>Apple wisely takes an ain't-broke-don't-fix-it approach to macOS's standard multitasking model in Ventura by turning Stage Manager off by default and making people go hunting for it if they want to use it. You can't change your Mac's UI in a major way by accident.
If you haven't used it, Stage Manager differs from standard macOS multitasking by offering a column of recently used apps on the side of your screen (it's the left-hand side by default, but it will switch if you've got your Dock set to use the left-hand side of your screen instead). But unlike minimizing or maximizing an app from the Dock, each "stage" can contain multiple app windows from multiple apps; switch from one stage to another, and every window on that stage will pop back up on your screen in exactly the arrangement you were using before.
Within a given stage, app windows work exactly as they do anywhere else on your Mac. You can move, resize, and rearrange them any way you want, including shoving them all the way to the edges of the screen. The recent apps column will persist on the side of the screen by default, but it will get out of the way if you move an app window over it; you can bring the apps back up by moving your cursor to the right edge of the screen.
Stage Manager integrates seamlessly with macOS's other window management systems. Do you still want to use some apps in Full Screen mode? Great—they don't appear in your recent apps tray, and you can access them with a trackpad swipe, the same as you could before. Do you like Mission Control? Also cool. Apps in your tray slide gracefully up into Mission Control mode, along with any open apps that aren't in your tray.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/macos-13-ventura-the...
If you take away the background, the way that it's arranged feels very AR-y to me.
I tried out uBar for Mac OS https://ubarapp.com/. Too buggy though.
It does not make a whole lot of sense.
Windows has great window management = less chaos, less orphan open windows Mac OS has inferior window management = chaos, hundreds of open windows
The main reasons stems from the fact that Windows open window discoverability is higher. Open windows are always displayed in the menu bar. MacOS only displays the app icon but provides no information about the open windows except for pressing F3.
I hope that answer makes sense.
This theory makes little sense.
The right click Mac OS solution is the best example. By default, right click on MacOS is deactivated. Even if someone right clicks on an app icon, that person has to click AND process the titles windows instead of seeing a visual preview as on Windows of the window.
That’s why this is all armchair designery about pet issues. You may like the way Windows works, that’s fine. But that doesn’t mean MacOS works ‘terribly’. It’s mostly just different from what you’re used to.
Nobody said that macOS has "terrible UI". Some people expressed that the window management in MacOS is inferior to Windows. I laid out UX reasons why macOS window management is inferior to Windows.
I will not participate in further discussion.
Personally, I leave tons of windows open because I feel no need to keep things "organized". I rarely feel the need to constantly micro manage things that are running because cmd+tab and cmd+` along with mission control/expose/spaces makes it pretty simple to find what I'm looking for. My individual windows go into pretty specific positions and they rarely move, and I also rarely fully close applications.
I've been maximizing the windows for every app on the built-in screen since forever. More recently I've been using Rectangle when my MBP is connected to my new 27" screen. It works quite well but the layouts require a bit of nannying, I guess it's just a matter of me familiarizing myself with the keyboard shortcuts.
For my usage/preferences, the Windows taskbar and alt-tab switcher scale extremely poorly. They drive me to keep no more than 3-4 windows open, because any additional windows beyond that make my desktop progressively more difficult to manage which feels utterly absurd on a tower with a 5950X and 32GB of RAM which I should feel empowered to heavily multitask with.
Keeping the taskbar in its icon only default mode makes it basically like the Mac dock, which isn’t too bad, except that having more than one window open in a program which causes the button to “stack” for each window, then requiring an additional click or an awkward hover-dance to surface one of that program’s windows. If I disable stacking and enable window names, making it like the Win9x taskbar, I get back single click window summoning but the taskbar fills up very quickly and becomes noisy. Either way comes with drawbacks.
Alt-tab scales badly simply because of the sheer number of tab-taps it takes to switch to any given window when you have more than a handful of windows open. Without any logical grouping (like with macOS Command-Tab app grouping), it gets too full too quickly.
Windows also lacks a universal shortcut to cycle through only windows of a single application (Command-` on macOS) which I often miss.
I assume some Chrome product manager is as clumsy as I am (bless their heart), so it will insist you hold down the Q key. If only that was the default.