) does it and is free.

From the article:

> this is a work machine and I need to get everything I install blessed by IT security. Easy for large applications like Slack or Chrome, but harder for the small tools that only fix my niche issues (I’ve already found Rectangle, BetterSnapTool, and Magnet).

I’m using a 40” 4k monitor for Win10, and never found snapping to be attractive, although I routinely have about 20 active windows.

I get where the author is coming from, but I too prefer the cmd-tab to switch between applications, and cmd-backtick to cycle through windows in the application. I do more of the latter than the former.

Neither do I care that much for snapping. What I really prefer is for my windows to be where I left them, and MacOS is pretty good about keeping them that way.

> What I really prefer is for my windows to be where I left them, and MacOS is pretty good about keeping them that way.

Well, it is once you go into Preferences > Mission Control and turn off "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use"

I can't imagine why that's enabled by default, and I always forget to turn it off when setting up a new machine and don't realize it until I get confused for the 50th time, thinking I'm losing my mind cause my desktops are in a different order from what I thought

Probably because most of the "windows in the application" these days is just the web browser.

I've never used snapping on any OS, but on MacOS I feel the need even less, because the programs seem really really good about remembering my window positions once I have things setup the way I want.

Sorry for the snark in advance: Are you for real? I do want IDE and documentation in browser next to each other on my 31.5" 1440 screen, thank you very much.

In your said use case, full screen mode with split windows would be a much better solution than snapping.

Maybe I'm the only one that finds being locked into full screen mode a horrific experience.

I’m the opposite, I only work in full screen mode for everything. It’s like a zen mode for every app.

> Let's say (as you do) you have a dozen browser windows open (maybe in more than one browser) ... do you REALLY want to sit there hitting Command+Tab dozens of times ? No. Its quicker to switch to the desired app and then cycle within the app. That way you don't cycle through the browser when you don't need to.

I'll see your use case and raise you a:

Let's say you now have two dozens of browser windows open on two desktops. And you also have a dozen terminal windows open also across two desktops. You've just googled something on desktop 1, and trying it out in terminal 1, now you get a beep from Slack on desktop 2, which is not maximized because you were communicating something from your workspace there so it was needed on the right half of the screen. You read the message, you alt-Tab back to the terminal... and end up in a different terminal on the current workspace.

It feels like this was done to work around the fact that windows are grouped by application in MacOS, so that Alt-Tab between a browser and terminal always stayed on the same workspace.

Yeah this annoys me too. I just had get used to the fact that if I context switch away to a different desktop, I should switch back with ctrl-left, not with cmd-tab.

Three fingers up on the trackpad shows everything...

OSX takes about a week, after 10 minutes with someone that's used it a lot.

All of the OS's are at parity now, the rest is just getting used to the frosting.

Nobody seems to know about App Exposé, which you can trigger with ctrl+down. I also have it set for three finger swipe down. You can then use the arrow keys to move between windows if you don't want to use the mouse, and it includes minimized windows as well, which cmd+` does not.

> Nobody seems to know about

That seems like a problem.

When you go into the trackpad settings there are little videos showing what each gesture does. App Exposé is right there. I don’t know how more discoverable it can be.

Since it seems like it’s Windows converts that can’t find it, maybe Apple could buy some of those Windows File Explorer ads Microsoft is experimenting with and explain the functionality.

TBH I think this is a more universal problem. I work in a University and students with either Macs or Windows laptops all seem to lack the basic ability to get around their OS. They'll entirely mouse orientated ignorant of many time saving affordances.

On the other hand you have people who read HN who know their system intimately and don't like when another system is different. I could rant all day about Windows too!

At this point, anything but many workspaces and automatic tiling feels like a toy implementation of windows to me. OS X doesn't do better than dwm.

As a longtime user of Macs this is dead on. Mac OS UX feels cumbersome today in a way it never used to feel. A lot of that is by comparison to Windows 10/11 and Linux, rather than actual regression, but it doesn’t change the fact that it feels bad. I remember first using OSX and it feeling like a revelation compared to Windows. Honestly it wouldn’t take much to fix this. If they implement drag windows snapping; rethink full screen mode; and improve the intelligence of dock autohiding, I think it would do a lot, but as is I feel like I am fighting the software to do basic window navigation.

At the same time, I think Apple is currently doing some of their best most sensible hardware design and their quality control has only gotten better.

Despite my misgivings about Mac OS I still choose a Mac for work because I need a laptop and I want a quality machine, but I really hope Apple take a long hard look at MacOS and devotes some resources to pushing desktop operating systems forward again.

Win7 taskbar and Win10 taskview was huge improvement. Both basics are based on macOS Dock and Expose but improved. Meanwhile Apple stopped improvement.

I think this is a pretty fair article. I'll add one more:

in MacOS there is no unified way to get to the beginning or end of a line. In Linux and Windows this is done with the Home and End keys. In Mac, there are some shortcuts but they are not universal, what works in terminal may not work in a browser textarea and so on. Some programs interpret the same shortcut as "go to the very end of the text (as in a PgDown key) but that same shortcut, in another program, might go to the end of the line (like the End key).

Please let me know if I'm missing something! Every time I make a web search about this topic, I end up in various pages like this one[1] with shortcuts that don't work for me for the reasons explained above.

EDIT: I found out that there are some Mac keyboards with the Home and End keys. So it seems that this is not an OS issue but, I guess, a MacBook issue (I've only ever used MacBooks and always without external keyboard).

[1] https://djst.org/topic/what-is-the-end-key-on-a-mac/

I use a keyboard with dedicated Home and End keys and the behavior is exactly how you describe. This is definitely a software problem and one that should be fixed.

Isn’t it just option plus right arrow?

Cmd-a and Cmd-e work in most/all native controls, no? Really ergonomic once you've remapped caps to cmd as well.

^^^ you mean ctrl-a and ctrl-e? But yes, +100 to the caps lock → ctrl remapping. Trivial to do in the keyboard "modifier keys" setting, and makes emacs text movement extra fast.

That's the one. Thanks for the correction. Forgot my keyboard, which has a ctrl key in place of the caps, so I've stopped mapping it.

Emacs movement keys generally work. Ctrl-A for the start of the line, Ctrl-E for the end, Ctrl-K to kill a line...

Yep, or CMD + left/right arrow. Option + left/right arrow goes back/forward one word. Hold down Shift doing these to select what you move over.

in my experience, Cmd + left/right arrow behaves like a pgup/down. Goes to the very end of the page, not end of a single line

That's weird. Where do you mean? e.g. in a text editor? in HN comment text entry boxes?

OK I'm sorry I just went back to my Mac and found that my previous comment was incorrect, but the main problem (no way to select a line) still exist.

The issue happens on web (and on web based UIs such as Electron apps) outside of text input fields or textareas.

This is how to reproduce:

1. first we doble click on the first word of the line, to create a selection

2. At this point we expect that Cmd-shift-rightarrow will expand the selection to the rest of the line. But it doesn't because this key combination only works inside a text input or textarea. In every other desktop OS I can do shift-End at this point, and select the rest of the line.

3. option-shift arrow does work, but selects one word at a time so it is cumbersome to use

4. I had been told that I could use fn-shift-arrow in this case, but that selects all text until the end of the page (that's the one I was thinking about in my previous comment)

I just tried and reproduced the issue in Chrome and Safari.

> no way to select a line

Hmm yeah I never noticed that. Fastest way to select a line I know is: click at the start of the line, then Shift + down arrow.

Good one! It might select the first word of the next line in some cases, but it's easy to deselect it with the left arrow. Thank you!

It never selects the first word of next line for me.. Hmm anyway, while clicking at the start of the line, may as well just drag down to next line. :-)

Also, TIL that you can hold down CMD and drag over various words/letters on the screen, non-contiguous, then CMD-C copies them all to the clipboard. Must be handy for something!

These shortcuts were my favourite thing about moving to a Mac.

> Ctrl-K to kill a line...

The text system also has a basic kill-yank separate from copy paste. So you can Ctrl-K to kill a line, then Ctrl-y to yank it out elsewhere in basically every text input in the OS.

Oddly this is actually nicer in macOS than Linux desktops, because Ctrl-A is normally reserved for "select all" on other OSes. Because macOS puts all the "normal" select/cut/copy/paste combos on the command key, the full set of Unixy movement keys is available on the control key.

Gnome tweaks has a setting to enable Emacs keyboard for GTK apps. It's pretty good and supports things like M-f and M-p better than mac (which uses Option for special characters). But it does confuse some programs that don't expect it. Like Gedit doesn't seem to have a functioning Find shortcut in this mode. (It uses C-s for save so C-s for search doesn't work)

Cmd + left/right works everywhere for me (except the terminal)

And for those unaware of Cmd+left/right, there's also Alt+left/right for moving over one word at a time.

Yes navigating via muscle memory is way better on macOS because per word cursor movement is supported.

And terminal has ctrl+a and ctrl+e. My mnemonics: A is for Anfang (german: start, beginning), e is just End.

On windows I was confused as to whether Pos1/End gets me to file ending, or line ending. I think it's the first, unless you hit a modifier key.

And hold Shift while doing either of those, to select the text you move over.

doesn't work for me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31000315

I'm sorry, the comment that I linked above was inaccurate, but the issue still persists for me, see here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31009239

I have never had this issue, I just use command left or right and it goes to the beginning or end in every application except my terminal but I am pretty sure that is because it mapped command left and right to changing tabs. When in the terminal I just use home/end and it works just fine.

But I use this functionality extensively when outside the terminal.

Fn + left arrow is Home. Fn + right arrow is End.

Funny. Coming from macOS to Linux Mint, I find I can make many of the same or similar arguments but against Linux.

The UI is inconsistent, esp. wrt the menu bar. Keyboard shortcuts are inconsistent across different apps. macOS remembers window positions, GNOME doesn't. macOS can use different backgrounds for different monitors, GNOME can't. The GNOME Panel is a poor substitute for the macOS Dock (which itself is severely limited) i.e. doesn't offer any visual cue that an app is launching. I could go on.

OSes are a tool. Use what works best for you.

Not sure if these are similar arguments. These are relatively minor cosmetic issues. Window management and package management on the other hand are essential parts of the operating system.

I thought Mint came with Cinnamon. (Wow that was a funny sentence :D)

> macOS can use different backgrounds for different monitors, GNOME can't

That'd be the least of my problems. Also, on xfce you can set different backgrounds for different monitors.

That's the thing GP is missing in his Linux criticism.

Whatever you don't like you can just change. You can change to a different DE, change WM/themes/icons/dotfiles whatever you want, you can change. You are not constrained by a perscribed UX philosophy.

To me personally that is very liberating.

I tried KDE and had different but equally frustrating issues. People say you can "just fix it yourself" with Linux but that's not always feasible or worth a person's time.

But whatever frustations you have, irrespective of what you feel is the time commitment, you can actually fix in Linux. With Windows/Mac you are stuck with those frustrations as 'prescribed' by however did the UX.

We're talking "out of the box" here, and while I'm not a fan of a lot of the UI changes in macOS it still "just works". Linux doesn't i.e. the wifi on my laptop dies after sleep & the only "fix" is a reboot. I've tried everything the internet can suggest, to no avail. You say you can "actually fix it in Linux", but this isn't true; sometimes the "fix" requires a level of technical knowledge that ordinary users don't have.

I agree that Mac is much better out of the box. And nearly everything "just works".

I like Macs, though my personal machine is currently the latest Fedora Beta running on a ThinkPad. It's too early to tell if there are issues, but first impressions are looking good.

Over the years I have discovered that — especially with laptops — some machines work better than others with Linux.

For instance, some Dell machines and nearly all ThinkPads work pretty well with Linux without any of the usual issues (sleep/suspend/bluetooth/wifi problems). However, that's not the case with all manufacturers. For an anecdotal example, I had to resort to witchcraft to get Debian to run on my non-technical friend's ASUS laptop.

> sometimes the "fix" requires a level of technical knowledge that ordinary users don't have

True statement.

As someone who switches around between primarily Windows and secondarily OSX, and GDM3, I find OSX to have the most intuitive window manager. I don't like apps being maximized, and I feel like I can always intuitively find the window I'm looking for in OSX, just under the active window. I find myself arranging windows in Windows like OSX might arrange them. Maybe Apple is just using a different metaphor. I understand this is very subjective though.

Apple products are supposed to be revered the world over as the pinnacle of design, used by artists, engineers, professionals, and creators.

Is this still really the case? Most of what I hear nowadays is Apple's reputation is that their products are luxury status symbols rather than a tool for creative types, outside of maybe the camera on the iPhone. 10 years ago, you might have seen the coffee shop filled with macbooks, but that's not the case today. What artist is going to afford a $1900 monitor that can only be height adjusted with a $400 upgrade?

Funnily enough, for the ~5 years I used macOS, the Window Manager was the most frustrating aspect for me. I could not maximize apps (there was only a weird fullscreen/focus mode), I would accidentally end up dragging a window very often etc. All this gave ended up creating this feeling in my brain that the windows are just "floating" on the screen instead of being tightly bound to an arrangement.

You're not really 'supposed' to maximize or even tile apps on the Mac. In most cases it's a waste of screen space. The Mac has always been focused around the desktop metaphor. Historically applications were composed of multiple windows, and focusing a window in an application brought all of the other windows for that application to the front. You would manually arrange each of the windows/palettes of your application for multitasking, much like you would with physical pieces of paper.

At this point, my work is around tasks, not applications. I hardly ever need more than one window in the same application simultaneously. What I need is my browser open next to a document, or a spreadsheet open next to powerpoint.

Heavy Mac user here for many years, and I agree. I can't even think of the last time I "maximized" an app. All my apps sit around in a pile and I switch between them. If I were on a tiny screen, maybe I would dislike this, but at 27" a maximized app would be a pain in the ass.

So the menubar is worthless? Because the fullscreen mode kills it. Or is it some mental gymnastics in saying that it's a waste of space to only look at one thing?

Otherwise what you describe sounds like, basically every floating window system ever.

But that artist might be able to afford a thousand dollar MacBook Air with whatever cheap hand me down monitor they have lying around.

(But then the dongles they need to buy to attach to that monitor or keyboard or what have you is the straw that will break their financial bank!)

This is a story as old as time.

When you’re used to something else the change hurts. I have found it far better to not bring your mental baggage with you and meet the new platform as its level rather than try and make it the same as the old one.

I have gone MOS > RiscOS > WinNT -> Solaris -> Linux -> Win7 -> macOS and it hurt every time.

Indeed, and the change that hurts me when I try to use a Mac is the fact that there are things that I can't change. I prefer focus-follows-mouse and no-raise on-focus, and those are apparently structurally impossible in macOS.

"I can't change it to work the way I like it" is a totally legitimate complaint and Linux has a strong advantage in this regard.

Focus-follows-mouse is great. That’s the biggest thing I miss from Linux.

FFM is completely possible on macOS (unless you mean something completely different). I use yabai for it: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

Yabai requires tiling windows, doesn’t it? This is far easier than general focus-follows-mouse support.

You can tell yabai to leave your windows alone with

    yabai -m config layout float

And enable FFM with

    yabai -m config focus_follows_mouse autofocus

And voila, you have FFM without tiling!

I’ve tried implementing focus-follows-mouse on macOS. It’s possible to do, but complicated, because changing focus to an arbitrary window can “mutate” it: popovers will disappear, and selections will shift under your mouse. I don’t think Linux or Windows really support these so they don’t have to deal with this.

I actually like the command+tab behavior, and miss it when I use Windows.

I'll explain: if you have a lot of windows open, I think it's nice to silo them. When I have ten Firefox windows and six Sublime windows and three iTerm windows, and a few other random applications, it's generally easier to go first to the app I want and then find the window inside it, rather than always having to shuffle through 19 different windows at the top-level.

This is probably a matter of personal preference and habit, and you can make a good case for either behavior. I just don't think macOS' behavior is obviously worse... only different.

If you pin apps to Windows task bar, you can cycle through the windows of the third one with Winkey-3 and so on. Currently daily drive a mac for work, but the above is my preferred way to switch windows on Windows.

It's nice to silo windows when you have lots open, but I think grouping all browser windows together is not a sensible way to do it. Some browser windows go with my IDE, some with spreadsheets, some terminals, etc. Grouping all browser windows (including web apps, email, etc.) because they happen to use the browser is like grouping all windows whose title starts with "A" or something.

Once you have your browser focused, you can use App Exposé (ctrl+down) to show all the windows from it.

You can also get to that directly from the cmd-tab switcher -- if you press up or down while the switcher is open it jumps straight to exposé for the focused app.

You learn something new every day! Thanks.

This is true, but my Windows experience suggests that the one-set approach to window-switching doesn't help me maintain that grouping. You do get quick switching between recently-used windows, but if I have more than a few (or multiple sets I need to switch between) then they rapidly get jumbled together for me.

What I actually do on macOS, which I felt was too opinionated to mention in my initial comment, is use Spaces (macOS' virtual-desktops feature) to split things up by task. Normally pretty high-level -- a "work" space and a "relaxing" space always exist, but making task-specific ones to focus on is trivial. Then once you're inside a given space, all the tab shortcuts only switch between windows on that space.

I have never spent much time on Windows machines but I _love_ cmd-` on the Mac. I mean, I have a whole rant about how its ordering behavior changed on Lion for the worse but I love having windows grouped by application and picking the app I care about before picking the window I care about. I have never understood why so many people use a single chrome window for all of their tabs but I think it comes from not being experienced with cmd-`. For me, I group tabs in my browser by subject, most commonly, by google search query, and then I can close them all at once when I'm done with them.

I've actually started braking more websites out into their own fluid.app so that I can cmd-tab to them specifically. Jira, Github, Gmail (well, when I used gmail) all get their own app so I don't have to go hunting for that single tab in my browser, making my browser window management that much easier.

If you're interested in that, I pair fluid.app with choosy so that links open in the correct fluid browser.

Big fan here of “appifying” favourite Web apps too. I recently discovered a programme called Web Catalog that is best in class for this.

Ooh, I'll check that out. I've also experimented with Flotato

Yeah, Fluid is great for that. I also use it for any streaming station I frequent, so I never have to worry about accidentally closing a browser tab.

The list of things Lion didn't make worse is pretty short.

I've had a long background of Windows and Linux usage but I've used MacOS a significant time as well - I'm daily driving a 2018 MacBook Pro 15 and use a Windows Desktop for WFH because it's much more powerful an silent. And I'm also developing on .NET core right now which is a Microsoft tech.

With that said I would say MacOS grows on you. On my 34 inch screen using snapping is just not practical - I just move windows around and have plenty of visual space and can quickly move my head to move attention to a different window, find other windows through overlaps - I prefer this to tabbing - and this is when working on my Windows desktop.

Returning to Windows after not regularly using it for last 3 years it's sad to see that the UI has regressed with Windows 11. For example windows had system calendar app that would connect to the system calendar in the bottom right and show event previews for the day and you could click on the day and get day summaries, sort of like Itsycal but built in. They removed this in Windows 11.

I think MacOS is strictly better for most of my use cases :

- The new right click UI is clunky and obviously touch optimized, most of the OS is going this way and it's shit for desktop usability

- Dark mode support is hit-and-miss, much better in MacOS

- PowerToys Run doesn't work reliably at all compared to Mac CMD + Space which works without a hiccup

- chocolatey is garbage compared to homebrew

Where Windows beats MacOS for me :

- Docker performance is much much better

- WSL/linux integration is fairly nice (using OpenSuSe rolling release to get relevant software, Ubuntu LTS they provide is ancient)

I constantly use window snapping on my desktop Mac with two widescreen monitors. But, I use keystrokes to do so, using Rectangle, not the mouse.

For me even the vertical space fully extended is too much visual area since I need to move my eyes/head to scan top to bottom. but I do have a 5k panel relatively close at low scaling so maybe your setup is different

It likely is different based on what you've said. I hope you keep finding and using what works for you. It's often different between people even who have similar configurations.

Docker is still such a mess on Mac. Losing hope that they’ll ever sort it out.

I always find this interesting, my primary computing device that I do actual work on is Mac (technically I guess my primary is my iPhone or iPad if I go by time but I am not counting that). But I have a Windows computer for gaming and a few Linux machines lingering around.

I constantly find myself frustrated by Windows because I am just used to how Mac operates. I have been using it as my primary compute device since Lion.

However one of the things that I find interesting from the Window management point that I don't see mentioned, touchpad gestures. I cannot use Mac without gestures, even when I am using my laptop as a desktop I use the Magic Trackpad. The few times I have tried to use a mouse... it just feels wrong. I would highly recommend taking a look at this and looking at the window management from this prospective. Because of these gestures I never think I need to snap things because switching windows is a quick swipe and and a click. Then all the other gestures, hot corners, etc.

That being said, I find the same issue with my partner. He has never used a Mac (has an iPhone though) but sometimes he needs to do something quick so grabs my laptop. It is fascinating watching him struggle with the trackpad and other basics that to me I don't even think about anymore.

Yea, I think what OP is missing is that macOS was designed to be used with a trackpad. I think three fingers up is what they want when they alt tab. The green button makes the window full screen because using three fingers sideways and the occasional three fingers up is the best way to manage windows on small laptop screens. Even on my external monitor I have every window fullscreen. This was admittedly hard to get used to moving from windows/linux, but it really is a much better way to do windows/virtual desktops. OP should ditch the mouse.

I don't think it was necessarily designed this way to begin with, they didn't really add these gestures until well into OSX I don't think.

But at the very least they have leaned very heavily into it. Considering they sell 2 devices to add gestures when you are not using a laptop.

I find myself very rarely using cmd-tab because it just doesn't fit my use. I can either more quickly do that my moving my mouse to the bottom and accessing the Dock or 3 fingers up and everything pulls out. Throw in hitting "space" to quickly zoom into a window if I just need a quick piece of information but not open the app completely.

I am largely the same with 3 monitors. At least 2 tend to be full screen apps with my center one being my mix of things, but it depends on what is happening. Each monitor has a desktop of scratch things (like notes) that I don't want full screen but just sits somewhere. The native tab support in the OS for things like VSCode helps a lot with this.

I've got an ultrawide, and everything full screen isn't really a viable strategy, but I generally agree about like just having workspaces and shifting between them instead of keeping a bunch of windows floating around.

That said I would really prefer to use a mouse and one handed keyboard shortcuts in place of the trackpad, but when you transition applications/workspaces with the keyboard in macOS it plays the full (slooow) duration of the transition animation and you cant interact with anything until it finishes. Absolutely insane choice. On trackpad you can swipe faster and it changes faster.

I end up using my laptop with a mouse, but then using the trackpad to do gestures. It's crazy, and I really wish I could do something about it.

> Yea, I think what OP is missing is that macOS was designed to be used with a trackpad.

OP here. Yes, I'm starting to get that from reading these comments. Does everyone who uses a Mac with an external display also purchase the Magic Trackpad?

I would say a pretty good portion, enough that it is becoming more common that if IT either has a dedicated Mac person or they use Mac themselves... a new hire will likely just have a trackpad on their desk when they start. At least that has been my experience in recent years.

But even if not, I know I have had conversations many times of people being frustrated with something (especially if they primarily use their Mac as a desktop) and a trackpad (and gestures) largely fixing it.

As someone else said, Mac as long had a fantastic trackpad experience. Partially hardware for sure, but software is a major part of that. So they leaned into that and using a trackpad as a desktop initially felt like a really weird idea. But the ability to use the same control setup regardless of how I am using my laptop is awesome.

I personally use a Mac Keyboard and Magic Trackpad. And I got https://www.twelvesouth.com/products/magicbridge from TwelveSouth that basically just turns it into one single piece.

I would be completely lost if it wasn't for the trackpad. I tried the magic mouse and... it worked but it wasn't the same.

I use a MacBook Pro, and when I'm not just using the laptop on my lap, my usual setup has it connected to a dock with an external keyboard and a Magic Mouse. The Magic Mouse doesn't give access to all the different gestures the trackpad does, but it does let you use two-finger swipe left & right for switching spaces, and a two-finger double-tap for activating Mission Control (showing all the windows of the active space, as well as the active spaces along the top).

Mac OS is a better laptop OS, and Windows is a better desktop OS. Mouse support is poor on macs, window management is more painful, and multiple desktop support is rough. Meanwhile Windows has rough trackpad support, generally windows laptops have terrible battery life and buggy sleep.

There's a lot of people in comments defending macOS saying that the difference in switching between operating systems will lead to a bad experience no matter what and people just need to power through and learn the new system.

I'll say that I've used Windows and macOS both personally and professionally for two decades now (longer for Windows). I'd consider myself a power user in both OSes, I know the keyboard shortcuts, I know the OS settings somewhat in depth, and I've used a lot of the common tools to extend each OS.

My experience is that Windows has far better UX for pretty most end users.

I have 4 monitors connected to my Windows computer. I just plugged them in and it worked. I've burned hours fighting with external monitors on macOS. Is it even possible to have 4 external monitors? Actually you can extend this to all sorts of peripherals.

Windows explorer feels way more productive than finder. It still bothers me that I can't cut and paste folders by default.

I revert to the command line way more on macOS than I do on Windows. That's a skill that your average user isn't going to have.

I found my old Oregon Trail 3 CD two months ago and decided to play it. I had to navigate a few context menus but this 1997 game booted right up on Windows, how many hoops do you think I'd have to jump through to run a Mac OS 8 application on my MacBook Pro?

And there's a bunch of other examples I could give. There's a lot of reasons people like Apple products and if the interface works for you, great! But I don't think it's fair to dismiss critiques as ignorance of lack of ability.

I have five monitors. When it works, it's great. The other 5% of the time it's a giant pain in the butt. I don't know why this part of macOS is so incredibly buggy. It often forgets the arrangement, the HDR setting, and the refresh rate.

I wrote a little program to detect when it breaks and set it back, but they don't have APIs for refresh rate and HDR so it's only a partial fix.

I've half a mind to take a job there, fix it, and quit.

I'm running 3 external monitors off of a laptop and for me macOS is much more consistent about putting the windows in the right place, I don't even have to plug them in the same order. When I try to do the same on my desktop with nvidia surround, all of the monitors need to be plugged in on boot in order for it to "remember" the configuration.

Try using displayplacer. It supports hz and I added color_depth to it a while back. I don't remember HDR being in the APIs used either but that may address it.

https://github.com/jakehilborn/displayplacer

> I've burned hours fighting with external monitors on macOS. Is it even possible to have 4 external monitors?

> but this 1997 game

In the grand scheme of things, you appear to be in an extreme minority.

> It still bothers me that I can't cut and paste folders by default.

I think, if you were to start from 0, drag and drop to achieve movement is easier to "get" than cut/paste to/from some invisible aether.

But, I still agree with you. I don't really understand who the target audience of macOS is. It seems to have a better starting point for someone starting at 0, but there's an increasingly steep curve up from there. Ffs, just look at the keyboard shortcuts, and the fact that app expose is disabled by default ("where did my window go!?"). Then, as you said, you're quickly in the terminal, where that learning curve goes vertical for a bit.

How does

> My experience is that Windows has far better UX for pretty most end users.

followed by

> I have 4 monitors connected to my Windows computer.

Make any sense? Using four monitors isn't something a lot of users do.

Anyways: How many monitor your computer supports depends on your graphics card. This is true for every OS. You should check the manual for your Mac to see how many external monitors at which resolution it supports.

> Windows explorer feels way more productive than finder. It still bothers me that I can't cut and paste folders by default.

You can move a file or a folder by using Opt + Cmd + V. It is basically the same functionality with different shortcuts. I guess Mac users feel the same way on about Windows.

The best UX for end users is the one they are used to. I think macOS has some positives. Windows Home is outright user hostile with all the ads Microsoft is putting in it. And they change the UI with every major release macOS is relatively stable and if you learned how to use a Mac 10 years ago you could use a mac today. Windows on the other hand changed a lot in this time.

> My experience is that Windows has far better UX for pretty most end users.

UPDATE: After seeing a reply to this comment, I googled some screenshots. It seems that Macs normally do display a hint for the shortcut to delete files. I'm not sure why mine doesn't.

Windows is also more learnable. On Mac at least today you're just supposed to know stuff. The most basic operation: deleting files. Seems like an operation you'd like to speed up with a shortcut, since you're going to be doing a lot of that with your computer. Mac has hints in its menus about shortcuts for different actions, just like Windows. However, they're hardly ever there. That sounds a bit contradictory, but mind the quantifiers. The selection of which actions have hints about their shortcuts is completely arbitrary. It's completely disconnected from the potential frequency of use, and the hints that are there are far and few between. So, back to deleting files: this is not hinted in the menu. You can select this action with the mouse, but come on, going to the menu, finding this action and clicking it is a ridiculously slow process for such a common operation. Dragging files to the trash bin is only marginally better. It has a shortcut, it's just that macOS won't tell you what this shortcut is. This is insider knowledge. And then you google it, and find that it's "Cmd+Delete". So you press that... and it doesn't work. Because on macOS Delete is Backspace and Delete is Reverse Delete.

Also, it's a theme that what requires a single keypress or two on Windows, on macOS requires a convoluted chord making you look like Axl Rose playing solo of November Rain. I mean, look at the shortcuts to take screenshots: <https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201361> Wat??? 1. Who thought that would be easy to remember? 2. Who thought that would be easy to press?

Finder tells you the keyboard shortcut to Delete a file in the menu. Most every menu item on macOS that has a keyboard shortcut exposes it in this way through the menu, which is one nice feature that macOS has that Windows doesn’t have, but could have.

Yep, it's cmd-backspace, which is unfortunately cumbersome, but it works and it's easy enough to remember.

That said, how the menu items appear always baffles me. Want to search for a file by name? Hit Ctrl-Shift-Command-F. How did I discover this? Open the menu and start banging different modifier keys till "Find" turns into "Find by Name..." I'm sure this behavior is as old as Macs, but it's an odd quirk, one that I still stumble over from time to time.

Or just hit cmd-space for spotlight search?

It is a bit odd that it doesn't appear in the right-click context menu, but yes - I love the menubar consistency in OSX. That plus the search field in the "help" menu is amazing, every OS would benefit from mimicking it.

In fairness, I don't think most end users are plugging in four monitors, cut and pasting folders, or playing 25 year old games.

And all those things are very user-specific and better for some than others in different places. I have a Dell from 2017 that won't run an external monitor with the lid closed out of the box, it'll go to sleep. I tried playing Total Annihilation (another 25 year old one) off GOG on it and it didn't work - using either Linux or Mac (I forget which one it was) worked because the emulation layer it was using for Windows was more compatible with an ancient game than real Windows 10.

I think today's "average end user" for a Mac would propose examples more like "the Messages and Photos apps is synced with my iPhone out of the box."

> I don't think most end users are plugging in four monitors, cut and pasting folders, or playing 25 year old games.

Most users are not cut and pasting folders? What?

When I first used a Mac, that was one of the first major difficulties I encountered. Cut and paste was quite unnatural - you had to Copy the source item, and then press COMMAND+OPTION+V to move/paste an item rather than to copy it. It was quite unintuitive.

I’ve been using Macs since 2008. I’ve always dragged folders to move them. I wasn’t even aware there was a keystroke for cut and paste.

⌘ + drag moves the item

TIL.. There's shortcut to cut folder and I've been using OSX since mountain lion.

Not that it matter much since the first thing l do is to install 3rd party finder replacement on a fresh MacOS.

You can ignore the "four" and just say "more than one". And that's absolutely not uncommon in work environments.

Try running that game on a modern Mac, it won't launch now either.

I have mostly enjoyed my transition from Windows to Mac. I agree the the default of not being able to Cut and Paste in Finder was annoying but there is one thing that absolutely makes me furious:

The file save dialog box has this unbelievable limit of 38 viewable characters! I regularly have to deal with 50+ character naming conventions where the first 38 characters are the same among many files. It is a huge hassle of cursor navigation that is so unnecessary as I am looking at all this unused real estate in the dialog box.

For those of you long time Mac users: why are you not out with torches and pitchforks???!!!

If your workflow is dependant on many files, and with that naming convention because of it - there’s a good chance the workflow could be cleaned / simplified greatly. Wether it’s worth the effort or not, I don’t know - but lots of tools / freedoms / restrictions make certain processes possible and it’s always worth revisiting.

The naming conventions that require >38 characters come from a vast number of business entities that I have worked with through the years: Customer_Project_Subtask_Blaa How does anyone in the real working world not have this issue?

...folders?

There's already a sibling comment that suggests this, but to elaborate, this is how I would typically organize something like that:

    /home/my_user/
      Customer/
        Project/
          Subtask/
            Foo.txt
            Bar.txt

Is there a reason why you can't just use nested folders?

I mean, I can't speak for any other long-time Mac users, but...

> I regularly have to deal with 50+ character naming conventions where the first 38 characters are the same among many files.

...that's arguably a kind of unusual situation.

I don't think you're necessarily wrong, to be fair! It's just that in over two decades of owning Macs and at least a decade before that of using them off-and-on, I've never been in a situation where I thought, "man, the text field for entering a file name is just way too short."

The thing is, 38 chars is arbitrary limit from bygone era when screen space was precious and UI had to make sure dialog boxes fit no matter what. It's not like Apple can do hidpi UI but can't overcome 38 character limit for file name entry widget. It'd be small qol fix but no, for some reason other commenters need to defend it and point out that OP should just organize their files better. I don't understand, truly I don't.

It's interesting - I use all three major OS's (MacOS, Windows, various Linux distros) and I seem to have no problem switching between them at all. I don't even get bothered with the nonsensical UI problems such as some of finders limitations (with cutting and pasting folders I just never do that on MacOS, it makes you use a different flow or else you're fighting it).

The only thing I dislike in a UI sense is alt-tab on Mac - I still think it sometimes arbitrarily reorders my windows.

On reflection there is one other (not quite UI?) fundamental part of the OS I actually do really dislike - the mouse acceleration curve. How could I forget that - I find I can use it but geez is it inferior to Windows/Linux in this respect.

Cmd-Tab is annoying. There's multiple layers to why it's so annoying:

1. Cmd-Tab doesn't switch between windows, it switches between apps. This seems like not that big of a deal (you lose being able to quickly switch between windows of the same tab, you have to Cmd-` for that) until:

2. Apps can have multiple windows on multiple spaces, and Cmd-Tab preferences windows on your current space. Let's say you have apps A1 and A2, with windows A1W1 and A2W1 on space S1, and window A1W2 on space S2. Let's assume you're on window A2W1 and your goal is to get to A1W2. You have to switch to the app, then press Cmd-` to switch to A1W2!

3. Of course, this also means that the space you switched from has changed to have A1W1 on top! So if your spaces are actually monitors, this means you aren't looking at A2W1 and A1W2 together. So you finally give up and use mission control to arrange your windows, but now you're using the mouse.

The best solution I've found for this is using Hammerspoon's window switcher shortcuts, which work like Windows Alt-Tab. There's an open source app with just that functionality if you don't want to use Hammerspoon, but Hammerspoon's great so there's no reason not to go all the way.

I'll concur on how amazing Hammerspoon is - one Lua file that lets you write hotkey binds to literally anything you could possibly do on the system.

I use mine for resizing/throwing windows all around the system, for custom global hotkeys for controlling music playback, etc.

(also MacPorts > Homebrew, but that's a different discussion)

Yeah, and it's got so many useful APIs it's nuts. There's a keyboard-based expose API that is like Mission Control but with vimimum/tridactyl's follow mode. It's insanely useful when you need to jump to a window you opened ages ago and is therefore at the bottom of the alt-tab list. That's useful enough as it is, but then you can filter the windows that show up in expose, so you can make an expose just for your terminal windows! Legitimately amazing.

Microsoft has zero respect for my privacy.

They regularly show ads when I am searching for files and doing routine file management stuff

I don’t care how good Windows is. If they can’t keep ads off a product that I purchased they don’t deserve to get my dollars.

Purely on monitors, I've had the opposite experience - Windows has been dramatically buggier and worse-behaving. Particularly if they're different DPIs - Mac DPI support is just so far ahead of Windows that it's absurd.

I've had slightly better luck getting monitors to work at all on Windows... by a single monitor. I mean more around system behavior when I plug in a monitor. OSX acts... normal? Stuff moves where I last moved it in that setup, or stays wherever it is. Everything stays about the same physical size. Display-rearranging is easy and perfectly reliable. On Windows, literally anything is possible, often including windows completely disappearing or going completely out of the bounds of any screen.

That said, I have no idea why monitor support is so buggy anywhere. It seems nuts. Is it actually that hard? I get that there are some scenarios where there are no perfect choices (e.g. what do you do with desktop icons / window positions when changing sizes? they've gotta go somewhere)... but the amount of times Windows has shoved windows completely off-screen and made them inaccessible is totally inexcusable. It even does that when going from a small screen to a large one, or just adding a second monitor. What kind of code leads to that??

> Particularly if they're different DPIs - Mac DPI support is just so far ahead of Windows that it's absurd.

On Apple endorsed monitors and resolutions, yes, otherwise no. My personal pet peeve is that I have to use 3rd party tool (BetterDummy) got get decent output to 1440p monitor from my M1 mac. On Windows I know what I'll get when I plug in any monitor, on my Mac it's a guess. Maybe I'll get non-crappy rendering, maybe not. Otherwise I much prefer Mac handling of hidpi and fonts, but monitor situation in general is not perfect on MacOS.

Last year, I switched from Windows to Ubuntu and it was an incredibly easy transition and while there are some oddities with Ubuntu, like some software is hard to update and I've had a couple weird things with audio settings, everything has been quite seamless and easy.

I mention this in support that switching OSes does not necessarily have to be difficult.

This is my exact experience as well. I'd love to switch to Mac full time, since the integration with iCloud is extremely well done and the hardware is magnificent, but I feel so much more productive in Windows, although Microsoft is fighting hard to make its UX as bad as Mac's.

I should note that I pay for several MacOS apps to make the desktop experience better, but I don't pay for any third party app for Windows.

Never combine, show labels feels significantly better than anything the Dock can offer, including uBar. Multi monitor switching is better in Windows, even with third-party apps. Alt-Tab is better in Windows, as I can preview everything before switching, including individual instances of each app. Windows Explorer, although lacking tabs, is infinitely better than even Forklift, which I pay $30 for. Windows allows far more customizeability for most settings especially with Power Toys. Keyboard navigation is significantly better. Especially because DE hotkeys are clearly separated from application hotkeys -- if it's the DE, use the Windows key. If it's an app, ctrl. Mac mixes ctrl and command and makes setting global shortcuts difficult as they likely overlap with some random app. The Task Manager is light years ahead of Activity Monitor.

On the flip side, Autohotkeys and Karabiner are roughly equivalent in power, but Karabiner has the better UX. iTerm2 is not as good as Windows Terminal. Brew is better than Windows alternatives, and most importantly, Mac OS doesn't reboot whenever it feels like it to install updates.

With Apple diverging in CPU architecture, Windows supporting WSL2, and VSCode/IntelliJ supporting remote development I feel my Windows machine is closer to the hardware my applications end up running on.

I tried plenty of times to switch to Mac full time, but have always come back to Windows for these issues.

> and most importantly, Mac OS doesn't reboot whenever it feels like it to install updates.

But when it does reboot, it's a game of dice how long it's going to take. My windows laptop is roughly half powerful as my M1 macbook, but Windows OS updates are all relatively quick. Updating MacOS I never knwo whether I should just grab a coffee or head out to lunch. 6 minutes remaining, no 11 minutes remaining, now 8 minutes remaining, hooray, just 1 minute remaining! Except that that last minute is actually 5 minutes long.

> It still bothers me that I can't cut and paste folders by default.

cmd c to copy

Then

cmd v to paste

cmd + option + v to cut and paste

I have 3 monitors connected to my Windows machine and I have to switch all 3 of them on before logging in or weird things happen. It's only a little bit better on Linux and I don't have a mac to try. I'm actually blaming the modern connectors and how digital inputs are handled, this was never a problem with D-SUB (i.e. you could move the mouse to the empty space where the switched off screen is, but it won't move your icons or your taskbar around...). If there was a global "ignore plug and play for monitors, just assume they are there" I'd use it...

I have an opposite problem - I turn off my monitor and it doesn't want to disappear... before you ask, I switch between inputs because consumer grade KVMs naturally don't support anything more than 1080p@60Hz.

>you use what they give you, how they give it to you, using their workflows, barely customizing anything. Apple products are supposed to be revered the world over as the pinnacle of design, used by artists, engineers, professionals, and creators. Why do I feel like there are training wheels on a machine I use for productivity?

Gosh, this is exactly how I felt in a similar situation. Really hit the nail on the head.

I've used Linux for a long time, and for a while I was kindly forced to use a Mac (got a Linux laptop last week). It was a painful experience that took a heavy toll on my productivity.

My impression is that Mac has so many idiossincrasies that fans just assume are "intuitive" while they're really not - they've just been used to it for a long time. Personally I hated, hated the usability. Can't stress it enough, it absolutely sucked. Never again!

Also the benefits compared to non-Macs are diminishing over time. You can get great hardware and battery life with system76 for instance.

system76? sounds cool can it run excel and apple music?

I guess?

System76 makes laptops. They come with their own Linux distribution called PopOS.

System76 doesn’t make laptops they just resell the same Clevos a hundred other places do:

https://clevo-computer.com/en/laptops-configurator/purpose/b...

I believe the one value add they do provide is that they choose their components to work well with Linux and test to make sure that's the case.

Ah yes, apple music, the pinnacle of computing and benchmark by which to judge all professional-level personal computers.

I don't like what you like...

alright how about framer

anything with a browser can run apple music.

“You can get great hardware and battery life with system76 for instance.” The build quality of these two platforms is nowhere, and I mean nowhere close. Apples (heh) and oranges.

I’m rooting for system76, but they have a long way to go.

Absolutely agree. Build quality is meh, not even good. But the battery is seriously good. Like 10+ hours good.

Which model is that? My 2 year old System76 Galago Pro gets 1 hour of battery life.

This guy here: https://system76.com/laptops/lemur

>Up to 14 hours of battery life per charge

I routinely get over 10 hours.

10+ hours isn't 'seriously' good anymore. I routinely can get 18-20 hours on my M1 MacBook Pro.

Whilst that's true I dream of getting 10 hours battery life on my XPS 13 Dev Edition (9370).

I really miss all day usage that I had on my last Mac. If System76 can provide that again I think I could live with lower build quality.

they are cheap clevo laptops at a huge markup

I just spec'd out the System 76 Galago Pro to match that of the Clevo equivalent that's linked elsewhere in this thread (L143MU), and the System 76 came to $1032, while the Clevo is listed at €1,026.90 (or $1,116.89), so when you say "huge markup" it must be in reference to something else. That said, I don't have any real skin in this game.

They don’t pay retail. Perhaps they have a slightly less high of a markup than the OEM.

I have no idea whatsoever.

well to be fair, i did the same exercise before buying a system76 a few years back and the difference was a bit more even with oem consideration so thats good to know. the build quality is very cheapish feeling and it fell apart pretty quickly and i regretted not just getting a lenovo or xps or something but it was nice to support their efforts

I have not used any System76 laptop, but how is its build quality to a Thinkpad?

As a Linux user of 15 years now, i look forward to beeing challenged by using a Mac, since for me energy efficiency is more important than personal comfort.

How does energy efficiency matter here? Or rather, why are you implying that a Mac might be more energy efficient, and enough to matter? Geniuenly curious.

M1 coming secong at 10 watts shortly after a Ryzen at several times that? Check out the reviews on anandtech.

There is nothing inherent about having a bad window manager that makes it more power efficient; Apple could implement a better desktop environment and still have low power use.

You could also install a window manager such as rectangle or magnet if window management is a big deal for you. People switching OSs expect some things to roll over and then forget that they can google for potential solutions when things don’t work the way they expect/want.

I, like the author of this essay, was prevented from doing such things by my employer when I used a Mac for work.

I do also want to point out that such suggestions - "just install and configure [some software] which will solve your problem" - are generally rejected when I point them out to people who are having a hard time getting started with free desktops. The KDE or GNOME environment are expected to be perfect at installation, but Windows and Mac OS are afforded more leniency. It's a double standard.

Ryzen 5700 has 25W TDP https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-5700U-Processor-Be...

IMO a 15-watt difference is basically negligible in this context. It is so insignificant it can be offset by pretty much anything. You know creating aluminum uses a ton of energy; maybe that fancy aluminum case of the Macs used more power than a tiny TDP difference will ever save.

It came second to the desktop processors at 3-4x25W TDP.

I think they were talking about energy efficiency in terms of "how long battery lasts".

And 15-watts makes a big difference when you have a 60-watt-hour battery.

> In the overall multi-core scores, the Apple M1 is extremely impressive. On integer workloads, it still seems that AMD’s more recent Renoir-based designs beat the M1 in performance, but only in the integer workloads and at a notably higher TDP and power consumption.

Apple’s lead against Intel’s Tiger Lake SoC at 28W here is indisputable, and shows the reason as to why Apple chose to abandon their long-term silicon partner of 15 years. The M1 not only beats the best Intel has to offer in this market-segment, but does so at less power.

I also included multi-threaded scores of the M1 when ignoring the 4 efficiency cores of the system. Here although it’s an “8-core” design, the heterogeneous nature of the CPUs means that performance is lop-sided towards the big cores. That doesn’t mean that the efficiency cores are absolutely weak: Using them still increases total throughput by 20-33%, depending on the workload, favouring compute-heavy tasks.

Overall, Apple doesn’t just deliver a viable silicon alternative to AMD and Intel, but actually something that’s well outperforms them both in absolute performance as well as power efficiency. Naturally, in higher power-level, higher-core count systems, the M1 can’t keep up to AMD and Intel designs, but that’s something Apple likely will want to address with subsequent designs in that category over the next 2 years.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

"Training wheels" is my favourite description of the macOS GUI!

I actually appreciate the simplicity. Being stuck on Windows for the past couple months I say the best analogy for its window management would be “square training wheels”. Or rectangular, as square ones would have a single cadence.

What are people doing with their computers that a Mac is so stifling? I'm late to the Mac game, have been on it for about a decade, and was a 15-year Windows and Linux desktop user before that. Still, I don't even know what it might be.

Docker Desktop is relatively bad compared to native docker on Linux. If you spend your day doing that macOS is very stifling. Or if you want to change a keyboard shortcut Apple don't allow you to, like cmt+tab.

Ah—I've done a lot of Docker on Mac, but just with the command line tools, so I don't know how Docker Desktop is (on any platform).

> Or if you want to change a keyboard shortcut Apple don't allow you to, like cmt+tab.

The only keyboard customization I do is something that Mac makes at least as easy as Linux (use Caps Lock as an extra control) but I bet it is frustrating if you want to customize stuff outside the cases that they explicitly support remapping. That makes sense.

To run Docker on macOS you need Docker Desktop or any of the alternatives. The docker CLI is really slow compared to native, at least with Docker Desktop, and i Rancher Desktop failed installing.

The options for package management on macOS aren’t great in my experience, coming from using Linux on all my personal machines. Homebrew exists but it always feels bolted on and I’ve had things break in interesting ways using it. Nix might be better, I don’t have much experience using it on macOS.

Also, tiling window managers.

That's because most mac users fall to the well-crafted publicity of Homebrew, and remain ignorant about the better https://www.macports.org/ package management system. MacPorts was inspired by the FreeBSD Ports Collection, is created by Apple engineers, used by Apple internally, is unix-y and has more packages than Homebrew. (But yeah, I think both Homebrew and MacPorts still fall behind Linux / xBSD packaging systems in terms of the number of packages they have).

I started as a MacPorts user, and moved because it managed to break itself about quarterly over the two years or so that I used it, usually in some way weird enough that it was easier to just remove all my packages (rm the whole directory) and start over than try to fix it. HomeBrew's done that zero times for me, in about eight years.

I've extensively used Portage (gentoo), rpm (Fedora, Mandrake), and dpkg/apt (Debian and Ubuntu), and MacPorts, plus put in a smaller amount of time with several others. HomeBrew is, overall, my favorite.

[EDIT] And this in particular:

> But yeah, I think both Homebrew and MacPorts still fall behind Linux / xBSD packaging systems in terms of the number of packages they have

HomeBrew has failed to have a package the fewest times of any I've used. AFAIK only Arch and Portage even come close.

[EDIT]

Downvoted for countering someone's passive-aggressive insult ("people who don't like the software I do must be gullible morons, it can't be that they have good reasons") with my own, honest anecdote, in a respectful tone. I know, I know, don't complain about DVs, but man HN, sometimes....

I had exactly the opposite experience. Homebrew chewed up my computer a couple times back when it installed everything alongside OS files. The only sane way to get rid of it was to reinstall the OS.

> back when it installed everything alongside OS files.

Whoa—I don't recall it ever doing that. Some time before ~2012?

Not sure. It made the system binary folders user writable. It stopped doing that when Apple forced them by adding some extra security measures around /usr/bin.

Man, that blows. I find the current model (and only one I can remember? Maybe I did use it when it worked that way, and just didn't realize it) of keeping all user packages totally separate from the core system and just linking them in better and safer than what e.g. most Linux package managers do—now that I'm used to my package manager not really being able to mess up my base system, I wish all the rest worked that way, too :-/

Since the start Homebrew installed in /usr/local instead of a dedicated directory (which it now does); it literally always had a worse design than the earlier systems Fink and MacPorts. The only reason people used it is that it was written in Ruby and at the time there was a generation of new Rails developers that for some reason only wanted to use tools written in Ruby.

> HomeBrew has failed to have a package the fewest times of any I've used ...

Not that I doubt your claim but MacPorts has more packages than Homebrew:

Homebrew - around 6031 packages (https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/)

MacPorts - 29,128 packages (https://ports.macports.org/)

(Ofcourse, more doesn't imply it has all the newer and / or popular packages or that Homebrew has the same packages as in MacPorts, which could explain your experience).

I second that. MacPorts is amazing and makes the Mac a very decent Unix environment.

If you are used to using gnu user land you’ll be using a utility like brew to install the gnu components. The bsd counterparts are just off enough to find something a bit off on most of them.

I really dislike finder. I’ve not found a sane replacement.

Updates for me took 10-15 minutes. Rebooting a few times. Relegated to answering slacks on phone during that time.

Office is also awful on the Mac. I wound up using office in a windows VM because a lot of stuff was broken opening complex documents.

My newest job I asked for a windows laptop. WSL2 is ok. I just run vscode connected to wsl and do my work there and use native office. Those two apps, postman, and chromium (chrome and slack) is really my stack and it works well enough. I would rather use Linux but our IT department have a big thumbs down since they have no clue what they are doing regarding securing that.

Microsoft Office has gotten better but it’s still bad on Macos. I think it’s by design.

I am not saying it will solve your problems, but I like PathFinder on the Mac. I use Directory Opus on Windows. They fulfill the same niche & need for me. I find Finder and Explorer to be anemic in terms of functionality.

I've used Windows, Linux, Mac extensively for decades and I also frankly have no idea. The other responses to you as of this writing seem to be nitpicking and not anything truly foundational to the user experience.

I had to start using mac for my current job as of last year and have no idea. once you learn about cmd-` and the weirdness with minimizing, and installed rectangle, i became as productive as I am on windows

finder to drive navigation to native desktop apps + a first class unix terminal nails my productivity needs. I ended up buying an m1 pro pretty soon after getting accustomed

Similar usage pattern here. MacOS desktop design is not perfect, but it's fine.

I could never have the majority of apps in full screen though, I switch apps far too often. My desktop is just a pile of windows on top of each other.

Cannot at all relate to this perspective. If you like PopOS, that’s great. But this nonsense about Mac fans being blinded by their love of the brand is the edgelord meme that will not die.

MacOS is fine. PopOS is fine. Windows is fine. They each ask you to adopt a UI paradigm because how could they not. It’s natural that transitioning between them is costly.

Every time I see comments like this I’m reminded of this great quote: “The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned.”

> “The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned.”

At least IBM took this to heart.

Hmm, I was using my ThinkPad with the wrong body part

>nonsense about Mac fans being blinded by their love of the brand is the edgelord meme that will not die.

Thank you for the completely unemotional comment that totally does not add to the notion I was alluding to that some fans are a bit sensitive about criticism.

Joking aside, our points are basically the same. I totally agree that nothing we create is intuitive "by definition"; that's my whole point. I would never claim that Linux or anything else is intuitive "by definition", and yet I see a lot of Mac fans claiming that. It might be perception bias, but I think not.

My first contact with a Mac was some 10 years ago. I struggled to turn it on -- contrary to _all other similar devices_, on the Mac the power button was very faintly beveled, and tucked in an invisible corner on the back of the screen (it was a desktop). I get that people might like this, totally fine. I just don't accept that this is intuitive design.

See, Mac users rarely turn the device off. It can stay on for months without issue. Laptops can sleep for weeks before they run out of power. The power button is more like a reset switch, and doesn't need to be front and center.

A lot of these first impressions are just that, first impressions, and can be quite different from feedback coming from daily users.

I read this comment and realized I don’t even remember the last time I powered down my Mac! You’re right that it’s not something I do very often. Is that not the case with Windows and Linux nowadays? What’s the point in powering down?

Software updates is one reason

For simpler userspace updates a restart of the relevant processes is easy enough, but it can be a bit more difficult when it comes to kernel updates.

(Updating a running kernel has been a thing in Linux for a number of years, but my systems don't do it.)

Software updates require a restart, but that's not what I'm thinking of when I consider a power down. I'm thinking of the scenario where you take explicit action to power down your machine and leave it powered down. I power down my machines before going on vacation, for example.

Even when you power down or restart a Mac it remembers all the applications you had running and all the application windows and it re-opens everything so you come back to everything just the way you left it.

3 of the 4 items that the author mentioned can be solved with using NixOS inside a VM on your mac :)

Inspired by Mitchell Hashimoto's VMWare setup[0]. I setup my own computer in such a way, I now have the best of both worlds. Developing on a linux machine, where I can control everything if I wanted (down to the OS) and the ease of Notes/iMessages whenever I need it.

Window management is a pita because of internal APIs and the fact that Apple doesn't cater to people that actually care about these tools. Check out Yabai[1] which btw requires you to disable SIP (System Integrity Protection) if you want to use its full potential.

Instead you can run NixOS and choose your favourite window/tiling manager (i3).

Package manager: I still run Nix but I am not that happy with it. Either I need to spend some more time or look for an alternative. One of the problems is the ability to easily pin older versions.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubDMLoWz76U&t=359s&ab_channe... [1] - https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

If corporate IT isn't okay with you installing third party window management tools, I can't imagine they'd be thrilled to discover you're running some oddball OS inside a VM on your corporate machine in order to hide unvetted third-party software.

Likewise, I doubt the OP or people like them would get away with disabling System Integrity Protection or loading untrusted kernel modules.

Rant

I switched to a Mac Mini M1 in December and it has been a complete pain in the ass. First of all, to even be able to use it I had to switch out my monitor, mouse, keyboard and speakers because Apple didn't like them. And then I had to buy an extra dock to get more ports. On top of that I've also had to install a bunch of third party software to get basic functionality like window snapping (Moom), and a functioning scroll wheel and the ability to turn off mouse acceleration (SteerMouse). And don't get me started on the absolute bonkers ways you toggle between applications, or the fact that you need to click TWICE on a window when switching between windows, if you want to type something in it. My desk is absolutely cluttered with application windows, because minimizing them apparently makes Mac treat them as if you never want to see them again, which messes with my voice control software. Oh, and why is there no delete button? And why do I need to be so precise when clicking on desktop icons, instead of just having a bounding box around them? Who thought that was a good idea? And while we're on desktop icons, why on earth aren't they sorted and fixed to a grid by default? Does anyone like unorganized items in folders?? Another thing that annoys me is pop-up windows with no freaking option to close them other than clicking "done" or whatever. What if I don't want to apply any of the changes I've made? Why can't I just cancel?? I could go on and on about UI inconsistencies and various bugs I've encountered. Needless to say I'm switching back to Windows (which isn't without its own problems) next time I'm buying a computer.

This mac has made my RSI go haywire. I've tried to do everything the "Apple way", but it's just always so clunky and slow compared to Windows.

What monitor, mouse, and keyboard did not work with mac?

Most of the complaints makes it sound like you aren't actually trying to do everything the "Apple way", rather wishing macOS way worked like what you're used to and comfortable with from Windows.

> What monitor, mouse, and keyboard did not work with mac?

The monitor was an MSI Optix MAG321CQR (32", 1440p, 144hz). The text on it was blurry and pixellated as hell. It turns out that Apple has removed previously existing scaling functionality that would have made it work. So I had to upgrade to a 4k monitor to get around it. I would assume it's because they don't want to compete with cheaper monitors. The text was very sharp on Windows. I tried every single trick you could imagine to get it working. The speakers were from Logitech. I don't remember the name of them since I gave them away when I bought new ones. The mouse is a vertical ergonomic mouse from a lesser known brand, same with the keyboard.

> Most of the complaints makes it sound like you aren't actually trying to do everything the "Apple way", rather wishing macOS way worked like what you're used to and comfortable with from Windows.

Which complaint? How should I do it then? Please tell me because I'm dying to know. There is no way to turn off mouse acceleration or to get my scroll wheel working without a third party app. I can't snap or organize my windows without a third party app. Minimizing windows fucks me over when using voice control software (which I need due to RSI). Switching between windows from the same app is a pain in the ass, because it requires more clicks, which literally equals more pain for me. Folder content is not organized by default, do you suggest I just let it be messy, the way Apple wants it to be? Trying to click on desktop icons that are super small is a pain in the ass, because you have to click exactly on the icons for it to register. And so on.

> The monitor was an MSI Optix MAG321CQR (32", 1440p, 144hz). The text on it was blurry and pixellated as hell.

I've used a ton of third party 27" 2560x1440 monitors with Macs and they've all been fine. In fact I'm using one to write this post.

It sounds like either the monitor was running at a resolution below 2560x1440 or you don't like how macOS does text antialiasing – macOS favors on-screen letterforms more closely matching their printed versions while Windows will distort characters to forcibly snap them into the pixel grid.

The other possibility is that you're just feeling the lowered DPI that results from stretching 2560x1440 to 32". macOS definitely has a preference for moderate-to-high DPI, and stretching 2560x1440 to that large of a physical size probably pulls the DPI below the threshold.

The text looked crisp on Windows, but on Mac the PPI was too low, so it was barely readable. The frustrating thing is that Mac used to have settings that would fix this problem, but they removed them a while ago. I ran the monitor at 1440p, not at a lower resolution.

> Minimizing windows fucks me over when using voice control software

I think this is a good example of wanting macOS to work like how you were used to with windows. Try cmd+h to "hide" instead of "minimizing" [0]. Multiple desktops also works well, and using "mission control" to switch apps vs minimizing things.

> Switching between windows from the same app is a pain in the ass, because it requires more clicks, which literally equals more pain for me

I actually find this pretty convenient on mac with cmd+` (cmd+tab to switch between applications, cmd+` to switch between windows of an app)

[0] https://superuser.com/a/543072

Nice article. Coincidentally we have the same computers, even the same specs. I’ve been on macOS for 11 years now, so I’m biased.

On window snapping: why on earth would you want to obscure your desktop with two huge panes? I usually have ‘small’ applications on my desktop ‘workspace’ (terminal, reminders, messages, finder). I always see ex-windows users cluttering their desktop workspace and not utilising more workspaces. It’s more efficient (in my opinion) to have multiple workspaces and avoid the tedious game of minimising and maximising dozens of windows on the desktop. I get that it’s what you’re used to, since this behaviour is enforced on windows, but do give the macOS way a shot. Whenever I’m on windows I feel hampered by the lack of virtual workspaces.

I think some of the idiosyncrasies are worth bearing with in macOS. It’s worth it even for the consistency of the design across the OS. It seems trite, but I like that everything speaks the same design language. It feels coherent. I’m never jarred as I am on windows 10, when I open the advance control panel and find that it’s from 1999.

> Whenever I’m on windows I feel hampered by the lack of virtual workspaces

Windows 10 actually has workspaces built-in. But I don't think workspaces are a replacement for window-snapping and a "superior alternative". It's two different things. Sometimes you just want to see two things side-by-side and workspaces isn't providing that.

BetterSnapTool was one of the first things I installed when I had to use a mac and I've been both using Ubuntu and Windows a lot before and always utilized workspaces on Ubuntu.

As of more recent versions of w10, it supports virtual workspaces

> Whenever I’m on windows I feel hampered by the lack of virtual workspaces.

Windows has virtual desktops. Press Win+Tab. I find having many windows on the same desktop is much more useful than lots of desktops in practice, and it's what I do in Windows and Linux. I use virtual desktops to separate tasks, each of which usually involves many windows, some maximised or snapped to a side.

Obscuring the desktop itself is basically what it's for IMHO. I never ever see my desktop background, as there's no point - it has no purpose or use to me.

Snapping can be a nice option, but I don't want it to be how things work all the time. As you note, it's great to have control over your windows, desktop, etc. — windows moving into place on their own is disturbing (and annoying) after using Macs since the mid-80s.

macOS is not Windows, and trying to shoehorn that way of doing things into it is senseless. The Alt-Tab section of the article is a good example of this — can they begin to grok that the presence of cmd-~ is a (potentially) useful thing for workflows, and makes sure that you're not stuck with one, basic command (Alt-Tab) that has other stuff glommed onto it? There's plenty to be annoyed at when it comes to the Mac interface, but these are weird hills to fight over.

This is a good comment, especially the point about leaning into the idiosyncrasies of Mac, but I wanted to share my experience that follows OPs post, then your advice, and then I ended up back on i3.

I grew up a Windows kid, switched to Linux and then i3 (tiling), and use Windows 10 at work in a huge enterprise environment.

With a wide open mind (from my recent switch to running Linux and i3 full time on my personal machine) and a deep appreciation for the hardware of this gen of Macs, I got the new M1 Macbook Air last year. At first I really struggled, but committed to learning the trackpad gestures because seeing some of my friends wizz around the desktop in such a way that reminded me of i3, and things improved. Along the way, I reminded myself that I had to accept the mindset/ethos of the window manager, rather than think constantly of what's missing, if I was to ever an effective power user (re: your good point about using more workspaces instead of managing multiple Windows in a single space).

I still switched back, I missed tiling too much. And without me noticing, Windows 10 now has incredibly underrated multiple display, virtual desktop and tiling built into the system with their Meta+Tab, Meta+Num, and Meta+Arrow key tiling. Dynamic snapping and window borders is a huge part of this, in my opinion.

And this is Windows, not even my preferred system but the one that I switched away from and only use because my work requires. I'll spare you my evangelism of i3 (I enjoy config editing as a hobby and procrastination technique), but i3wm+xfce desktop bar is essentially the closest thing to my ideal system.

Doing it the Mac way never felt AS efficient, nor did it ever seen to align with how I wanted to do things, as much as I tried to change my mindset. This surprised me, and there is still elegance in the multiple workspaces and trackpad gestures that I can understand preferring as a full time system, but it was decidedly not for me. I do admit that tiling features are the primary shared features between these two systems, that might be primary bias. And that M1hardware is nuts.

I'm sharing this partially as a swansong for my personal experience with Mac and OSX, and also to share that I'm a human (user) with an interest and non-dogmatic enthusiasm for this domain (it's analogous to the sense perception layer in the mind, imo!) and as someone who is willing to invest time learning the techniques and mindset of a new system. For me, while MacOS is internally consistent and capable, I preferred Windows and especially i3.

> On window snapping: why on earth would you want to obscure your desktop with two huge panes?

I use Spectacle do this _all the time_. I use an external monitor with my laptop, and put IntelliJ on the left half, and my terminal on the right half of the monitor every single time I plug it in. I'll do it with Chrome + the Dev tools, as well.

I even use it when I am just using the laptop's screen by itself. While my editor and terminal are _nearly always_ in a window sized to the full screen (again, with Spectacle), I will often use left/right half arrangements (or 2/3 and 1/3 arrangements) when doing something like a video call (2/3) where I want to also take notes (1/3). I find this substantially more convenient than the mac's builtin screen splitting behavior, since with Spectacle it's a single key chord to change between them.

(Edit: This is all in addition to using virtual desktops as well, so they are not a replacement.)

Spectacle (and, I suppose, Iterm2) is a Must Have app for me on Mac. It's possible I just haven't found the "mac way" of doing it yet, but this feels convenient and useful enough that it helps my workflow.

> On window snapping: why on earth would you want to obscure your desktop with two huge panes?

Most often when you need to type something in one application basing on info from second one. Also virtual workspaces do not work that well when you have a lot of windows open, as Linux user i after use workspaces as window type category, eg I have one for IDE where I often end up with 10+ windows, and having that many workspaces would be way to difficult.

I'm little surprised that author complains about alt + ` as this is exactly how it works in gnome and it's actually really handy.

> On window snapping: why on earth would you want to obscure your desktop with two huge panes?

OP here. I typically have a browser with documentation on one half, and a terminal/IDE in the other. I'm on an external monitor, so I want the space.

No doubt that multiplexing is useful, and macOS is NOT as good as something like BSPWM or EXWM. I didn’t mean that multiplexing/tiling/snapping is not useful. I meant that I don’t know why windows makes you multiplex over your desktop. It just clutters things. I know there’s Win+d to get to desktop (or something), but it just feels wrong to have many layers. It’s like a pile of junk. I consider it to be a real desktop in this sense. A window is a piece of paper, something on the desktop is an appliance (clock, pen, whatever). I wouldn’t want 5-10 pieces of paper laying on top of all my appliances. I want them spread out in separate spaces on the desk.

I'm sorry, but this feels more like a religion than an actual technical reason.

I have all my important applications on the taskbar (windows) or behind shortcuts (linux).

If it's a rarely used program, I can use the start menu/app launcher to open that application.

I don't need to access my desktop.

> Package management

This always floors me when I have to use a non-Linux computer. The difference between package management on Linux and other OSes is shocking. Dnf, Yum, Pacman are all so convenient and straightforward.

I can't understand why Windows and MacOS don't have anything official that fills this gap.

The main problem is that the majority of software in the Windows and Mac world doesn't come in a "package-manager" format, not really.

For *BSD and Linux, the package manager is great because if you can think of it, it's probably there ready to be installed; as long as it's software like TeX or emacs or vi or something else available in an open-source way.

But stand-alone programs? Not even things like Photoshop, I'm talking something written by someone and you want to install it? That's not as compatible with the Linux method, but Windows and Mac both have standard procedures and installers for them. Snap tries to do something here, but it's a complete joke.

And homebrew (and anything equivalent for WSL?) works pretty well.

I've not used macs for a few years, but has homebrew become a lot better then? Because my recollection of it is that it worked fine for small sets of well-maintained packages, but it's much, much slower than the linux package managers, and there were tons of compatibility issues once you even slightly left the beaten path. Also, I remember fighting with many apple CLI tools; they seemed to be wildly out of date with the comparable linux tooling, to the point that you sometimes needed to homebrew something technically already part of the base OS just to get other things working (e.g. IIRC bash)

Incidentally, on windows there are the beginnings of package managers nowadays, e.g. chocolatey. They're nothing like as good as those in linux, but better than nothing. Chocolatey's focus isn't quite the same as homebrew, however, so they're not strictly comparable.

It ... "works". For most things you may want, it works pretty well, but it's not at advanced as even Gentoo's portage, and once you leave the beaten path it can be all sorts of hell trying to figure out how exactly to compile something yourself.

However, I've experienced the same on Ubuntu and RedHat - if they don't have what you want in a repo already, and you can't find one providing it, trying to roll your own can cause all sorts of fun explosions.

Anything GPL included with MacOS is stuck at the GPL v2 - since many things like bash went to v3 they don't update anymore; one of the reasons MacOS changed to zsh as the default shell.

> But stand-alone programs? Not even things like Photoshop, I'm talking something written by someone and you want to install it? That's not as compatible with the Linux method

There's definitely some room for improvement here, but fwiw you can double-click executables on Linux to run them just like you would on Windows (or to an extent, MacOS). I think the "solution" here is not to rely on portable software, and when you do need to rely on it, use a packaging format like AppImage.

> And homebrew (and anything equivalent for WSL?) works pretty well.

I hate to burst your bubble, but Homebrew is genuinely awful. The vast majority of Mac devops issues I've encountered stem from a Homebrew issue, as a matter of fact. Oh no! Software (x) isn't running on Mike's M1, but it runs just fine on Melissa's x86 machine! The problem? Homebrew installs software to different locations depending on your system architecture. That's right, the same package will end up in different places when the only difference between machines is CPU architecture. That's just one issue, I have gripes about reinstalling, leftover files, formulae syntax, Linux "compatibility", UX and more... the author isn't wrong when they say the experience simply doesn't compare to apt or pacman.

Yeah, homebrew isn't the greatest by any means, but it seems to have more stuff and more people use it than fink or macports anymore, so usually there's a workaround somewhere.

The MacOS "app bundle" is a really cute solution to the installation/library problem, and I wish something like it had caught on in the Linux world. It seems AppImage is heading this way.

App bundles are neat, but when given the option of "an app directory on top of a traditional Unix filesystem layout" or "everything is packages", I'll tend to choose the latter. It might just be an impasse situation; I think the ideas of package management are developed about as far as they can go, even newcomers like Flatpak can't really bring anything new to the table. The only package manager that's impressed me in recent years is Nix. I think if most developers decided to throw their weight behind Nix packages, we could live in the "it just works" utopia that Linux and Mac developers alike have been dreaming of for years.

The bane of package managers is when you have to go beyond what they supply for whatever reason - horrible memories of trying to upgrade php on old versions of CentOS still haunt me.

Because they are platforms on which open-source (including dependencies all the way down) is not the norm? They do have app stores.

>Windows and MacOS don't have anything

Doesn't Windows have two official ones? Chocolatey and Winget?

Winget is the official one.

But Chocolatey exists too and is pretty nice. I have used both of them but I know Chocolatey a lot better. They both are basically used as wrappers for traditional package formats like msi or other commercial installers. I guess windows has msix and appx as well which are used in the Microsoft Store.

Blows my mind that Apple doesn't buy up homebrew and turn it official. I use it for everything, even my web browser!

Pretty much the only time I install something and it's not through Homebrew (unless it's a dependency of a project, which I manage separately, because I like having an easy life and I'd do the same on Linux, for the same reasons) is when it's some sub-100-stars GitHub project. And half the time, those are on there, too.

Linux user for years before switching to Mac.

I prefer Brew to every Linux package manager I've used.

I like that it's totally separate from the base OS.

I like the insanely large package selection, including binary [edit: that is, closed-source binary] packages. I almost never install any tool that's not in Homebrew—usually I just blindly try it, and sure enough, I got the package name right and it does have it, and it installs no problem. Gentoo's Portage and Arch's whatever-they-call-it are pretty close, but those are... higher touch operating systems, to put it mildly (I was a heavy Gentoo user for a few years—I know Arch is less of a pain than that, but it's still got rolling-distro and various DIY rough edges)

I don't try to use it to install development dependencies like some people seem to. It's not good for that, but doing that on Linux isn't a great idea, either. Your project should manage its own deps separate from your development system, or you're gonna have a bad time sooner or later, unless you are only deploying to exactly the system config that you're developing on.

They do. On Windows it's msi, and Mac it's pkg. But, for whatever reason folks have preferred to build their own package solution instead of learning the OS native approach. I'm guessing because building your own makes for an easier end user CLI experience.

Microsoft made the mistake of adding non-deterministic behaviour to MSI files, because without that the package format is pretty much everything I'd want out of a software packaging system.

I think companies wanted to stuff branding and ads into their installers, so MSI files fell out of use. Modern Windows seems to prefer msix and other weird UWP-based formats, but I don't think you can just install those.

What Windows is missing though, is a clean way to manage these MSI files. A reinstall or an uninstall shouldn't take twenty windows and four different "next" buttons to process. When Microsoft created the Microsoft Store, they neglected to also add a command line option for installation (you can manually install a package, but you'll need to do updates yourself from what I can tell). Just add a Powershell command like "MSStore-Install" and the entire ecosystem would be so much nicer to use!

I suppose this is what they're trying to do with WinGet, after forking AppGet and leaving the original project to die. For some reason they like to reinvent the wheel every time someone thinks of a new way to install binaries onto a computer.

You can use Chocolatey until WinGet gets some traction. You have everything there and no more clicking around. I haven't started MSI by hand in last 5 years.

Errr ... because they're commercial operating systems, with the expectation that software is not just universally available for no cost?

The respective stores for macOS and Windows are changing this, but there's a 30-ish year history of needing to register and pay for your software, so having it all just _there_ still isn't really a thing.

IMO, command-tab and command-tilde are vastly superior to the Windows method. It's less relevant these days due to applications running their own tabs inside of the app. I fought this for years but eventually gave up because you really have to use tabs these days. Many applications have wasted space for a tab bar even if you refuse to use tabs. But I liked being able to switch through windows in a given application vs switching applications entirely.

I still feel that tabs-everywhere is making up for a broken window manager. Why should we offload this to each application?

I am overwhelmed with how many of the comments in these discussions are of the form: 'this thing is super hard to do on a Mac' responded to by, 'actually it's super easy; all you have to do is cast this magic spell.'

The same sort of exchange is pretty common when discussing Linux and Windows as well, especially the former.

OP here. This is why I wrote the article.

In this case, the OS issues are just window snapping and window switching. No spells to be cast here!

Frankly, if native window snapping is your largest OS concern, that's probably a great sign.

I think it’s more what you’re used to.

I use Windows and macos daily and I sorta prefer the mac’s window management, but they both work fine once you know what you’re doing. In some cases macos just has different keystrokes that the author doesn’t know yet, and in others you just manage windows a little differently (or use an app if you don’t want to adjust).

> The entire design of macOS feels like the Gnome desktop: you use what they give you, how they give it to you, using their workflows, barely customizing anything.

The user just started to use the OS: of course they have little knowledge of customization plus they are using a computer subject to corporate policies. Not a fair criticism.

However, the critique of the window snapping mechanics is correct. Very frustrating to have the window go full screen when removing one half of the previously split screen.

> However, that keyboard doesn’t have the Option (⌥) or Command (⌘) keys like on my Macbook.

It does; they're just labelled ‘Alt’ and ‘Windows’.

No one mentioned the home/end keys so I will. ;-) I am a big user of these, use them a hundred times a day to go to front/back of line. Mac doesn't do that, goes to front/back of doc, which I do very rarely. But if I do, just click with the mouse or hold down PgUp/Dn. More common operations should get the default hotkeys imho.

I managed to change this, but DBeaver finds a way to screw it up occasionally.

Cmd-Left and Cmd-Right go to start and end of line.

Similarly for Up and Down for start and end of document.

I've always found that pretty intuitive.

I haven't personally used a Mac keyboard with Home or End keys in a very very long time.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

This initially bothered me too.

The macOS equivalents are command+left-arrow and command+right-arrow. I find them even easier to invoke than home/end.

Moving around in lines is a complete mystery to me on my new MBP, having used Windows and Linux exclusively for ~20yrs. Throw in some various terminal programs and tmux and vim and oh god the horror.

⌘+left/right goes to the beginning and end of a line, ⌥+left/right moves by word.

Sometimes!

Karabiner can map home end to cmd left cmd right. Install it and go to advanced, custom script site and you’ll find it.

You don't need an app for window splitting. If you hold Option ⌥ key and hover over the green circle, there will be "Move Window to Left side of the screen" and "Move Window to Right side of the screen" options presented instead of "Tile Window to Left of Screen" and "Tile Window to Right of Screen" options. Those don't create a new virtual desktop.

yeah its weird they didn't look them up. they got 90% of the way there by already being a power user on Windows and then just gave up? I think the strength of MacOS is that non-power users would get 90% of the way there too.

But definitely just ask around and look up how to do things you are accustomed to! They even found the AltTab package somehow, even though I couldn't figure out what was missing... MacOS' minimized windows not being the thing that comes up, if they are minimized, but on Windows it will switch to those windows if they are simply behind or if minimized? Even the package they found doesn't exactly say whats going on. I almost never minimize windows on MacOS.... probably for that reason.

I minimise them quite frequently these days for something I want to tuck away. A good way to surface them is the "App Exposé" feature (Preferences -> Trackpad -> More Gestures). Shows all the hidden windows for the current app.

It's different to Windows though. If they're looking for something more similar to Windows, maybe Command+H (hide the active app) is a better alternative.

It's an alternative, but in windows minimizing works on a window, not the entire app. The philosophies of [apps] vs [windows] are just too different, I don't think anyone that wants windows can be happy out-of-the-box, with the apps vs windows thing plus with the minimizing being basically "putting the app to sleep" on macOS vs "putting the app away" on windows.

TIL, thanks!

This is an issue on MacOS, a lot of features like this one are not easily discoverable.

In the old days, OSs comes with a manual and tutorial, so it is not a big deal. But you don't have a manual now and Mac still treats you like you have one.

And it is a problem now.

The official macOS User Guide is available online [0], up-to-date, localized.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac

MacOS's quirks don't really bother me much, except one:

    1. Open a terminal on screen 1.
    2. Open a terminal and a browser on screen 2.
    3. Be using the terminal on screen 1.
    4. Cmd-Tab to the browser.
    5. Cmd-Tab to "go back"

MacOS will switch to the terminal... on screen 2.

Drives me nuts.

I've had to use Mac at my last two jobs, before that was Linux for 8 years. I use Linux at home. I just do enough to get by and get my job done in Mac. I know its a bad mentality and I should work to improve my Mac experience, but I just don't enjoy working in that O.S.

Even if I spent the time honing in the UI and terminal. Home Brew is just terrible compared to Apt. That's really the game for me. Maybe my next gig will let me use Linux, but Mac seems to be becoming the only show in town for nix-based development teams and its just sad.

Pretty reasonable write up to be honest. I think the window management thing is reasonable when you come from a background where that’s a given. There are some great third party window managers available, I use one of them and very happy with it. It’s called Magnet for those who are interested.

> give anything to replace macOS with Linux (or even Windows)

I agree that this was a fair, measured post, but I find it bizarre that a Linux enthusiast would ever want to replace their Mac OS with Windows when the biggest complaint is... window management? I feel like they left something out here.

I do understand that recent Windows has some pretty good basic window size+position control. That is not something that really comes default in Mac OS but there are several widely used third-party tools that do that using different interaction models (Moom, Better Snap Tool, Magnet). I suspect that building that into the OS would hurt the third-party market at this point.

I’ve been using DOS, Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and now macOS over the past 30 years. macOS is still the least shitty OS out there from a user point of view, in my opinion. Window snapping on Windows and various Linux environments makes my blood boil, so I have never missed that in macOS. Also, it’s hard for me to accept that Windows has better UX than anything. There are at least two different UI frameworks at play in Windows, the new Windows 8-derived stuff, and the classic Windows 2000/XP Win32 UI, with abrupt transitions between the two. I don’t know how this ships. Microsoft certainly has the resources to fix this, but chooses not to. They just don’t care. So I suppose Steve Jobs was right, they have no taste. In a strictly utilitarian sense, none of this matters, but if the user-facing side is this bad, what are they allowing to slide under the covers. In addition to the vastly different UI idioms in Windows, there is a lack of organization and level of convolution that makes relatively simple things hard (finding how much RAM a system has), and somewhat more technical tasks maddening (e.g., changing the MTU on a network interface). I’ve used Windows 3.1, 95/98, NT 3.51, NT4, 2000, XP, 7, and 10 over the years, and it just keeps getting worse. Maybe I will try ReactOS one of these days.

My wife just switched from being a life-long Windows user to a Mac last week. The two biggest frustrations according to her are: Cmd+O to open a file and window management. And as a long time Mac user myself, I completely agree.

Cmd+Down also works, which is better if you're using the arrow keys to navigate files.

"In summary, macOS does not behave like Windows or Linux."

"In summary, macOS does not behave like Windows or Linux out of the box, and it's difficult or impossible to change many of those behaviours."

...And can you easily change Windows or Linux to behave like macOS, in these fundamental ways?

On Linux yes, absolutely.

"Linux" and "easily" don't really belong in the same sentence here.

sometimes you can.

A good exemple is Windows 8.1.

Depending on who you ask, it's either the best OS Microsoft has ever made or one of the worse. If you know how to install a different Start Menu, you can get >95% of the benefits of W10/W11 with no downside other than game compatibility. If you are stuck with the menu provided by Microsoft, it's almost literally unusable. It's so bad that and hated by literally everyone that IMHO it deserved a "fire managers/leaders who approved it" type of response.

I didn't ask if you could make Windows act like Slightly Different Windows. I asked if you could make it act like macOS. Single menu bar at the top, Alt-Tab changing applications, with another shortcut for cycling through windows of the active application, etc. Since the criticism that it was hard to make macOS act like Windows.

This review is misses for me due to these two quotes:

> I’m using this Macbook almost exclusively with the lid closed, with a USB-C adapter to connect my keyboard/mouse/monitor.

> However, that keyboard doesn’t have the Option (⌥) or Command (⌘) keys like on my Macbook.

The reviewer isn’t using the built in webcam, Touch ID, trackpad, or the Mac keyboard layout! Why even have a Mac with that setup?

Opening the lid solves the webcam issues. Using the trackpad gestures solves the desktop switching issues. Using the Mac keyboard solves the keyboard command issues. And, yeah, get a USB-C dock for those ports (or the latest laptop that added them back).

I typically use my MBP on a dock with the lid closed too, because:

1. I like Linux and Mac is essentially Linix/BSD that "just works." After years of putting up with annoying bugs in Ubuntu and Manjaro, Mac has been a breath of fresh air.

2. I sometimes need Mac only tooling like XCode.

3. I don't like the glare on the MBP monitor.

I have a Mac keyboard, so the command key isn't an issue.

Using windows keyboard on mac is totally fine I think. How is it a big deal if just two key switched.

And the 2016 buildin keyboard is just bad. Lack of feedback and having low travel distance. You are going to destroy your own finger if you actually decide to use it as your daily driver.

I think it is probably even worse than a $30 keyboard you can pick from random shop in case of ergonomics. How come apple designed a thing like this. (Fortunately they regretted it now)

I don't see why you can't like a mouse if you like MACs. Also if you like a mouse that you have to turn upside down and can't use while charging you are just a glutton for punishment.

USB-C mice are not really a thing, so you have to use a Bluetooth mouse instead of using a mouse you may have had for the last 10 years and replaced the omron switches in several times. All this for what arrogance?

Oh I don't know about that. I just put a little adapter on the end of the cable of the crappy three-button Mouse I've used for years and it worked fine.

I also happen to really like the little crappy mouse that comes with the Raspberry Pi computer. That one works with the same adapter. I just leave it on the end of the cable.

Edit: I generally like little crappy lightweight mice with good Glides and good resolution. I don't care much past that and if it has three buttons and a wheel I'm good.

And I'll plug in mouse in when I really want a mouse. For a lot of tasks the trackpad on the Mac is fantastic. I really love using the thing.

Mac is not an acronym, it's short for Macintosh.

MAC stands for Mandatory Access Control or Media Access Control (as in ethernet hwaddr).

I wish I had a MACRO to ignore this completely unhelpful correction

I'd swear that writing Macs as MACs (or MAC's) is a shibboleth of people who don't like Macs.

i had it as Mac's but changed it because I knew something offended people honestly didn't know which

For what it’s worth, I’ve alternated between mechanical keyboards with and without “true” Mac layouts, and it’s sort of a wash.

By “true” I mean: meta keys are in the right place by default, send the right signals by default (or provide a built in affordance for same), and the numeric keypad either has the same shape or doesn’t exist.

Pros of “true” Mac layouts:

- They really are what you expect if you’re a Mac user.

No really that’s it.

Cons:

- The only vendor actively making them is (last I checked) Matias.

- 100% of the Matias products I’ve bought have failed on me in the same way: switches get a spec of dust in them, then intermittently flip between no response and being stuck. This doesn’t matter if you’re using their custom switches or third party ones.

- They’re positioned and priced as vanity products. Which would be fine if they actually worked for a reasonable period of time. I’m a Mac user after all.

Pros of everything else that actually tries to support Mac users:

- They mostly work according to your expectations if you know which expectations to have.

- If you buy a quality keyboard and mind the reviews, you can reasonably expect it to last.

- These products increasingly offer more than a keycap swap and a shrug. It’s not uncommon to find a built in switch to use macOS defaults for meta key positions. They size (more on this) meta keys to be relatively comfortable for Mac and non-Mac layouts. This is huge if you’ve developed muscle memory for the cmd key.

- They don’t ship unmappable key signals like the context menu key by default.

- Even if you need to swap meta keys, that’s trivial in macOS.

Cons:

- If you care about a number keypad, it’s probably going to be wRoNg. It sucks. I hate it every day.

- No kidding the size of meta keys might throw you off. Otherwise nbd.

- If you do get one with a context menu key get ready to throw your entire computer in the nearest body of water.

Honorable mention: you can still get Apple Extended keyboards and ADB adapters. They’re a great middle ground! They’re much less likely to fail and much more likely to have a Mac keyboard layout you’ll benefit from. Support your local electronics recycling reseller!

> However, that keyboard doesn’t have the Option (⌥) or Command (⌘) keys like on my Macbook.

What? Option is literally just the "alt" key, and Command is the "windows" key - I haven't seen a keyboard without a Windows key in almost twenty years, maybe more. There's also a UI to switch the Alt/Opt and Win/CMD keys so the functionality is on the same placement as the laptop keyboard (alt and win are switched).

> macOS has a weird snapping implementation where you need to click and hold the green “zoom” button, then choose to “tile” left or right. But, once you pick another window to fill the other half, both of those windows (together as one) move to their own virtual desktop. I want them split on my current desktop, not on a separate desktop.

This functionality is actually built into macOS by default, though it’s not very discoverable. The Tile Window to Left/Right of Screen options (which can also be found in the Window menu in the menu bar) change to Move Window to Left/Right of Screen when you are holding ⌥, which will move and resize the windows as desired without entering full screen. (For windows whose minimum width exceeds half the screen width, the left edge will be aligned properly while the right edge will overflow into the other half of the screen or off the edge of the screen respectively).

> Also, unlike Windows or Linux, you can’t “maximize” a window using the green “zoom” button, it will only make the current window fullscreen (and again, on its own desktop). Confusingly, you need to again click and hold the green “zoom” button, then choose “Zoom”. Apple calls the green button “zoom” in their documentation, but its default function is fullscreen, not zoom.…For all the Apple fanboys screaming “There’s an app for that!”, I hear you, but remember, this is a work machine and I need to get everything I install blessed by IT security.

While it is unfortunate that Apple doesn’t provide any shortcuts for these features, you can set them up yourself without any extra software via  > System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts. I have the following “missing” shortcuts set up, kind of like the tiling shortcuts on Windows but with more modifier keys.

Move Window to Left of Screen: ⌃⌥⌘←

Move Window to Right of Screen: ⌃⌥⌘→

Zoom: ⌃⌥⌘↑

Tile Window to Left of Screen: ⌃⌘←

Tile Window to Right of Screen: ⌃⌘→

Enter Full Screen: ⌃⌘↑

I just (couple of weeks ago) received my First Mac, a 2019 MacBook Pro to work with... and I really don't get the "HW good" meme...

The MacBook Pro HW is mediocre, at best.

The body is heavy. Boy, have anyone used and LG gram? But even my other work laptop (a Lenovo) wheight less and feel more balanced.

My model has only the usbc ports.. I don't even have an HDMI one.

My model has the infamous touchbar, and it sucks. A lot. But even the keys... They seems empty, I don't have feedback from them...

And for the ginormous touchpad... I ended using a mouse because that "thing" it's awful to use. I don't give a dime to the gestures... The problem is the lack of feedback! Not a click, a way to understand if you "did" something or not. It was so absurd that I though it was damaged.

I really don't get the "Mac HW is stellar" meme

> It was so absurd that I though[t] it was damaged.

If you’re not getting haptic feedback, it is damaged.

it's not broken... the problem is that, for my fingertip, the haptic feedback is not enough. I want "physical" feedback.

The haptic feedback on my M1 Air is indistinguishable from the physical click of my 2013 Pro's springboard-design trackpad. Are you maybe comparing it to some low-quality trackpad that has a lot of flex?

I'm comparing against almost all the other trackpads I've ever encountered in my life. The latests ones are the LG gram one and the lenovo E570, but I've used any kind of laptops in my career (HP, sony vaio, etc...)

I can use and I feel "some kind of a" click on this macbook trackpad, but it's just awful to use.

I was expecting a rant about the Finder, found one on window management (which has infinite solutions).

Other than the spacebar and column view, the Finder is a toy compared to File Explorer.exe and I’ll never forgive Apple for it. 20 years of staleness.

Ive been working on windows OSes for few years before my employer finally let me use macbook.

It was the best switch I could make. I had fully working linux distribution together with superb UX of MacOS.

Recently switched jobs and again back to Windows. Now I see how many things that simply work out of the box on MacOS you have to hack-in on Windows to be even able to work as a software developer.

WSL2 is also such a pain to work with. Quality of Microsoft apps on Windows is also worse than Microsoft apps on MacOS. For example -> MS Teams on Windows constantly hangs up or freezes. Never had such issues on MacOS. Beside OS nothing changed in my home office.

I also recently got a MBP and it's the first time I've used a Mac since the '80s, mostly using Linux for work and a Chromebook for home.

I agree with what this article has to say. Great hardware. For my primary reason for spending the money on it, it runs rings around anything else out there (video editing).

The OS I find mostly ok, but a few things feel pretty rough:

Updates. My terminal blocks updates from happening when I'm not using it. Updates take an amazingly long time where you can't use the system. I'm talking like the majority of an hour. It makes Windows updates look speedy, and I hate how long Windows updates take. Linux and ChromeOS do this right: You can use the system while it is doing updates, then it's just a reboot into the updates

The app finder (3 finger pinch), I sure wish it was a little smarter. In Firefox if I go to the URL bar and type "n" it knows I probably want "news.ycombinator.com". Every time I 3 finger pinch and type "b" it's like a babe in the woods, never having met me before. Now, every time I type "blue", MacOS thinks I want "bluetooth" until I add the "j" and it can figure out that, like every time I've done this, I want the BlueJeans app because it's meeting time...

I still haven't gotten used to clicking the yellow window button and the app "hides", the only thing on my screen is firefox or whatever, but when I start typing it's still going to that hidden app.

That said, it's still a great box. Mostly I use it as a web browser and a SSH terminal to my work machine. But, it has absolutely solved an infrequent pain point for me: Editing videos of my kids. Last fall I edited a concert video, the hour long concert took me ~40 hours to do because my wife's laptop, reasonably powerful but not the highest end GPU, required so much time generating optimized media and churning, and even then everything I did was slow as molasses.

The Mac has handled all video editing tasks without breaking a sweat. I feel like an idiot for spending the money for an infrequent task, but it is a 100% solved problem now.

Re: Snapping

I recall visiting a Apple store around 2006 and playing with a store model iMac. I asked why I couldn’t easily maximize windows and manage them. The Apple genius just replied “why would you ever want to do it that way!”

Well, idk? because it is intuitive and works? Sometimes I wish the Apple-heads would get their head out of their asses.

I still bought a Mac Mini and by all accounts I am deeply invested in Apple products.

These days, whenever working on a new Mac system, my first install is usually to install Amethest (https://ianyh.com/amethyst/)

All the classic complaints that show this person hasn’t really given it a chance.

Window snapping and maximize are the only two things I agree with here, but they are easily fixed by many third party apps. To those that say that’s “cheating” or something like that: the amount of third-party software required to give me a usable Windows system far outweighs what I install on a Mac. Yes macOS’s window snapping/maximization are non-existent/weird, but BetterSnapTool is one of the few “first installs” I feel I MUST make on a Mac. Contrast that with OneCommander, Everything Search, 7-Zip, etc that I absolutely require on a Windows machine. And even then the experience is…crusty. And of course you can’t even talk about Linux here — the whole thing is third party software, that’s the point.

Cmd+tab is simple: it is for apps. Cmd+~ is for windows within apps. This is, I think, a very fair way to approach a system wherein “having all windows closed” != “the app is closed;” a design decision that I think is far, far more useful than Windows/most Linux DEs (it also arises out of the fundamental difference of “being in app (Finder) when you’re not in any other apps” — again, a better overall UX decision, I think.

The comments from supposed “power users” claiming that you can’t cut/paste within Finder clearly aren’t power users.

Etc.

As usual, these rants and arguments come down to little more than familiarity. I have met very, very few people with a truly objective and measured take on desktop OS UX and are power users.

Lots of "I don't like how it tastes/feels, therefore it must be bad" packaged in a rant, as usual. Essentially only useful information if you are a clone of the author, in all other cases your milage will vary... drastically.

There isn't much of a point in attacking or defending taste in such a way, but neither is trying to objectively score something because it's not the objective score that matters, it's how it feels to the user, and users aren't all identical.

What a useless comment. The post is from someone new to Macs. You have completely failed to grasp the context and got immediately defensive.

Is it? The author self-described the written article as a rant, and here on HN the title presents it as a neutral "impressions from a first-time user". I think you may want to do some introspection before accusing people of failing to grasp contexts.

Right...like if I made a blog post about my experience using Windows when I'm forced to, it'd surely be more than a few paragraphs long. The UI in MacOS isn't perfect but it's a lot better than the state of Windows 10, not even close.

I dunno, I really like being able to set out my most-used apps and cycle between them with Win+n - much quicker than alt tab / cmd tab.

But then that’s not obvious unless you’ve read any of the documentation - so that’s another question, how many people actually read up about their OS features ?

I've always felt like Apple [desktop] tries to make choices based on what's intuitive for the user, presumably through user testing, whereas Windows historically made choices that developers prefer. My impression is Windows has tried to become more user friendly over time, but it has baggage that results in trying to satisfy two influential groups. Maybe this describes a lot of software, but for better or for worse I think Apple makes a more concerted effort at putting users ahead of developer desires, or at least not sacrificing usability in favor of power users.

I have an iPhone now but I prefer Android's flexibility. I really miss the Google Translate button that comes up automatically if I copy some text. On iPhone, to translate some text, I need to copy, open the other app, make sure 'detect language' is selected, and paste. On Android that was two clicks.

> …whereas Windows historically made choices that developers prefer.

And more recently, what marketing wants. Windows is insanely pushy about Edge and Teams, with the latter even being tied to a key shortcut that I keep accidentally hitting.

Exactly. Some people like chocolate ice cream and some like vanilla. I never understand the need some people seem to have for these posts. It’s not going to get me to change. I like my Mac for my own reasons, and that’s all that matters.

I'm in the same boat, recently starting a job which provides an MBP. I've last used macOS in school, a few years ago.

It's mostly meh. I don't care for the OS conventions ( like the cmd stuff) and I'm not going to force myself out of years of muscle memory for one of my machines, but i can mostly tune that ( with third party tools, but still). Cmd remapped to ctrl, cmd+tab remapped to ctrl+tab. The only issues is Ctrl+C doesn't work in iTerm, I've yet to fix that.

However the UX is like something for children - what's with drag and drop for installing a program?? The included tools range from meh to garbage - Pages mangling .docx and saving them in its proprietary format is inexcusable. And for some reason i can't get the MBP to sleep when it's charging and an external screen is connected - clicking sleep through the menu makes it sleep for a second and then it wakes up. Oh, and it's extremely annoying that the scroll button on a mouse and trackpad have to share the same scrolling direction.

Honestly i find that macOS is OK. Slightly better than Windows, but with annoying differences and stubborn "this is how things are, the old way no longer works, you're holding it wrong" attitude. Linux is best in terms of flexibility but has some other downsides.

The funny thing is - many years ago, MacOS was ahead of Windows in window management for a long time.

Sure, that maximize button doing a weird thing was still there - my "favourite" app was iTunes, which randomly switched it to a different mode - but otherwise, Expose was something amazing that other systems later copied, as well as the Dock system.

However, it kind of stalled recently, and the "tile window to the left" is laughably bad; as if coming from iPadOS.

> Homebrew is a lifesaver on macOS and is the only thing not making me pull my hair out.

All credit due, Homebrew is amazing given that it doesn't have the same opportunities for deep integration that Linux package managers do. It certainly made MacOS bearable for me. But, it's only good in a walled vacuum. There's almost nothing else on the platform to compare it to. I have been using nix-darwin, but packages routinely break on darwin (not that I blame them for it).

Windows might have never had a package manager, but there are decades of workflows build up around not having one. Downloading an .exe/.msi and installing is sub-optimal, dangerous, and barbaric, but it does work. Linux has pacman, RPM, deb, nix, ostree, flatpak, and more, which (from personal experience) are all amazing. The Mac package workflow has been built up around a second-class citizen: Homebrew. And the fact that Homebrew is a second-class citizen shows. If you've used almost any other package manager as a daily driver you get an idea just how wanting the whole MacOS ecosystem is. There are a few ones worse than your options with Apple (cough Snap cough), but not many.

I wonder how many Apple power users understand just how bad they have it with Apple.

I have started noticing regression after regression in almost all devices I use, mostly due to all the "reinvention" going on.

In Monterey they made it easier to use multiple audio outputs. The new UI removes scrolling over the speaker icon to change volume.

After updating to Monterey some of my keyboards don't have a command key. They worked until I updated. Now I get weird issues. But only on the non-US-ansi layouts (I'm Swedish).

Similar things:

Firefox on android started opening things from the most visited list in new tabs. I press the address bar and press one of my 8 most visited sites (which account for 95% of my sites) and they open in a new tab. This changed from one version to another, and now I regularly have 40 tabs, some I want to keep.

Google decided that the volume up button on 3.5mm headphones should start the assistant. So suddenly none of my headphones work as they should.

I notice things like this all the time. Especially the last one kills me. Who, who?!!, thought this was a good idea. Every update on os X and my smartphone brings something that makes me feel like I am fed a turd. I don't use Windows, but I suspect it is the same thing there.

The worst thing on macOS is how they are removing all affordances that made the Mac so nice to use.

They removed:

- scrollbars

- toolbar labels

- color

- separator between title bar and content

- resize indicator

- document icons

A lot of things are still there if you know where to look, but I feel like learning macOS is a lot harder than it used to be. Watching my kid struggle to drag a window is infuriating. There's no logic why it's possible to drag the window by the top 50 pixels only, unless you know the history that this used to be the title bar which looked different than the rest of the window on earlier versions of macOS...

We're doing cross-plat work and I have a macBook that I sometimes need to use to compile and debug stuff.

Even after a couple of years, I dread having to work on the mac. Could be me being used to Windows since the DOS / Win3.1 days, but I feel right at home on Windows - know most nooks and crannies; macOS feels like a kid's toy by comparison (an ATM or kiosk terminal) - it literally feels like being asked to do work with my right hand tied behind my back. I actually enjoy working on Linux desktops more than on macOS.

For the past year I have a home setup with a Windows laptop and a macBook side-by-side hooked up to 2 external monitors and Barrier software KVM; the idea was to use Windows for work and mac for personal. But I never venture outside the browser on the mac - a chromebook would work just as well.

I actually wanted to install an USB network adapter because the machine felt so laggy and I blamed wifi; a thing that on Windows for the past 20 years has literally been plug&play needed futzing around with driver packages, an hour of searching for workarounds and at least 2 reboots.

I honestly don't know why so many developers prefer working on mac.

I grew up using Windows, but have been using macOS and linux primarily for the last 10 years or so. I have a similar "handicapped" feeling when I go back to Windows. I guess it's just what I'm used to?

> On the other hand, macOS has a weird snapping implementation where you need to click and hold the green “zoom” button, then choose to “tile” left or right. But, once you pick another window to fill the other half, both of those windows (together as one) move to their own virtual desktop. I want them split on my current desktop, not on a separate desktop.

Apple keeps changing the green button, but with Monterey, if you hold down Option then hover over the green its menu options become:

- Zoom

- Move Window to Left Side of Screen

- Move Window to Right Side of Screen

Which I think effect the behavior the author wants. In general, the Option key is the gateway to additional behaviors in the macOS GUI. I can't find a way to make this the default behavior of the green button, but what you can do is add keyboard shortcuts for them.

System Preferences... > Keyboard > Shortcuts > +

    Application: All Applications
    Menu Title: Move Window to Left Side of Screen
    Keyboard Shortcut: something unique such as control-command-left-arrow.

Repeat for "Move Window to Right Side of Screen" and "Zoom".

The title bar can also be double-clicked to zoom (default is to minimize, but there's a preference under System Preferences... > Dock & Menu Bar to set it to zoom).

The author's conslusion isn't well supported by the evidence they provide. They assert they would never buy a personal Mac, but their primary criticisms are solved by downloading a few apps. It's surprising that they can use Homebrew but not Rectangle etc given their work policy, but these restrictions don't apply for personal computers anyways?

>"Why even have a Mac with that setup?"

It was given by employer. People get used to particular keyboard, mouse, big monitor, etc. etc.

I had to write and debug some docker scripts on Mac. Since I was in no mood to buy one just for that I asked my client to supply me one. They gave me Mac laptop and I used it in exactly the same configuration with the lid closed.

I think at this point Apple does not see macOS (from the user perspective) like a traditional GUI OS.

It used to be that OSes provided window management, file management, some basic file handling, and APIs and framework to build and connect apps.

Apple, instead, sees the OS as an app launcher that provides a framework to build isolated apps.

IOW, it's reduced macOS to the Dock.

"Also, unlike Windows or Linux, you can’t “maximize” a window using the green “zoom” button, it will only make the current window fullscreen (and again, on its own desktop)."

Just hold option when you click on the "zoom" button.

Your other complaint, about Alt-Tab, is just a preference. I actually prefer this behavior over Windows.

Apple believes they always have the best way, and rarely gives you options to do things in other ways..sometimes they're right, but not always.

I switched from Windows last month, after installing rectangle, bettertouchtools and speeding up all animations possible, I'm left with the following gripes.

1. No magnetic windows the way windows does unless in the clunky fullscreen mode.

2. No way to turn off animations for maximising windows.

3. No way to let mouseover select window an action is taken in (i keep closing the wrong chrome window using mouse gestures)

4. Finder still sucks (so does no cutting and pasting files)

5. All apps cost money, e.g. ScreenX for windows is free and better than all paid macos options for screenshots.

6. Chrome window resizing seems artificially slow.

Overall windows still feels more productive, but also sucks more in many other ways, such as preinstalling candy crush or its opaque update system.

4. You can press the option key when pasting to move the files or you can drag the files (you can enable drag with drag lock to make things easier: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-mouse-trackp...)

5. Why do you need a standalone app to make screenshots? cmd + shift + 5 (or 4) work fine imo.

4. Im aware but it still cumbersome, would be nice to do it without the using the keyboard.

5. Because I need more functionality.

4. Dragging and dropping doesn't require the use of the option key. So there are two ways:

- Keyboard: cmd+c -> cmd+opt+v

- Non Keyboard: Drag -> Drop

I know that's not the same as right click -> select cut -> right click -> paste, but it doesn't seem strictly worse.

Oh! While dragging a file if you keep the cursor over a directory or over the Back/Forward Finder arrows it will move the focus while move to that dir.

5. I really don't know much about screenshots, their possible functionality or what you are looking for, but this app -> https://shottr.cc/ might serve your needs?

I've been using macOS professionally for years, but I still find the application/window management system really strange and clumsy. Quite often, closing the last window of an application doesn't entirely quit the application itself. This is particularly annoying when using chrome or firefox, since I'd expect the last tabs I had open to be there when I next open the application, but if I haven't entirely quit the application it just launches a blank new window. I've gotten used to right clicking the icon in the dock and quitting it that way, but it's cumbersome and inconsistent with how it works on other OSes. You also can't quit Finder entirely this way either for some reason.

I'm sure there's some technical explanation that makes sense, but it feels wrong.

We’ve seen quite a few of these “I tried a Mac” articles on here, and this is the usual for these posts: The UI conventions of macOS are quite different from Windows (and thus also from the mainstream Linux desktop environments, which mostly ape Windows).

The author thinks the macOS way is weird/annoying/wrong, without realising that this is just an emotional judgment caused by his own (in)experience rather than a problem with macOS.

The differences do chafe until your mental model adapts itself. The inverse is also true. When I happen to use Windows, I hate how I can’t drag a window anywhere near the edges without the snapping behaviour kicking in. I hate having to use Ctrl-C for copying, since that means something quite different in Unix, etc.

The OP probably didn't spend much time with macOS. Here is a more serious rant with macOS:

1. The Spotlight program will randomly consume 100% of your CPU while you are doing actual work.

2. The iCloud integration will decide to disappear your desktop/document folders when you most need them, and nobody understand how that thing works.

3. macOS safety features not allowing you to install some software. Worse, it doesn't give you a hint that it is the responsible party.

4. macOS parental control blocks randomly your localhost, failing some requests. Spend 6-10 hours investigating to find out the real culprit. Good luck deactivating that.

And these are just on the top of my head and I hadn't used macOS in the last two years. I can't imagine what a cluster-fff it must be right now with all the crap they have been adding.

I came from Windows about four years ago.

The two top bad points in the article can be fixed with addons: - Moom (https://manytricks.com/moom/) to snap windows, - Contexts (https://contexts.co/) to switch between apps.

Yes, it would be better if this functionality was included, but it's an easy fix.

The thing that was a dealbreaker for me with Windows is that it would reboot to upgrade without my permission and I would lose work. Mac doesn't do that. It may reboot to upgrade when I"m not looking, but you would never know as it puts you exactly back where you were before the reboot.

That one thing will keep me loyal to Mac.

Since the author appears pretty savvy, I recommend trying out https://www.hammerspoon.org/ and writing a little bit of lua to customize his mac experience. Can even install it as a Homebrew cask

I always found windows (not the os) to be pretty annoying. Having a full screen app, or two full screen apps side by side is way more usable than a window on top of another that keeps getting lost, or you have to move it around all the time to see what’s underneath.

On large (>24-inch) monitors I prefer windows, but on smaller monitors I typically prefer full screen apps, for the reasons you mention.

I think the title bars are pretty outdated too. They take up a lot of monitor real estate. The hide expand maximize buttons along can be hidden in the right click menu. Going all the way to the top of a window for those items is a waste of time. If you have to read a titlebar to see what app/file you’re working with, it’s a bad app.

I`m in a similar situation working as a android developer the company sended me a macpro 2021 with the infamous touch bar.

Diferent from the author I had some previous experience with macbooks, since I did had a Macbook white many years ago, and have some vintage apple computers like a clamshell laptop and a G4 (I just think they are neat).

While I`m in no way as productive with it as I`m with my thinkpad runing Fedora there`s some mitigation I was able to do.

The main wone with the window manager. While I do think Apple full screen works well when working exclusive with the mac screen, when connected to multiple screens is a pain in the ass.

In this case Magnet solved my problems since it looks a lot with the Windows / Gnome way of dividing the screen with multiple applications.

THANK YOU!

I was recently forced to switch to a Mac for work. After 6+ months I am still relatively unimpressed.

I feel like such a big baby, and I know it's because I am familiar with something else, but I cannot express enough how much I hate Mac's window management. I constantly have to split up my work between multiple Chrome windows and I am now resigned to losing track of everything all the time.

(Hardware wise - I might actually disagree. The device feels nice, but I've found it to be fairly fragile and delicate. Whereas you can drop a Thinkpad down a flight of stairs into a pool of ice cream, a 6-inch fall onto a hard surface might total the screen on the MacBook. But special shoutout to the speakers which still impress me.)

I've had the same experience. Always used Windows for work machines and Linux for my personal laptop, and now it's the first time that I'm working on a company that only use macbooks, and, oh boy, what a pain!

The hardware is truly amazing, no arguing with that, but the OS overall experience have not been very good for me. I knew that there would be needed some time to adapt, but there are some things that are simply counter-intuitive. I'm even having trouble putting this to sleep. I've lost count of how many times I had chosen the "Sleep" option on the menu only to the macbook not go into sleep, and drain my battery overnight...

By software you only mean window management and switching really, then. When you witness a lot less of app crashes on macOS you will appreciate the software better.

Window management used to be a pain for me too on a mac until I found Spectacle. With a few keyboard shortcuts that you set yourself, you won't miss snapping windows by mouse drags. Everything happens with your fingers on the keyboard.

Alt+Tab with multi-window apps is still a pain for me I admit. So I'm with you there.

Overall the stability of a mac (both software and hardware), usability and the productivity you get with the trackpad gestures will make you not want to go back to anything after you've used them for a few weeks.

Having bought my first Mac some months ago, I fully share the conclusions. Being able to install Linux in this hardware (assuming everything worked as well, including sleep/wakeup) would be ideal.

I have one very big item to put on the 'Bad' list not mentioned in the article: key shortcuts, especially those for text manipulation. I'm reading and writing emails and documents all day long. I need CTRL-LEFT (ok, SUPER-LEFT) to do the right thing and move one word at a time. Having to switch to ALT-LEFT for that is killing my productivity in MacOS /and/ in Linux and Windows (because my muscle memory is gone). It's extremely frustrating.

The Alt-Tab image is amusing but I will point out that Windows is doing its own innovations here - by default it now cycles through the 5 most recently used Edge tabs alongside your actual windows. On the bright side it can be turned off.

This is fair. Most of the bad mentioned can be worked around trivially, and even turned into a strength with third party apps (a lot of the window management stuff, especially, has more/better third party options than Windows), but Macs are total garbage as corpo machines. Pegging yourself to anything less than the latest version of anything (as businesses managing a fleet of machines are wont to do) is Russian roulette. It’ll work for a while then break with zero warning. You’ll put in a paid issue with Apple support and they’ll just throw their hands up and tell you they can’t help you unless you’re on the latest version.

I would just like to add that this thread is an absolute gold mine of information. I haven't been full time on a mac since the corona-induced WFH where I just picked stuff up on my desktop, but recently I've picked up an M1 Air to work on and separate "home" from "work" and a lot of the suggestions here provide incredible insight into slight annoyances that I find within Mac OS. Not that I care that much since like 99% of my time is spent in tmux and I try to avoid the touchpad/mouse like the plague as much as possible, but it's nice to read the insight people provide here.

Window management is still my number one complaint with macOS. Windows has only gotten better with it since Windows 7 introduced Aero Snap, and on Linux I can do whatever my heart desires, including using a proper tiling environment.

Ironically, if you’re looking to snap two windows side-by-side (which I expect accounts for the majority of cases), iPadOS with a keyboard is actually more capable for that specific use case than macOS. I expect the same shortcut will make its way into the next Mac release, I just hope they don’t gimp it by tying it to full-screen mode.

Er...macOS has had the ability to put two windows side-by-side in full-screen mode for a few years now. Press and hold on the green "zoom" button and you'll get side-by-side options.

It does not, and likely will never, have options for gluing two windows together and treating them as one in non-fullscreen mode. That seems like a fairly niche desire to me.

I don’t think there’s a keyboard shortcut for it though is there?

Oh—no, I don't believe there is. Sorry, I missed that you were specifically referring to a keyboard shortcut for that (since I very rarely use an iPad with an external keyboard).

Yeah and the author was talking about how inflexible their side-by-side approach was - moves them to a new desktop and puts them into full screen

I’m always amused when people bring up package managers as a complaint about macOS. I like them, and use them of course, apt on linux machines, homebrew on Macs. It’s great, super useful for what I do.

However I feel like pointing out that no one who uses a computer for mundane tasks like surfing, writing email, watching videos, posting pictures, etc. cares remotely what a package manager is, or how well it works.

Package managers feel like they live exclusively in the realm of developers and Linux aficionados. And I see people complain about it as though they just bought a house to discover it doesn’t have toilets.

Not being a mac user myself, the ubinquity of homebrew made me think it was native for many years, to the point that I'd been tempted several times to make the switch (not because having a package manager is that fantastic, but it signals a lot about the intended use of the OS). I always thought MacOS was more stable than Linux, but more open to devs than Windows, but now I'm not so sure about that second point.

I doubt I'd get a mac anyway because there aren't many games I could play on it, but I have been previously tempted over the past year or so.

I don’t use it (and never used a mac for more than a few horrible seconds), but Windows does now have a package manager built in: WinGet [0]

[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/win...

Also choco, though thats third-party

All OS's should come standard with sophisticated windows management. I use BetterSnapTool on my Mac, have done so for close to 10 years now. I honestly don't know what I'd do without it--and I'm not doing too much fancy. But keyboard shortcutting to maximize, minimize, or tile (left right/corners/thirds) elimintes 90% of the fiddly annoying this about dealing with the too many windows I have open. But even this basic level of control that the app affords doesn't seem to be important enough for any of the major OSes to make standard.

All OS's should come standard with sophisticated windows management.

Then people on HN would complain that the OS makers are driving the small utility software shops out of business with walled gardens and regulatory capture, or whatever the buzzword of the week is.

I'm pretty sure macOS was designed to have every window in fullscreen 100% of the time and the user would three finger swipe to switch windows. Seems like having a shitty experience when trying to do anything besides fullscreen is kind of the point, "do things the way we want you to or suffer."

I almost never use that kind of full-screen mode in Mac OS. I do too much work between apps and rarely restrict myself to just one. Drag-n-drop has been a major interaction model in Mac OS for many decades

I do most of my work in many apps too. It's pretty easy to remember to three finger swipe left twice to get to my browser from tmux etc. and is faster than other methods i've found. Plus I need all the screen space I can get, 16 inches is barely big enough.

I do a lot of drag and drop between and it always felt off trying to do that between full-screen apps.

No, it was actually designed to never have any window in fullscreen. That behavior is a relatively recent addition to the macOS windowing model.

Ok I'll rephrase. I'm pretty sure that apple redesigned their entire windowing system and related shortcuts around 100% fullscreen when they implemented full screen windows. Every short cut seems to be built with full screen windows in mind, especially the track pad stuff. Even the snapping that op complained about makes sense when considered through the 100% full screen paradigm.

Full screen mode wasn't even a feature until OS X Lion 10.7 in 2011. Until then, the green button only Maximized a window; now you have to Option-click to get that behavior.

I rarely, if ever use Full-Screen mode. I’m struggling to understand why you think the OS is designed around this use.

Honestly, for something with a disclaimer about it being a rant, this read pretty positive to me. Pretty sure this guy will be in love with Apple by the end of the year and will start weeing the shortcomings in windows/linux. (at least that was my journey anyways)

For the cmd+tab thing I think it's a matter of taste and/or something that the author will get used to. I think I found it odd at first too, but now I get mad at Windows for not doing it that way. I love being able to switch between windows of the same program only.

Devoted fan of A tries B, is displeased.

He makes a good point that work computers especially benefit from sane defaults so anything the OS doesn’t do well out of the box (even if fixable 3rd party) is no-go for many users.

Some corporate IT security policies just don't make sense. Why is he allowed to install random software from homebrew but not signed apps from a developer who has a contractual relationship with Apple? Even the economics are broken - hackers are going to refine and commercialize security exploits against widely used apps like Slack because of its large and ubiquitous deployment. They are not likely to spend resources targeting power user Mac apps that change the appearance of the alt-tab menu.

I am a fan boy and did not find any of it offensive. Great write up, actually. Windows simply does a better job at window management. I use full screen and three finger swipe between 5 separate desktops for work to overcome this weakness. The flash drive did make me giggle... oh you poor windows laden idiot. Flash drives... like from 1999? Most of your issues are just growing pains. I did it when I migrated about 10 years ago from my LeapFrog: no carry handle, screen too bright, no built in songs, ect.

Hold the option key and it snaps on the same desktop.

Or install Rectangle.app (free) which gives you mouse dragging and keyboard shortcut snapping like Windows/Linux.

>Apple M1 Pro (8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores)

Fwiw I'm not sure anyone really thinks of the M1 in terms of performance vs efficiency cores, but rather in terms CPU and GPU cores (and maybe Neural cores if they're doing AI). For example, "8 CPU Cores and 16 GPU Cores", or "10 CPU Cores and 24 GPU Cores", or the like. But not even Apple's own store really makes an upfront differential between performance and efficiency cores.

> There is no other way to say this: window management is painful on macOS.

Out-of-the-box yes.

> If you open two of the same window (e.g., two Chrome windows), they appear as one in the dock. However, when you press Command (⌘)+Tab, this will only show one entry for Chrome, even though you have two windows of Chrome open.

For app switching I've set the "Move focus to next window" keyboard shortcut to Option+Tab (don't remember what the default is). This works like Cmd+Tab, except it cycles between windows of the active application (i.e. Chrome windows in the above example). It's really quick and smooth since you just move your thumb between Cmd and Option.

There is a slight difference between using Cmd+Tab though - you don't get a preview of the window you're about to switch to, so it's sometimes a bit clumsy if you have many windows open. To solve this I have three-finger swipe down set to display all windows of the focused app (called App Exposé). Don't remember whether this is default behavior. But with this you actually see all windows, which makes it even better than Cmd+Tab in this regard (which only shows icons).

The above two in combination work very well for me and window management is a breeze.

For window snapping I use BetterTouchTool[0] (paid app), but agree that if you need to get corporate IT's blessing to install apps then it's a hassle. Another app I couldn't live without: Alfred[1]. Just its clipboard history management and snippets make it awesome, but it can do so much more, like Workflows which I use a lot for various things). And iTerm2[2] is great.

So in conclusion I agree with OP - if I was forced to use a vanilla installation then I'd prefer most Linux DE's, but being able to install a couple of apps I simply love MacOS and would have a really tough time transitioning back to Linux (been a MacOS user now for almost 7 years, before that 10 years of Linux).

[0] https://folivora.ai/

[1] https://www.alfredapp.com/

[2] https://iterm2.com/

File management is another one I'd like to add to the list of macOS screwups. How can viewing lists of files and moving them over from one place to another be so complicated?

MacOS apparently caches directory views somewhere, and I can routinely get the "Downloads" folder to not actually show what is in the Downloads folder; often having to resort to "open" on the terminal to access the file. I wish I knew how to force it to refresh the actual contents instead of reading it from the cache.

Do you have that folder set to sort by something useful like “date added”? Then it should work. If you have it set to not sorted then maybe the file is lower on the list and off screen.

~\Downloads is always the first tab in Finder for me and I almost always keep it to show the most recently added files at the top.

I always do date added, and it sometimes doesn't show new files in the file picker view most commonly - and then I have to go somewhere else and back and it seems to refresh.

The other weirdness is sometimes a file gets updated (think "touch") and it won't change it's order in the list.

Most of the time it works fine. It's like inotify or whatever sometimes doesn't fire.

Ah, I almost never use the file picker. I tend to keep certain folders open in tabs in Finder and drag from them to the apps or to the file open dialogs. I tend to do a lot of work in a handful of folders and never liked the process of of “File Open….now navigate to that folder you were just using”.

What is complicated about it? I typically keep a handful of tabs open in Finder and drag and drop between them or to applications. You can also always do CMD-C and then either CMD-V to copy a file somewhere or OPT-CMD-V to move a file.

I like that in Windows I can copy-paste the location from one File Manager windows to another one. Something that you cannot do in MacOs File Manager

This is possible but needs to be done with shortcuts instead of selecting the paths in the address bar:

1. Ctrl + Cmd + C to copy the folders path

2. Cmd + N to open a new Finder window

3. Shift + Cmd + G to open the "Go to folder..." menu

4. Cmd + V to paste the path

5. Enter to go to the pasted path in the new finder window

The other option is to right click the folder and open it in a new tab. But this doesn't open a new window.

Not quit sure what you want but you can copy or drag path information from the “Path Bar” at the bottom of a finder window/tab. I do this all the time to get a path in terminal

Most annoying for me is there is no simple way to simply search for files matching a name in a folder.

Attempting to search using Finder insists on bringing up a giant system wide search that indexes content of files, emails, every stupid thing that contains anything like the phrase I looked for.

So imagine I am sharing my screen and I try to just find a simple file and it's spewing the contents of my private emails in front of everyone. So aggravating.

Well, if Finder is in the folder, and you enter a search, then I see three options reading to just search in the folder. It pops up between the command bar and the folder contents.

yeah ... I guess I don't think that is simple when I have to click extra options to get to it. But also, it still insists on searching within files. I ONLY want it to filter on the file name.

I admit, I hardly use Finder. I usually use linux terminal with linux tools like find.

You can configure the default file search behavior in the Finder preferences in the "Advanced" section.

I've set it to search the current folder, you can also configure Finder to reuse the previous search scope.

i used to be totally fine with the macOS desktop manager experience.

then i went in hard on i3.

now, macOS feels ungainly.

Re: cmd+tab issues, consider trying cmd+space+(first letter or two of the app), followed by cmd+`.

Especially for touch typists, I think it's faster than cmd+tab: doesn't require you to use your mental "app icon classifier", and it's impossible to over/under-shoot the target.

Scales O(N), where N is the number of windows open in the app you're switching to, whereas cmd+tab + cmd+` is O(N) + O(M), where M is the number of apps you have running.

Just use Hot Corners and "Application Windows"+"Mission Control", its superior.

It's a cool feature, but it does require touching the trackpad/mouse!

You can activate Mission Control with Control-Down Arrow. After that, you can use the arrow keys to navigate, but then the pointer is significantly faster and you don't have to "think."

> Apple decided to grace the 2021 Macbook Pro with ports that any PC laptop user has had for years (HDMI?! SD card reader?! gasp!).

To be fair, MBPs also had those for years, until Apple in its wisdom decided to ditch them in 2016, along with making other questionable interface decisions that they've been gradually reverting since then. I still use a 2015 MBP partially for that reason. Now it's probably become a time to upgrade to a M1 model.

I’m certain this was a change in design philosophy. And I think the exit of Jony Ive resulted in substantially more rational design decisions (form follows function), but any time that happens there’s a year or two of product pipeline that has to cycle.

Not sure I'm buying the "I need to get everything I install blessed by IT security" and "Homebrew is a lifesaver on macOS" story...

For me many macos things are weird.

One of the latest ones: to create new window for safari you have to press Cmnd+N. But if safari is maximized, you have to press Cmnd+Alt+N. Why? No idea.

And the fact that I have to manually adjust safari window width to make it full screen without hiding other interface elements is even more weird. Some apps support alt+maximize, some do not. Safari is latter. Definitely no technical reason.

You can double click on the top bar to maximize it. Far from discoverable, though.

Something OP didn't mention, but miffs me about macOS is the way it handles full screen apps.

macOS takes the entire app full screen in a separate desktop and doesn't allow other windows to overlap.

Cmd + Tab during full screen triggers a 1 sec animation as it switches workspaces... so if someone texts you on your iPhone during a video, you can't just peek at the Messages app with the video in the background :'(

My favourite tool to modify most aspects of the OS is BetterTouchTool.

I have it set to move the window under the mouse cursor when I hold down Fn — and if I also hold down shift then it resizes the window under the mouse cursor until I release Shift

It must have saved me, in aggregate, hundreds of hours as I no longer have to care about finding the top or edge of a window to move/resize.

Try it! An absolute game changer for productivity.

I totally get the window switching thing, especially if one of the windows is minimized. In that case, hovering over the window using Cmd + Tab will not open the window. You have to press Option while simultaneously letting go of the Cmd key.

The only other major thing is how terrible Finder is out of the box. There are ways to make it less terrible, but it's still far less than ideal in usability.

What problems do you have with Finder? I feel the same about Windows File Explorer when I use Windows. If nothing else, I keep looking for a way to add a tab for a different path.

Admittedly, I tend not to use that many keyboard short-cuts. Beyond the basics, I find the effort to learn more of them not worth the effort unless it is an app that I use frequently. File management is not one of those cases.

Yes! I provided the same comment above with a step-by-step as the sequence of key presses is a little hard to figure out the first time.

I’ve now finally committed this to muscle memory but I doubt many people are aware of it — it was really good to hear of somebody else using it!

Completely agree withe window management part. I find it easy to work on Win/Ubuntu with multiple desktops and Alt+Tab, but the overly complicated flow of Command+Tab makes this impossible on Mac.

So I just end up with most of the stuff on one desktop and using spotlight with the trackpad to switch. But props to Apple for having the smoothest spotlight implementation of the three.

I had to use a Mac for my last job and it was awful. Coming from a customized tiling window-manager setup on Linux that I've slowly tinkered with over the years, everything UX-wise was such a slog for me.

I'm not recommending linux for everyone. Far from it. But if you want the best experience and don't mind tinkering, I think it's the best you can get currently.

To be fair, my first time returning to a Linux desktop after 10+ years of MacOS was marked by feelings of contempt and disgust.

Not to say MacOS is objectively better or that it gets everything right. But any time you’re thrust into an unfamiliar workflow, it’s frustrating. You want things to work the way you’re used to. Eventually you learn to appreciate what works, and work around what doesn’t.

I think it also matters why and how you do it.

Around 2019, I had a new PC at work and wanted to try out Linux, after more than 10 years of macOS. I had wanted to try a TWM for a while, and the Mac implementations felt... weird. I used to use Linux with KDE as a daily driver up until around 2008, when I got my first MBP, so I was somewhat familiar with the possible quirkiness of it.

After the initial shock of "how do I do anything?!", I started loving it more and more, to the point that whenever I went back to the Mac, I got annoyed by all the animations, window borders taking up half the screen, etc. I went hunting to disable animations. It helped somewhat, but not completely.

I still love the Mac, especially the hardware, and how smooth an 8 yo laptop still is. But I guess that, to your point, I wasn't thrust into this unfamiliar environment, I went and looked for it, and was able to do it progressively. I also recognize I was lucky in that my computer was fully supported out of the box, and haven't had to fiddle with obscure settings or anything.

I moved from windows to Mac when I switched jobs a few months ago. The biggest thing I miss is the ability to have a separate Taskbar entry for each window of a program. I have many windows of the same IDE open at once and I'd like to be able to switch between them quickly. Is something like this possible in Mac, maybe through a FOSS app?

command + ` (native) is the bind to swap through same-app-windows

I would agree on macOS window management it can be pretty painful especially if you are coming from Linux i3 background

I also really dislike that you can literally push a window off screen. It is weird to me that you can push a window 99.99% off screen.

That said, I prefer Mac over windows. It is close enough to linux and has crazy good battery life. Now that I'm not using C++ anymore and mostly python the differences aren't too big.

I wonder if any of the UI sugar the author misses is not there because of patents. Like, does MS have a patent on window snapping who won’t license to Apple, but let’s small companies slide? I think the GPL is why Apple ships with such outdated BASH and switched to ZSH for the default shell.

I go between ubuntu, Mac, and increasingly rarely windows which for many years was my daily. I am not fully at home in any of them but they are all good enough now that it doesn't matter. most of my time is ubuntu machines through jump desktop

I think the author is being overly pessimistic about Mac software. I did not find anything utterly "eye-rolling" from his article, besides a few nitpicks that are reasonable from someone accustomed to linux/window.

I've been using macOS since version 8.5, and lots of things have stayed the same since then and are familiar today. However, there's a lot that's unintuitive for a new user that's maybe there just because of inertia.

Huh. People actually use window snapping? Interesting. Never seen anyone use it myself.

Depends on screen size I supposed. And it is really useful when you want to open multi document/web page at same time.

Side by side view, eg. terminal + code editor. Or when I want two finder windows in sort of a total commander fashion, so I can copy/move hundreds of files around and visually inspect the results so I don't accidentally lose anything.

I always just size the windows as needed. Snapping for me is just this annoying non-feature that attempts to be more clever than me and interferes with my flow.

I don't use native snapping, just Rectangle, mostly through shortcuts (ctr+alt+left/right, and then ctrl+alt+backspace to reset window), because it's quicker than manually resizing for me.

I had also same complaints as author in https://www.nurgasemetey.com/what-i-lack-in-osx-after-linux/

> Homebrew ... is the only thing not making me pull my hair out

oh you just wait, sweet summer child

What a coincidence, everything that the author is complaining about I have an third party application to make up for

- Window management (Magnet)

- Command-tab (Contexts)

I guess this means corporate-enforced macOS (no downloading of unapproved apps) would be a nightmare for users.

I’m amused that the author is allowed to install Logi Options (a massive electron bundling steaming pile of … from a company with a dodgy track record) and not Rectangle or AltTab.

Also no mention made of the Cmd-~ vs Cmd-Tab distinction.

That's just like, your opinion, man.

But, seriously, I've become so accustomed to the many shortcomings of macOS UX that using anything else would be like living in a house without loose doorknobs and sloping floors. Embrace the suck.

> Embrace the suck

OP here. Can I get that printed on a t-shirt?

The only negative is around window management and you can install helpers for this.

Yep, as a user of both the window manager is the main area where mac loses. Also keyboard shortcuts are more comprehensive and available on Windows. But that's about it, MacOS is superior on most other things.

I have similar issues like the author but the comments in this thread have solved some of those problem.

I also moved from Windows to MacOS. What was the purpose behind introducing ctrl, opt and cmd button? What do they stand for?

What do you mean when you say "introducing" them? Apple's implementation of modifier keys on the keyboard were essentially released concurrently to that of IBM's (whose 1980's form factor is still the accepted standard for PC's with only a few changes), and it was ahead of Windows by several years.

Side note: I was using a 1984 IBM Model M keyboard as my daily driver (clackity clack!) when I moved from Windows to Mac about 18-months ago with the original release of the M1 Mac Mini. I had re-mapped F1 on that keyboard to function as the Windows key, but sadly found the lack of a dedicated super key on Mac to be too cumbersome, so the ol' trusty Model M is resting peacefully in my closet now. It's still in pretty good shape, although I've been meaning to take advantage of its time off to take it apart and give it a good cleaning...

What's the purpose behind having ctrl, alt and win buttons ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think Moom is one of the best reccs for OSX in general: https://manytricks.com/moom/

Will let you snap windows the way you expect.

> On the other hand, macOS has a weird snapping implementation where you need to click and hold the green “zoom” button, then choose to “tile” left or right

TIL, and I've been using MacOS and OS X for almost 15 years.

> While macOS isn’t POSIX-certified, it is Single Unix Specification UNIX 03 registered and compliant.

This sounds wrong. Isn’t POSIX a mandatory subset of the Single Unix Specification? Hence it is inherently certified.

OP here. I was mainly going off of this (2nd paragraph).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

"system developers generally aim for compliance with POSIX standards, which form the core of the Single UNIX Specification"

I know die hard old devs that are Mac fanboys and the first thing they do is turn off "natural" scrolling. I know because I had to ask them if I was holding it wrong. Couldn't believe it.

The window management grips are fair, although I don't find Cmd + ` to be particularly burdensome - it's right above tab on the keyboard, and my KDE Plasma desktop behaves the exact same way.

I don't know any Mac users who don't primarily use expose (or is it mission control now? The thing where it tiles all your windows open and you click the right one). Agree that windows should snap even when not fullscreened but I think expose solves this one better if you hand is already on the trackpad / mouse

I don't use it, in fact I thought it was mostly abandoned.

I hate window snapping behavior. I use rectangle, but cannot for the life of me figure out why it makes sense to snap a window to fullscreen on my 40" ultrawide the instant I get a window somewhere near any side of my monitor. Who works like this? You have to just leave a window floating in space if you don't want it fullscreened?

I use Moom personally to tile windows. I feel like no one tests the huge external monitor setup at apple compared to just using the laptop screen, despite it's near ubiquity among developers. Maybe the vast majority of mac's aren't used that way? But Mac pros are.

I do leave my hand on the trackpad on Mac a lot more than I do with Linux - partly because the trackpad on Mac is better than any other trackpad - but also because I think a trackpad is inherently slower and sometimes when I use a mouse/keyboard on Mac I notice the system isn't quite as responsive as it feels when I use gestures

Did not know about alttab.app for macOS. That really was the last gripe I had about macOS. alttab + rectangle gets you back to Windows/Linux style window management anyway.

ITT: Let me tell you why you should take my anecdotal evidence and subjective preferences serious while I also dismiss your anecdotal evidence and subjective preferences.

I think it’s unfair to compare OS X to both Linux and windows. You’re basically double teaming. Also comes off as bias to have only cons for the software.

There seem to be utilities to address/work around a lot of this stuff. Wonder how much his experience would have improved if he had admin rights.

I get if someone wants to move to Linux from macOS, but Windows?

Every time I need to work with Windows, I think switching from Windows to Mac was one of the greatest decisions of my life.

And I'm saying this as a person who still have used Windows more than Mac in his life, time-wise. That whole OS is a mess.

I think the author will get used to macOS by time. I complained about similar stuff initially, but then got used to everything pretty quickly and those are just very minor issues that definitely do not outweigh the benefits.

I tried the m1 mini when it came out because I was hyped by all the m1 HN talk. This was my first time using macOS and besides the window management what I loathed was having to re-learn all the shortcuts I've been using for 20+ years, how no one mentions this is baffling to me. I tried to make it work more like "normal" windows / linux but I didn't find any good options and I always felt like I was running with my shoelaces untied.

I'll stick with my linux i3 env for the foreseeable future

It just takes time to get used to. I used Linux for a long time before switching to a Mac about seven years ago. I nearly returned my new MacBook to the store because I felt hamstrung by the UI. But in a few weeks, once I'd become accustomed to the application-centric windowing model, the keyboard shortcuts, and especially the touchpad gestures, it all clicked and I wouldn't go back now.

My linux workflow is almost entirely keyboard-driven, there's no need for a touchpad than maybe doing things in the browser.

Shortcuts are maddening when you just switch. But then you realise how much of the keyboard is underutilised in Windows. Linux uses the Meta key, but IIRC it was very app-specific, and not as comprehensively used.

A lot of MacOS is keyboard driven [1][2], but it takes up to two weeks to get comfortable (it took me at least that long when I switched to MacOS in 2008).

[1] But the new breed of "designers" at Apple no longer care about that. All new first-party apps that Apple vomits out are an abomination, UX-wise. And keyboard access there suffers as well.

[2] There are a bunch of shortcuts that will work the same way across most apps (such as Cmd+<comma> for settings, or text navigation shortcuts), and that is a blessing. You can also assign custom shortcuts to any menu item in any app if you need directly from settings. Or you can re-assign behaviour of Ctrl/Caps Lock/Alt from settings as well. There are small things like this all across the system, but it does take getting used to.

I doubt it could ever be as keyboard driven as linux with a tiling WM

Put Asahi on that M1, it's apparently great even though the work they have done with the GPU is still disabled.

I returned it a long time ago and have no reason to replace my work thinkpad t490

Homebrew isn't the only game in town. I've been using MacPorts without issue since I bought my first Mac in late 2003.

A very fair assessment by OP. Mac window management isn't great but I personallu got around to getting used to it.

Discovering Rectangle and AltTab were the keys to overcoming my productivity issues with macOS. So much better now

As a decades long Mac user, all these points are fair and worth reading. Apple, hope you’re paying attention.

The only actual criticism was that it doesn't do window tiling the same as Linux

there is a hidden feature buried deep inside mac accesibility options whic let you do a double finger 'dobule click' with only one touch.

IT IS THE KILLER APP for macOS. If I hadn't discovered it years ago I'd be so distraught

So the UX is worse than Linux, and Windows? I don't believe that for one second.

yeah, hardly a rant. Hardly any serious problems. Homebrew IS the package manager for apple, get a window-snapping tool and/or learn to use alt-click on the green "maximise window button". Keep enjoying. Done.

The only real deal breaker for me is the package management system on Mac.

Windows comes with more than you need.

MacOS comes doesn't come with enough.

Oh, let me know when I can select text in a photo and copy/paste it (exists by default in macos) or when I can open a PDF and sign it via my touchpad (by default in macos). Or being able to do pretty advanced video editing in iMovie or record a song in GarageBand (not installed by default, but free and one click away). Or that I can force touch a word and a dictionary dialog pops up explaining what it means without me having to select the word and search for it in google.

On the other hand I can't shit+click select multiple files in icon view or reverse the scroll direction of my mouse without a 3rd party app. In general, though, macos offers more out of the box for the enthusiast than windows.

Waiting for the reverse culture shock in a few years.

as an Ubuntu user, I also got a new Mac in my new place. I survived a day before switching back to XPS+Ubuntu. I have a list of things that were horrible but I'd like to add one in particular which is that dock auto-hide is a complete mess, so not intuitive and when you want it to show it doesn't show and vice versa.

spectacle will solve your snapping problems. gives windows / Linux snapping.

100% agreed. I forget sometimes that spectacle isn't part of MacOS proper. The snapping and management are amazing and really add to the UX. https://www.spectacleapp.com/

Except it's end of life so you should probably switch to Rectangle (which the author mentions in the article explicitly)

Just means u r not adoptable

command+backtick is the key he was looking for :)

I miss IRIX.

I recently got my first iPhone, and I just couldn't get past how annoying some things were. But now, after about 1 year I don't feel like that at all anymore, perhaps I'll feel them now when I go back... This is what I wrote down at the time:

* Tried installing Signal 4 times, it failed on the apple account generation and no further clues that it didn't or did install signal (it didn't).

* You can't just put icons on the bottom of screen, where your thumb is... need to fill the top with other icons first to get important stuff on the bottom. (The start screen fills from the top, so to say, very annoying).

* Love the privacy notice that say they won't share anything that is not needed for functioning, feels good.

* App store does not start with search.. so I feel a bit lost at first.

* Confirm app installs with side button twice, bit weird. Especially when you have the phone in your left hand.

* Absolutely maddening that it keeps correcting my .nl email adres to .nul (android leaves non text field alone as far as I'm aware).

* Nextcloud picture not available to Signal? I Synced some folder of nice pics for profile pics. Where are they?

* No intro at all into UI... After a week or so, I got a sort of set if intro cards which were quite helpful.

* Almost all of my selfhosted apps are represented, very nice (NextCloud, Home Assistant, WireGuard)

* Top suggestion in app store is never what you are looking for or searched for. Pretty strange. Can we change that? Ah I learned later that the first one is an ad, you can see it because there dark blue around it (???)..

* Many controls are at the top when I can't reach them. In Android I feel that that is much more avoided.

* Video pauses when taking a quick look at notification tray, I don't like that.

* Notification tray is on the left side, the settings on the right. But not on the lock screen, then it's a swipe up... (I got used to this after some time)

* Can't drag to folder onto lower bar/icon area (maybe fixed in iOS 15)

* Pull down in middle of screen brings up Siri, not notifications, I'd swap that, now notifications really require a stretch of your hand, or that awkward small swipe down at the bottom. I turned Siri of when she started interrupting my meetings.

* I set Firefox as the standard browser yet both telegram and Signal (so far) always open Safari.

* Photos contains every image, not just photos, it's more like a gallery.

* Why is it not grouping notifications? Notifications were quite confusing at first, but I got used to it. Especially the difference in notifications and bars (stroken in dutch).

* Auto correct does not uncorrect on backspace. Language switching does seem to go very well. It ofter autocorrects my last work AFTER I press send. Absolutely maddening.

* Swipe to type only seems available for English (fixed in iOS 15)

* Notification dots sometimes stuck on Nextcloud or other apps, I turned them off on some apps.

* Swiping in photos app is un-intuitive... but once used to it it works well and is consistent, ie it also work in chat apps like signal, close picture, swipe down. Details, swipe up.

* Printing worked without an app, but unable to change size or anything. Everything is printed at 25%? Samsung/HP print apps are absolute crap.

* Red dots are not synced with open notifications, when I dismiss a notification I want the red dot gone. hotspot keeps shutting down after some time, annoying.

* I had 652 mb is data on iCloud no idea what it was, I didn't think about it and now stuffis in the cloud.

* In the android notification tray curation can happen, on iOS it feels like a mess (not anymore after a year)

* Alarm is confusing, not the same sound for the health alarm as the other and weird to change an alarm. Also weird to turn the alarm off

* Replying to an email and adding a couple of consecutive pictures is a very difficult.

* Widgets feel connected, updating the calendar and closing it makes it swoop back into the widget and the widget has the changes I made. On android I was used to it being normal that widget would still need some time to update, later on, to represent my changes.

* One gets a report screen use report about next week, tap it, it takes you to the current week :s

I am an I.T. consultant and use Windows machines daily for work. I used DOS as a kid in the 1980's, and Windows from v3.1 through to 10/11 today. About five years ago I chose to turn all my home PC's into Linux machines while I worked through a Linux Sysadmin bootcamp curricula that used to be popular on Reddit, and became fluent with Debian and CentOS before moving back to Windows almost entirely because I never found a decent alternative to Photoshop (GIMP has always been painful to use for me, but I think that's just my own muscle memory having used Corel and Adobe products since the mid-1990's). I rather enjoyed my time with Linux, and the skills I learned along the way have never stopped contributing to my life in positive ways both personally and professionally.

18-months ago it was time to upgrade my primary desktop, and I decided to completely change my personal computing platform once again after reading about the performance of the M1 chipset. With my curiosity piqued, I looked and found that new M1 Mac Minis were comparatively very affordable (under $1k), so figured I'd take the plunge. Maybe it's because I'm something of a masochist and rather enjoy the experience of exploring new systems and UI paradigms, but even using a Windows-style keyboard and mouse, I thought MacOS was an enjoyable and intuitive (if somewhat rigid) experience.

What surprised me most, and I'm kind of perplexed that it hasn't been mentioned elsewhere in this comment section, was how powerful the built-in tools for customization and automation were. Applescript and Automator are kind of like having a natively integrated AutoIT scripting engine. I don't miss WSL since I have ZSH (or BASH) readily available out of the box, and Macports and Homebrew do a reasonably good job of package management (they have their strengths and weaknesses when compared to APT, but I have not had to spend nearly as much time chasing down missing packages as I did when I was running Debian and CentOS).

The other pleasant surprise was the unparalleled quality of most of the software available, particularly with Apple's mobile OS when compared to Android. Anyone who uses a mobile device to write/record/produce/perform music is seriously missing out if they aren't using an iPad, and Logic Pro on MacOS is easily one of the best DAW's I've ever used at a fraction of the price of others (I will grant that DAW's are even more highly influenced by personal factors than even OSes are, so I won't go so far as to assert it's "better" than any others). Yes, Apple's software development ecosystem is more closed and restrictive, for everything in their AppStore especially, but that comes with increased security, privacy, and stability. The other upside, and the reason iOS/iPad OS apps are frequently so much nicer, is that developers can generally spend less time/effort worrying about all of the wildly variable hardware platforms and custom launchers their apps must support--with any possible slip up resulting in a potentially ruinous slew of negative reviews.

For all the dozens of people complaining about window switching--if you're on a Macbook, the three-finger swipe to move between desktops/full-screen apps is frankly a joy when working between two applications. For everything else, I use a 21:9 widescreen monitor that makes side-by-side windows a natural experience.

It did take a lot of getting used to some of the differences, but honestly, I embrace the somewhat creative mental burst I get by leaving my comfort zone, and if you come at these different approaches with an open mind, a little patience, and a willingness to adapt when needed or to find workarounds otherwise--MacOS has a lot of great features for anyone who works with creative workloads or software development, and the integration with desktop and mobile devices is unbelievably good compared to anything else. But I honestly have never really understood the tribalism that exists with tech brands and Mac/PC or Android/iPhone squabbles. I have found ways of enjoying all of them for what they are good at, and screaming at them for what they aren't.

This is full of stuff that isn't actually a problem, he just hasn't learnt how to use macOS yet.

> Snapping

Yes, macOS does suck in this regard. I can only hope they address it in the future.

> unlike Windows or Linux, you can’t “maximize” a window using the green “zoom” button

Hold down option when you click the green button. Annoying that Apple made this undiscoverable, but nevertheless it works and is built-in

> Command+Tab

macOS does this differently than windows or linux. I prefer the macOS way. Shrug? This is not a problem in macOS though. Your cheese got moved, deal with it :-)

> However, that keyboard doesn’t have the Option (⌥) or Command (⌘) keys like on my Macbook. This makes using keyboard shortcuts difficult due to the keys being switched, but I don’t blame Apple for this. I tried changing the modifier keys in System Preferences–>Keyboard, but that broke other keyboard shortcuts.

I'm not sure what he did here, but I've been using system preferences to swap the Windows and Alt keys so they match Option and Cmd, for over a decade and it works flawlessly. I can only assume he's misunderstanding something?

> However, plugging in a mouse with a scroll wheel means the scroll wheel is “backward”. Thankfully, I was able to download Logitech’s Options software to reverse this.

There's a checkbox in system prefs for that, you don't need any crazy logitech junk!

> There's a checkbox in system prefs for that, you don't need any crazy logitech junk!

But that option also reverses the touchpad scroll direction. You can't have the touchpad scroll inverted like on a touch screen and the mouse wheel scrolling normally (without third-party software), which seems crazy to me.

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