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Comment by cmcaleer | Hacker News Reader

> I got my first mac through work this year and I hate the UI.

I am baffled by whoever thought having icons leap in the toolbar as a default behaviour was an OK thing to do. Drives me crazy when I use a Mac other than mine. I have lots of little issues with the UX. Play button opening Apple Music -- ahh! Running unsigned apps is easy but I always get caught out by the right click thing.

> you can install a dozen little extra utilities to customize your way out of most of these things

Usually paid for too. Using mouse on Mac feels absolutely awful to me without Smooze.

I wish there was a better laptop on the market, but despite the compromises my MBP is the best laptop I've ever owned it's not even close. Just like my iPhone, I think it's a brilliant device despite Apple being, well, Apple.

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I gave up trying to use a mouse on OSX years ago (the acceleration curve causes physical pain for me) and leaned into what Apple did right: trackpads. I got an apple trackpad for my desk setup, and otherwise use the built in trackpad on the macbook.

Doesn't help for those who need a mouse device (cad/design/photo-editing, etc), but for what I use it for (software dev/ops work), it's great. Trackpads in a windows ecosystem feel absolutely horrendous to me, so I just use mice there lol.

God bless the trackpad on Macbooks. Some Windows laptops come close but none match it.

Thumbs up for Smooze if you're looking to try and have a somewhat usable mouse experience. It's 20 bucks because of course it is, why wouldn't a tool to allow a need that basic cost money? It does have a trial. Maybe another commenter can recommend something free but when I was looking a couple years ago it was the only thing that did it right.

> Maybe another commenter can recommend something free

https://linearmouse.app/

Excellent user experience using a Logitech MX Master 3S with Mos and ScrollReverser.

https://mos.caldis.me/

https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/

YMMV, but I've found that using very high resolution (~3000 DPI) "gaming" mice works very well under MacOS. This works well with my tendency to not move my hand very much when mousing, but still expect the pointer to go to the other side of the screen. Plus, some of those mice have on-board memory which allows customizing their buttons without having some crappy app running in the background (Logitech G vs normal Logitech).

Using a regular mouse does feel like trying to push a string through sand.

So, that's why my mouse feels totally fine on macOS. Gaming peripherals the win

Trackpads are terrible for your wrist though.

i am not a mac guy, saw a friend use m1. why does everything have to be trial/paid?

i use linux and everyone is expected to be a freeloader and yet people constantly keep on churning our good/bad software for free because its the whole idea of "you scratch my back, i will scratch yours" and "i am doing this for fun. how about you have a problem so you fix this yourself and help everyone" type camaraderie which is opposite in osx where the idea is "you are rich enough, why wont you pay"

The major obvious factor is because the devs can earn money doing that unlike with Linux, but there are also things like: because it's usually not free to make those apps (mac's developer subscription, without which it makes harder for the users to install apps)

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