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Comment by quietsegfault | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is the first time I've read someone who actually says that Windows is ... better ... than MacOS. Wow.

I've used macs for pushing 20 years. The external monitor story remains crap. Even on a recent mbp and a $1500 LG 5k ultrawide. Plug it in and the display flickers back and forth. etc. Apple do not care.

I wonder if they nerfed HDMI connectivity to get people to buy the expensive Apple Studio displays. I just bought myself a Studio XDR, and my MBP now wakes up in under 2 seconds, compared to about 30 seconds with my old Dell monitor.

More likely that they spend a lot of time getting Apple devices to work just right, and not nearly as much on the rest. Same result, but less malicious.

That’s disappointing. I never had any problems with external monitors on MacOS. I have two 4k monitors. I use a Thunderbolt dock because I understand how much data 4k screens push, and how a USB dock won’t cut it. I think if you’re having flickering, you might want to try new cables?

> I use a Thunderbolt dock because I understand how much data 4k screens push, and how a USB dock won’t cut it.

To elaborate on this point: a USB-C dock that includes display connectivity needs to operate at least some of the high-speed lanes of the USB-C connector in DisplayPort Alternate mode. If you split it with two lanes for DisplayPort and two lanes for USB 3.0 signals, then you have halved the potential display bandwidth.

But it's also valid to use all of the high-speed lanes for the DisplayPort signals, limiting the USB bandwidth to the USB 2.0 signals that are carried over separate wires. This is adequate for connecting a keyboard and mouse, but not ideal if you want the dock to provide 1GbE or plan to do large file transfers to external storage devices connected through the dock.

Thunderbolt doesn't always achieve quite the same video bandwidth as raw DP Alt mode, but it allows both DP data and USB data to be multiplexed over all of the high-speed lanes of the USB-C cable, so you can be using more than half the bandwidth for displays and still have enough left over for USB 3.0.

But I don't think the above particularly matters to your use case, because Apple's hardware doesn't support DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport so the Thunderbolt dock is the only way to drive multiple monitors from just one of the Mac's Type-C ports.

It's flickering during the initial negotiation. And resolutions snapping up and down. Once macos connects it works.

Windows just kinda works on this monitor. It was the same on my last setup too...

That's super frustrating! I had that problem when I was a heavy Linux user, but have had success with MacOS. I hope it gets figured out for you, it would drive me insane.

Compared to when I recently tried a Starbook (so, made for Linux) for a few months, MacOS monitor management is like silk. Despite using the same display every day for work, Ubuntu failed constantly to even get the resolution right every day. Meanwhile my Mac somehow guesses which side of the computer the monitor is on (even on new setups) almost always correctly. That last part I have no idea how they do it.

> Meanwhile my Mac somehow guesses which side of the computer the monitor is on (even on new setups) almost always correctly. That last part I have no idea how they do it.

I have no idea how macOS does it, but the obvious thing to try is to leave the relative positioning undefined until the first time the user tries to move the mouse off one screen, and assume they're aiming for the other screen.

It would probably make sense to constrain this to horizontal movements, so that taking advantage of Fitts' Law to hit the menu bar or the Dock (at the bottom by default) wouldn't produce a false positive signal about display positioning when stacked display setups are less common than side by side.

I think macOS makes some trade-offs to give a supposedely better user experience as long you're part of the 80%. If you're not though, yes it is painful.

For me the macOS Display management experience is absolute dreadful. I had the same issues as the author's and I even had to pay actual money for a third party application (BetterDisplay) to fix some of the issues.

The most infurienting one for me is that I can't disable the internal MacBook display when I am connected to an external monitor without closing the lid. Why you may ask? Because I want to keep using the TouchID. However this is impossible in macOS without an external app.

Which external app even allows that?

BetterDisplay allow you to disable the internal monitor while keeping the lid open, this way I can still use TouchID.

I would've said that at the tail end of Windows 10. I got my first Mac via work just as Windows 11 was coming out (having switched my personal devices to Linux), and my memories of Windows were much better than whatever version of MacOS I was using at the time. But my next work computer was Windows 11 (I got tired of the differences between MacOS's shell and Debian on all our servers so I just wanted to use WSL) and Windows 11 is the worst OS I've ever used

I don’t think TFA said Windows is better overall, but c’mon, even a diehard Mac user like myself can see how stagnated, say, task/app switching is on macOS in comparison to Windows. And things like Mission Control always seemed like a “we’ll come back and polish that up later” feature, but they never did come back to it.

Hyperswitch and Hyperdock solved the problems for me. Couldn't live without actual alt-tab behavior or window previews.

I use cmd-tab/cmd-` on macos, and alt-tab on windows. I feel they're mostly equivalent, not sure what's wrong with task switching. The real issue is finding the right window/tab I want in my browser, but searching tabs is now a thing and works for me pretty much everytime.

AltTab works well for me on macOS https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

Here is another one, using Windows since version 3.0, and I get to use macOS in some projects.

I will never buy an Apple device for private use.

“Mac OS X” > Windows > modern macOS

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