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Comment by mikeocool | Hacker News Reader

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.

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