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> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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".

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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'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.

> 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.

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.