Hacker News Reader

Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

> The built-in animations on Apple's software are sometimes hundreds of times slower than on their competitors, in ways which can't be accounted for.

You can turn down the animation times for most of this with "defaults write" commands. Set them to 0 or as small as you want. Here's a good list to get started:

https://gist.github.com/j8/8ef9b6e39449cbe2069a

> I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.

System Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion: Enabled System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency: Enabled

View on HN

As others have noted, the "Reduce Motion" doesn't fix anything (neither does Reduce Transparency).

These terminal commands don't fix the problem- there are still lengthy animations, e.g. when swapping desktops or opening folders. These are tasks I sometimes do multiple times per second on Linux.

Hilariously, this is what the Gnome 2 people would have called an "Unbreak Me" option, something they tried culturally to eliminate more than a decade and a half ago. With... not total success, I guess, but the resulting environment tends to have a very high level of "work and not suck by default" quality -- something that steadily evolving commercial software tends to struggle with maintaining.

The only thing I need to do to unbreak gnome is twiddle the ctrl:nocaps thing in xkb-options. Everything else is optional.

> Enable the “Reduce motion” setting in System Settings.

> This is always the default answer to this question online, and I’m sick of it! It doesn’t even solve the problem, but rather replaces it with an equally useless fade-in animation.

https://arhan.sh/blog/native-instant-space-switching-on-maco...

You're missing the point here. The "old" Apple would never have tolerated a janky feature that inverts responsibility onto the user and behaves poorly out-of-the-box. Back then it was either lightning fast, jank-free, and intuitive -- or else it doesn't ship.

But this eroded over time. Nowadays both Mac and iOS are bloated pieces of crap that reek of design by committee. A lot of people blame Alan Dye (and they are probably right to do so) but there are other factors too. With Steve and Jony gone, they need someone who cares to step in and assert control once more

> Back then it was either lightning fast, jank-free, and intuitive -- or else it doesn't ship.

That's kinda rose tinted history. System 7 (1990s Mac OS) for example crashed and locked up a whole lot, in my experience. The UI was fantastic and had great consistency, and the developer docs were of a quality that would blow minds today. But the software was not as solid as all that.

Windows was the same or maybe worse at the time. BSOD was common and a nightly reboot was a good idea until NT/Win2000. Solaris and BSD would have months of uptime on similar hardware, so it was a software problem. PC OSes were just not there yet. Windows 2000, OSX, and Linux gradually fixed that.

That's all basic uptime. The UI design drift of MacOS is another story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com