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Comment by galad87 | Hacker News Reader

Mission Control is unusable in macOS 27. Shortcuts to switch spaces stop working (Dock must be killed to get them to work again), there is a padding between spaces thumbnails and the top of the screen so it's no longer possible to just easily move the mouse at the top to select one, windows rearrange randomly when one is clicked, full screen app spaces breaks each time you try to use them, animations are wonky and you can't reenter mission control while some animations are running, etc…

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Pretty sure Apple must dedicate a product manager to coming up with new ways to break spaces in each OS release.

It sure does feel that way. But I've often maintained that Apple took a look at how people were using features like this on other operating systems and said, "NO! We're gonna 'think different'!" And no one liked their way of "thinking different". But they keep doubling down, believing that once we see the genius, we'll all come around.

I haven't yet come around. Unix had it figured out back in CDE days. i3 was my happy place... now it's Niri. As long as I can get to my workspace with a key combo THAT I DEFINE, I'm probably okay.

The funny fact is that they didn't add any new feature to Mission Control, they just rewrote it and broke it in the process.

I don't know -- my conspiracy theory for many years has been that Apple isn't really very interested in multiple desktops at all, and there's just this one engineer who's made it his life's mission to bring the idea to the masses. But the masses also aren't really very interested in multiple desktops. So every two or three versions, he screws around with the UX and says "surely this time everyone will see the genius!" And they do not.

Personally, I almost never use more than two virtual desktops on macOS, which means most of the changes and bad decisions sail over my head. I don't think I really seriously used more than two virtual desktops on any OS later than BeOS, though -- which IIRC did it really well! -- which I suspect is less a function of macOS doing it badly than a simple function of rarely feeling like I'm cramped on a 27" 5K monitor. (Yes, I know half of you are like "I have three 24-inch monitors and each one needs nine virtual desktops to accommodate all of my windows." That's fine. You do you.)

I mean... I have a 34" widescreen, and yet, I spend most of my time on my laptop screen. So having multiple workspaces is pretty helpful for focus. I think your theory is a sound one. Once they realized their main business is a single screen with ONE APP focused at a time (yes I know, iPad can do more, Duo will also do more), they stopped caring about anything else.

I just want them to make the animation faster. It makes Spaces completely useless to me that it takes what feels like 2 seconds to shift focus to a window on the new space when I swipe on my trackpad. Worse, it takes longer the higher refresh rate your monitor is; it's not too bad on 60Hz screens.

You can turn the animation off - but, when you do, there's still a ~2s pause when the workspace you switch to is dimmed and unresponsive so it feels just as janky.

There's simply no way to quickly flick from one space to another and then back again, which is something that could be done more or less instantly on Linux desktops back in the late 90s!

You can't turn the animation off, you can change it to be a fade animation instead of a slide animation. As you say, it takes the same time regardless.

I also genuinely cannot believe how broken Mission Control is. I use it constantly and the flickering, black spaces, and other small issues lead to an overall frustrating experience I did not have in 26. I'm very surprised that these issues didn't come up on HN from all the beta users, many reporting that they're very happy with 27. Is Mission Control a feature that those likely to download the beta are disproportionately unlikely to use?

I’ve been experiencing much of the same as well. There seems to be some kind of oversight over keeping previously stabilized affordances intact through each upgrade, at least in the past couple of years. It’s my theory that it’s likely to do with some kind of newly introduced AI steps in their process which doesn’t care so much about small nuanced ui spots like this but check plenty of other boxes.

Another instance in watch os is the total removal of access to the app switcher And quick jump to precious app. It’s been driving me nuts.

same… I mean, I wouldn't go so far as to call it unusable, but it was certainly that bad back around beta 2 or 3. Now it's just mostly-there.

There was clearly a fundamental refactor if not complete rewrite in Mission Control, and sadly it’s just not quite done yet.

Otherwise I've found Golden Gate to be an improvement in every way.

oh, speak of the devil… yeah there's an issue where full screen apps don't show the "stoplight" icons on hover… sometimes it takes several seconds, sometimes (with Slack just now) they never appear.

I've given up on filing radars, feels like talking about your relationship to a housecat.

Spaces really needs some attention. It makes me much more productive overall, but it really feels like it's been forgotten. Beyond just making it less buggy, some simple things would make a huge difference, like being able to rename spaces, and not only showing the name of the space when you hover over it.

Edit: Thanks for the tip about killing the dock to get the keyboard shortcuts working. That was driving me mad. Do you have to do that every restart, or will those just work now?

After every time the computer goes to sleep or something like that. I made a script to quickly restart the Dock.

Ugh, how annoying. Thanks.

Moving an application window to another space without a mouse would also be nice. I've only wanted it for, like, the past 10-15 years. Snow Leopard even had that ability. Why was it removed? That's beyond me.

I have had to work around it with the most hacky scripts possible, and it's been so annoying trying to maintain all those scripts over the years.

I swear such a shortcut exists? I sometimes accidentally trigger it and have to sit through the window-sliding-to-another-space animation.

Negative, Ghost Rider.

Rename spaces + move to them by name. At one point I had a hacky buggy mess of a (Quicksilver, I think) addon that let me do this, and it was the best, even though it crashed my computer a couple of times a week.

Does anyone know how to do this, nowadays? I've lost hope that Apple will make it a native feature.

I use Spaces very heavily and it is amazing how much they borked it up. Even 27.0.1 is not helping it.

I tried using Mission Control with two monitors for the first time yesterday. Nothing fancy: a YouTube video in fullscreen (aka with its own Space) on the secondary screen, whatever else I was doing on the primary (built-in laptop) screen.

It was such a broken mess. Opening Mission Control and closing it again, interacting with it only on the primary screen, would often (but not always) result in the secondary screen forgetting what it was doing and going to a normal desktop space instead of the video space.

And I'm certain that windows are more prone to overlap now than they were before?

Spaces have been nearly unusably bad for a very long time in MacOS. I used them heavily, but in frustration, have simply given up on them completely. They're simply too unreliable and inconsistent, even when they're at their best.

Also am I tripping or is anti-aliasing missing from the previews now? It looks like glitter when they’re moving and I swear it wasn’t like that before.

I had a fun one where clicks stopped registering sometimes and right clicks didn’t register sometimes and my mouse disappeared randomly.

I thought my machine was broken. Turns out this is a known bug with window managers (????????)

The sporadic nature of it had me question my own sanity.

I’ve experienced spaces shortcuts not working suddenly throughout the Tahoe release at least, so I doubt it’s specifically related to Golden Gate. They could have made it worse somehow of course.

They rewrote it this year and it doesn’t seem like they polished it enough :(

The bugs in Mission Control are a deal breaker for me. I use spaces extensively and they are almost unusable in macOS 27. It is inexplicable that they did not notice how badly they broke things.

Fortunately I only upgraded a single computer, immediately noticed the bugs, and noped out on the other computers.

Welp, sounds like another year running Sequoia for me.

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