Hacker News Reader

Comment by doix | Hacker News Reader

Intuitiveness is just what you are used to at this point. If you've been in the Apple ecosystem your whole life, then their UX seems intuitive to you.

If you haven't, then it makes absolutely no sense. I first touched an apple device in my 20's, there was nothing intuitive about it. I couldn't do anything and was extremely frustrated. I'm sure the same applies to apple folks trying gnome/KDE/windows.

People are getting introduced to touch devices from a young age now days. I bet they will find things intuitive based on the devices their parents gave them. It's kind of like religion at this point, did you grow up using Android or iOS? Switching would be a deliberate effort, like not following your families religion (with hopefully significantly less judgement).

View on HN

I don't really agree. The really interesting part of intuitiveness is how it scales once you became familiar with the basic set of UX primitives.

At least from my experience with ~15 years of mac, ~15 years of on-and-off linux and windows, macOS has remained more consistent, because the primitives are much more universal.

Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work. Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries. Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides. Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets. Or looking up words in the built-in dictionary.

The amount of effort the mac team invested to re-use ux interaction modes is really crazy coming from other platforms, and it extends to abstractions such as disk images. One of the things that impressed me the most was how you could clone mac volumes to usb or firewire disks, boot from them, clone volumes to compressed images and restore them - all seamlessly, without messing with disk sizes, sectors, boot records or bioses - and it would just magically work.

Granted, the story is no longer that easy with APFS and M1/M2 macs, but I still think this is a bar that no other operating system has reached.

> I don't really agree. The really interesting part of intuitiveness is how it scales once you became familiar with the basic set of UX primitives.

Is intuitiveness the right word? I make the same arguments about Vim, that it's one of the most logically consistent editors once you learn the basic set of primitives (not perfect of course). But I don't think anyone would call it intuitive.

> Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work.

Why do you need to alt drag? Why can't you just drag? You can drag a lot of stuff in windows and it "just works".

> Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries.

Why does it not show all the options all the time? How are you supposed to know to press alt?

> Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides.

This is pretty universal.

> Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets.

I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens.

The disk image stuff is cool I guess, but I'm guessing it's possible because Apple controls the hardware and software. I'd be pretty pissed off if some tool automagically changed my boot records.

>I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens.

On macOS, there's a concept called "Proxy Icons". These are little icons that are shown in a title bar of a document-based applications (e.g. "[ICON] My File.txt"). You can interact with these icons as if they are an actual file on the disk.

For example, you have "My File.txt" open in TextEdit, and you want to reference them in Terminal, you can just drag the icon into Terminal.app window and it will resolve the full path. Or you're editing the file, but realized you need to make a copy of that file before making changes, you can alt-drag on the icon and copy it elsewhere. Or you're working on a file and want to navigate to the containing directory, you can right click on the proxy icon and it will show the full hierarchy for navigation, etc.

This is something I missed quite a lot when using other OSes.

Things like this actually works in KDE, I can take a file from the file manager and drop it into konsole and it will copy the path.

It's how copy/paste intents are supposed to work, the receiving object or program might want to use the object sent in various ways so you can extract image data or path if it's an image for instance. Konsole just grabs the path from all that is sent to it that is not clear text.

I did try your text file example from kate (text editor), but that didn't work. otoh, kate does provide the path to the file for easy copying right below this icon :)

I can drag the file from kate, however konsole doesn't accept the object. I suspect kate doesn't encode the path in the copy/paste object, perhaps something I should fix.

Drag n drop being something you can actually use and that usually does the thing you'd expect, rather than something you train yourself never to do outside things like moving files around in Explorer or whatever, because it usually breaks things, is one of the things that makes it hard to switch away from macOS once you're used to it. Last time I tried KDE a couple years ago I crashed an app in the first five minutes by trying to drag n drop, and was like "oh yeah, that's why I didn't used to ever try to drag and drop things".

And yet they redesigned preview and hid the damn icon. You can still get the drag thing sometimes, but every time I struggle to find what to drag... is it the title text or just next to it? Sometimes it doesn't work with anything, did I forget where to drag from or does it not work from this file? Who knows, it's very frustrating.

It was very frustrating when they hide the proxy icon behind an obscure modifier key trigger and a delay in Monterey. Thankfully enough complains were made, and they've since added a toggle in Monterey 12.1 to always show proxy icon (Accessibility -> Display -> [ ] Show window title icons).

Terminal equivalent:

    defaults write com.apple.universalaccess showWindowTitlebarIcons -bool TRUE

and to think, they caused all this problems just to make mac app window titles look more similar to ipad apps...

One of the nicer ui elements on sgi's was the drop pocket. a specific identifiable spot where dropping a item would do something, it is a ui feature I wish had been picked up by other toolkits.

The other really nice part about the sgi file explorer were the little buttons above the address bar to quickly go to a specific part of the hierarchy. Windows got this in 7(10 years later) and it works well but is via a hidden state. I am less familiar with mac's finder but I think it can do it, again via hidden state.

https://software.majix.org/irix/screenshots/screen.5.big.jpg

here you can see a drop pocket(the blue folder icon to the left of the address bar) that takes paths. and the very nice irix address bar.

Sounds a lot like drag and drop saving, which as I recall was a feature first introduced in RiscOS. That UI was way ahead of its time.

> Why do you need to alt drag? Why can't you just drag? You can drag a lot of stuff in windows and it "just works".

You can "just drag", but if you alt/option drag you get a copy operation instead of a move operation.

Sure, using option/alt to get a copy isn't "intuitive", but that wasn't the point. The point was to note that the consistency in macOS is such that even less known things like alt dragging has been consistently implemented essentially everywhere.

IMO this consistency and composability is a large part of intuitiveness if nothing else. It does help with a different part of the learning curve than what people often are obsessing about with the word “intuitive” though.

> Is intuitiveness the right word? I make the same arguments about Vim, that it's one of the most logically consistent editors once you learn the basic set of primitives (not perfect of course). But I don't think anyone would call it intuitive.

As far as I know, VI is actually an acronym that stands for Very Intuitive

> At least from my experience with ~15 years of mac, ~15 years of on-and-off linux and windows, macOS has remained more consistent, because the primitives are much more universal.

I'm having a hard time understanding this, even with your examples. It might be possible that I simply haven't figured out the primitives, or an underlying logic to the OS?

In my experience, MacOS is the worst offender (excluding Windows) of inconsistencies. MacOS is filled with UI elements that, as far as I can tell, only appear once. (For example, the green 'status light' when activating SSH, compared to the slider buttons used everywhere else in the OS.)

My experience is roughly ~5 years MacOS (mostly as a child), ~10 years Windows, ~10 years Linux.

In all, it feels like Apple demands a "larger" language one needs to learn, compared to various Linux distros.

I do agree with a lot of this.

What should not be forgotten, however, is how much of the basic UX primitives are being thrown away with the new Catalyst iOS style apps.

I think the key is that macs are optimised for this workflow. As someone who uses the terminal a lot, I often find it difficult to get the information I want from any GUI, compared to piping terminal output through different utilities. After all, if you're talking about consistency, you cannot beat the UNIX philosophy.

However, most people would balk at this workflow. Workflows are just very personal and a reflection of how one thinks. How one thinks is also influenced from what they've used in the past, especially in formative years. Trying to justify why any user interface as unequivocally better than another is an exercise in futility.

I have used/owned the macs at various points in my life. The user interface has remained consistent over the years, but it has poor usability compared to even Gnome due to the accompanying legacy baggage.

Here's an example. Closing all document windows doesn't close the app. This is a design decision from 1984 (at which point we knew far less about the usability of Desktop UIs than we do now) which imho hasn't quite aged well. What's the point of keeping an app open without documents? Most people open docs from the File Manager or Desktop (which might load the app as well if there isn't one already running). And not by going to an inactive app (with a hanging toolbar) and then doing File -> Open.

>Closing all document windows doesn't close the app

I love this about macos. Its consistent: eg, you close documents with cmd+w one by one, until they're all gone. Then you press cmd+n to create a new document. This is consistent and logical. On other OS, cmd/ctrl+w does something different if you're closing the last document.

Another example of the inconsistency it causes is in browsers when you close the last tab and it asks you "closing the browser will cancel the in-progress download, are you sure?" and so you have to keep an arbitrary tab/document open to keep background downloads going.

Also in a practical sense it is useful for slow-starting applications to be running and ready to load a document without needing to keep open a blank document.

The equivalent behaviour on other systems is achieved by MDI applications which are much less elegant IMO. Or for apps that have to keep running but don't have a specific window to show, they implement something similar to mac anyway where the application appears in the system tray.

Familiar != consistent. Mac is app-centric, all other mainstream OS's are window-centric, and they're all internally consistent. If you grew up with one system, the other feels alien and broken.

For example, on MacOS, alt-tab not cycling through the list of windows feels so absurdly broken to me that I don't even bother trying to use that shortcut anymore. Focusing apps that don't even have a visual presence on screen is also a source of heightened frustration.

When keyboard shortcuts that control window/document lifetime sometimes also control app lifetime depending on context, that is an internal inconsistency in the abstraction. Familiarity can help you deal with it just fine, but I don't think I was confusing the two.

“Magic windows” is something that bites me fairly often under Windows/Linux. “Well I’m done with this page, might as well close the browser wi— oh wait that’s right it’s downloading something.”

I wish there were Linux distributions that took an app-centric approach similar to that of macOS. It just gels with my brain better.

I'm the opposite. Just the other day I was trying to find if I could keep an application running without any window on KDE Plasma :-)

I want to keep some applications running so it continue to receive its own thing in the background, but I do not want to accidentally open the window during Alt-Tab, e.g. my email client, my chat application. (On macOS it's still showing up on Cmd+Tab, but selecting the application doesn't activate the window).

I think this design decision still makes sense in 2022. On Windows and Linux, applications can have no window open by installing a background service (ugh) or hide to status bar, but application need to explicitly implement the behavior. On macOS, this is the expected behavior.

You can pretty much do anything to a window in KDE Plasma: you could force it to stay behind, force some arbitrary state or geometry upon it, add a setting that hides it from the apps bar, or even from the alt-tab list - or you could do all of this, it's just a couple clicks away under the window title bar icon, other actions, configure... I'd wager to say you have much more control in KDE than in any other DE, macOS and Windows included.

> On Windows and Linux, applications can have no window open by installing a background service (ugh) or hide to status bar, but application need to explicitly implement the behavior. On macOS, this is the expected behavior.

Yeah, but the number of apps which require this behavior is far less than those which don't. Hence in my view, not a good reason to default to it.

Personally, I found the opposite to be true. Given more and more applications require constantly polling backend server (not only social apps, e.g. a TODO list, note-taking application, a time tracker, etc.) I much more prefer this behavior being the default.

That said, I still like KDE Plasma more than macOS as a desktop. But this and the proxy icons are two things that I missed the most.

> Given more and more applications require constantly polling backend server (not only social apps, e.g. a TODO list, note-taking application, a time tracker, etc.) I much more prefer this behavior being the default.

Why are desktop versions of TODO lists, note-taking applications, and time trackers constantly polling the server in the background? Social apps and web apps I understand.

I personally do not like using web apps and usually try to use desktop version whenever possible. Of these examples:

- Obsidian for note taking. Configured to sync with Obsidian Sync.

- OmniFocus as my personal GTD. Configured to sync with Omni Sync Server, and also sync to my phone (though on Linux I use OmniFocus for Web)

- Clockify (Desktop) for time tracking. Required for work.

Well, on macOS, my note-taking, reminders and calendar apps all sync with my phone and tablet. Having it poll in the background means I don't need to wait for it to sync when I next open it.

Your legacy baggage is my favorite feature. I may not need any documents open for an app right now, but what about 5 minutes later? Why would I wait for photoshop to start up again just because I was doing something else for a bit. It’s called multitasking and there’s a ton of working memory these days to the point of rarely having to check, not like the legacy days you refer to.

> Why would I wait for photoshop to start up again just because I was doing something else for a bit.

This is a part of what I was saying. Apps are cold-starting much faster today than it was back in the days of disk spindles. There are also ways to keep it hot, while not being active.

I am a professional artist who has been working with Adobe's tools since the turn of the century and let me assure you: Adobe's apps always take forever to cold-start. Always.

I recently got an M2 Air and Illustrator loads the fastest it ever has - I'm staring at the splash screen for all of five seconds before it's ready to get to work. Normally it's been more like 20-120 seconds for the past decade. I am quite sure Adobe will find a way to make their apps take several minutes to start up on the M2.

As a consequence, Illustrator cold-starts when I log in; the only time it stops running is if it crashes, or if I need to quit it to update plugins or the app itself. If I go off and do something else for a while it quietly gets swapped to disc by the system; the instant I switch back, it gets swapped into memory, ready to get back to work.

Not closing the app once all windows are closed is not 'legacy baggage', but intentional design. An app can do more things than just display stuff in windows, e.g. playing music, or downloading stuff.

It may be less intuitive that apps can run with few or no visual indicators.

I actually switched to an iphone around 2.5 years ago since teams wouldn't run properly on my old android and the offerings from my company instead of iphone (huawei and samsung) didn't really appeal to me.

Now 2.5 years later I switched back due to not being able to make friends with the apple UI despite trying for that long. It feels so constrained and inconsistent to me.

The pixel phone I got now is a dream in comparison. The keyboard just works, sharing between apps just works. Keepass didn't really integrate with ios, in android I can select it as my own "autofill provider". I can have firefox with ublock. The

Switching either way was not really a pain for me as I never go all in on something so I just had to find app replacement.

As a note to the article itself, I also run KDE on arch linux on both my work and private computers and since it matured from the 4.0 transition mess it has just been great I think. Having used linux as my desktop os since ~94-95 I am just a huge question mark when someone puts me down in front of mac os!

For context: I'd been a "linux person" since undergrad (mid-90s). I picked up a really early Android model after my BlackBerry expired.

I have almost the exact opposite experience as you describe: I switched from Android to iPhone a couple of years ago for two reasons: 1) my Google phones (I had a pixel at the time: previously had written it was a Nexus, but it was not) kept bricking; 2) I got an old model iPhone (it was an iPhone 8) to use as my work phone.

The iPhone 8 performed better and had a much better UX than my then-current Nexus. It just wasn't even a fair comparison, really. I upgraded my personal device to the latest iPhone and haven't looked back. I haven't even touched an Android phone since then, and unless something really compelling happens to force it I probably never will again.

Same thing with my laptop, actually: around the same time I decided to give a macbook a go. I haven't regretted it at all.

Apple fits a lot of people, just not me :)

I think for me the major issue is that I don't like any of the default options in the iphone and the 3rd party keyboards kept bugging out, even swiftkey and gboard would act really weird. Also the undocumented gestures drove me nuts.

And not being able to just have a normal browser with proper ad block and simple things like that.

Similar here, learned on DOS and Windows (3.1-98se) then used desktop Linux alongside Windows for about a decade, and when I eventually got a smartphone started on Android (because it was cheaper) before finally getting significant experience with iOS and OSX because I started working at a mobile dev shop (dual-platform, not just iOS). Once I got used to OSX/macOS (took maybe six months) I wondered WTF I'd been doing with my life, and seeing tons of Android and iOS devices side-by-side every day, and working on apps for both, made it really clear to me which was better and what I ought to be using, and it wasn't even close.

I've got complaints about Apple and they make mis-steps all the time—and I'm really worried about their getting into ads more heavily—but everyone else doesn't even seem to be trying to compete with what they're doing, so there's no real alternative.

I am glad that you are content with iPhone, and that it works for you. - It's what really matters. But I just want to point out that the latest nexus phone is from 2015 and iPhone 8 was released in 2017.

You're right: it was the next line after Nexus, Pixel, that I had. I edited my original comment.

FWIW, fellow Android->iPhone escapee here. I am not planning to get an Android phone for a while, unless iOS becomes much worse or Android much better.

> Keepass didn't really integrate with ios, in android I can select it as my own "autofill provider"

I've been using an iPhone for almost exactly 2 years now and I didn't realized until like a month ago that you can change the default password manager. Unless Keepass just didn't tap into the API (which would surprise me), but Enpass works like a charm and I felt like an idiot for manually going into the app and copy-pasting this whole time.

Settings > Passwords > Password Options

And then set "allow filling from" to your password manager

Even if you don’t change the default manager, third party managers automatically appear as options for auto filling password fields.

I’m thinking that whichever keepass client OP was using (there are multiple on the App Store) didn’t actually take advantage of the password API.

Which ties into why I haven’t been able to switch to keepass: client quality is all over the place and even if you find one you like, there’s no telling when it’s going to go dark and if you’re lucky get forked.

On the pixel phone "it just works" with keepass.

But yeah I didn't know about that option either in iOS after 2.5 years.. It says something about the UI I think.

I don't know. My password manager just told me to change the option there and it was never an issue. They have to put the setting somewhere. Alternatively a password manager could register itself with the OS, but that has a certain security risk (even with a dialog, which we just tend to dismiss).

> The keyboard just works, sharing between apps just works. Keepass didn't really integrate with ios, in android I can select it as my own "autofill provider". I can have firefox with ublock.

Password managers work without any issues, I'm using Bitwarden happily.

Sharing between the apps is also a thing? I'm not sure what exactly do you mean but I have zero issues navigating, copying stuff between the apps, the only issue is with Google Photos when you remove them from local storage, as sharing in iOS won't detect those unless you manually download them again or share from within Google Photos. Learned to live with that.

I agree with lack of uBlock for Firefox, though new Safari has 'mods' and Hyperweb helps.

Keyboard is something I genuinely don't understand. How a company the size of Apple can make such a shit keyboard app is beyond me. It's nearly impossible to use if you speak two languages, their dictionaries are terrible and general feel is generally lackluster. I switched to GBoard which I like, even though Google doesn't care enough to fix few bugs and clear performance issues in it.

It's funny you call iOS UI inconsistent while most iOS apps are way better designed, actually adhere to styling guidelines and are much more intuitive to use once you get used to iOS gestures and behaviours. Unlike Android where it's literally wild west and Material Design changes so quickly that no sane developer is able to keep up with new 'redesigns'.

I switched from Android over a year ago as an ex-fanboy(I also worked as an Android Developer for a while) and I would never come back. Amount of shit that constantly goes wrong in Android ecosystem is baffling, while Google got ahold of permission system, insane battery degradation is still my main issue. Even though I loved my S9, barely a year in it wouldn't even hold a day on a single charge. Even after battery replacement, it just barely did. Android is so poorly optimized that background services can do practically anything they want. People learned how to work around Doze years ago, hell, I made commercial products that did exactly that. Apple's politic regarding background use is way more pro-user. The same thing happens to every Android phone I ever had, it works great for a year, then battery and overall performance goes to hell slowly over the next year, until it's just annoying to use. I actually considered buying a Pixel device but Google is clearly too small of a company to offer their products in more than few countries and the amount of issues on release made me go with Apple. I'll pay premium if the thing just works and does what I want it to.

> If you haven't, then it makes absolutely no sense.

In the Lion era I was issued a Mac as a work laptop on a contract. Plugged into an external monitor, and that worked fine. Maximised one screen and... the other one displayed only the brushed metal background. Because, obviously, intuitively, you would only be able to have one maximised app at a time, right? Right?

For a Linux (by choice) and Windows (under duress) user who'd totally bought the "Macs have better usability" myth before that it was astounding.

My father had a lot of trouble getting used to his Android phone (he came to smart phones late) despite a highly technical background, just because a lot of stuff wasn't obviously something you could tap on. He did get used to it, but it was a slog for him to figure out. The death of skeuomorphism was a tragedy and I hope it comes back.

Personally I also miss proper manuals. There's so much software I use where googling around for someone who was trying to solve the same task is a more productive solution than reading the meagre documentation.

Lion was a bit of a stinker in that regard, prior to that there was no “full screen” applications in that more traditional sense, only borderless full screen for video and games - anything else used “smart maximise” where the window size would increase to fit the content (again a bit of a poor choice, but that’s my personal opinion)

That makes sense in context - but I think it reinforces the parent's point; if you don't arrive with that context it's just plain weird!

Older mac applications used to have the running state of an application utterly divorced from the windows the application presents.

This has fallen away with time now, which saddens me.

MacOS is interesting in that I know regular users who have used it for over a decade who still don’t grasp some of its basics.

For example, the post actually makes a mistake when mentioning macOS doesn’t have Alt+TAB window switching. It does. You just have to do Alt+’. That being said, even though the OP is wrong, there’s a massive kernel of truth in that the majority of ordinary Mac users are unaware of this.

Another one is that many regular users cannot distinguish between closing all windows and closing the app. See a regular users desktop and you will often see open but unused apps sitting in their dock because they closed all the windows and didn’t realize they had to do something different to close the app as well.

And to add to the point, Alt+’ is not the same as alt+tab, which will switch between all the available windows while the former will only switch between the windows on the current selected application. And it’s also even worse, because Alt+’ as a natural partner of alt+tab won’t even work if you use a different keyboard layout; and it won’t even work if you set an application on a workspace.

The keyboard layout issue is very real!

If you do have a regular layout, the 2 ALTs are indeed supposed to work together.

I remember when I first used a Mac in like 2004 I thought this was fantastic. That’s because at the time Windows (or at least the machine I had windows on), was incapable of rendering individual windows when Alt+Tabbing… So you’d Alt+Tab and try and distinguish between the window you wanted by the name or just plain luck.

However, computers ar better now and are capable of showing little images of the windows in Alt+Tab. The MacOS style is strictly inferior at this point IMO.

> For example, the post actually makes a mistake when mentioning macOS doesn’t have Alt+TAB window switching. It does. You just have to do Alt+’.

Alt-Grave is not Alt-Tab. Alt-Grave only cycles between windows for a particular app. Standard Alt-Tab behavior should cycle through all possible windows. Apple copied the behavior incorrectly.

> MacOS is interesting in that I know regular users who have used it for over a decade who still don’t grasp some of its basics.

This is true for every OS. Go observe non-tech office workers using Windows some time. I'm not certain things like hierarchical FS layouts (you know, the way every halfway-common filesystem and file browser works, and has approximately since desktop computers started existing) are really understood by a majority of people who've been using computers for a decade or more, let alone deeper concepts.

Like, lots of absolute useful option are hidden by default unless you hold [option]? It always both me that why mac ever want to make the [move] option be in the hidden menu at first place. Isn't move/copy 90% of the reason user ever want to open finder?

Windows surely also have lots of hidden function. By I never see it hide something that is so critical to a hidden menu or something similar.

and the thing is, the alt-tab is not even really a native idea for macs - Exposé is the way to switch windows (which, for me is the 4 finger swipe up on the touch pad - but some people can choose to use hot corner on the screen, or the dedicated hardware button).

Plasma has a feature like Exposé/Mission Control as well, but it's much better in one crucial way: it does fuzzy filtering as you type.

Besides directly summoning windows with hotkeys I've assigned, it's pretty much the only way I ever switch windows on Plasma.

There's a mix, I think. Some of it is what you are used to, and some things just plain make more sense to humans.

I remember when I first came to macOS from Windows (around 2003), these were the things that made me wonder why they were ever done any other way:

- Volumes simply had names! No "C:/" drive or "D:/" drive. Just "Macintosh HD" or whatever name the mounted volume was given. I felt the names were more intuitive than arbitrary "drive letters"

- Installing an app: drag it into /Applications. Uninstalling, delete it from /Applications. Felt way more intuitive than Windows

- File organisation felt more sensible. There was /Library for all my system files, and then ~/Library for all my user level system files. Each one had the same directories, it was really easy to understand

- Not having to install drivers

- Every app appeared to have the same shortcuts and the same common menu items. Preferences was always Cmd+, or App Name -> Preferences... in the menu.

- Drag and drop appeared to work everywhere. The OS clearly indicated via the icon being dragged, previewed things, in a way that Windows never did

- My Mac laptops went to sleep when closing the lid. And woke up instantly when opening the lid. I don't know if you remember Windows laptops in the 2000s and even the 2010s, but they did not sleep consistently, wake up consistently, they would crash, etc.

These were a few of the things I found more intuitive on Mac. There were other things I liked better (but weren't necessarily more intuitive)

Absolutely this. UIs have been "good enough" for a very long time now. There were some minor breakthroughs/inventions along the way, but half of them were probably just responses to shifting usage patterns. You build up muscle memory and you're set.

One example that comes to mind is more powerful/prominent search features. In the 90s, as a home user, you had a folder with some documents and in total, the number of installed games plus apps was probably around a dozen. So it was ok that on Windows, searching for files was hidden in a sub-menu and rather slow. Today, you have a bazillion tools and apps, games, documents from 30 years of migrating to a new system, backups, so you make search faster to access.

People value consistency and gradual development, not failed, half-baked overhauls like the Windows 8 debacle. And obviously that stuff actually works. Which is continuing to be a big downside of KDE or Linux in general. Too many components working together, maintained by different teams and ever-changing. It's basically up to the Distros to find the perfect combination of library and software versions to get a good experience.

I don't agree. I have an Android, and when I go to a product page on the app store, there is this huge "install" button clearly in a different color. Very good UX.

I remember receiving a company iPhone years ago. I went to an app store product page, and couldn't find any install button. Totally confused I looked for some menu options or whatever. Turned out you had to click the "free" text behind the app title. Not a button at all, not clear at all. That is just bad UX.

To expand on this, when you click that install button, you get a progress bar and a notification with that progress, so you can know what's happening and where it's at.

Just got an iPad through work, and i tried to install an app - there was just a loading circle animation, without any context or information. Guess what, it didn't work (but of course it wouldn't say it isn't working, it just kept spinning for tens of minutes), i had to set up a payment method first (for a free app, Obsidian, that supports payments for extra features). What the hell? Why no error message? Why no actual status instead of a useless animation?

Similarly, on macOS, the scroll direction cannot be changed between mouse and trackpad. There is a parameter in both menus, but they switch each other.

Yes, that is terrible UX.

> Similarly, on macOS, the scroll direction cannot be changed between mouse and trackpad.

Ha that's funny, because I'm also struggling with that one!

The general idea that Apple is good at UX is very wrong.

Probably iOS 7 or shortly after. They murdered what had been hands-down the best UI for non-nerds of any OS I've ever seen, with that version. Lots of "buttons" that were just text and other terrible flat-UI garbage. They undid some of that since, but it's still not back to being as good as 6 was.

> Intuitiveness is just what you are used to at this point.

No, it is not. The word "intuitive" is defined by Merriam-Webster as "readily learned or understood" and "knowable by intuition". If the UI is not one of these things, then it is not "intuitive" in the general sense of the word.

I think their point is that what is readily learned or understood (and one's own intuition) are both informed by what they're already used to.

So many of us are used to the UI of one or more ecosystems that you're going to report on the subjective intuitiveness of any UI based on what we're already used to.

For all intents and purposes intuition is subjective and so is "intuitive".

There's value in building things that are "intuitive" to people who are used to existing UIs/systems _even if those existing UIs are bad_. There is also value (harder earned, for sure) in ignoring those existing patterns and bringing something truly better to the table...but you'll have people CORRECTLY pointing out that it's counter intuitive along the way.

there are few intuitive things other than a mother breast.

Take doors handles or light switches. Must be learned.

I disagree. Both of those are relatively simple mechanisms with one, perhaps two degrees of motion, and provide immediate feedback when operated successfully. Take an alien who’s never been to Earth and give them ten minutes to master each of those, and they’ll be able to.

Counterpoint, a not tech friend of mine, switched to a macbook air M1 from Wintel, she's loving MacOS and keynote, couldn't be happier. Was pretty intuitive for her.

That's a bit silly. I was a Linux user from 1996 to 2015ish, then went to use macbooks almost exclusively. Apple's UI immediately made sense, even if it was remains tad unoptimal for serious use, when comparing to UX masterpieces like i3 and sway.

KDE has always been bit of an awkward horror, and I've given it a shot now and then for their whole existence. The latest incarnation, Plasma, is quite a lot better than it used to be, granted.

The reason KDE looks horrible to you is probably due to the history you use computer. KDE is just 90% similar to the logic you use windows. The system tray area, task bar, start button works just like the way you expect in windows.

It probably has the least resistance to use if you are a windows user that try the linux desktop the first time.

I recall Snow Leopard was quite intuitive after Windows, and iPhone 4. Definitely not what MacOS and iOS have become.

The most intuitive UI that I have ever used is Intuition on the Amiga. It's in the name, after all

Another hard disagree here.

My daily driver personal laptop is a macbook, it's the best machine I've ever owned & my next laptop will most likely be a macbook. My work machine is also a macbook.

But they are not intuitive nor highly "usable". After many years going through various osx/macOS transitions, it's an OS with objectively bad ux in many ways.

That's not to say it's bad software. Apart from the hardware of my personal laptop being great, I also like the OS for a few reasons. UX has multiple components outside of intuitiveness & ease of use:

1. reliability. Things work. It has its bugs but generally speaking the utility functions within the OS work well much much more frequently than windows or linux. Peripherals work. Suspend/sleep/hibernate work. Wifi works. Bluetooth works. Everything works. Without fiddling.

2. Builtin apps are sensibly functional & comprehensive. Disk tools have been built-in & better than Windows forever (even Linux usually has none unless you install gparted). Preview supports pdf editing & annotation (& saved signatures!) - these are things that literally every person needs at some point & I'm not even aware of any windows/linux apps that do these other than paid Adobe Acrobat. That's absurd. Screenshot/image preview support better image annotation than Windows (& still trying multiple linux utilities for this that don't have any annotation at all). Very basic day-to-day shit like this has actually been priorities and covered.

3. Unix-y stuff is good enough. I'm a linux guy so this is still a bit of a step down but it's actually fine. Anything that takes place in a terminal is very comparable to linux (& the builtin emulator is a lot better than what comes bundled with many linux DEs).

But. Everything about the macOS desktop experience is terribly unintuitive and bad. Maximising doesn't work (not configurable, ctrl-click remains hassle forever). Multiple windows within one app is badly supported. Finder window closing behaves different to everything - alt-tabbing to it rarely brings anything to the fore. It took them years to add a way to manually lock your screen without a hot corner.

All of these things are bad for both experienced users & new. There's no trade-off: you don't get some hidden benefit by learning to work around these difficulties. They remain bad.

TL;DR: People use macOS for good logical reasons, despite its objectively bad usability.

Just wait until your very expensive laptop no longer receives OS updates.

Not because it cant run them, but because apple doesn't want you using that machine anymore.

Legacy opencore patcher is proof that these machines can run the OS but the installer blocks it.

For frame of reference, I moved from using linux exclusively to MacOS around 2 years ago. I'd avoid buying real mac hardware over this because it is expensive planned obsolescence. I have a laptop running Ubuntu which is like 8 years old and still runs the most recent version just fine. How long will your mac continue to receive updates?

PS - Question for you. Why are there so many threads on the net on how to install linux on a macbook?

I'm not sure if you're making some assumptions about me being an Apple fan or something, but my comment was critical of macOS (specifically usability is bad): I didn't make any points about software lifecycle support (neither in favour nor against).

> PS - Question for you. Why are there so many threads on the net on how to install linux on a macbook?

There really aren't relatively speaking. Asahi is a fantastic achievement but most mac users use macOS. For better or for worse. Fwiw I've run Linux on an ancient macbook pro in the past (which was past supporting osx/macos): it worked great.

"Everything works" :D

Yeah, try to use an external non-Apple mouse with your macbook - your mouse will scroll in the opposite direction - changing it in setting will reverse the direction of your touchpad. Additional buttons will also not work.

or try to connect an android phone to your macbook via USB-C. You will not be able to access the file system to copy files or do anything else.

Printing doesn't work, unless you use Airprint... which will require you do disconnect from internet...

Half of Apple devices use USB-C and half of them - obsolete Lightning cable...

Many people have issues with Airpods connecting to the closed macbook.

and I don't even talk about Docker working 20x times slower than on windows and 100x slower than on Linux.

> try to use an external non-Apple mouse with your macbook - your mouse will scroll in the opposite direction

I use a Logitech mouse with my macbooks. Natural scrolling is available in Windows & Linux these days (as it's a user preference many have grown to prefer of late, on all platforms). I also use a Magic Touchpad 2 with a Linux machine & changing natural scrolling settings there will also affect both mouse & touchpad equally, so not sure which of this is specifically a mac problem? This is an odd complaint - scrolling on macbook touchpads presumably works in reverse to your own non-mac machine but you don't seem to have noticed?

> Additional buttons will also not work.

wfm ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

have had more issues on Linux here: all the many ways to get them to work do work fine I think, they're just a lot of fiddling. Piper's a cool project but doesn't seem to support many models in practice, GHub installation is patchy, which leaves fiddling with XOrg/xmodmap... if you're not on Wayland...

> connect an android phone to your macbook via USB-C

I've done this a lot to use adb, but haven't had a lot of need to copy files directly, so haven't noticed this issue. Does it just not show in Finder as a device or is it some deeper issue? Is it related to the USB connection mode in Android's settings?

> Printing doesn't work

wfm ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Never used AirPrint. Dunno what that is.

> obsolete Lightning cable...

True. This is awful. As are all of Apple's (many) hw lock-in practices.

> don't even talk about Docker working 20x times slower

Entirely a docker problem.

---

I'm contradicting a lot of your points but generally Apple are terrible in many ways. No disagreement there (and as I said one of them is usability). It's a trade-off though & in my experience (& I hear most people's) one of the things they do get right more often than others are things "just working". Windows actually used to be better at this I feel (did I imagine this?), but maybe regressed.

Small quality of life things like builtin pdf & image preview with annotations and signatures, a readily available pop-up dictionary, smooth gestures, built-in screen recording, quick preview for all types of files when you click the spacebar, sharing files quickly via airdrop, a good email reader, not to mention the whole creative suite and so on. Folks using windows and linux just don't know what they don't know, they don't miss it because they've never experienced it. They miss clipboard managers and windows snapping ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

>Multiple windows within one app is badly supported. Finder window closing behaves different to everything - alt-tabbing to it rarely brings anything to the fore.

How so? Finder seems to behave the same way as other multi-window apps, if you cmd-tab to it and a window is open, it will appear, and if there isn't the app will focus and you can press cmd-t to open a new window. This is consistent and in line with how macos deals with apps vs windows/documents in every app.

> How so?

Finder behaviour is technically consistent, all things being equal, but it's inconsistent in practice as a knock-on effect of other limitations: the root of this is the (inability) to quit Finder*. If you never quit any apps you ever use, you could probably get consistent behaviour across them, but broadly speaking if you do quit apps you're not using, opening those apps will tend to bring up a new window. Since Finder can't be quit, "opening" it afresh constitutes switching to it in its windowless state. Technically consistent (same as switching to any windowless app) but inconsistent in practice (switching to any other app you have quit will bring a window to the fore).

I suspect this is one of those engineers-vs-ux things where engineers will close this as "works as intented" without considering that the "way it's supposed to be used" isn't necessarily a good model for actual user behaviour. The other potential excuse is "but Desktop icons", which is just rooted in the leaky abstraction of devs tending to DRY-ify desktop rendering by hard-linking it to the app that provides file mgmt. windows.

*: You can work around this with the `com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem` setting at the cost of Desktop icons, but we're talking default settings here.

Are you sure the inconsistency isn't because you have QuitMenuItem set? With it unset like default, Finder will launch a new window in the foreground when it's run from eg. Spotlight, even if it has no windows open, which is consistent with other apps. The only difference is that you can't actually close it. When QuitMenuItem is set to true and you actually quit Finder, that's when starting it won't open a window.

> Are you sure the inconsistency isn't because you have QuitMenuItem set?

I don't have it set - it's got drawbacks (aforementioned Desktop icons) but mostly I prefer to run with defaults so I'm less annoyed at fresh installs :)

> Peripherals work. Suspend/sleep/hibernate work

Counterpoint: no it doesn't. My work MBP cannot sleep (even if i click on Apple -> Sleep), and my Sony headset always connects to it even if it's in my backpack supposedly sleeping.

> Builtin apps are sensibly functional & comprehensive

Yes, with builtin features such as saving in a different, proprietary format. Open a .doc(x) in Pages, Save it and you get a .pages document instead of the original being updated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com