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Comment by Slikey | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it ironic that the operating system called "Windows" offers one of the worst window management user experiences?

Out of the box windows management for MacOS is much worse than Windows, so not sure I follow? Power Toys does make Windows 10x better though... and they really should make it the default once it's fully stable.

I used to prefer MacOS for development, but Windows has far surpassed it in recent years, between native linux experience in WSL and better QOL tooling via Power Toys. The removal of vertical taskbar has been pretty annoying though... pretty awful on a 49" monitor. All that's left now is to get some 5nm chips in Windows machines

Simply try a native Linux install. You will find far better that "our way or the highway" behavior of Windows and OSX .

You get "native" linux on Windows with WSL. It's a linux container, but with nice integrations out of the box re: networking etc.

I'm not against running linux alone per se, but to me being able to run both Windows (with better app support, polish), and Linux at the same time is kind of the best of both worlds. Windows feels nicer as a daily driver, and can do all dev work directly in a linux environment

I am a big fan of WSL and used it extensively for a while across multiple development environments. Also like using Windows a lot and feel more productive on it than Unix based systems.

However, I started to run into a lot of issues with the file systems being a bit too commingled though, especially when using things like VSCode’s WSL integrations where you’re regularly reading/writing to the Linux file system from Windows (or vice versa).

I guess I mention this to say that I ended up putting Ubuntu on a Hyper V VM and it was a huge improvement. If you enjoy WSL, but need something a bit less integrated, I highly recommend it. Using VSCode’s remote container/host extensions work just as well (if not better for things like Docker).

Hmm was this for WSL v1? The previous implementation had pretty bad filesystem performance, but I haven't had any issues with WSL2. I host an app where I write gigs of data to disk every day without any perf issues.

But WSL1 would've been super slow for the same use case

Keep thinking I need to use X from a Fedora box to my windows desktop. OK, now to look into that..

That assumes the kernel supports the hardware. There’s nothing more annoying than only having a left speaker work, or WiFi not working, etc

Can you explain your claim?

For me, Windows 11 has one of the best window management experiences out of the box, far ahead of MacOS and in line Linux.

The ease of resizing, snapping and tiling windows out of the box is really well implemented in Windows 11 so I really don't get your claim.

Features that take advantage of multiple desktops are nonexistent. I don't think a tool to assign applications to specific desktops exists even outside the built-in stuff. And setting 1-2 apps as full-screen desktop is something I really liked about macOS that's not available. Before Windows 11, desktops didn't even have unique wallpapers.

You can assign apps to specific desktops, and you can maximize a window if you want full screen. How else do you expect it to work?

"Assign" as in open an application on a specific desktop. Windows 11 kind of got that (automatically, unfortunately no manual control) for multiple monitors, but macOS has it for virtual desktops too. It'd be even better if it supported something more explicit like i3 layout loading, but it can probably be combined with fancyzones at that point to get that working reasonably well.

macOS also has a way to treat an application (or two, with a split view) as a virtual desktop, where the shell disappears and wouldn't allow you to open additional windows on that desktop. I particularly want this seperation because I put VMs on different desktops, but because the shell is there I inevitably have to drag over some windows that opened on that desktop over after a few hours of mindless use.

How do you figure? As someone who recently switched to Mac I found that the out of the box windows management on Windows was far superior to MacOS. I needed to install a whole bunch of third part tools to make MacOS usable.

I agree that window management is poor in vanilla macOS. But fixing this just involves choosing a single tool, e.g. Moom, Magnet, etc.

Out of curiosity, what other tools do you use?

I do find this a bit annoying, but on the other hand, it gives me some flexibility to choose the style of window management I prefer through choice of utility.

The real question is why has Apple not implemented snapping behavior after ~10 years of it being in windows? But yeah, you can achieve something similar with tooling for sure.

That’s a completely fair question, I’m just curious why the parent comment required a bunch of tools.

To be more precise, it took installing a whole bunch of tools until I found a combination that worked for me. Eventually I managed to narrow it down to two, three if you count a workable file manager. One that did windows layout and one that 'fixed' Command-Tab.

No, but there is probably some law of the universe that states if there is a thread about Windows, a neckbeard must say that some feature of Windows is the worst thing ever.

I've actually never heard anyone mention Windows windows manager because the only people in the world who care don't use Windows.

I think Windows window management is better than Mac, and I use both (and Linux too) throughout every day.

I just want tmux splits at the operating system UI framework level that works across all operating systems without any hassle. Basically i3wm for Linux, Mac, and Windows, with the same keyboard shortcuts.

I would like to have multiple desktops like MacOS but windows has snaps which MacOS doesn't has.

While I like my awesome more on a laptop, every is can be configured one way or the other to feel similar across OSes.

Windows does have multiple desktops. Win+Tab to add and move between them.

Wow never seen this.

Tx :D

Windows does have multiple desktops. It was new in win10 I believe.

In case you are unaware, there are multiple snapping utilities for macOS.

I use BetterTouchTool, but there are many tools that accomplish the same thing as far as window snapping is concerned.

Here is an article that goes over many options: https://techwiser.com/snap-windows-on-macos

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