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Comment by mschaef | Hacker News Reader

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mschaef·

> The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world

Asking out of curiosity, why is this? What's the functionality you miss on Mac?

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Most of it is there but you need a crap-load of third party extension and some even cost money.

Like proper alt-tab, better keyboard configuration, Finder is the worst file manager I have ever used, a classical task bar and so on.

You can manage but the defaults are really bad for power users.

Honestly Apple just needs to let me install a proper Desktop Environment like KDE on it. The unix base is decent, just give me more freedom.

To be fair KDE is also pretty wonky out of the box (basic stuff like turning numlock on boot is unnecessarily buggy or confusing).

you usually also need a bunch of extensions. And 50% of them are broken due to various if you try to use KDE builtin extension thing.

The one I have always missed is proper focus-follows-mouse support. The mac desktop always feels really clunky without that when working with multiple windows.

FWIW, this is now possible albeit with a third party app: https://github.com/sbmpost/AutoRaise

Proper focus-follows-mouse does not autoraise the window when it gives it focus. I see that that app does offer "don't raise the window" (which I think is an improvement from last time I was researching this some years back), but only under an "experimental feature" flag that relies on undocumented private macos APIs that might go away in any future macos version...

Personally, most of my problems with MacOS (and Apple's operating systems) would be fixed if it were faster. The OS is full of very lengthy animations that aren't necessary, such as when switching between desktops.

Looks like on Windows it possible to disable all animations, including switch desktop, but you have to press two buttons to switch.

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