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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

I've used Macs for 20 years starting on the day 32-bit Intel Macs were released, and agree with the GP. Linux and Plasma spoiled me, going back to macOS and its windowing system feels like a step backward, especially for development, where using multiple windows is a must. Task switching is.. not good? I don't get window previews I can switch through when I hover over the dock, but I do on Linux.

Yes, I know about Yabai and the other things that modify the existing window manager. The problem is the window manager itself.

Outside of the windowing system, running native Linux if you're deploying to Linux beats using an amalgamation of old BSD utils + stuff from Homebrew and hoping it works between platforms, or using VMs. The dev tools that are native to Linux are also nice.

When it comes to multiple monitors, I want a dock on each monitor. I can do that in Plasma, but I can't in macOS, unless I use some weird 3rd party software apparently.

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When you use linux as desktop, sometimes you get into a customization-hole and make everything "just right" because on linux everything is customizable.

Then you switch to macOS or Windows or even (not your) linux setup and hate it. When I manage to contain myself entirely to the terminal it's okay, but the moment I have to interact with GUI I start to miss those "just right" things.

I can relate. macOS hilariously sucks on certain GUI and terminal aspects. Not much you can do about GUI, just have to adapt to the way macOS wants to be used. For terminal, I use home-manager to manage my $HOME. It not space efficient and public caches are sub-par, but it's better than searching "sed in-place repace macos and linux cross-platform" for the 9000th time.

The irony is that I set up my Plasma desktop to mimic macOS' layout in terms of positioning buttons, menus, widgets and docks, and just leave the default settings and themes. Just what you get for free by default with Plasma is great vs macOS even with customizations.

I do nerd out when customizing the shell, though.

> It not space efficient and public caches are sub-par, but it's better than searching "sed in-place repace macos and linux cross-platform" for the 9000th time.

When onboarding new devs, it's like Groundhog Day, where I will inevitably have the "did you use GNU sed or BSD sed" conversation at some point if they have Macs.

I'm going to have to look into home-manager

> I'm going to have to look into home-manager

It's amazing, I have the same terminal environment in WLS2, macOS and linux. NeoVim with all of its native dependencies, all k8s tools, etc. Sometimes I run it issues something not working on macos, but usually easy to resolve, if not, I use homebrew via home-manager.

Honestly, I get the GP completely. It’s not much the customisation hole. It’s just that MacOS is pretty meh as an OS and hilariously Snow Leopard, the first version I ever used, is my favourite amongst all the ones that followed.

I like the hardware however. I really wish there was a good laptop using a competitive ARM SoC with great Linux support. I refuse to buy anything from Apple since they started the whole EU shenanigans and I don’t really now which laptop I will buy. I’m seriously considering only using a phone as my personal computing device now that Android takes convergence semi seriously.

Snow Leopard is probably the most loved released. I like Tahoe though.

> I’m seriously considering only using a phone as my personal computing device now that Android takes convergence semi seriously.

Not really. Google, in fact, very opposes that convergence because it will hurt ChromeBook and chomecast sales.

Pretty much any android today and even Nexus phones let you go from usb-c to HDMI, but not Pixels. Because that's what chromecast is for.

FWIW, I think they finally allowed this from the pixel 8 onwards. (I'm holding a pixel 8, however oddly, I've never tried this).

> Not really. Google, in fact, very opposes that convergence because it will hurt ChromeBook and chomecast sales.

They oppose convergence so much that they have just added a desktop environment when Android is plugged to a screen and a way to run Linux app with GPU acceleration.

Also Pixels natively support HDMI through usb-c and have done so for years. They do have terrible SoC however so I'm leaning more towards a Chinese phone personally.

> Task switching is.. not good? I don't get window previews I can switch through when I hover over the dock, but I do on Linux.

That just sounds like being accustomed to one way of switching tasks, honestly. If I want previews, I use Expose (three-finger swipe up/down or ctrl-up/down). But mostly I just use cmd-tab and haven't really needed to see previews there. Because macOS switches between applications, not windows, often there isn't single window to preview, and I'm not sure showing all the windows would work well either. For Expose it works well because the it can use the entire screen to show previews.

The app switching behaviour is really infuriating. Selecting a window and having all the app’s windows come to the fore, obscuring the window from another app is still annoying, 20 years on.

And then when you full-screen a window, switch to another app for a moment, and then you can’t find it without delving into the ‘window‘ menu.

First world problems. But daily annoyances.

> Selecting a window and having all the app’s windows come to the fore

... would only happen if the application you switch to is enforcing it for some reason. Ordinarily you can interleave windows all you want.

Switching to an application by clicking on it in the Dock or Cmd+Tabbing to it will bring all its windows to the front, though.

You're right, I'm thinking of using the keyboard cmd-tab.

So if I have two Zed windows and Firefox in front of one of them, I can't switch from Zed to Firefox and back to Zed without losing view of Firefox. Means I have to move windows around so they don't overlap, which seems so counterintuitive.

You need to use CMD + ` instead of CMD + Tab

That only switches within an app, not between apps.

Unless you mean to find the full-screen window. And that doesn't work either. At least for Zed, Firefox and iTerm, where I spend most of my life.

Or just install alt tab to override that behavior and don't look back.

https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

If I wanted to use gestures, three/four finger swipe up and down shows all of the windows and all of the desktops with windows respectively. If I'm switching using the keyboard, I get window previews. If I'm switching using the dock, I get window previews.

Going back to macOS where I don't get window previews forces me to think in terms of app icons, instead of the UI I've been staring at and will instantly recognize. And if I use the dock, I have to remember the window title's name to switch windows using the context menu.

Funny, I've been using Macs for 10+ years and I've never really used Expose. Often I'd be trying to select between windows that look very similar (eg, code windows), so it doesn't work. Instead, I just use Cmd+Tab, and then Cmd+` to cycle windows.

Exactly. I find the macOS approach (Cmd-Tab to pick the right app, Cmd-` to pick the right window) much faster/better than just one shortcut to go through all windows.

Imagine having N apps with M windows each, with the macOS model your number of presses to find a given window goes from O(NM) to O(N+M).

This is how it works in Plasma, you can use the app switcher key combo to switch between apps and then the app window switcher combo to switch between that app's windows. You can also go through every single window, if you want.

I'll echo the sentiment about being very familiar with macOS but being spoiled by Linux and KDE Plasma. I put up with my work MacBook. My personal Linux setup just works and gets out of the way as a machine.

One other thing - latency.

The newest Macbooks have insanely powerful hardware (I have an M4 Macbook Max). Yet they do not feel as speedy or instant on my machines with i3. There's always a perceivable milliseconds of latency, with response time from the keyboard to the screen. As someone who has tons of key bindings, I find this tolerable, but it can get a bit grating compared to just how instantaneous everything is on my Linux.

The way sidebars feel is really "sticky". This has got worse with SwiftUI. The List component used for this has notoriously poor performance and a really inflexible API.

You can put a dock on each monitor on the mac.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254917813?sortBy=rank

You just saved me from years of headaches

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