The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it
theregister.com
theregister.com
MacOS, on the other hand, is bad and getting worse and not many people are talking about it. MacOS has no such “house ad” issues, but instead I spend half my time fiddling with windows in MacOS, sometimes inexplicably switching between full screen mode and normal mode to get apps to do what I want. Sometimes full screen mode is buggy, or maybe the app’s implementation of fullscreen mode is buggy, but either way I end up having to restart the app. Animations that once hid the limitations of spinning disk hard drives, making things feel faster than they actually were, now just make things feel slower than they actually are. (Windows, since 11, has actually added more animations, but, thankfully, you can turn them off).
It is a real shame too because Apple hardware is second to none. I just have grown to feel very frustrated by the direction of their OS. As Windows has progressed the Mac has gone backwards and it has to do largely with Fullscreen mode and the lack of window snapping.
Now they just aren’t putting the resources to it and seem focused on creating a shared experience between iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS.
1. The rise of the Web, especially during the 2010s when web browsers became filled with enough features to host entire applications that were just as feature-packed as their desktop equivalents. In fact, there’s now an entire ecosystem of _desktop_ applications written entirely in Web technologies. The Web has no standard UI and no Human Interface Guidelines. Users have gotten accustomed to each application, whether in a Web browser or on a desktop (or smartphone) behaving its own way and having its own look and feel. This undermines the notion of a desktop computing environment enforcing standard UI/UX guidelines; if users spend most of their time on the Web or using Electron applications, then what’s the incentive for imposing standard UI/UX guidelines on desktop apps? Windows doesn’t even bother with consistency these days, and macOS is feeling less polished with each new release.
2. The rise of smartphones really took the winds out of the sails of desktop computing progress. This led to predictions in the early 2010s about “the death of the PC.” Such predictions were premature, but this didn’t stop Microsoft from releasing Windows 8, and this isn’t stopping Apple from gradually adding more iOS-style influences in macOS. Even some elements of the Linux desktop world flirted with the inclusion of smartphone/tablet elements in the desktop, such as Ubuntu’s Unity and modern GNOME.
3. I argue that the business models of Microsoft and Apple, the two leading desktop OS vendors, changed in the past decade. Previously these companies relied on regular, predictable upgrade cycles from their users for revenue. Their business model was selling tools to users. The problem, however, is that upgrade cycles have lengthened due to how good hardware in the past 10-15 years has become; for example, a 2012 Mac Pro is still an excellent machine in 2022 for most tasks. Because of these lengthier upgrade cycles, these companies are increasingly reliant on selling services for revenue. Reliance on services also incentivized these companies to constantly be advertising their services on their platforms.
I long for the days of no-nonsense operating systems like Windows 2000 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard that allowed users to do their work without constantly nagging them with advertisements and other notifications. This is partly why I use FreeBSD these days.
Having said that, the UI was incredibly clean and didn't contain too much marketing crap. Though even in W95 Microsoft just had to put an MSN (Microsoft Network) icon on the desktop - not related to the messenger or news site but their own proprietary alternative to the internet which they abandoned soon after - thank god.