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Comment by ekun | Hacker News Reader

A functioning window system would drastically enhance OSX productivity.

Window management (and indeed, desktop environments in general) are rather subjective I think. As someone who's been using Macs in some capacity since 1996 I'd be upset if macOS suddenly resembled a traditional Windows desktop or tiling WM thing, and the absence of Mac-like desktops on Linux (no, GNOME and elementary/Pantheon are not that) is one of the primary factors keeping me from switching.

Window management got better in Mac os but only recently with the addition of window snapping. You could do it before, but you had to drag from the green stoplight button which was an annoying mouse target vs the entire top bar.

Personally I do like the windows approach where there's a bar at the top with a few preselected zones you can use that shows up when dragging a window but the state of things on Mac os now is fine enough that things like that can reasonably be left up to extensions.

What exactly do you miss about the Mac desktops when using gnome's? For me the only thing I've noticed is lack of independent desktops per monitor though Windows also suffers that deficiency.

> What exactly do you miss about the Mac desktops when using gnome's? For me the only thing I've noticed is lack of independent desktops per monitor though Windows also suffers that deficiency.

No independent desktops is indeed a big one and irks me just as much under Windows (which somehow in 2026 still can't even set per-monitor desktop pictures without glueing images together in Paint).

On a whole, GNOME is just too simplistic. Where the Mac Way™ (especially in the 2000s) is thoughtfully implemented progressive disclosure of advanced features, the GNOME Way™ is to check if they make the cut for the app's toolbar or "junk drawer" hamburger menu and if not, strip the feature entirely.

It almost feels like they took a tablet OS and then adapted it somewhat to desktop use. That's the vibe I get from the DE itself as well as from the barebones (if pretty) apps that its community tends to produce. It's not as locked down as a tablet OS obviously — there's full fat Linux sitting underneath after all — but I'm always fighting it trying to turn it into a proper desktop experience with GNOME Tweaks and extensions (which constantly break).

An easy way to see the difference in philosophies is to compare the number of settings surfaced in GNOME Settings to that of the settings app for any Mac OS made in the past 20 years. GNOME Settings offers relatively little to tweak where System (Preferences|Settings) has a list that's closer (though not as long) to that of the KDE Settings app.

And of course, no global menubar. KDE lets users enable this but unfortunately many apps do not populate it.

> It almost feels like they took a tablet OS and then adapted it somewhat to desktop use.

GNOME is designed to be touch-agnostic, which makes better use of padded UIs than macOS 11+ does. With a rumored touchscreen Macbook still coming down the line, I think GTK and the GNOME developers skated to where the puck was headed. macOS and iPadOS are both constrained for touchscreen users. GNOME is kinda the perfect UI for where Apple sees hardware converging.

I don't think GNOME can adopt any more macOS idiosyncrasies without being a worse holistic experience. The Overview/search accelerator on the Super key is faster than Spotlight search. The desktop switcher is a better-supported use of the menubar than forcing an unsupported global cluster. GNOME could try to cram these round pegs into their square hole, but they know it wouldn't improve things.

And that’s fair, GNOME doesn’t need to be a macOS-alike, but it’d be nice if something was!

As an aside, I have yet to be convinced that touch on desktop operating systems makes any kind of sense and the MacBook Ultra or whatever it ends up being called is unlikely to change my opinion on that. I much prefer an old-style low-whitespace, data-dense, pointer-first UI like OS X used to have. I’m tired of the virtual real estate on my screens declining year after year for the sake of functionality I’ll never use.

I think that data-dense paradigm died with Catalina, sadly. GTK/Libadwaita has a lot of room for improvement, but I've come around substantially on their direction. Touch UIs are an inevitability of HID, and most attempts at accommodating them (cough Windows 8 cough) go too far towards alienating desktop users. A compromise has to be made that supports tablets, phones and desktops in the same UI, or else GTK will have to reinvent the wheel for each platform it supports. The final product GNOME settled on wasn't one I liked at first, but it's admittedly super polished on my Magic Trackpad and touchscreen laptop. Apps like Tuba[0] and Resources[1] are high-quality apps in every aspect ratio and input method. It doesn't feel awkward to poke at or click on at all, despite the glut of padding.

The future of desktop computing is probably going to be weird. I don't know how companies like Microsoft will manage to curb-cut their OS while also expanding to new UI/UX paradigms. Simplicity feels like a safe bet, and there's a lot of runway left to build the plane before the wheels go up.

[0] https://flathub.org/en/apps/dev.geopjr.Tuba

[1] https://flathub.org/en/apps/net.nokyan.Resources

That’s the beauty of Linux though, users can use the software that suits them best, at least in theory (said software needs to first exist). Even if it’s deemed a dead end by some, data-dense desktops of various flavors can continue to exist for the users who prefer them.

GTK/Adwaita themselves aren’t terrible (particularly with CSS to tone down the acres of padding) but I still take issue with the quasi-mobile app direction in GNOME-oriented apps.

Same, I enjoy both the current macOS and iPadOS windowing systems. Everything else I tried on linux felt like an extreme downgrade.

I find window management in macOS to be fundamentally broken. I heavily organize using workspaces and I don't understand why it does the things it does. Windows are opened on workspaces that aren't active and where those windows have never been present before. Changing workspaces on one monitor and activating a window will cause a different monitor's workspace to change (because that app had a window there). Sometimes newly opened windows appear with ~5 pixels visible on the screen (versus where that window was previously).

It feels haunted or possessed by demons. Like it's a middle school bully trying be as frustrating as humanly possible.

A lot of odd desktop/workspace behavior comes down to the OS confusing screens. It’s at its worst when one has 2+ of a monitor model that incorrectly reports the same EDID across all units of that model (surprisingly common).

Some of it is also on app devs, who are responsible for implementing functions like saving/restoring window positions and sometimes misuse or overuse window/app activation.

There are also a couple of bugs I’ve observed that I wish they’d fix but those are sporadic and not at all consistent.

Someone who does need a window system can use many of the hundreds of tools available, or use something custom. Regular uses don't really care about window management systems.

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