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I’ve been using macOS in a multimonitor setup for years without much issue. A good bit of it boils down to macOS expecting monitors to be well-behaved, e.g. each having unique EDIDs (many don’t, instead sharing one across all units of a particular model) and initializing in a timely fashion.

> Why can't I move a window to a monitor/workspace that has a maximized window?

Because it’s fullscreened, not maximized. macOS doesn’t really have window maximization in the traditional sense out of the box, you need a utility like Magnet or Moom for that.

That fullscreen mode was introduced in 10.7 Lion and a lot of long time mac users have found it silly from day one. Personally I never use it.

> Text cursor/caret randomly disappears when editing text, so you can't see where the cursor is, and you can't fix this unless you restart the app (happens to pretty much all apps).

I’ve seen this, but only in Chromium browsers and Electron apps. Seems like it might be a Blink bug.

Regarding other OSes, multimonitor on Linux is mostly fine (so long as you’re using Wayland; X11 is another matter especially if you’re doing something slightly uncommon like using two GPUs, in which case xorg.conf mucking will likely be necessary).

By far the most frustration I’ve had with multimonitor is in Windows, which is generally weak there. IIRC it only recently gained the ability to set per-display wallpaper; before you had to glue wallpapers together into a single image that spanned across them, which is silly.

Interesting - it's one of the killer features of macos for me.

I use it to compartmentalize stuff I'm working on, and 4 finger swipe between them.

I have a couple instances of VSCode, some app/debugging browser windows, some chrome profile windows etc... all running full screen and I spend my day brush swiping between them.

It may be different for me because I work on a 14" macbook pro, mostly at coffee shops or unusual work locations, so I don't have a large monitor setup. I don't think I'd use it much if I had more of a traditional desk/multimonitor config.

But you can have workspaces/maximized windows without having the restriction of preventing moving windows to another monitor/workspace that has a maximized window.

I use workspaces on my linux laptops all the time - this 'feature' has existed for ~20 years, and is not hard to implement. The difference being that macos seems to force the restriction of having only 1 window per workspace and not being able to drag a window from one workspace to another. If that's the behaviour you want (one window per workspace), you can easily operate in this way without having the forced restriction.

You can have multiple monitors and multiple workspaces with multiple windows that can be freely moved between monitors and spaces. The only restriction is that when you make a window full screen (not the same as maximizing), it becomes its own new single-occupancy space. You seem to think that making a window fullscreen is the only way to make a new space, but it's just a special case of a larger system that already has the functionality you're asking for.

You're one of the few. Most "pro"-users I know immediately go for 3rd party applications like Rectangle do have a better window-management setup. I never understood how Apple thinks this kind of window management is still OK. It's one of those stupid little Apple quirks like not adding calculator on iOS for so long.

I could definitely see it being more useful on a small screen, especially something like the 12” Macbook.

Generally I’m working at my desk with at least 2x 27” displays. If I’m out somewhere it’s instead 16” MBP + 12.9” iPad with Sidecar.

> A good bit of boils down to macOS expecting monitors to be well-behaved, e.g. each having unique EDIDs (many don’t, instead sharing one across all units of a particular model) and initializing in a timely fashion.

I don't really buy this explanation. I'm talking about using a single external monitor here, a monitor which I regularly also use with linux (intel/amd) laptops without a single issue.

> Because it’s fullscreened, not maximized. macOS doesn’t really have window maximization in the traditional sense out of the box, you need a utility like Magnet or Moom for that.

That's not really a good reason though. It still doesn't explain why the restriction exists. Why can't a non-maximized/fullscreen window be displayed on top of a fullscreen/maximized window? What problem does that solve?

> That fullscreen mode was introduced in 10.7 Lion and a lot of long time mac users have found it silly from day one. Personally I never use it.

It's default though.

> I don't really buy this explanation. I'm talking about using a single external monitor here, a monitor which I regularly also use with linux (intel/amd) laptops without a single issue.

Might be model-specific then. It’s not something I’ve seen with displays from Asus, Alienware, and Apple. I briefly owned a Dell monitor that would periodically flicker but it got returned.

> That's not really a good reason though. It still doesn't explain why the restriction exists. Why can't a non-maximized/fullscreen window be displayed on top of a fullscreen/maximized window? What problem does that solve?

Probably because it’d be easy for windows to get “lost” if the fullscreen window were focused and non-fullscreened windows fell behind it, with there being no obvious indicator that those windows exist.

In my experience, MacOS monitor support is very hit or miss. For an Asus Gaming monitor, I had to write a custom plist file to get it to even show a picture and getting it to run at native resolution took a lot of experimenting.

I would not buy any new monitor for MacOS that does not explicitely advertize MacOS support.

That’s kinda wild. Is there anything remotely unusual about the monitor, like high rez and refresh rate?

I was pleasantly surprised when I plugged the AW2721D that’s part of my gaming setup into my daily driver Mac. Everything worked great, including 240hz and variable refresh.

> That fullscreen mode was introduced in 10.7 Lion and a lot of long time mac users have found it silly from day one. Personally I never use it.

Agreed, however it's arguably for a different mental model. If people think of it as "focus mode" or "workspace mode" it makes more sense. Four finger swipe to slide between the workspaces or focuses.

More importantly, you don't need MOOM.

- - -

To maximize a window to the dimension of the screen without entering full screen mode, either:

1) hold shift option ⌥ and click the green maximize button on the top left of the window

- or -

2) hold the Option key and double click a corner of a window to maximize without full screen focus, and doing that again will size it back to where it was

> To maximize a window to the dimension of the screen without entering full screen mode, either:

This is a handy trick to know, but has caveats. Option-green-functionality is actually defined by apps, not the OS, and so in some cases it will for example act as a “fit window to content” button.

Option-double-clicking a corner appears to be consistent across windows however.

Double click anywhere on the title bar works for me.

I've both used Macs for decades and at one time worked in enterprise Mac technical support, and I've never seen this stuff happen.

I've used multi-monitor dev setups and large screen setups in mac laptops for, christ, 15 years.

I've seen all of those things listed.

It would be one thing if OSX/Linux/Windows UIs would just stay at their basic usability from around 2010. They haven't. They just get steadily worse.

OSX has been the most stable of them, quirks and all, even with a goddamn architecture change, but its closed hardware, a forced upgrade cycle, and bad backwards compatibility.

Linux once would just rewrite window managers every 5 years as soon as they got stable, now Linux is rewriting with Wayland and Vulkan, and ... about 5 years in they'll probably start rewriting those once they get a little stable.

Windows? Committed UI suicide with the tiles and two desktops thing in Windows 8. Now there's ARM in the future and a break with the only thing it has going for it: backwards compatibility.

But yes, everything the author complains about happens in OSX with laptop + monitor / dual monitors, and even without with disappearing mouse cursors.

I haven't used Mac for a while, but I definitely remember the part about window freezing (and requires killing the process) when connecting/disconnecting a external monitor. It's very frustrating.

(And I for one hasn't bought a Macbook since 2020 because I am not going to spend at least $1,999 just to get dual monitor support. A $500 asus laptop can do dual monitor without any problem, and it turns out that machine is good enough for my productivity needs. That money is better spent elsewhere)

Do you honestly believe all of those things happen to everyone? You think everyone who likes macOS is just ignoring those kinds of severe issues?

Obviously you have some kind of problem with your system.

Well, most of what he is saying are actually easily reproducible macOS quirks.

- Windows disappear, become inaccessible after moving between monitors, even though it still open and active according to doc/task list.

This indeed happens relatively often if you have multiple monitors and switch between them for any reason. e.g. in my case I have two machines and two monitors, sometimes I switch the primary monitor to a specific machine and this almost always fucks up macOS. Solution is to disconnect and reconnect the monitor.

- Why can't I move a window to a monitor/workspace that has a maximized window? Like, you can do it by un-maximizing the window in question, moving the other window over and then re-maximizing the window again. But why is this nonsense needed? What problem could this restriction possibly be solving?

A lot of people who use macOS agree that the fullscreen window thing is needless and makes for quirky behaviour.

- Dock constantly breaks/becomes inaccessible. This is a known problem for at least 5+ years - the solution is to manually kill and restart the process???

- Text cursor/caret randomly disappears when editing text, so you can't see where the cursor is, and you can't fix this unless you restart the app (happens to pretty much all apps).

Yep, happens quite frequently to multiple people I know and in multiple apps.

- Bad defaults in terms of keypress repeat times and rate. No apparent way to change this from settings - need to run commands and re-login to test new behaviour.

Indeed this is very painful for people who are non-developers and are used to be able to have higher repeat rates.