If only the usability was as good as the visual design...
Like one of the screenshots has in the title bar a looking glass, three tabs, a check mark in a circle, a hamburger, and the close button. What am I even looking at?
A 2-D array of lit pixels. Any other interpretation is on you!
But Microsoft never got the memo.
Not only that but Fitt's law is dying as mice become less and less used as a means to interact with a device. Touchpads and touchscreens have usurped them.
And I do not get what a global menu bar has to do with window switching and monitor switching. Tiling WM fans all know that focus-follows-mouse is saner than alt-tabbing like a maniac, and this doesn't invalidate the role of a global menu-bar.
I miss notifications on my work computer all the time because the flash color just doesn't stand out very much with my dark theme, and I can't even expand the width because...well it feels like they released an unfinished and unpolished product, again.
I hate that there's trade-offs that shouldn't need to exist with every new version.
Meanwhile my mac I don't think has ever lost functionality or customizability in the last..8ish years I've been using it as my daily driver.
edit: caveat...this is a work computer and obviously has group policies/etc that might affect things. I will correct this post if I'm wrong :)
Except that's not what Windows does. Just about every app has a different place where you can find the menu (if there is one). Looking at a couple Microsoft apps on Windows 11:
- File Explorer: menu in an ellipsis in the toolbar; toolbar is left aligned so the ellipsis menu is in the middle of the window for a reasonably wide window.
- Edge: menu in an ellipsis to the right of the address bar.
- Windows Terminal: menu in a tiny down-facing caret next to the new tab button.
- regedit: Old-style menu under the title bar.
- Office: you know the ribbons.
There is a genuine tradeoff here. Global menu bars are easier targets and waste less space. Per-window menu bars are more clearly bound to their window. Neither approach is better on all counts.
(I’m not really the target market for any of these things, to be clear, gimme the screen space back and don’t make me touch the mouse).
To make matters worse, I have progressive lenses and the "sweet spot" for the text to be in focus within my field of view is relatively narrow. So not only would I have to move my mouse quite a bit if I had a global menu, I have to move my head quite a bit as well.
I think Fitt's Law is something like Moore's Law: both couldn't be counted on to go on indefinitely.
Fortunately for me, I use KDE and could switch between the two if I wanted.
There are extensions to add one to GNOME and XFCE, and KDE has it as a built in option, which is great. Problem is, this feature relies on programs advertising their menus via dbus, and a lot of them don’t bother at all, meaning that it’s sitting up there blank half the time. The only reason that this is even possible is because the desktop paradigm moved menus into the space of the app UI, which I think is a mistake. Menus are such an important accessibility feature that even if they’re glued to windows, it should be a standardized system owned widget so overzealous IKEA-minded designers can’t screw with them.
This is very frustrating to me because with hamburger menus and window attached menus I feel like I’m chasing a frequently used widget around the screen.
Menu bars are terrible! Visually navigating a tree structure via mousing is a nightmare, especially if the whole thing disappears or radically shifts if you mouse a few pixels off. Visually scanning huge, variable chunks of the screen is inefficient, awkward, and a burden.
Everything that you can do with those nasty, collapsible visual hierarchies can be done way more efficiently and way more accessibly via a nice search interface with fuzzy filtering and autocompletion.
When it's actually fast and unencumbered by bullshit like advertisements, something like Spotlight or the modern Windows start search is infinitely better than crap like the Windows 9x start menu.
If you've ever coached someone through navigating a graphical, hierarchical menu they've never seen before, you know how painfully slow all that mental processing actually is. Even a hunt and peck typist will be faster in most cases, as all they have to type is at most a handful of letters. Menu bars suck in the exact same way, and they ought to be either eliminated or replaced in the same way as ye olde start menu, too.
EDIT: I think the best option is taking the golden middle road and having a menu bar which can be searched through, kind of like Unity has.
Yes! I've been a KDE person since like KDE 3.4, but I gave Unity a chance in its heyday and I absolutely loved it for that feature.
Discoverability with a search interface can be improved by adding a visual representation of search categories or common search terms, and an old-school hierarchical menu can do just fine for that. (I think a different kind of menu might be better for discovery, though. You could do a more search/filtering-oriented descent of the same hierarchy, and enrich the menu entries being filtered with documentation and previews.)
Discoverability of search interfaces can also be improved with by tagging things with synonyms and descriptions, so that users can search by task instead of the app's canonical names for functions.
Edit: this is something that can be fixed but it requires well funded attention and there just isn’t that because the commercial opportunity is entirely on the server.
I mean I'm sitting there earlier having a shit and I shout at my watch to add some more toilet paper to the shopping list. This is now on all my devices including the one I take shopping. If this was on Linux I'd have to crawl back to my desktop, write it on that, then export it when I went shopping. Everything is just that much more difficult and disjointed.
The whole experience leaves me somewhere around 2008. I can't find any real advantages over my gnome2 desktop in 2008. It stopped being usable then for me.
Linux has become what its good at, which is a container target and server platform. As a desktop it hasn't even caught up with the 2010's yet...
I genuinely think they're better suited to it.
Linux on the desktop failed to retain me because of feature stagnation (and reliability issues which are quite frankly not there on other platforms)
They were kind of half-close to the Linux servers I work with, but I needed to use homebrew to make them useable. Why can't Apple get a decent cli environment going?
The GUI stuff just pissed me off. I want to arrange some windows the way I want. I don't actually like tiling window managers, but after using macos I thought it was possibly the only way to make it properly useful.
Keyboards: well, everyone knows about how they fucked that up. The new ones are much better. I like the Mx hardware and when Asahi is fully up to speed, my next personal laptop might well be one of those.
I have no issues with macOS UI as such. It takes about 6-9 months to get used to it though coming from anything else. When you get there it actually makes sense. I've seen a lot of Windows converts expect everything to be windows-like but it's more NextSTEP than windows.