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> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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