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> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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