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Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Windows programs hid functionality under layers of menus and the registry. MacOS, at least, surfaces much less functionality, because it offers sensible defaults. I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry.

I did like some Windows things, though, like the ribbon, and reconfigurable UIs. Today's UIs are more immutable, for the worse.

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I'd agree macOS surfaces much less functionality but I feel like it's more "because they don't want you to feel like there is a choice to make in the first place" rather than "because the defaults are ideal for everyone". Over time it feels like "layers of menus" have definitely made their way into Apple's software anyways.

The replacement to the registry seems to half be "magic CLI incantations for settings which can't be found in the GUI for some reason" and half "here's a $4.99 app to 3 finger tap to close tabs".

And the defaults system is just registry by another name

Not really, defaults are stored in per-application plist files rather than in a singular database.

And what difference to end user it makes where exactly the key/value data is stored? No real difference whether the data is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MyAppName or com.my.app when you're trying to coerce some internals whose configuration is not exposed because you're not worthy of it

I’d say that a quick defaults command is probably on the whole more friendly than trawling around in the arcane mess that is the Windows registry. It’s not as friendly as it could be, but at least it’s a somewhat human readable one liner.

It’s also reasonable to back up plists and/or sync them between machines like some users do with their dotfiles, because they’re just files.

Registry settings can be modified via CLI, too. Windows users are just far more averse to the command line.

I have never seen anyone backup defaults database between macs[1], I have seen a lot of scripts calling setting by setting instead.

Which has direct equivalent in "reg" files, to be quite honest.

[1] Other than restoring time machine backup to another system or similar cloning setups

It’s not a database, they’re individual files. Most are even plain XML that can be hand written and edited with a text editor.

This is not a gotcha, really. An XML file can be considered database just as well (similarly, part of registry on NT is portable between machines).

It was common in the Windows 9x days for the two Registry Hives (SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT) to get corrupted leading to an unbootable system or to get fragmented and/or full of disused values from poorly-uninstalled software leading to increased memory usage.

Here are some KB articles to check out for context:

- https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/105563

- https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/89799

- https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/89794

Been there, know the pain, still not actually a big difference to the question of modifying "unexported" settings

There is - removing a wonk preference namespace is as easy as `rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.cheapskatesoftware.wonko.plist`. Whereas the Windows Registry is a monolithic piece of gunk you need a Microsoft editor for to zap something

Considering the day I once spent hunting for all possible plist locations of a single program, I'd rate it about same for registry and plists

It’s not a 1:1 mapping, but much power user functionality in macOS is designed to progressively reveal itself as the user becomes more technically capable, a type of design known as progressive disclosure. This allows newbies to not feel overwhelmed while also allowing power users to feel at home.

The problem is that way too many people approach macOS with the Windows way of doing things firmly planted in their minds as “correct”, which interferes with this process. For example, over the years I’ve encountered numerous posters complaining about how macOS can’t do X thing, after which I point out that X thing is right there as an easy to find top level menu item, but the poster in question never bothered to take a look around and just assumed the functionality didn’t exist since it wasn’t surfaced the same way as under Windows or KDE or whatever they were coming from.

Of course there are things macOS just doesn’t do, but there’s plenty that it does if users are willing to set their preconceptions aside for a moment.

If you approach macOS the Linux or BSD way, it feels like Windows Powershell. Of course you can use brew and stuff, setup you dev enviroments etc. But when it comes to system settings, its bad, very bad. Also stuff like docker, k8s suffer performance and usability.

Docker, etc are going to suffer on anything that’s not Linux due to how coupled they are to Linux. Even WSL isn’t as good as bare metal Linux in that regard. To me it speaks to a need for return to platform agnosticism in dev tooling more than anything.

WSL2 works fine, but that's merely because it's a linux VM with a little polish.

I'd kill to do dev on a linux machine, but alas it's not company policy :(

One thing that I always hated about macOS is the menu bar placement.

Ironically, in the long run, it has proven to be an asset for the simple reason that any macOS app has to have a main menu with commands in it, if it doesn't want to look silly. So this whole modern trend of replacing everything with "hamburger" menus that don't have the functionality isn't killing UX quite so bad there.

Although some apps - Electron ones, especially - stick a few token options there, and then the rest still has to be pixel-hunted in the window. Some don't even put "Settings" where it's supposed to be (under the application menu). Ugh.

On the last paragraph, something is better than nothing, though. It’s always bugged me that Electron doesn’t offer Windows and Linux users a way to enable the menus that’ve been provided for the Mac version.

As somebody who recently had to switch to Mac for work, my experience has been the exact opposite of this. Every other OS I've used since Windows 95 I've been able to get to grips with the same way: start off using the mouse to find my way around the UI, and introduce keyboard shortcuts as and when I find them useful. Eventually I get to the point of being able to use either exclusively keyboard or exclusively mouse for most tasks.

MacOS seems to _require_ some unergonomic combination of both from the get go. Some basic things are easy with the keyboard but hard/impossible with the mouse and vice versa. The Finder app doesn't even have a button to go 'up' a directory for god's sake.

It helps to keep in mind where the OS and its core user base is coming from.

For the case of the up button for example, prior to OS X the Finder was a spacial file manager where each folder had a single corresponding window that remembered its position on screen, allowing users to rely on spacial memory to quickly navigate filesystems. Its windows didn’t even have toolbars, because they weren’t navigator windows — every time you opened a folder you got a new window (unless that folder’s window was already open, in which case it was foregrounded).

So when OS X rolls around in ~2000 and switches the Finder to navigator windows, they’re looking at what existing users will find familiar. Back/forward is easy since most had used a web browser by that point and map cleanly to most people’s mental models (“I want to go back”), but up? That’s a lot more rare. A handful of folks who’d used an FTP client might’ve been familiar with the concept, but few outside of that few would’ve, and how “up” relates to a filesystem is not in any way obvious. And so, the Finder never got an up button, just a key shortcut because anybody advanced enough to be hunting down shortcuts is going to understand the notion of “up” in a filesystem.

Right click the window title and you get a drop down navigation menu of every folder in the hierarchy up to the "/Volumes/$VOLUME" the folder is on.

I'd kill for this on Windows or any mainstream Linux DE.

> I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry

If I recall correctly, when I got my first Macbook, I had to edit plist files or something similar in order to do basic things like permanently showing hidden files, showing the full path in Finder, show file extensions for all file types, increase the animation speed so the computer didn't feel slow as molasses, etc, etc.

Maybe these things are now easier to configure via GUI on macOS?

Toggling hidden file visibility in Finder and open/save dialogs has been doable with the key shortcut Command-Shift-. for quite some time now.

Is that permanent across reboots and all? I think that was the main issue I had with it, but was a long time ago now.

There is a checkbox for file extensions and a View menu item for full paths. Hidden files is still not surfaced in the GUI, but is persistent.

The last time I was setting up a system, it's still very difficult to find in the menus. If it's not discoverable and I have to know the incantation/shortcut to do it, then that's bad UI.

One thing that is weird is that you’re expected to look around the menu bar holding the option key as the menu contents change when that is pressed (also applies to tray icon menus, e.g. WiFi icon shows a lot of stuff when option-clicked.) IIRC some of what you say can be toggled with option menu items.

MacOS is pretty cursed. The equivalent to registry fiddling is doing anything in ~/Library/Application Support

It still has "Services" as a hold over from Next that is completely broken and unused (but still present in every app for some reason). Now you also have the joy of diving deep into the Settings every time an app needs some sort of permission.

I'd say something about .DS_Store files, but that's not really UI.

NeXTStep/GNUStep/Cocoa 'defaults' commands.

I'd much rather work with plain-text human readable property list files with straightforward `defaults` commands than the hive of Hell called the registry.

> I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry.

I don't believe you. You have never, EVER, NOT ONCE run a terminal command to change an option on MacOS? I just refuse to believe anyone on HN hasn't altered preferences in the terminal on MacOS.

Not with anything near the frequency of Windows. The last such thing I remember doing is restarting the locate indexing service with launchctl. I do lots of things in the command line, of course, but not so much to configure MacOS itself.

I haven't edited a .plist in years, but nor have I fiddled with the Windows registry in years. Honestly think both OSes ship with sane defaults these days.

There is an entire ecosystem of free and paid Mac apps meant to augment the Mac experience because MacOS does not provide functionality or configuration needed for a sensible computing experience out of the box.

I think, the main difference of MacOS and Windows is, that Windows allow drivers from 3rd-party. MacOS does not. Drivers means also hardware. So you can build your own PC. Same as with Linux.

This is the Apple secret of success IMO. No 3rd-party drivers and hardware, means, it will just work and no one will blame you for stuff 3rd-parties messed up.

But its also like: There is only a red and blue t-shirt. Choose. No gray, no white, no yellow, no printings.

macOS allows third-party drivers too, Apple just wants vendors to write them in userspace rather than kernelspace. That’s probably not the worst thing, because proprietary driver code is notoriously shoddy and should be run somewhere that limits the blast radius.

Sure, i think the userspace restriction is also the reason, that nearly no 3rd-party hardware for Mac exist.

That’s mainly restricted to graphics cards. Audio cards like used for production as well as I/O (USB, etc) and networking cards have drivers and work fine given you have a PCI-E slot to plug them into, and of course almost anything external connected via USB or Thunderbolt works fine. For GPUs, it’s only a specific subset of users that needs a discrete GPU, especially as the GPU built into M-series SoCs has become powerful enough for most uses outside of high-end gaming.

Selecting the appropriate tool for the task at hand is crucial, in my opinion. However, I believe the choice is often influenced by companies mandating the use of Microsoft and Mac systems due to cost and maintenance considerations, rather than allowing employees to choose between Mac, Windows, or Linux based on their preferences. Proprietary software that only runs on Mac or Windows, never was an argument, because you can just RDP stream remote desktop apps or use the browser.

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