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Comment by webdevver | Hacker News Reader

the pragmatic thing to do is just let the Free Market decide. as far as i understand, windows just lets apps grab whatever window they want, whatever input they want, right? and everything Just Works(tm). app writers are discouraged to make things too clever by virtue of users having the choice of not using the app in question.

why cant linux guys just... copy windows?

android-ifying this space with permissions, channels, protocols etc, and pretending that apps are insecure is adding friction that benefits nobody imo.

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Sometimes I type a password into one window, only to have another window pop up partway through and eat the rest of my input. This is why we need to prevent unintentional window activation.

This happens so rarely, that it makes the UX impact to the every day user not worth it in my opinion.

Fellow macOS users: is this rare for you as well?

Maybe an auto-updater will do this, and if it happened with any frequency I might disable those autoupdates and try a macro-based (e.g. Keyboard Maestro) solution.

Windows stealing focus happens to me multiple times a day on Windows when I'm working.

It's infuriating.

It is relatively easy to replicate if you open 2 apps and start typing in the first one which opened, both on macOS and Windows (I don't use Linux enough to notice this issue).

A proper solution is probably faster startup times, but overall it pretty much never happens? Idk maybe I'm lucky or just conditioned to ignore it.

> windows just lets apps grab whatever window they want [...] and everything Just Works

Not really, as proven by the amount of searches with "Windows 11 disable focus stealing" (and ensuing frustration after seeing that it's not a simple toggle somewhere in the Settings) that I've done over time, and confirmed with so many coworkers over the years that we'd like to disable it.

Windows in particular and computers in general, work as they do, and people just adapt to it and sigh in frustration, assuming that things must be that way and there's nothing that can be done to change it. It's difficult to measure "Just Works" if there are no satisfaction surveys for each feature (also would be impractical). Focus stealing in particular is so ingrained in people's minds that I doubt many are even aware that it could work differently.

It already works that way on X11.

Linux is already set up to handle this better than Windows actually since most apps are open source and abusive window management is likely to result in PRs.

Someone has to actually accept and merge them.

Not necessarily. The fork could get packaged instead if the users prefer it.

As history has proven multiple times, most forks fail, after those that made them in first place lose interest keeping up with upstream, while others appreciate the fork as long as they aren't the ones actually doing the work.

You're right, but it's not unusual for distro maintainers to carry patches for one or two removing an obnoxious behaviors for a long time.

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