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Comment by thinkpad13 | Hacker News Reader

Any other example why the both said its restrictive instead of its not open source?

What linux can do but osx can? Because I always thought osx can do whatever linux do because its unix based

If you work within standard POSIX, sure. But there are many things that are not POSIX that are useful and not available on macOS:

- systemd has some inspiration from launchd, but certainly not its documentation strategy - `du` doesn't have a `-b` flag (repeat for oodles of useful GNU flags baked into my fingers) - getting a "pristine" environment on macOS is a true PITA and a horror for CI (containers win massively here) - some things are only available through the UI (e.g., TCC.db edits are SIP-locked to when Preferences deigns to ask you) - useful window management (macOS is quite a bit behind even Windows' rudimentary tiling and focus management and even Windows has all kinds of sad quirks compared to what XMonad and Awesome provide)

Can I switch to a different window manager, because I really don't like the default in macos - specifically a tiling WM.

There are tools like Magnet and such that help. Window management is maybe the worst part of macOS and it’s worse after each release of macOS.

It's been my biggest frustration with macOS over the years. I've never understood why Apple has never done anything about it. Talked to an Apple engineer once and brought this up and he said that macOS has always been Steve Jobs Opinionated on where window placement should be and what the optimal size should be instead of letting the user decide.

I think there's something called 'Yabai'.

EDIT: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

There is no real window manager on macOS, only hacks that fall apart very soon.

https://rectangleapp.com/ works really well with OSX. Does everything wayland and others on linux in OSX and performs really well.

Wayland is not a WM. https://wayland.freedesktop.org Wayland is the thing "underneath" a Window Manager. For example you can run KDE on top of X or Wayland. There are a few blurry boundaries in all this but that largely covers it.

No it doesn't. Wayland is the window server. [DWM](https://dwm.suckless.org) allows new windows to automatically be tiled when created. It also allows you also to change the way the tiling occurs when new windows are opened.

My new windows used to split an ever smaller portion of my screen in a fibonacci spiral based layout. I could also move between windows with hotkeys.

Rectangle is useful in a pinch, but it's no tiling window manager.

I've been using Amethyst for a few years now. It's not exactly a separate WM in terms of changing the window decorations, but it's more of a kind of an automation layer that works through the Accessibility access layer of MacOS. I've been relatively happy with it. The only bad thing is that because the Command key is used for so much in MacOS, it tends to need to be chorded with multiple modifier keys to ensure that there aren't keyboard shortcut clashes.

https://ianyh.com/amethyst/

I've been issued a Mac Laptop for work, and for the first 2 months by far the #1 issue for me was the alt-tabbing (edit: always been a Linux/Windows user).

I've been successfully using Witch to restore normal window-tabbing (in place of application-tabbing): https://manytricks.com/witch/

Unfortunately after MacOS ~Vista~ Catalina you still need to grant Witch permissions for each application you're alt-tabbing to that Witch hasn't seen yet, but considering I use ~6 apps 99% of the time, this works for me.

To get simple window tiling/placement, I found BetterSnapTool to be sufficient for my needs: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580?mt=...

It handles magnetic corners and placement via hotkey. I mostly work with a dock and external keyboard, so I bound CMD+SHIFT with numeric keypad buttons to reflect the placement (e.g: CMD+SHIFT+NumKey7 -> put the window in the top-left corner). I don't miss the hotkeys when I'm without dock because anyway the screen would be too small, so I resort to just alt-tabbing.

> Any other example why the both said its restrictive

MacOS cannot run Docker containers natively, if you are a developer today that is a pretty big annoyance. The solution basically being to run Linux on MacOS.

You can't disable mission control, which I've only ever activated by accident. Same with fullscreening applications. I'm sure there are various other features that I'd like to disable but I simply cannot because the operating system doesn't make it possible. Generally though despite the occasional frustration I find the OS pleasant to work with.

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