macOS needs its grid back | Hacker News Reader

macOS needs its grid back

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399 pointsranebo265 comments

> If they approve, the settings open, then the user has to find the specific little toggle and enable it. Another security prompt then done. Why isn’t this at most 2 prompts?

Answer: Because modern-day Apple has subscribed to a particular brand of mitigation for the "noobs will always click 'Allow' especially if you ask them to first" problem. The mitigation is that Apple just dumps you on step 2 of a little 4-5 step mini sysadmin adventure where you prove, every time, that you're sophisticated enough to deserve an exception to the padded-cell walled garden mode they've sealed off 'for your safety.'

As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this.

What's my solution to prevent grandma or a 10-year-old from clicking "Allow full filesystem access and keylogging" to an executable she downloaded from facebook-security-center-and-password-verification-cgi-bin-ab383 dot xyz? IDK, that's their problem, but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.

And then one that grinds my gears, perhaps more than it should: there's no way to change the default browser without explicit user action or consent.

But do that and the very next thing that happens when you try to open a browser or a link in an email?

"Your browser has been changed from Safari to Chrome. Would you like to use Safari or keep using Chrome?" and for a little salt, the default is "Use Safari".

This particular permission is pernicious, ponder for a picosecond the possibilities:

It’s used for writing keyloggers.

That’s it. It’s the permission that lets you write a keylogger. It SHOULD NOT be just a click away. It should require some extra song and dance, because this is an especially dangerous permission, and the extra friction is justified.

All the permissions are treated the same way though. Microphone access. Screen sharing access. etc. Yes, all could be used to spy on you in evil ways, but the replacement of a straightforward "Want to grant this app the following permissions?" with these stupid little spelunks through the garbage app that is Settings irritates me every time.

Apple should throw this whole thing out and replace it with first-launch lists of permissions, with toggles for each. This app 'Zoom' wants "Record the screen, microphone, camera." Then you're done and you don't have to keep searching for it in little lists and relaunching it.

Honestly, I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with, I think it just kinda sucks and doesn’t do its job. Apple is kind of fixing it but there is a long way to go.

There have been alarm bells ringing in my head for a long time with all these settings, and the fact that they’re buried in the settings app gives me a lot of peace of mind. I’ll click through a lot of boxes and alerts and grant permissions that I shouldn’t. I’m SUPER glad that I won’t accidentally grant, you know, full disk access or accessibility to an app just by clicking on a box that appears at startup.

I remember back in the bad old days when I was constantly making extra user accounts just to run some program. Kinda sucked. Hard truth is, you sometimes want to run code that you don’t fully trust.

> I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with

Well, if you feel that way, they do make platforms that sound like a better fit: iPad, iOS, even Android kinda fits that mold. I would call them "toy computers" but that is my bias. It's not a real computer to me if I am not even in control of what code runs on it.

Ah, I can see what you’re getting at. There is actually a system which is a better fit for me, which is the Mac. I can still run the software I want on it, and even though the security model isn’t tight enough, it’s improving.

Linux is also doable, but there’s extra work involved with setting up separate user accounts for running specific pieces of software, configuring namespaces for those processes, that sort of thing. But this is backwards. I’d rather start with a secure default state and have to configure exceptions. Back in the day I could get that from SELinux strict policies but it seems like those have fallen by the wayside.

Have you considered Docker?

Problem is, Apple are slowly turning the Mac OS into the iPad. You can't run software you compiled unless you jump through hoops to code sign it. That's today. In the future, it'll probably require Apple's developer subscription for them to "let" you run your software on "your" computer.

I still use a Mac too, but it is not on a good trajectory if you value having any control over your computer.

They are not all treated the same. Microphone and even Location or Local Network can be permitted direktly with the dialog.

That’s likely not quite the reason. It is to make you have to pause to think if this is the action you want to take.

On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications. I almost never do. I was looking at settings recently and surprised how often I’d clicked yes by accident (maybe about 5% false click rate?)

but the damage of notifications is almost zero compared to keylogger IMHO

Notification requests add to decision fatigue, which can lead to bad things.

Right, that’s why you get a simpler yes/no dialog for notifications, and a conplex “navigate to this settings pane and click a separate button” flow for a keylogger

I’d like a dialog where you are simply asked to repeat a sentence like «yes, record my screen» or «yes, record what I type» into a text field to approve. Straightforward but still makes you think.

AWS Console has that, but it's infuriating that it has different prompts for different resources, it asks you to type "delete" or "confirm" or the name of the resource.

But like most of the AWS Console, each service is different in a unique way.

Depends on what you allow and what your level of sophistication is.

My mother recently had "There are antivirus notifications taking over half the screen, do I need to click on them and renew Norton?"

She'd been somewhere and done something that had allowed an unscrupulous site to flood her with alerts directing her to give payment information to a scam site pretending to be antivirus renewal.

When I finally got over there (she doesn't live on the same continent) I went in and disabled notifications on all of her installed browsers.

As far as I'm concerned the whole 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.

> As far as I'm concerned the whole 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.

It's a symptom of the whole "we converted our document platform into an application platform" debacle that typifies the modern web.

Notifications make no sense for the majority of websites, but if you use, say, a web-based email client, then you probably do want them.

> 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.

Yes and no. Prompting for it modally the way they do now is for sure wild, but for some webapps (e.g. Slack) it makes plenty of sense. I think Firefox used to have a UI they used for some things where they'd inject a non-modal bar with a couple of buttons inside the content area. This sounds like the right type of UI, maybe at the bottom of the viewport.

  site.com can send notifications when you're not on this site.  (Get Notifications from site.com) (Dismiss)

>On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications

One of the first things I disable on any new Firefox setup. I want zero notifications from websites (or in general, one of the objective improvements of Windows 10 over Windows 7 is that you can just disable notifications entirely, while disabling balloon alerts in Windows 7 was a huge battle that never fully worked)

For a long time, I’ve believed that the actual solution is to make the system transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious. Imagine playing hide and go seek in the salt flats

What does that actually mean?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats — the salt flats are extremely flat (as the name implies), and because of all the salt, no vegetation can survive. Look at the pictures: there are no trees, no grass, no hiding places at all. Anyone standing (or even lying prone) on the salt flats is visible to anyone else for miles around.

GP was saying that systems should be "transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious". I'm not entirely convinced that that's possible (On Trusting Trust should have taught us that compromised systems can create places for the compromise to hide), which means that the salt flats analogy is not a great analogy, IMHO. But at least now you understand the analogy.

I don’t think the analogy was the issue. What does it mean for a system to be so transparent that it’s obvious when it’s compromised?

I can’t speak for the ancestor, but I think making every screen recording app prominently visible in the status bar would fit the bill.

That what apps have permission to access/record what at what times they use it, shouldn't be hidden or scaterred across several Settings panels.

I was thinking it would even go so far as to make the background red if it failed some heuristics.

What I mean can be shown with an example:

Let’s say first that we know (some) users will inevitably agree to let malware compromise their system, no matter the popup or protections

A compromised system that’s transparent:

- Has only one way an executable can be started and, being designed as a “salt flat”, it’s easy to read

- Exposes all I/O and all network requests (to admins), regardless of driver abstractions

In this case, even a young enthusiast can look at a system and immediately see that it’s compromised, remove it’s ability to start or do work, and likely remove it from the system entirely.

The inspiration for this approach is a backlash against the absolute glut of places to hide in current user-focused systems. From multiple startup options, to services, to drivers, and in to the “hidden from the admin” executables that can be compromised it’s an ever-worsening problem that erodes user’s ability to keep their own system secure

If I log into my system it's safe. If someone reads my password off my screen post-it and logs into my system it's quite thoroughly compromised. How would you demonstrate which of the two sessions are compromised, during the act?

I agree, however the fundamental problem here is that transparent systems are on the far side of the axis from user focused systems, think about it, the whole point of building a user interface is to hide and remove choice from the user, to change the system from "A steady hand with a magnetic needle" to "point and grunt" the whole point is to build a shiny facade that hides the inner working of the machine. So while you and I and many other people like to see the machine, the inner workings whirling around in grandiose majesty. Millions of man hours have been spent hiding that stuff away keeping it from view, pretending it does not exist. And thus the transparency of our computing environments have suffered correspondingly to this focus on hiding things.

That seems ≈impossible in a world where you're running arbitrary, Turing-complete code. A modern consumer machine can do so many different things—often a bunch at a time—that there is always a massive amount of space to hide bad behavior.

There might be some way to design a system from the ground up to avoid this problem (some kind of declarative, capability-based security?), but retrofitting that onto an existing behemoth of a system does not really work.

From the time of very early viruses, malware has spent effort modifying the tools that make the system transparent to lie to you. So your approach demands that there must be things that are absolutely impossible to change. I have yet to see a system where that is actually true.

> but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.

I'm not sure if it's what you're asking for, but you can disable SIP:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling...

It's been a while since I dumped OSX and went back to Linux, but IIRC, this setting gets reset every time the system updates.

At some point Apple realized the "power user" market was too small, and they were better off treating all of their users like idiots. And that's when I left.

The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots".

Desktop power users were on the Acorn, Amiga, Atari and PC.

As NeXT "acquired" Apple, Linux users thought OS X was the UNIX experience they were looking for, and since they were never part of Apple culture, keep getting their expectations wrong.

Apple also kind of accidentally won the power user/developer market. When macbooks became synonymous with SV devs, Windows sucked for everything that wasn't Win32 development, and Linux on the desktop wasn't quite there yet (workable, but no where near the state its in today). Your only other choice was mac. It was UNIX, could dual boot windows if you needed it, so it checked the boxes is nice looking hardware (this was around 2008-2012 era, PC hardware at the time was complete crap).

They never set out to build the ultimate power user machine, their target was still general consumers. They just happened to have the right product at the right time when everything else just failed to compete.

Had desktop linux been in a better state, or had MS built WSL earlier, things might look a lot different today.

Or even had they acquired Be instead.

Microsoft had "WSL" earlier, only badly.

The only reason I started with Linux at home back in 1995, was the half hearted UNIX subsystem on Windows NT.

Had they been serious about it I am sure GNU/Linux would never taken off.

As shown by Apple sales of folks buying POSIX instead.

Apple did openly court Unix users during the early days of Mac OS X. As a teenager during this era, Macs of this era were my dream machines due to Mac OS X, and I was so happy to buy an 2006 MacBook the summer after my freshman year of college with money earned from a summer research internship.

Here's a Titanium PowerBook G4 ad that says "Sends other Unix boxes to /dev/null": https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageunix/comments/b4kojo/sends_o...

Here's a snapshot of the software solutions page for the aluminum PowerBook G4 from November 2004, proudly touting Unix and even X11:

https://web.archive.org/web/20041126011836/http://www.apple....

Some quotes from the Power Mac G5 page (https://web.archive.org/web/20041126015955/http://www.apple....) from the same era:

"With the Power Mac G5, a researcher can now run both productivity applications and high-performance UNIX applications on a single system. Mac OS X Panther includes 64-bit optimized system math, vector and image libraries that take maximum advantage of the 64-bit G5 processor."

There was also a cluster in Virginia made of Power Mac G5s, which Apple also touted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(supercomputer)

Yes, as they were fighting for getting out of bankruptcy and were reverse acquired by NeXT.

I also attended a marketing session at CERN, when they came to visit our IT department in 2003, when there were still people using Sun pizza boxes as their desktops (aka SPARCstation).

Anyone that has been around Apple long enough can recognise the old Apple (pre-OS X), on current Apple, now that they can be their old self.

Any good biography on Steve Jobs, like The Next Big Thing, Folkore or Cult of Mac, will show that underlying culture.

This rings true to me.

Mac when I got started on it in the 00s was really dependent on everything to do with creative - Photoshop, publishing, etc. It kept that for a decade or more, and added a ton of the software developers market in the 2007-2017 era. During that era, they at least made a show of seeing us as an important demographic. Since about that time though they've had so much success in the "mainstream" that it seems like if there is any decision where software developers would want X and it would be better for mainstream nontechnical users if Y, they go with Y every time, and often no longer even bother accommodating the "X" use case at all.

Silly point: Years ago, the iChat client that is the forefather of "Messages" on Mac let you choose a sound for an alert, and it would include whatever sounds you had put in ~/Library/Sounds. Today, it only offers the fixed list of canned alert sounds that shipped with the computer. Because why would a mere user even know what a wav or aiff file is? Why should the user get to choose?

>The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots".

I'd call the power user market that - the kind of idiocy that's more interested in the process than the results.

The actual target market was "people that have a life outside computers".

I don't think Apple was ever really strong with the "idiots" market until the iPhone halo effect came into being, as much as they may have tried in their marketing.

That market always bought the cheapest machine (or "best value", by specs/$) they could find (or, if they were really an "idiot", the machine that Best Buy had the highest commission on), which would be a PC.

In the beige days, Apple's bread was buttered in the publishing market, once they moved to OS X, they got the "professional nerds who wanted UNIX but not doing sysadmin at home".

I've had SIP disabled for years, across many updates.

Could have been something else then, but (in the past, at least) they would definitely reset some of the settings on every major upgrade.

The scary thing to me is how Apple makes you jump through hoops to install or use any sort of app, but when it comes to adding items to your login items, they don't even require you to grant permission.

Tried some little throwaway app and realized you don't need it? Sucks for you. It added itself to your login items and it'll start up in the background every single time you turn on your computer. And it won't even tell you. Thought you deleted the app from your Applications folder? If you didn't check your login items, there's probably some little script that deeply installed itself and it'll reinstall it in the background during your next startup.

Adobe is the fucking worst with this. Their Creative Cloud spyware keeps enabling itself and reinstalling itself so long as you use photoshop. And it'll constantly find ways to turn itself back on. Steam also adds itself to login items, which is fucking annoying because you'll reboot and be hit in the face with game ads. At least it respects your decision when you turn it off, but login items should be opt in, never opt out.

I try to always install with Homebrew. Because then you can uninstall with the --zap option, for example:

  $ brew uninstall --zap aerospace

Usually it blows away everything associated with the app, including cached files, configuration in ~/Library and ~/.config, etc. Very useful. It'll leave a non-functional login item which isn't active and can't be active.

I like the app uninstaller included in Forklift. You open Applications folder, and delete an app. A window appears with all the associated files Forklift can find (which is extremely accurate, BTW), and you can uninstall everything you want from there.

For .pkg files, there's UninstallPKG which reads the package manifest and properly uninstalls it.

I would like to take this moment to rage against Apple for shipping that package installer, literally 25 years ago, and never once having apparently even considered a native, out of the box way to uninstall programs that were installed that way.

Speaking of packages, even more embarrassing, Microsoft Windows literally beat them to shipping a first-party package manager. I feel like Apple lives in a fantasy land that the drag’n’drop app install method from the classic macOS is some kind of platonic ideal — never mind that they can’t stop half the apps out there from going outside that paradigm and installing their crap all over the place.

I get notifications that an item has added itself to your login items.

I do as well, but no app should be able to add itself to the login items: ask me or better have me navigate to the login items settings pane and add it manually.

I like the app ‘Lingon X’ I think is the name, to help with this. It’s a viewer/editor for all the startup and recurrent background tasks on your Mac. But also it has a feature to notify you of any edits/additions to the startup/background items that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about.

> As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this.

You seem to have understood the problem. But then you didn't follow. If there was a way to disable this, first thing that the grandma would do is watch a video how to disable that and lose security from then on.

Of course it is not perfect, but their approach here is really decent. And also, if you find yourself needing to go through that often I think that's not a good sign security-wise.

Could make it disable-able only from the terminal in recovery mode. That one would be too hard / bothersome to fend off most cases I feel like

Never underestimate the ingenuity of a motivated fool.

My litmus test for this sort of thing is Excel - I think we all can agree that Excel is used for way more than it should be, and the most complicated, unhinged uses of it are done by non-technical folks looking to get a task done through desperation.

At that point it's a them problem.

Yeah, it always seems weird to me how we deem most adults responsible enough to own a car and not drive into oncoming traffic or how people are allowed to buy actually dangerous tools from big tool stores without a second glance. And sure, there's safety training available and in the case of driving you gotta first prove you're able to follow the rules. But after that? You're on your own, only in computer land do the manufacturers and so on keep holding your hand trying to make sure you're not figuratively cutting it.

With that in mind it ends up being weird to me in a way I can't articulate because after all I can speedrun losing a limb if you left me loose in Harbor Freight or speedrun losing all my money and becoming debt-ridden if you give me a laptop with internet connection.

Anyway, I know there's more nuanced discussion to be had still I sometimes wonder how would the ideal approach actually look like without requiring people to have a digital(ing) license before being allowed to connect to the internet.

> You're on your own, only in computer land do the manufacturers and so on keep holding your hand trying to make sure you're not figuratively cutting it.

Well, firstly, newer cars are now equipped with tons of safety features like various kinds of auto-braking, various warning systems which monitor blind spots in the car, and driving aids like lane assist, lane monitoring, what have you. And then they also have advanced telemetry features that don’t keep them safe, but their insurance company hopes will identify them as bad drivers if and when they get into accidents so they can be denied coverage. These could be analogous depending how you look at it.

Additionally while there’s not much out there for tools, I think that’s less to do with it not being an issue and more to do with it being kind of impossible? That said a few tools have things like sensors that detect the presence of fingers near saw blades and will not only stop operating, they’ll usually destroy the tool in the process to ensure the operators safety, because fundamentally, more saws exist, more fingers do not.

Like despite loving track driving, I wouldn’t think that everyone tearing around in V8 monsters with stripped interiors and roll cages is a good idea.

Huh, I always forget about the newer safety features of cars because I generally see older cars around me and I used to drive cars where ABS, ESC and beeping where as far as it went for safety. And sure you could argue that telemetry used this way could be a path to price bad drivers out, if I understood your point correctly, yet while it would be effective when deployed to this goal I still instinctively regard telemetry as an invasion of privacy (in a space I assume by default to be private) but that's veering towards a different discussion.

Generally I have to admit that society is trending towards making things safe(er) by default but as always with every trend some attempts at following or complying are executed poorly (intentionally or unintentionally). Here's where I agree that while some safeties are universally good and people that disable them suffer from overconfidence I have seen some examples like experienced people removing the shields from brush cutters because they can get in the way and increase the risk of a tangle when cutting overgrowth (though you have to be mindful and careful to not fling small rocks around afterwards).

And yeah, I see your last point and generally agree but for fairness sake I would like to present the other extreme end where a person on a bicycle against a pedestrian is also dangerous albeit less so. That said I'm about to accidentally argue in favor of the "guns don't kill people..." rhetoric and I really don't want that so I will concede that for the time being it's better to (thoughtfully) design safe systems instead of relying solely on operator diligence.

Oh how I dislike that objectively I recognize the need for safety yet subjectively I disdain the fact that my tools try to nanny me and I can't reconcile these two views :/

> And sure you could argue that telemetry used this way could be a path to price bad drivers out, if I understood your point correctly, yet while it would be effective when deployed to this goal I still instinctively regard telemetry as an invasion of privacy (in a space I assume by default to be private) but that's veering towards a different discussion.

A discussion on which I think we'd absolutely agree. But yeah, it's a thing, whether we agree with it or not.

> Generally I have to admit that society is trending towards making things safe(er) by default but as always with every trend some attempts at following or complying are executed poorly (intentionally or unintentionally). Here's where I agree that while some safeties are universally good and people that disable them suffer from overconfidence I have seen some examples like experienced people removing the shields from brush cutters because they can get in the way and increase the risk of a tangle when cutting overgrowth (though you have to be mindful and careful to not fling small rocks around afterwards).

Oh 100%. I would argue most safety features, even when implemented well, will encumber those who were already skilled, which is why you rub against the ones in MacOS. It just... I don't think there's a way around that, you know? Think it's just an immovable law of the universe.

> Oh how I dislike that objectively I recognize the need for safety yet subjectively I disdain the fact that my tools try to nanny me and I can't reconcile these two views :/

I struggled with this for a long time too, but for me, it kinda resolves with the following reasoning:

On balance, safer... everything... makes for a better society, because it enables more average people to do more things, to go more places, to use more technology, to make their lives better. And the fact is, for more experienced people, we can get around this.

Like the security constraints in MacOS are a great example: they are fucking ANNOYING when you're configuring a new Mac, completely agreed, because every last thing requires so many steps. However how often do you really find yourself needing those options in daily driver use? I can count on a hand the number of times I needed system access the last couple of weeks (and usually it's just an app update where I have to give the app the go ahead by typing in my password). The last time I had to open security options and do that whole procedure... it would have to be weeks at minimum, perhaps even months.

That isn't true at all.

To attack your specific example, cars have added all kinds of things that "hand hold" the user and keep them (and others) safe: Seat belts, air bags, anti-lock brakes, traction control, automatic emergency braking, back up cameras, lane keep assist, blind spot monitors, etc, etc, etc. (Oh, and guess what, per-mile traffic deaths are WAY down from a few decades ago).

All of which are trivial for a user to override, disable, or ignore completely except the primary airbags, which I believe is the whole point. The user is in control and its all in the owner’s manual to boot.

Many are not, and ma y of the ones in the pipe line, like speed limiters and drunk driver detection are going to be legally mandated to be nondisableable..

That's intended for the public good however in my opinion, not the driver themselves.

And, notably, require a license, a test, insurance, and registration.

> At that point it's a them problem.

Except when it becomes a reputational problem for the OEM: Excel sucks at X (i.e., don't use it for that) and Excel sucks can become equivalent in many people's minds.

Sometimes it is actually a problem of people 'holding it wrong' (as the meme/trope goes). And who gets the blame?

I'd say, the reasonable person test, if the mistake sounds like one a reasonable person would make, then fine.

I guess sadly the press will gloss over all the intricacies for a few clicks.

I also feel that dumbing things down probably just exacerbates this problem as "reasonable folk" have no clue how you actually get from a to b.

*shrug* I bought my mom a specific laptop to prevent "them" problems. I'm sorry that you're mad that every laptop doesn't conform to your use case, but perhaps this is a good time to realize that not every product is for you, and not every product has to conform to your view of the world. Sometimes, you can just not buy things that don't function the way you want.

Easier said than done. Economies of scale.

I suspect you're missing the entire point of my statement however, I also suspect your mother accessing a recovery boot mode intentionally is not on your list of concerns, if you're infantilizing her use to such an extent.

Did you know that Facebook actually has a message styled with color and different font sizes that pops up in the browser console when you open the inspector for Facebook.com with instruction not to paste things you're told to paste there, with a link to https://www.facebook.com/selfxss for more information?

No, it would just become something you ask your tech-savvy nephew to fix for you. Windows is (or used to be) full of things like this.

you really underestimate the will of people to not change anything that annoys them about their OS. they will click 1 million times a popup away before even considering that it could be resolved indefinitely by an option change. i think Apple's system works well to keep the average user safe.

Agreed. It just doesn't occur to most people. To even come up with the idea that maybe there's a setting for something, never mind searching for a tutorial on how to change it, you already have to be a power user for some values of "power".

The grandma is going to follow the video on how to disable system security because scammers are making these videos and she think she has a virus.

Not because she wants to install brew or something.

Good point.

This is evidenced by the people who constantly dismissed the Wi-Fi pop-up on iOS. Which is just about everyone I know with an iPhone.

Which pop-up do you mean?

It's a setting that iPhones had for a long time, where they would prompt you to join the nearby WiFi networks. I don't currently have one, so I don't know what it's currently like, but a large number of people would pull out their phones, start doing something, dismiss the pop-up, and continue, many times in a day. Probably they almost never actually used it to join a WiFi network at all. You could turn it off in settings but they didn't.

"they will click 1 million times a popup away before even considering that it could be resolved indefinitely by an option change. i think Apple's system works well to keep the average user safe."

I find this reasoning backward. I have been saying what you just said for years, in defense of NOT making changes a giant pain in the ass for knowledgeable users. The vast, vast majority of people will not imagine that there's an option; much less go looking for it. Therefore if the user goes digging around in Settings, everything should be there all the time, with no further hassles required.

By the same logic, a lot of Apple's recent decisions are anti-user stupidity. For example, removing the "Get new mail" button from Mail. If my mom tries to log into her bank account and the site says "We just sent a confirmation code to your E-mail," she's going to go there and try to fetch mail. But nope... now she has to sit there and wait for it to poll the server at some unknown interval.

Apologists rush to say, "Oh but you can simply customize the toolbar and put it back." NO. Give me a break. Why on earth would the average user even imagine that you could customize the fundamental UI of the application, let alone figure out where to perform that task? It's so out of touch with real-world users.

Their approach is not decent. There should be some kind of master key to get full admin access. Leaving al the keys in the hand of a mega corporation is asking for trouble.

It's gone so far that even tech people now think that having root access to a mobile device is somehow scary. Well guess what that root access is still there for the manufacturer. It needs it for stuff like updates. It just shields you from having any kind of input or visibility on what is going on.

And once you've given up your admin control to the mega corporation, your government is going to be next. They'll be demanding backdoors and regulatory bullshit like age verification and snooping backdoors. Even today the EU launched yet another chatcontrol proposal. Eventually they'll manage to get it through when they've paid off enough representatives.

Keeping full control is the only way to prevent this.

Doesn't the government already have root to whatever machine via the NSA? It's the downstream government, the state-level governments that are squeaky wheels with the age verification and other nonsense.

I'm in Europe not the US. But NSA and their likes are a very expensive resource. They're not going to use that for small fry cases. Also, any evidence they obtain is not legal for any purpose so it has limited use.

And even NSA backdoors could be discovered more easily if we had full access to our phones, obviously.

You can have the full access to your phone. See: Librem 5.

There's nothing you can do with that in daily life if you need apps. Also, purism is American.

And yeah you can root other phones too but then you end up getting blocked in apps, that's the problem. It should be none of their business that my phone is rooted.

Imagine office refusing to work on windows because I logged in with an admin account?

I do use this phone as a daily driver. I can run Android apps with Waydroid, and I can run any GNU/Linux desktop app.

> Also, purism is American.

So what? The device runs an FSF-endorsed distro, and they even provide its schematics. American is not necessarily the same as evil.

> Imagine office refusing to work on windows because I logged in with an admin account?

This is exactly why I use this phone and support Purism, since they explicitly say they want the users to be in control of their devices: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24463347. And its not just empty words.

> If there was a way to disable this, first thing that the grandma would do is watch a video how to disable that and lose security from then on.

My grandma absolutely would not watch and follow a video on how to e.g. disable Gatekeeper, nor do I think she’d be able to if she tried.

Your grandma sounds substantially more tech savvy than my grandma. Good for her, she seems to know what she wants. Grown adults should be allowed to knowingly opt into an additional level of risk.

She would ask a grandchild or neighborhood kid to fix it, and then it would be disabled.

Should she be allowed or forbidden from doing so?

I think it's reasonably within scope of the threat models considered by operating system creators.

I still don't understand the threat. Is it that a user who is not "worthy" of more permissive security may nonetheless be capable of enabling more permissive security?

I can put that more charitably by thinking about it in terms of informed consent, ie does the user understand the risks involved. But if you're concerned that someone following a video tutorial or seeking out a friend has not consented, then I think your standard for what constitutes consent is ludicrously high!

And if it turns out that lots of people are consenting to something, that isn't a failure of design. You asked your users a question, and they gave you an answer.

The threat is that users who are not sufficiently tech savvy will shoot themselves in the foot, including using methods they don't understand. This is a pattern we've seen play out numerous times. The more secure platforms are overwhelmingly the ones that protect the users from themselves, and (most) users value security over absolute computing freedom.

> The more secure platforms are overwhelmingly the ones that protect the users from themselves

More secure by what metric? I would expect that by definition, they are equally secure until the security settings are disabled. If the user disabled a security setting, of course that system is less secure, that's a choice the user made in exchange for some other benefit.

> (most) users value security over absolute computing freedom.

How do you know this? I think that if they're disabling security settings, it's probably because they value freedom/capabilities over security. And you may think this is the wrong choice, but it's theirs to make.

The most secure platform is one that protects the user from themselves by never letting them log in, or even turn it on.

Accurate enough. Those platforms are more secure. But given that many players have a liability-related interest in making sure everyone uses Secure Platforms:

- Many important things that are needed or at least highly useful for daily life will only support "Secure Platforms"

- Everyone will have to use "Secure Platforms" whether they would value computing freedom or not

- "Not As Secure Platforms" will be unsupported and treated as roughly equivalent to malware.

We can see this already literally playing out - it's the whole point of the browser attestation idea.

So thanks to this thinking, we'll get one secure package - Firmware, OS, Browser, all cryptographically sealed. None of them changeable, no "tampering," like adblockers, tracking blockers. No programs that could, say, show you what other programs are phoning home. No third-party programs at all, unless they've paid the platform fee and agreed to Platform Vendor's terms.

You can always use Linux, if you can figure out the drivers, and if you're ok just browsing GNU websites and the Indie Web. Everyone else will block that dirty, non-attested traffic. "It's probably bots," they'll say.

I agree with you, but then to me this is a great reason why macOS (and Apple products in general) just aren't made for me. And that's ok, that's the beauty of diversity.

It got restrictive enough that I jumped to Linux with Hyprland and just configured everything the way I actually want

True, I started with Omarchy, but then changed everything to my liking. It's so much nicer if you can change your OS by changing some dotfiles, and don't get distracted by all the nonsense of new features that macOS and Windows are adding. I wrote about my journey https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/ and what I learned after 8 months: https://www.ssp.sh/blog/linux-omarchy-the-good-bad-and-fixab...

This is the reason I stopped bothering with MacOS, also. Linux just works.

Making the prompts understandable helps a lot when it comes to preventing your grandma from installing a keylogger. I don't mind the setting not being obvious exactly because people who don't know computers shouldn't be tricked into toggling them.

But it is funny to see the daily barrage of permission prompts fly through when macOS made an entire ad ridiculing Vista for half the popups and permissions macOS requires these days.

You can make the vast majority of them go away by rebooting into recovery mode, running Terminal and then executing:

csrutil disable

nvram boot-args="amfi_get_out_of_my_way=0x1"

I really wouldn't recommend doing either, but you do you.

Ironically, my first thought was using Automator or AutoHotKey (there's a different one for macOS I think? But you get the point) to just identify those dialogs and click yes/allow/whatever.

Even though a bunch of the responses are "well you don't want a keylogger" when the first solutions I can think of are also (potential) keyloggers. :)

That is a solution. But the underlying problem is that they didn't go far enough. There's no good reason to bundle arbitrary screen recording with window snapshots, or bundle arbitrary keylogging with hotkey activation. Just off the top of my head:

For previews, Apple could provide an API for this very common task. The OS can provide the images, and they could be sampled at refresh rate that makes it unusable for arbitrary recording.

For key chords, they could repurpose the emoji key, which is currently not available for external binding, to effectively allow capture only following that magic sequence. The OS should manage this centrally, allowing a program to define its commands and then delivering only the command without the specific associated keys presses. We get the benefit of centralized management with deconfliction, too, which is a real pain on macos as it stands.

I don't know if these solve every problem, but they solve some. There are probably better ways. Apple has plenty of smart programmers. The product team needs to let them solve the problems that they surely know bother their professional users.

Bring back the "Unix expert" checkbox from NeXTstep?

I oftentimes think that as a nerd, it's easy to walk around like my shit doesn't stink, but then I realize I too have been the victim of clicking through popups mindlessly and probably have done some 'risky computing stuff' I'm unaware of beyond that.

As nerds, do we have a higher capacity to fix a mess than a grandma? Sure, probably, but that doesn't mean that we don't make messes.

The solution is that you as the nerd should be able to prove your skills once instead of every time. This is why I’ve personally never had an issue with Gatekeeper—one `spctl --master-disable` and a trip to the Settings menu and you’re done. Why can’t TCC work like this?

> As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this

As a self proclaimed complete nerd I expect you to be insufferable about this—lo and behold...

Let’s not pretend these security practices have no use, please. This “I’m such a greybeard, screw modernity” playacting is so tiresome it’s not even quaint any longer.

Wait until they add a captcha so AI can't do it for you.

Prior to MacOS 10.11, Mission Control was good: you would swipe up with four fingers and it would show you a preview of all of your spaces. Then in 10.11, for no discernable reason, they changed it to suck: rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2", etc until you mouse over it; the practical effect is that using spaces is disorienting and requires memorization.

Some third-party software pretends to restore this functionality, but they do it by repositioning the mouse to simulate a hover, which introduces a delay and doesn't integrate correctly with the animation. Someone wrote a patch that works by disabling SIP and injecting code (https://github.com/briankendall/forceFullDesktopBar), but eventually stopped maintaining it.

A decade later, I doubt anyone at Apple remembers that this bit of user interface used to be good.

Agree! That "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2" view is so annoying, and given we have higher res monitors now, it serves no purpose if the intention was to save space.

I loathe that I can't even rename the desktops.

Wouldn't it be great to have them named "Design", "Dev", "Productivity", "Games". Or whatever makes sense given your needs, instead of simply desktop #.

Windows has had the rename feature for ages and I don't know why Apple can't just copy that. They've copied plenty of other stuff, why stick with the weirdly restrictive desktop naming scheme?

> rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2"

I never noticed that behaviour because I only use mission control in full-screen mode. If you swipe up with three (or four) fingers from a full-screen window the previews are visible immediately. I have no idea why we need a different preview for desktop vs full screen however.

The part of this UX that annoys me is the spaces get re-ordered for no apparent reason. I usually have a few IDE windows open and it's tiring to have to double-check the window hasn't moved.

that's a setting you can turn off. settings -> desktops and spaces -> reorder spaces

Ah thanks!

The setting is "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" which explains why the behaviour felt so intermittent.

Does it work nowadays? Back in High Sierra days whenever I tried turning this off it did absolutely nothing and still reordered my shit.

Turning off "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" keeps the spaces in the order I left them. That's nice. Three finger swipe between spaces when not using the preview seems to work.

However, swiping beetween the previews, it sometimes jumps to random places in the order - which is not nice.

Possibly a bug, but I might as well just write this as a letter to Santa because it's got more chance of being read than a feeback.

that is an incredible rage-inducing default, and really makes no sense. why would i want a system that scrambles my spaces?

The full-screen mode handling might be a clue about what went wrong: if you swipe up from a space that contains a full screen app, it has an animation where the app goes into a slot in the preview strip, but that animation doesn't make sense visually for a non-full-screen space. So, perhaps someone was implementing that animation, didn't want to implement an alternate animation for the non-fullscreen case, and decided to minimize the preview strip instead? And because this was after Steve Jobs had died, there was no one left in charge of UX to explain why that was a bad idea?

The animation for the full-screen case serves a useful purpose: drawing the eye to the window in the preview.

The non-fullscreen (desktop) case uses an animation for the same purpose, locating the current app window in a sea of others.

So what would the preview be in the swipe-from-desktop case? A preview of the window-sea, or the desktop as is? What should the animation be? I suspect those questions are why they chose to just name the desktop.

I think it would be more consistent if the tab based preview only existed for the desktop window-sea and transitioned to the actual space previews when swiping between spaces.

> If you swipe up with three (or four) fingers from a full-screen window the previews are visible immediately.

Previews are also visible immediately if you set Mission Control as a hot-corner action. In never see the title-only spaces — i forgot it even did that until this discussion.

I also wish I could name the Spaces. "Desktop N" is pretty useless.

Yes, and I'd go a step further: OSes in general need a concept of a 'project' or 'task' or whatever, which a) cuts across apps and b) integrates deeply with windowing and spaces.

Multitasking and context switching has been increasing for years, instant messaging boosted them again, and agent-based workflows are only going to push further in that direction. The OS needs to support that, and it's not an app-level concern: I use the same apps in each of my tasks.

IDEs can help with this of course: they tend to have workspace/project primitives and can restore code and terminal contexts from those. But there's always a bunch of other connected stuff that can't be linked: web pages (some IDEs are starting to manage those too), agents which don't reside in the IDE, relevant chats with colleagues, project management apps and so on.

This is clearly an OS-level concern, not an app-level concern.

Some of the iPad experiments with alternative window organisation looked kind of promising, but they’re just not powerful or intuitive enough IMO.

I make a version of this happen with Aerospace on macOS.

Oh nice, looks awesome, I will give it a go!

Thrilled to see it's FOSS.

https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace

For anyone wondering, you can use Aerospace purely as a workspace switching solution without the tiling: https://www.boronine.com/2025/02/09/Instant-Workspace-Switch...

I've been experimenting with aerospace for the last month. Still not sure if I enjoy the tiling aspect. It can get quite janky on occasions when multiple windows open at once. And it lacks some UI affordances (I'd love if you could make the focused app much more prominent). I might try this more limited approach

I wish macos for more serious about window management, it's extremely limited out of the box.

KDE tries to do this with Activities¹ (I personally haven't found it useful).

¹https://blogs.kde.org/2026/01/17/streamline-plasma-with-acti...

I feel like Arc nailed this perfectly with the vertical tabs and multiple "spaces", and since almost everything happens in-browser these days, this was 99% good enough. I can't understand why more power users don't find this setup ideal. I'm hoping Zen Browser can become a solid replacement.

Zen has been working as a full replacement for Arc for me since the Atlassian acquisition. There are only minor things that I miss from Arc ("development mode").

I use Niri workspaces that way. I name my spaces (usually after branches) and have a browser, editor and usually a few terminals open on a workspace. It's also great that a workspace has infinite space so that I can never have to think about creating workspaces just because some workspace has run out of room.

I can never prove it, but I like to think I'm the one to credit/blame for inspiring Apple to "inexplicably restrict [spaces] to a horizontal line only" in Leopard. I produced a concept video in 2009 that prominently featured a linear window manager with gestural navigation, and while it's mostly forgotten today, it was covered by all the tech press at the time and inspired a few attempts at adapting some of its idioms into proofs-of-concept in the early 2010s.

While linear window management is clearly not to everyone's taste, I still think it's a valid idea! It was heartening to see this launch and its reception, as I'm actually working on something in the same area right now...

Is the video still around? Share a link!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf03YBxCyGI

Ah, I remember that video, seeing it as the future of window control. Very nice.

Thank you for confessing!

I hate that design and what it has done to Gnome.

A grid was so much better.

PaperWM is the closest to this approach. There's also a macOS port:

https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon

FWIW your video is amazing. make it 2D and add hotkeys to go to spaces and I'll use it right away

I like the concept. Assuming you were the inspiration for this (very possible) how do you feel about the usability?

I spent an hour today trying to get it working the way I’d expect and it still does odd things, like after disabling automatic reordering based on usage the order is different when 3 finger swiping previews as opposed to actual windows. The visual order is as expected but the swipe order is not linear.

My criticism of MacOS Spaces is one I have of all Apple's window management efforts over the years: It's a great start and a foundation to build upon, but they never really followed through with iterative improvements informed by real-world usage.

In Spaces' case, the problem is a combination of an overly rigid model (only two full-height windows per space) and high friction to management (the process of moving full-height windows from one space to another requires multiple steps). Traditional free-form windows are a little better, but it's easy to lose track of them because the overview itself requires two steps to access (open Mission Control, hover the top bar to expand thumbnails). These could have been gradually improved over the past 14 years, but Apple has somewhat frustratingly left these core workspace features to wither on the vine.

This fixes a dozens-of-times-per-day annoyance for me.

The grid is good, but even better is the instant virtual display switching.

Nowhere is the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts annoyance of modern macOS worse than having to hit Ctrl→→→→→→→ and suffer those repeated animations, over and over.

yes! it's the worst!

I've been using Instant Space Switcher (which got a small callout in tfa) as a targeted fix for this, and it's lifechanging

I've also switched to Instant Space Switcher, it is soo good! Previously I used BetterMouse for only this feature but they made the space switching worse in later versions (slower, on-par with the default macOS speed).

Here's the link if anyone is curious: https://github.com/jurplel/InstantSpaceSwitcher

I also used to use BetterTouch tool just for this feature, no idea what they have been thinking over at Apple with this delay.

It's every action on Mac and iOS that does this, and it has been increasing in intrusiveness for a decade. I can't be sure why they do it, but it comes off as though their visual designers are immature, thinking we want to see their impressive animations not just in a demo, not just in a tutorial that we go through once, where we are meant to grasp the relationships between the things, but over and over again, all day long, for decades.

I freaking don't. One time was plenty. I don't want any animation. And the "reduce animation" feature's implementation is a slap in the face: all the delay -- that part is non-negotiable apparently -- but with blurry crossfades instead.

I'm using cwm (x11) without a compositor (never noticed tearing). And it's so nice when everything is not trying to be cute with shadows, animations and round corners. Animation only makes sense when there's a direct action that controls it (like when swapping spaces or hovering) or the system wanting to inform us (notifications). And it's better be fast. Otherwise it's just visual effects that quickly become tiring after a few days.

It is absolutely, positively mind boggling that you have to sit through those animations. And key presses don’t even take effect if your new desktop until the animation is done. It’s just lunacy.

How does a company with infinite resources and talented designers come up with shit like that??

Tried this? defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.05; killall Dock

Yup. Doesn't work.

You can also do Ctrl-UpArrow then click the space you want. This isn't instant, but it might be a little better than repeatedly cycling through each desktop, especially if you have a lot of them. Turning off "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" is also a must IMO.

Personally, I only open one app per desktop and just use Command-Tab. If you hold Command after Command-Tab, you can select an app with having to cycle through all of them.

> I only open one app per desktop

So what benefit do you get from multiple desktops?

Slightly off-topic: the old Aqua UI looks so much better. Not only it was much easier to see what's a control and what's text, but it also looked visually nicer (subjective, I know).

Funnily enough when Aqua was new i remember thinking Platinum looked so much better.

That is correct. Platinum still looks fantastic, carefully hewn out of the HIG. Early Aqua is a bit ostentatious and at the very least indulgent. Still better than the fucking flat-slop plus glarse vomit we have to put up with now.

We dont have to put up with it. At some point the collective “we” could consider using some other machines with other, more free, operating systems.

To be fair, so are many other UIs. Windows 95-style boxy buttons and bevels make the content look organized. Every possible action gets its button that looks like a button. You often see the total set of available actions by looking at a toolbar. You don't need to second-guess whether some piece of content itself is clickable / editable or not.

Also, everything has excessive padding now. Modern Windows control panel UIs often feel like a multicolumn wall of text with lots of empty space and a few switches dropped in, and to fit the same amount if options as the older UI they had to either hide some toggles because "known needs them anymore" or introduce extra intermediary navigation steps. As a result the new Control Panel feels bloated and less useful.

> Two decades ago I had a better Mac desktop experience than I have today.

Two decades ago was 2006. I have the same desktop experience today as I had two decades ago (Fvwm2) and have had the grid virtual desktop layout this author misses so much for the entire time via the Fvwm2 (and Fvwm before that) virtual desktops feature. One of the reasons I switched to Fvwm (I no longer remember when, but sometime in the mid to late 1990's) was the grid virtual desktops feature. So I've had gridded virtual desktops for longer than twenty years. Fvwm2's configuration has been tweaked and adjusted slightly along the way, but at no time did a corporate designer decide that I no longer should have a feature I had previously been using.

Proprietary software does not have your interests at heart, it has its stock price or next quarters sales numbers at heart, nothing more.

Reading the article as a Linux user was almost infuriating. I can't imagine having my workflow, something I've refined for my needs over the years, taken away from me at the wish of a company. Before I switched to Plasma and Wayland I ran XFCE with the exact same config for maybe 15 years, unbothered by updates.

> I can't imagine having my workflow taken away from me

You never ever had a single software change its workflow?

People have been using emacs for how many decades? Or vim and terminal? Linux DEs rarely change entirely without the ability to run old versions, with the notable exception being gnome 3 which is still divisive to this day in large part because of it. And even then it was still possible to keep your workflows with MATE, the continuation of gnome 2. Libre office just recently implemented the ribbon and you can still disable it.

Radical workflow changes with no recourse is the standard in proprietary software, not so much in FOSS.

KDE 4.0 has entered the chat.

Jokes aside: yes, I can see how it's technically possible to never experience a workflow change. But also using the same tools at work, your kids school, family you help etc. I just find not very probable.

I think GP was more talking about having your main workflows changed out from underneath you not so much never having to interface with something outside it. I haven’t had the luxury of a non windows workplace but if I worked in a Linux shop I’d be matching my home workflows. I see plenty of anecdotes on here about users who haven’t worked outside of emacs in decades. Not a probable scenario though I’ll agree with that.

> I can't imagine having my workflow, something I've refined for my needs over the years, taken away from me at the wish of a company.

The great Gnome 3 rollout did this for me... to be fair I guess that was a decision of the distributions, but it was in concert with the developers who decided to make a hard changeover, EOL the gnome 2 line there and then, and (deliberately?) scupper the possibility of installing both 2 and 3 on the same system.

Either way it sucked and that pushed me to Xfce, which I still use on linux. But it goes to show it can happen in FOSS.

Yeah okay. But at least we have decent font rendering.

so does linux since when infinality-lite was ported into fontconfig, harfbuzz, and friends.

I’m convinced that the biggest threat to good UIs are the majority of professional UI designers. Think of it this way… Half of all UI designers are below the median. These people chose UI design as a career. You don’t advance your career by simply defending the status quo year after year. To advance you need to design something new. So, you do. You do whether whatever was there before is working well or not. Because what are you going to do, sit on your hands year after year? And because half of all UI designers are below the median, a new UI design has even odds of being a step backwards. And then you’re on stage yammering about Liquid Glass at an Apple launch event. One thing that makes me sad is that a lot of designers seem to focus on visuals and don’t seem to understand anything about usability. How many designers entering the workforce know what Fitts’s Law is, for instance? How many designers were standing in the breach against all of Liquid Glass’s usability issues, most of which were quite obvious? Honestly, with rare exceptions, the designers are the issue.

This assumes that every designer is on the bell curve at the big tech firms in the roles that can influence this. I am not defending modern UI/UX, but that is quite an assumption.

You're right, it is a big assumption, but it's not unfounded. I've worked at F50 companies and founded my own startup. It's a lot easier to get two really great designers from the far right side of the bell curve when you're a small startup. As an organization reaches even 1000 people, you're now starting to draw from the middle of the bell curve. In fact, you have to. If you try to hire only from the far right of the bell curve for all positions, you end up with a lot of egos that will clash. In the best case, you hire leaders from the far right of the bell curve and followers from the middle. But at some point those mediocre followers start asking for promotions and your hotshot leader leaves for greener pastures. Controlling for that in your hiring practices at a large organization is virtually impossible, particularly if you have standard (middle of the bell curve) HR people. BTW, this is exactly why startups out-execute large companies every day of the week. A small startup can carefully control its hiring, select from the right side of the bell curve, and avoid all the large company HR crap. But as soon as it starts to scale, the bell curve becomes a looming threat.

On the other hand, just working at big tech doesn't mean you are especially great. Conformance and criteria other than raw skill matter. As you say, promotion games, etc... I would just lump all of that under conformance. So, you aren't wrong.

However, why startups outperform big companies isn't just the skill gap. Even if you have the most amazing leadership in big tech it is monumentally difficult to move the needle on some problems purely because of size not because of incompetence. All I am saying is don't overindex on perceived intelligence. A big org can start looking pretty dumb even though it is still far right of the bell curve compared to even a startup (hypothetically). Org size and the constraints that brings are a significant factor.

Oh, absolutely size has a lot to do with it, too. A founder and three engineers can change the plan at lunch to respond to something they see in the market. It takes admin assistants days, possibly a week or two to get the meetings set up and arrange the catered lunch for the same decision to be made at a large company. And even when it’s made, half the company will spend months trying to undermine it.

As someone technically under a design role for new product exploration reasons... Yeah... Lots of graphic designers who don't care much for actual product design. Be it the purpose of the product, of this bit of ui, the human factors, the interaction design, or the ux beyond where it fits the aesthetic.

There's a lot of lip service paid to each, but not a lot of real consideration for them, because that's not what will win in a portfolio at interview or in a deck for your leadership. We end up strongly self-selecting against those things.

The window (miss)management of MacOS is what's holding me from switching to Mac. I've already tried Aerospace and similar solutions, but I can't replicate the fast and unobstructed experience I have with i3wm.

Sadly wm in MacOS is like notifications on iOS: with enough time you get used to the unproductive mess they are, but you'll be missing out on better solutions. And since probably all MacOS devs are using Mac, they won't see/understand other (better) approaches.

I switched to MacOS a few months ago from sway and I really try to be as open as possible to the mac way of life, because I don't want to fight my OS. But, boy, mission control is unusable crap. I was really shocked how dumb everything around this feature was made. Things that were possible a few years ago, are not possible anymore. Like switching to desktops/workspaces by keyboard. Or the grid.

With the app "AltTab" I can at least switch between my apps without using the mouse and with raycast I can position windows, but it is painful how much slower switching and positioning things in MacOS is, than in any tiling window manager.

Magnet is easily one of the best mac apps i've ever purchased - makes window management so easy and it works great every time. Just Command + Shift and then you can pick any portion of the screen you want the window to go to.

That paired with multiple desktops does the trick for me! Highly reccommend (not sure if it's okay to share URLs? sorry in case it's not):

https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/

We can do this natively in macos, isn’t it?

No. Mac window management is inexplicably awful.

Yes, mostly, since macOS 15

Yeah I guess, just a bit clunky I think. For $5 Magnet is awesome!

Is it different from Rectangle? (I've been using it for ages)

looks pretty much identical!

Both apps look like a slightly less flexible version of Divvy (which I've been using since 2010):

https://mizage.com/divvy/

However, they're also cheaper ($0 or $4.99 vs $13.99).

Nice to see I'm not alone in missing old Spaces.

It's too bad we can't mix and match parts of releases as desired. If I could have OS X 10.9 Mavericks (last Aqua release) with 10.6 Spaces and modern macOS integration features (Continuity, etc) I'd be in heaven.

100% agreed.

The issue for me is how buggy the modern features are. Continuity with the clipboard: sometimes I copy text on my phone, and it just never pastes on my Mac. Why? No idea. It's not even like text is a complex format. It just... never pastes.

Or this morning I spent ages trying to connect to my phone's personal hotspot. It was a foot away on the table. It kept saying it could not connect. Turn things off, turn them on again, turn off, on again... I eventually moved to where I have wifi. It's a nice day today and I wanted to be outside. Annoying.

And repeated grinding failures like this form a slow, slow, growth of real frustration and annoyance with Apple. I know I don't hold the same attitude to them these days that I used to, and I think it's the whole set of changes since they dropped Aqua. It's not a good OS any more.

WM psychosis time:

My current "WM workflow"/window management keyboard shortcuts is:

    neovim → tmux → Ghostty → Rectangle → OS

    so moving to the left window/pane is (depending on the "nesting level"):

    ctrl+h, ctrl+a + {number}, cmd + [, option-ctrl-left, ??

This is what happens when you spend years overthinking / fighting the walled garden UX. The sad part is that I'm kinda OK with this at this stage (besides 1-2 days a year, when my mental faculties are lowered and I decide to _fix it_).

A global fzf / rectangle / alfred shortcut for all "windows and panes" would be great.

Unfortunately, at this stage, my overthinking/poor ux induced psychosis reached the point where I control Claude using voice and a Playdate console with a crank and I'm day dreaming about just looking at the pane I need and making a click sound with my mouth to select it (like Neddy in Adventure time).

> A global fzf

alttab.app recently went paid, but it'll do that

Thanks!

Just checked their site, but I don't see "jump to a tmux pane / browser tab" in the features there...

> besides 1-2 days a year, when my mental faculties are lowered and I decide to _fix it_

God this is so recognizable, it's truly at my lowest moments that I decide I need a new terminal emulator and spend 6 hours in a brew install rabbit hole. The worst thing is that I'm still using Warp of all things

I genuinely could not believe it when they took away vertical spaces. Having to jump over extra screens made the feature useless to me. I stopped using it. It's impractical.

Honestly, anyone who used and loved macOS in the past should really try a modern KDE Plasma desktop.

It’s not the same, per se, but it’s just … mature. It’s mature because it’s a nice mix of « it’s old and boring » + they took inspiration from everything that worked on macOS and Windows and stole it. They never removed features for any bullshit marketing reasons.

It’s not perfect : there are things that I like better on macOS (but they tend to be very rare tbh) or even Gnome or whatever I’m trying nowadays (it’s Niri!)… but I do think KDE is the best overall when it comes to respecting its user, giving him nice and clean defaults while giving them enough options to work however they like to.

And yes, that includes virtual desktops arranged in a custom grid. It’s not the default but the option is right there waiting for you to enable it if you want it.

Seriously, it's honestly pathetic at how little Microsoft and Apple have pushed UX in the past two decades.

Something like quickshell-overview feels so smooth and delicious compared to the painful use of virtual desktops on Windows/MacOS.

[0]: https://github.com/Shanu-Kumawat/quickshell-overview

I use KDE at home after leaving OS X when it became clear Apple became more interested in mobile OSes than desktop OSes, and using various combos of Linux and Windows for a bit. Gotta agree. Powerful, customizatable, and predictable at the same time.

I would. I love linux desktop, but the apple hardware just smokes anything else. I've had a little success with asahi, but not enough to let me switch.

Questions for those who like the grid layout of virtual desktops - how does it (or should it?) interact with multi monitor setups? Feels like this would break or at least compromise the spatial metaphor.

- Each monitor has own grid?

- The VD 'spans' the pair of monitors?

- VDs only on one monitor?

- The monitors form a fixed 'window' into the grid?

- Something else?

I have a separate grid on each screen. Each with different grid sizes. I have a 3x3 grid on my main display a 2x2 grid on my display to the left and leave my laptop display with no grid constantly locked to my works video conference application.

It works well for me, but as you can see from the comments everyone is different :)

I have a Kwin plugin so my laptop is always the same, but my external monitor is a grid. Iirc by default, KDE makes them all share the same grid

The Window Manager is the one thing I would rip out of macOS and shove in KDE's Window Management features if I could, it drives me crazy.

Humans have good spatial memory and having a handful of statically-positioned desktops in a 2D plane makes navigation intuitive and consistent.

The real issue is how the ORDER of the desktops changes all the time which messes with that spatial memory and kills a lot of the productivity improvements. A consistent straight line would still be worse than a grid, but still MUCH better than the current situation.

I think this behavior can be changed in System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Automatically Rearrange Spaces based on most recent use (turn it off)

> Textmate (and its revolutionary text-snippets) were the catalyst to my migration

Hooo damn TextMate snippets, that brings back memories. Hard to convey how hyped I was to use these. That is also what drove me to Mac at that time. I remember writing hundreds of those snippets for every possible C++ construct, and <tab> to fill in variable name, type, loop counters and so on.

Oh man, thank you! I was just complaining the other day about the missing Spaces grid… when they first took it away in Lion I looked frantically for the setting to bring it back, with no such luck.

Ironically, I think the reason they took it away was to help with fullscreen macOS apps, which are a garbage anti-feature it doesn’t seem like anybody uses. Long live the grid!

Part of the reason I wanted to to make the app is because _I actually do like fullscreen apps_. Or at least maybe I learned to after they took away the grid. In any case I certainly wanted this app to work with them.

As a fellow fullscreen liker (there are dozens of us! dozens!), this looks quite intriguing to me. A grid layout always fit better with my mental model of how these types of spaces should work, since I could use rows as categories of work and columns as specific applications within that category. Or one of a few other mental models I've used over the years.

I want to use full screen apps. But they are not in the command-tab order. So… no good.

They are, but it's nuanced. If you have one app with a single window, it will always be selectable via Cmd+Tab, even if it's full-screened. If you have an app with multiple windows, one of which is full-screened, and you select a non-full-screened window from that same app, you won't be able to return to the full-screened window using Cmd+Tab. Which kinda makes sense, since Cmd+Tab cycles apps, not windows.

I am going to put in a plug for “Which” a command tab replacement that lets you, among other things, cycle between windows like alt-tab.

A bit of self-promotion here, but coming from Windows/Linux land I got used to having the taskbar at the bottom and never really liked the Dock. I love my Mac, and I know folks who have been using macOS for decades swear by it, but this is one UI feature from other OSes that I would have liked to see in macOS.

One major issue is that the Dock cannot filter apps between Spaces, so I built boringBar[0] for this. It frees up real estate taken up by the Dock and makes it much easier to figure out what goes where.

I do understand the need for an app switcher on the Mac, though. It has the same problem I faced: it is very app-centric rather than window-centric. Switching between windows is nigh impossible on a Mac without third-party apps, unless you like using the three-finger swipe up gesture. I have never been able to switch quickly between windows using Mission Control.

[0] https://boringbar.app

Interesting, but I will prefer more unified and i3 style way for that I use aerospace and many other tools which give me such experience https://github.com/lanycrost/home_is_everywhere

Like GridLion, there are a handful of macOS space organizers that attempt to confine specific apps to specific spaces.

What would be most helpful for my workflow is something slightly different. I need to be able to launch specific browser profiles/windows in these workspaces. One space with all of the tabs for project X, another space with all of the tabs for project Y, and then another with all of the tabs for project Z. These might be in different browser profiles.

I don't see how I can achieve this under the common per-app paradigm of macOS space organizers unless macOS has some notion of Windows/Linux style shortcuts whereby command line arguments can specify the exact things that need to be in the browser window.

The same applies to Linux.

I remember the 2x2 grid in Ubuntu 12 being the best desktop UI I had ever used.

The current Gnome workspaces with a single row are a huge step backwards in terms of productivity. It must be easier for beginners, but it frustrates me every single day.

If you're attached to Gnome, this won't be a solution, but if you're willing to consider other options, KDE allows configuring the number of virtual desktops and their arrangement.

I remember some very old Windows shell app, Dashboard, by Starfish software, I think. It run under Windows 3.1, possibly replacing Program Manager, and it had a neat virtual desktop feature with tiny pictograms of several desktops for you to switch and drag mini-windows between them. Combined with other capabilities it was a true gem. (But somehow in Windows 95 the updated version started to feel less useful and I eventually abandoned it. Maybe it was the effect of moving between systems and a typical reinstall-to-clean-up routine that was common those days.)

> Apparently what I wanted was a Merchant of Record. Someone to handle purchases, taxes and refunds. There seems to be three main companies providing this service: Paddle, GumRoad and Lemon Squeezy.

I've used Lemon Squeezy a couple years back, but after the acquisition I feel they've gone downhill. It's been a month since I submitted my product for review and I'm still waiting.

Stripe also has a MoR service now, I was able to set it up and ready to sell in a few hours

> [In my day job working with LLMs] The bulk of my time is spent reviewing

This is depressing. I've been out of the field since Covid (after decade_s of work) and basically have to get back to work since kitty is gone, but this is definitely what I signed up for when I started on this career in software engineering.

If I'm gonna be reviewing all day, I'd rather manage humans rather than LLMs. How is it affecting managing engineering teams?

> If I'm gonna be reviewing all day...

I think the point is:

Pre-LLM: 1. think, 2. write code & check, 3. review.

LLM: 1. think, 2. write prompt, <LLM writes code quickly>, 3. review.

If the thing that you enjoy about programming is writing code, you can have the LLM write code in the style you like. If you enjoyed getting to explore and understand a system, an LLM can help you do that quicker, too.

"Use LLM without thinking" won't get you substantially useful results.

> LLMs don’t care about UX

Many parts of the LLM care about UX, and you unlock it with your feedback loop, which is a good way to unlock it but one of many ways.

One way to show that LLMs care about UX is to have one tutor you about UX. If they weren't trained to care about it, they couldn't do a decent job. But I've asked dozens of questions about UX to LLMs and they have a great deal of insight.

I've never really used spaces, I remember them being introduced but they didn't really take for me.

Anyway to see what all the fuss is about I've installed Gridlion but… how can I move an app to another space?

I was expecting to be able use to a keystroke to "flick" an app up/down/left/right onto another space.

I've been using macs since the Classic. I have used macs because the OS was rarely a limiting factor in my productivity. In fact, everything has always been made unobtrusive. Presently, there is misdirected focus at Apple. Most consumers will not have known better. But, that complacency has never been the way apple managed to innovate to be so ahead.

I just installed it, but I can't get it to switch spaces, or show the grid overlay. It just beeps at me with the "you can't do that" beep. When I click "Add Desktop", it says "Could Not Add Desktop" and "GridLion could not read the current Spaces for this display."

This is a M1 macbook air. I really want to try this.

I don't get the use of the spatial layout here. A line may be cruder but if you're going full swordfish hackerman mode why are you caring about grid geography at all? Bind each to a hotkey. The only time you're swiping is when you're lost.

Like what competitive player uses scroll wheel weapon switching in Quakelike games? Nobody

Visual memory is really powerful and maps far more easily onto human brain’s experience of navigating the world. So it’s easier for many people to imagine and organise around a grid.

Gonna reply guy here because this is a paid thing. Agree with the author. Exposé was amazing. Here's an open alternative that I built, completely keyboard driven: https://github.com/peterp/cmdcmd/

I use Charmstone for spatial app switching - https://charmstone.app/

Not the same as full spaces, but it gives the same vibe of always having a particular app on a particular hotkey.

I try to limit my multi-tasking though, so I can imagine where full spaces would be useful.

Vote with your money and time!

If you can, switch to Linux, choose the distro you like, and help make it better, in UI and whatnot.

I was a linux user for some time in my youth, then corporate appeared and with that the locked windows Thinkpads, the MacOS's and such. I am finally back in Linux at home and I find it so amazing, and all my video games work too!

I’ve been using a friend’s app switcher because cmd+tab was a bit too slow and not window oriented.

But this has been pretty nice for me.

https://mwitch.viraat.dev/

It’s also open source if you want to customize it for your own preferences (pinned apps, custom keybinds, etc)

> cmd+tab was a bit too slow

Using that app, if I cmd+tab from one space to another, will I see 0 (and I mean zero) animation whatsoever? The exact same behaviour as if I were switching between two apps on the same space? Because that's what I need to go anywhere near Spaces, and that's what seems impossible.

Thank you, Great description. I have a similar feeling while on my work computer for switching between windows. For some reason when the number of windows are too much, full screen task switching is slowdowns (its not a case my personal work) So i made taskbar.ahmetozer.org my be it helps.

I still miss MacOS classic vibes, even System 7 was great to me. I'm not totally a fan of the whole new MacOS system, its amazing of course, not saying it's not. But I miss the simplicity of MacOS9 and how we customized our desktops with nice pixelart 32x32 icons!

I'm excited, thanks for spending your free time bringing back parts of mac that made it an OS that felt nice to use. I also hope Apple brings this back as a native feature, but until then, I hope you can make some $$ on the effort.

You could call it hyperspace in an homage to that old 10.6-era application which customized spaces. (Also I just realized why Apple called it called mission control, it allows you to organize spaces).

Also this is basically a replacement for the zombie TotalSpaces 3

There's already an app called Hyperspace, it reclaims disk space through use of APFS features

Snow Leopard was peak OS X

This is all normalization to iOS horseshit.

A list ordering is the most primitive and least memorable layout because lists sort arbitrarily and alphabetical listing of capabilities are not intuitive.

But the weirdness only grows from here:

For example, Photos shows library recents bottom to top, but pick-photo from library shows recents top to bottom

Portrait orientation puts "Done" on one end, landscape puts it on the other.

"Done" can be implied by a return tap or involve a "done" tap.

Some controls tap, some slide and some do both.

Release to release, the formats move around.

Format varies between apps & modes.

Mystery meat abounds

Holding the device a certain way causes spastic mode changes, which vary release to release.

Almost any way you touch the device instigates an action or mode change and some controls have 3+ levels of function:

WTF does the "power" button do?

- stand-by - camera shutter - emergency SOS vs shutdown - arbitrary mode change depending on accessibility setting

Bugs and features overlap.

The UI is never baked, ever more modal...

exhausting

there is a project that makes macOS alt+tab look like windows grids (if anyone coming from there), its all something alt_tabs or something

yup, that's alt-tab : https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos I've been using it daily for last 3 years, it's awesome !

Forget all that. I want my stuff in text-based lists. Showing icons and file previews is way slower and less informative.

DE design was done in 1995. Any tiny advancements since have been entirely overshadowed by all the gigantic setbacks.

I am not so hopeful about the future of macOS given that the next CEO of Apple is a hardware guy, not a software person.

That’s one framing, here’s another:

The next CEO of Apple is someone that cares about quality. (As evidenced by how good the hardware is)

> The next CEO of Apple is someone that cares about quality. (As evidenced by how good the hardware is)

I think it's important "what quality" they care about. Tim Cook cared about supply chain quality, and honestly he did an amazing job, but he didn't care much about software, vision of Apple, etc.

Their chips are quality and the hardware itself is still some of the best. Which is what I believe they were designed insinuating.

The current guy didn't ever once show a sign he cared about anything but 'Number Go Up'[1] so I don't see how anyone could be worse for those of us who care about the actual product than he was.

[1] to be clear, I stipulate Cook is indeed the world champion of Number Go Up. Nobody Number Goed Up more than Cook did. For Ternus to do Number Go Up to the same multiplier Cook did, I think he'd have to acquire all the other companies in the world.

p9wl: A 9P wayland compositor: https://12e.iwp9.org/papers/p9wl.pdf

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRx75piIlxo

I loved spaces. It was so awesome. I tried stage manager the other day and died inside. Immediately turned it off.

I recall using litestep back in the 9x days. Loved this feature (virtual desktops.)

Plus the wharfs were cool, imo.

How much “tiling” and “mission controlling” do the civilians do or want to do anyway? I want to think close to zero. They are happy full-screening their Chrome on their Airs, bless their hearts, my wife included. I once attempted to demonstrate to her the brilliance of Alfred, Raycast, the new Spotlight, and she asked me if I forgot to take my meds.

The ones who do want this flexibility is also close to zero (I’m in the demographic, so not zero). Kill “Mission Control” / “Spaces”, “Stage Manager”, free up system resources and unfreeze some APIs. Win-win, Mr Turnis.

You can also assign hot keys to each desktop and then this grid layout is irrelevant anyway

The article mentions that feature and how it doesn’t work for the author.

Seems MacOS Snow Leopard is for the Apple people what Windows 7 is for Windows people.

There is no way I could have been as productive as I was on a 13" MBP back in the early 2010's without Spaces. I still vividly remember losing it [0] and spent a few years using various apps to re-implement the old-style spaces. The 2D -> 1D change is what killed it for me. I had amazing muscle memory of where everything was. Center screen is my browser, going left took my to my code editors, going right took me to my terminal, going down to my database GUI tool, and up for reference (second browser or photoshop design).

I never had to think about where things were, I didn't feel constrained on my tiny screen with no external monitoring, things were good. And now it's been over a decade and while I've "replaced" spaces with multiple external monitors I still think about it from time to time.

I watch people use (fight) the current "spaces" and I just shake my head thinking of what we lost and how Fisher-Price the new version is. Spaces used to be a power tool, now it's a shadow of its former self IMHO.

[0] Single row spaces is a joke, I won't use it

I wish there were a way to sandbox apps with more granularity.

> I’ve had feedback this name is terrible

GridLion is an excellent name

Apple has a strange habit of making the first version excellent, then finding ways to degrade the experience. The grid pattern of spaces is definitely one; Spotlight, as it appeared in Tiger, is another.

The last good MacOS was System 6. Change my mind :D

It might be nice to have more than 8 MB of memory available.

I do not like the grid. I can’t see what’s in it.

Anything great starts with Japanese toilets

how do u write the "llms dont care about ux" paragraph then link to your app site that exemplifies llm ux

DockDoor does this and a lot more. Its also open source https://dockdoor.net/

Maybe I just missed it, but I don't see where DockDoor has anything at all to do with spaces.

I just checked out DockDoor and I could not find anything related to multiple desktops in it at all.

But we're not talking about Dock Door. Respect the Maker by giving him his time.

We need a new social media platform purely for Apple product experiences. Stay with me. People post their experiences with various parts of all their products, from hardware button position to software design and behavior. Upvotes are "It's Genius", downvotes are "It's Shit" -- because Apple has completely shirked its much needed Jobsian specter.

The joke, of course, is that I imagine a good 75% of the reviews would be "it's shit."

They already have that, it's the Apple Support Community. Apple still manages to neglect most complaints on the site.

Honestly, people have been complaining about Apple's decision on every semi-Apple-related forum forever. Still didn't prevent them from rolling out Liquid Glass. Not sure another one would do the job

isn't this just what 3-finger upswipe does???

Reading this article and comment section really makes me appreciate Qubes OS (XFCE4), lmao.

60 workspaces, in a 12x5 grid. You'll never catch me driving an Apple!

As long as useful idiots keep circling the block in queues to buy the next version of their apple product, nothing will change. This will only get shittier.

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