It really has gotten to the point where Linux offers the best option for a sane desktop experience. Watching Windows and macOS implode while KDE and Gnome slowly get better and better has really been something. Not quite at the point I'd recommend them for grandma and grandpa, but not that far off, either.
I've been using a Mac basically full time for years now, due to work. It's easily the worst UX and it's sort of shocking, after decades of hearing "it just works" or whatever. Hidden windows, hidden desktops, obscure keyboard shortcuts, etc.
I actually don't even know how to use the mac for the most part, I've learned to live in the terminal. I contrast this with Linux where I can just... idk, browse files? Where windows don't suddenly "escape" into some other, hidden environment, where I can just use a computer in a very sane way, and if I want keyboard shortcuts they largely align with expectations.
I was extremely frustrated while on a call using a mac. I made the video call full screen, which then placed it onto essentially a "virtual monitor" (ie: completely hidden). I had no way to alt tab back to it, for whatever reason, and I had no way to actually recover the window in any of the usualy "window switching" means. I knew there was a totally undiscoverable gesture to see those things but I was docked so didn't have access to the trackpad.
I figured out if you go to the hidden dock at the bottom and select Chrome, as I recall, you can then get swapped back over to that virtual desktop, "un full screen" the window, and it returns to sanity.
Mac UX seems to go against literally every single guideline I can imagine. Invisible corners, heavily reliant on gestures, asymmetric user experiences (ie: I can press a button to trigger something, but there isn't a way to 'un trigger' it using the same sequence/ reverse sequence/ 'shift' sequence), ridiculous failure modes, etc.
I can't believe that people live like this. I think they don't know how bad they've got it, I routinely see mac users avoiding the use of 'full screen', something that I myself have had to learn to avoid on a mac, despite decades of having never given it a second thought.
MacOS definitely has its issues but this just makes it sound like you have different expectations of how an OS should work. Different isn’t always bad. Hiding applications is a pretty key concept in MacOS. Shortcuts are pretty straightforward? Cmd+H to hide, Cmd+Q to quit. Spaces aren’t hidden- there’s lots of ways to access them, but it seems you haven’t bothered to learn them. In your example pressing ctrl+right would have switched the first full screen space. You could also have right clicked the Chrome icon in the dock for a list of windows.
BTW the dock doesn’t have to be hidden, and idk if it was a typo but alt+tab isn’t a default shortcut. Command is the key used for system shortcuts, so maybe you should have tried that? Like yeah it’s different but that doesn’t make it bad. If you been using it for 10 years without figuring that out…
—-
I’m with you on the 1st party apps though, and the stupid corners on Tahoe.
I call it "alt tab" because that's how my brain maps the keyboard. The reality is simple - I struggled going from Windows to Ubuntu about 20 years ago but ultimately made it to the other side knowing how to use both well. With macs, I didn't. 10 years later and all of my adaptations are to avoid the operating system. In 10 years the main thing I've learned is how to get myself out of a jam and stick to the parts of the OS that don't feel like shit. I mean, it's not like I haven't learned these things, I know how to gesture, I know how to exit full screen, etc, it's not like I didn't ever learn, I'm explaining that the experience was dog shit.
Anyone is free to claim that I just didn't try, or didn't give it a fair shake, or perhaps I'm just some idiot who doesn't know computers or whatever.
Maybe I just think an OS should work differently, but okay? I've never said that I have some sort of access to a platonic ideal of objective operating systems and that macs don't meet it. I'm saying that I think it's bad and I gave examples of why. And I think I can easily appeal to my experiences seeing others use the OS - I don't think they find anything you're talking about appealing either.
Years ago, they changed the behavior of the green button to be "fullscreen into a separate space." As someone who never uses spaces, this is never what I want.
You can escape it by moving your cursor to the top edge of the screen and clicking the green button on the titlebar that appears to exit fullscreen.
In this case, because I had docked my laptop, the entire window moved to a virtual desktop that didn't actually map to a real desktop. Meaning that the video call continued in a virtual desktop that I literally could not see, that I could not mouse over. I don't know if that's just a multiple-monitor bug or whatever but the behavior is stupid even without that failure mode.
Apple presumes you have a multitouch pointing device. You can three-finger-swipe between spaces. I know there's a keyboard equivalent, but you'd have to look it up.
It used to be that Macs would use single button mouses because the user would otherwise need to know which one to click, but now we have to know how many fingers to use and in which direction to swipe, so much for discoverable
It’s certainly “bad design” if we’re designing specifically with the OS convert who has a grudge against trackpads as the target user. But multitouch and its functionalities has been a fundamental part of macOS for nearly two decades now. For better or worse, a traditional mouse makes about as much sense for a macOS environment as it does for an iPad at this point. It’s workable, and it has certain advantages, but it’s really not recommended as your only pointer. At best, it’s used in tandem with a trackpad.
You're making multiple desktops sound very confusing when it's really not. Every desktop OS has them and macOS' implementation is quite good. You want bad virtual desktops, try Windows.
It sounds like you don't actually want the app in fullscreen. Fullscreen is "I only want to be in this one app window with no distractions." I pretty much only use it for watching videos.
If you want the window taking up the entire screen while staying on the desktop, double click the window chrome and it'll expand to fill the screen. And if you want the dock not taking up space, there's a setting to auto hide the dock (which I always enable)
> It sounds like you don't actually want the app in fullscreen. Fullscreen is "I only want to be in this one app window with no distractions." I pretty much only use it for watching videos.
I do want that. Every other OS has no issue with what I'm describing. Who said I don't want distractions? I want the video content to be expanded as widely as possible, that is what "full screen" means. Who said "full screen" means a separate desktop?
Ridiculous tbh
> And if you want the dock not taking up space, there's a setting to auto hide the dock (which I always enable)
> The fact that a full screen window creates a whole new virtual desktop is hilarious and I dare you to justify it.
I can kind of see the idea here. The alternative is that all the other windows in the working desktop get hidden behind the fullscreen window. That's pretty bad UX. I personally avoid it on Linux by always moving a window to its own desktop before fullscreening it.
That said, the implementation is awful, and exposes the rotten foundations of Mac's window management paradigm.
IMO floating windows always fall apart and should be reserved for modals and transient dialog boxes only. Everything gets a lot easier to understand when applications can't occlude one another or occupy the same space.
> The alternative is that all the other windows in the working desktop get hidden behind the fullscreen window. That's pretty bad UX.
How? It means I could have a full screen video and then overlay something smaller over it, or maintain my alt-tab behavior as it plays in the background, etc. I'd maintain the same UX. Why would full screen have such a weird behavior?
You're right that it's more consistent to have windows behave as you describe, and Windows and Linux both treat fullscreen windows this way. I posit that Apple cares more about not hiding windows behind others than it does consistency. This also shows with their new window placement algorithm that results in an absolute mess of windows all partially occluded but with some corner or edge peeking out of the stack for a user to visually identify and click to focus/being-to-top. Compare to Windows that (at least when I last used it) opens new windows at a slight diagonal offset from the last focused window, almost like building a neat deck of cards. Apple's ethos is also on display in the design of Stage Manager, which groups windows into these messy clumps and creates a visible shelf to swap between window bundles. Everything is optimized for hunt-and-peck visual users. If you're the type to organize your windows and workflows then you're fighting the system.
Or you could maybe learn how to use the OS, in linux lingo RTFM. I don't want to be rude, but the critique was very flippant, the arguments vague, all about expectations based on years using a different OS, doesn't seem you want to give it a fair chance.
I gave both generalized and highly specific cases where I felt the UX failed. I referenced principles of UX as well as literal "here is what my experience was in a concrete story".
> , all about expectations based on years using a different OS
No? I mean, again, funny. I explained how I've been using MacOS for years. Actually a decade, now that I count it out.
Plenty of people use an OS for years without learning. And you admitted to spending time in the terminal, which indicates lack of will to try and learn macos shortcuts, gestures, windowing model, spaces, and so on. And the comment used sweeping generalizations, without referring to any specific principles broken which aren't just personal dislikes or unfamiliarity with a different way of doing things.
> I gave both generalized and highly specific cases where I felt the UX failed.
No guidelines named, no principles defined. No comparison standard is established.
The earlier fullscreen story is a specific case, maybe a discoverability argument, but not not that UX violates every principle. MacOS spaces and fullscreen apps follow a workspace concept, it's not a window resize mode.
> Asymmetric user experiences
What’s asymmetric is not the command — it’s the spatial context. The claim that it’s violated is arguable.
> Heavily reliant on gestures
Not sure which guidelines this breaks, but every gesture has a keyboard shortcut alternative, there is mission control key, menu bar, dock.
> And you admitted to spending time in the terminal, which indicates lack of will to try and learn macos shortcuts, gestures, windowing model, spaces, and so on.
It indicates no such thing, other than that my preferred UX on a mac has landed on the terminal. It doesn't indicate whatsoever that I never tried to learn, or that I haven't learned, unless you presuppose that learning would necessitate using the computer a specific way.
Indeed, I have learned quite a lot of the various gestures, spaces, etc, unsurprisingly. I avoid them because they suck, and the learning experience was shit.
> And the comment used sweeping generalizations, without referring to any specific principles broken which aren't just personal dislikes or unfamiliarity with a different way of doing things.
All design principles are going to boil down to personal dislikes lol but no, nothing was "unfamiliarity" you can stop saying that thanks.
> No guidelines named, no principles defined. No comparison standard is established.
I could cite guidelines if you think it would help. Microsoft released a UX guideline years ago justifying why magic corners etc are a bad idea. Of course, they obviously don't follow that guide these days. What would you like?
I'm not interested in debating this. I'm perfectly fine with how I've expressed myself, I'm just not motivated enough this late in a Friday to get more detailed, so you'll have to just try to decipher what I've said and find if there's value to you or reject it, which I think is your prerogative.
And if you bring up these points to an Apple fanboy, they'll tell you that "you just don't get it" or "forget all the 'bad Windows habits' and just learn the Apple way of things. It's soooo intuitive!!".
> "forget all the 'bad Windows habits' and just learn the Apple way of things
I mean I'd be willing to say I don't get it, because I sure as fuck do not get it. But I think I'd absolutely reject the "forget all the other stuff, learn this". It's been literally years on a Mac. I remember the frustration of going from Windows to Linux, I look back at that adjustment and laugh, it's hilarious to me that that felt frustrating when I contrast to my Mac adjustment. At least the Linux adjustment was tractable, the Mac adjustment is a total joke.
I actually suspect that people don't "adjust" in the sense of learning how to do things with a mac but instead adjust to not doing things with a mac, like how many mac users I know of outright say they just don't use full screen mode because it's confusing.
Agreed. On MacOS, I use a variety of smaller apps and scripts to make it less awkward, e.g. Karabiner, BetterTouchTool, Hammerspoon, and, of course, "Alt-Tab" (https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/). I am even contemplating starting to use a dedicated window manager, such as Aerospace (https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/). But all of this is a massive time investment.
And yes, the fullscreen mode is the perfect example. It is so shockingly poorly implemented that I almost never use it. Even if someone thought it was 'good enough', that doesn't change the fact that there is a forced transition animation when going to/from fullscreen that is unreasonably slow and awkward.
I actually like the concept of an app in full screen creating a new virtual desktop.
I feel like it’s really intuitive when you switch desktops with the trackpad.
It’s just incredibly poorly implemented, like all the window management on macOS.
Disclaimer : I own MacBooks since 2010 and I have seen macOS rotting update after update. To me they achieved a really mature and pretty well thought OS with Snow Leopard and it’s been slowly rolling downhill since then.
I can totally say that KDE AND Gnome AND Cinnamon AND Sway AND even the immature Niri are all better experiences than macOS.
Personally replaced Windows 10 with Linux Mint on my very computer illiterate mother in law's laptop a few months back. Haven't heard any complaints so far.
Linux is ready for prime time for anyone not bound to Windows/MacOS software.
Personally, I'm still on MacOS for work, but all my personal devices run some form of Linux. It's been liberating to say the least.
I set up windows 11 on a laptop for my dad so he can read emails and browse the web. Came back 3 months later when he told me he couldn't see the PDF files anymore. Turns out he installed THREE different PDF viewers that he randomly found on google, they installed tons of bloatware/spyware, replaced browser toolbars and searches etc. to a point where I decided to just restore from a recovery point. Told him not to download weird stuff (again) and ask me when he needs help.
At that point I questioned myself: I really should have installed linux for him.
This is still a thing? Browsers still have toolbars???
My go to for family is giving them no install rights, and adding a remote desktop app for me to connect to them when they need something to install.
I don't get called very often anymore, and when I do, it's for their work computer or something, to which I say, talk to your IT department, I can't fix that.
Browsers today view and can do limited editing for PDFs. No need for a dedicated reader. One does need a dedicated authoring tool if you need to create PDFs from scratch. Most OSes support print to PDF as well if you only need conversion.
I've never seen a website break because of ublock, at least not in the default config. If it's that much of a problem you can just remote in on grandmas computer and disable it for whatever website.
I think that beats remoting in when granny inevitably gets scammed by an ad.
There really is no excuse in my mind for not running an ad blocker. It's as vital to personal computing security as firewalls and anti malware.
Blocking ads helps grandma not accidentally leak private information that could have disastrous consequences, for example, getting scammed out of their money.
Not blocking ads helps grandma visit a few more websites that don't work well with adblock.
I mean yeah, Chrome and Firefox both run on Linux. And that covers 99% of what most "normies" need.
It's funny when people say Linux is difficult for their grandparents or siblings, when that's the place it covers best. And it keeps them from calling you about random adware/spyware/viruses they accidentally installed.
It's prosumers and professionals that have more issues with Linux, because they tend to rely on proprietary software that's problematic to install/use.
Before she passed, I had one of my Grandmothers on Ubuntu for about a decade... I had to set it up for her, and I ran updates every few months for her, but she really didn't have an issue... Her Windows 9x era games even ran under Wine when they wouldn't load on Windows (7 I think), correctly.
Email, browser and a few games... she was pretty happy with it.
I was so close to getting my parents to switch to Ubuntu in the late 2000s. It stuck until my dad needed some piece of software on the home PC for work that only worked with Windows. Today, they have iPhones and they think it will be more convenient to have a Mac to "sync things". Oh well...
> Linux is ready for prime time for anyone not bound to Windows/MacOS software.
I suspect in order for this to be true we'd need a PR campaign that can shift culture on the scale of civil rights.
I'm not trying to be hyperbolic or deride Linux or anything—I agree that technologically it's probably ready. Overall UX I'm slightly skeptical. But the far bigger problem is culture.
There's already been a shift away from "PCs" among younger people. The majority of my kids friends have never touched a "regular computer." I've heard an unsettling number of reports of new hires who have never heard of a spreadsheet.
I'm bringing this up because if kids aren't using PCs as much in the first place and quite literally don't know what an operating system is (and please challenge this assumption; I'm going off of anecdata) it's going to be even harder to try to create cultural awareness and acceptance of linux.
But even disregarding that there would need to be a massive, massive coordinated campaign to create a real culture shift. I'm talking superbowl ads.
Again, not trying to be pessimistic, I'm trying to say that "ready for prime time" at this point has little to do with engineering or even design and far more to do with PR. Once I started launching my own products I quickly discovered (as everyone does) that making the thing is like 5% of the job and the remaining 95% is marketing.
The frustrating thing is that developers are some of the most reluctant to change. I'm sick of fighting docker on my Mac among the many other problems. But if we can't break away nobody else is going to either.
I've been using KDE for a decade and I completely agree. It used to be only better than GNOME because I could remove features from it and now I run completely stock KDE and it's solid compared to anything else.
I bought an SBC that booted into Gnome on the official disk image, and it didn't recognize my mouse. It was entirely unusable. In applications that were part of Gnome itself, like the settings menu, it was impossible to navigate using tab and arrow keys.
>settings menu, it was impossible to navigate using tab and arrow keys.
Huh? All you need is tab and the arrow keys to navigate the GNOME Settings app. I'm literally doing that right now. Maybe it was a later addition but it works perfectly fine in GNOME 49.
Gnome Shell in particular offers a ridiculously coherent, sane window management. Nobody agrees with all the choices the Gnome Team took to get here, but it sure is nice there being one way of doing everything that makes sense contextually.
I don't even know if Gnome and Gnome Shell are the same thing. One thing I do know is the default install of Gnome on Debian 13 leaves you without a dock, without a system tray, and without minimize/maximize buttons. They purposely remove the three most important tools the average user relies on for navigation.
It's like trying to make a car without any round edges because "square edges are better". Good luck with the wheels!
I can fix that somewhat with extensions, but every normal person I know will take one look at the defaults and abandon it. That's a reasonable choice in my opinion. Why use something where the first interaction gives you a clear indication you're going to be fighting against developer ideology?
If you want to customize your DE a lot - Gnome isn't for you.
If you just want a clean and productive environment by default... Gnome is great.
Once you stop fighting it, sigh, and go with the flow... modern Gnome is genuinely pleasant in that I spend almost zero time thinking about it, and shit just works.
I still run other DEs for some specific purposes where "general use" isn't the goal, but I can reliably hand non-technical family members a machine with Gnome and they don't have to come ask me a bunch of questions.
My problem with GNOME (after having used it as my main desktop on my Linux systems for many years) is that it removes some really useful features and they are not just expert features, but also features that non-technical users are used to, such as system tray icons and menu bars. You can bring them back with GNOME Extensions, but for instance, the system tray icon extensions are very buggy.
KDE on the other hand just has these and is also great out-of-the-box (I pretty much run stock KDE).
Anyone who lived in a browser was fine a decade ago.
At this point... it's basically anyone who doesn't want to play competitive mp games with poorly implemented anti-cheat, or who doesn't have niche legacy hardware (ex - inverters, CNCs, oscopes, etc).
Steam tackling the gaming side of things has basically unlocked the entire Windows consumer software ecosystem for linux. It's incredibly easy to spin up windows only applications with nothing but GUI only software on most distros at this point.
Crazy how much better a system with a modern linux kernel and Gnome or KDE is than Windows 11. I'm at the point where I also prefer it to macOS... which is funny since I think Gnome was basically playing "copy apple" for a bit there 5 years ago, but now has really just become the simpler, easier to use DE.
In the past few years, I’ve started to develop a form of “upgrade dread” when it comes to OS upgrades. What are they going to enshittify now? What are they going to drop support for now?
This somehow excluded Linux and its DEs, and I eagerly read any news, changelogs, and announcements in this space. They’re still not perfect in every aspect, but at least I see things improving instead of public turf wars between departments trying to improve their KPIs.
Why is there an extra URL handler for MS Edge that bypasses the default browser config? Why is the search bar this wide in the default taskbar config instead of showing a simple button? Why are local searches always sent to Bing with no easy way to switch it off or change the search provider?
> I’ve started to develop a form of “upgrade dread” when it comes to OS upgrades.
I've been going the other way on Linux.
I used to think it might be wise to postpone updates if you were traveling, especially using a rolling distro. Today, I would be quite confident running the updates 10 minutes before leaving.
Granted, this is also because I'm more confident than ever that I could fix most breakages, and worst case the smartphone is there, but I've also not seen big breakages for years.
Yep. I run NixOS unstable-small on my ThinkPad and there is rarely breakage in daily updates. If it ever happens while on the go, I can just boot into a previous generation. The immutable OSTree/bootc distros are similar, as well as openSUSE, which uses btrfs snapshots on updates.
Given that a lot of things happen in the browser, I think it wouldn't be too crazy. There are even distros that look like Windows if you're after that. What part of it do you think isn't ready for this scenario? (honestly curious)
This has to be sarcasm. Either that or you have never used KDE or Gnome even once in your life. No DE for Linux is anywhere near as polished as the DE in Mac OS. You have to spend hours customizing KDE or CFCE to get them to function even halfway near what an average user would expect. Gnome is okay but so bloated and even more opinionated than MacOS or Windows.
This is definitely not the case, and I invite anyone reading this comment to install a Linux distribution themselves in a VM or something to find out via direct experience. Fedora is a good place to start in my opinion.
If you want to compare on the basis of microissues like this one, then note that KDE Plasma has exactly the same issue with the resizing area of rounded corner windows aa the one pointed by TFA.
Learnability and usability are related but independent concepts. This feature is difficult to find out about unless told, relatively easy to remember once you first learn about it, and very intuitive once you try it out. Dragging from the corner is slightly easier to stumble upon or infer, but most people will learn about it because they were told about it. The alt drag version (both for resizing and moving windows around without having to go to the title bar) is in addition, becomes second nature quickly and is significantly nicer once you learn it.
Of course I've been using Cosmic for most of the past year now... It's getting better, but still some rough edges... the launch bar still doesn't feel quite right, and there's still times where keyboard navigation doesn't quite work right/smoothly.
Similar experience here: I setup Debian stable for my 76 yo mother, and for a 79 yo friend. Works like a charm, and the 2 years release schedule is perfect for people who don’t care about bleeding edge and would rather have stability.
Unattended security upgrades keep it secure, and in my experience a bit of initial “locking things down and simplifying” is valuable, but after this it’s smooth sailing compared to other older folks I help with Windows systems where MS is constantly throwing at them insane bugs, complete UX changes, ads, or Copilot everywhere.
The main problem is that Apple wants to be opinionated. Linux is the polar opposite of that. People used to say the latter is bad, but it turns out the former is way worse (many hackers of course already knew this).
> Not quite at the point I'd recommend them for grandma and grandpa, but not that far off, either.
But at this point grandma and grandpa are the only ones I'd recommend to use Apple devices.
Opinionated design was great back when Apple's Human Interface Guidelines were based on concrete user testing and accessibility principles. The farther we get from the Steve Jobs era, the more their UI design is based on whatever they think looks pretty, with usability concerns taking a back seat.
It was good because it was both Opinionated (in other words, the path to write software that follows the design was easy, and the paths to write software that violated the design were hard), and also well-researched by human interface experts.
Now what we appear to have is "someone's opinion" design. A bunch of artists decided their portfolios were a little light and they needed to get their paintbrushes out to do something. I don't work at Apple, but my guess is that their HI area slowly morphed from actual HCI experts into an art department, yet retained their power as experts in machine interaction.
So here we are, we still have Opinionated design, but it might just be based on some VP's vibes rather than research.
I don't like to paint Apple as being completely incompetent (but damn have they been screwing stuff up), but I do think trying to solidify the experiences around a common codebase has become untenable. The idea is great thought - write one app that works on macOS, iPadOS, iPhoneOS, visionOS, etc. What a time saver that is for developers - but the problem is that screen sizes and interactions with those different platforms vary. Yes, resizing a window with your clunky finger needs a bit more wriggle room, while a pixel precise mouse or touchpad is a lot different.
Opinionation (heh, opinionatedness?)'s value is entirely different depending on the user category.
Hackers by and large don't want opinionated, because they're willing to spend the time configuring & customizing AND have the knowledge to do so.
Just about everyone else (as far as I can tell) very specifically do not want this, and for those who do, the amount of customizeability e.g. MacOS offers is enough. Having an immediately-useable computer (recent problems notwithstanding) is of much greater value.
So when you say "The main problem is that Apple wants to be opinionated" I can only conclude that you're coming at this from the 'hacker' POV. But I may be misunderstanding your comment.
I don't love all the new tahoe stuff, and do wish I could go roll back, but this hand wringing around Apple is way overblown IMHO. What he is reporting is real, but in my actual usage I haven't noticed this at all- in other words, if this wans't called out, I am not sure I would have ever realized it.
Tbh I have always found window management on Macs to be annoying and something to be avoided- Rectangle or something similar is one of the first things I install and try to use the shortcuts to just put windows in either a quarter or half of the screen.
That said, I use Macbooks for the hardware, if for whatever reason I had to switch to Linux I would just shrug and not care one bit. It took me a few years to realize, but MSFT just disappeared from my life one day and I didn't even notice.
Also, for some reason KDE renders everything super-fast/smoothly on my 120Hz 4k display, whereas macOS on Apple Silicon is often stuttering (no, it's not the Electron bug). The tables really turned, when I first switched to macOS on the desktop in 2007, the GPU-based rendering was insanely good compared to... pretty much everyone else.
Rather than evolutionary improvements we get Liquid Glass and ads in iWork applications. The enshittification has started I guess.
I've actually bought a Mac Mini which I use for media consumption and run it besides my Linux (Cachy OS) gaming PC. I have a jellyfin server, but the media client for linux is totally broken.
And, when you use an nvidia card, you really have to do a deep dive on which settings and which render client you want to run. I now have a stable solution that runs KDE Plasma via Wayland, that allows for games to run smoothly. It took me a while to figure that out.
The Linux community also, quite frankly, sucks. When you need to figure something out, you really need to make it a study and only if you know the correct jargon, you are deemed worthy of help. Othrwise you're bombarded with rtfm comments.
my mother and younger sister both prefer it over default Windows 10/11 design. mum says, "feels similar to my phone [pure Android 12] yet I can do so much more".
given that sister only really needs Steam Big Picture and everything mother uses is already in Flathub or defined in a Nix flake, they didn't experience any ecosystem issues
There are no good options for grandma these days. I've been helping my 85-yr-old mother with her computer stuff (she has an iMac) and there's so much user-hostile, broken stuff--not just on the Mac itself, but many of the internet-based services she has to use--it makes you want to take a baseball bat to the while affair.
> "...while KDE and Gnome slowly get better and better"
These projects have been around for literally decades and really haven't changed much during that time. I think what you're noticing is that Linux desktops are as good as they always have been, but since Apple and Microsoft keep messing with theirs for marketing reasons, in comparison it seems that Linux GUIs are improving.
This is just not true at all. Yes Gnome and KDE are old, but they've changed SIGNIFICANTLY.
Gnome 2 => 3 was a bigger and more ambitious transition than anything Microsoft has done. Except maybe DOS => NT. Same thing with KDE 3 => 4.
KDE gets new features on a very regular basis and they're not just, like, little checkboxes added here or there. No. Theyre huge changes. New system resource monitor, new notification center, new widget editor, new panel editor, window tiling... the list goes on. And that's just, like, the past 2 ish years.
Linux GUIs are improving, and rapidly. Before, they were close. But the gap keeps widening. At this point, KDE is so unbelievably far ahead of windows in terms of UI, UX, usability, performance, and feature set that it doesn't seem fair. I don't know if Microsoft can catch up. And, if they could, it would take multiple versions of windows.
Sorry but you clearly haven't used macOS. Linux on the desktop is still about 15 years behind, and I tried it recently. It's such an inconsistent experience it's almost hilarious.
Speaking as a Tahoe user by the way who is not experiencing any issues to speak of (on 26.0.1 - and I can't reproduce the resizing inconsistency either). I've been using macOS since 2003 (back when it was called Mac OS X) and before that I was a Linux desktop user since 1996.
I used macOS as my daily driver from Tiger to last year, actually. I don’t know what the inconsistencies you’re referring to are, but I certainly prefer them to cloud account nagging and constant attempts to monetize user behavior, which is the modern macOS experience.
Since the first taste of Linux WMs, I believe the best and only good way of handling window move and resize is super+lmb/rmb respectively. No more pixel-perfect header/corner sniping!
On Linux if you learn shortcuts for close/minimise/maximise as well, you can even remove window borders and title bars entirely. It's free screen real estate.
The gnome window title bars are obnoxiously thick and useless by default tho. I've found that Unity or even just Windows like styling in Gnome is a lot more respectful to your screen real estate.
I used to use "GTK Title Bar" gnome extension which was abandoned a few versions ago so had to write my own and it's X11 specific. The one drawback is that when windows are reopened, they are offset by the title bar height i.e. it messes up whatever is tracking the size/offset/location.
Anyone have other ways to do this in gnome and do they work on wayland too?
I'm on Fedora KDE so won't be much help to you, but there is a "Windows Rules" section in the system settings where I've added a rule that applies to all windows with the property "No titlebar and frame". Actually I'd quite like frame just with no titlebar, but that's not an option.
MacOS is the "it just works" operating system. As such, I think the moment that you need to declare custom workarounds like this, it kind of loses its legitimacy, and you should already be in Linux land.
I abhor the current state of macOS and Tim Cook’s leadership, but your take is nonsensical.
For one, “it just works” hasn’t been used in over a decade, same as Google’s “don’t be evil”, which does tell you something about their current philosophies.
But more importantly, “it just works” was obviously never about it “it reads your mind and does every software feature however you personally like”, it was about the integration of hardware and software and not having to fiddle with drivers and settings to get hardware basics working.
While I get the butterfly keyboard hate (though mine is so far still perfectly fine) the USB-C ports were amazing. I have a 2016 MBpro and that thing still cooks really well. As somebody who worked in video production those ports were a godsend. No more waiting around for footage to transfer all the damn time. Complete game changer. Plus with one or two quality docks I could plug-in literally anything I ever needed. With the AMD GPU i could also edit pretty beefy 4K with no proxies most of the time. In 2016/2017 that was pretty awesome. Plus last good intel machine they made IMO, so good compatibility with lots of software, target display mode for old iMacs, windows if I wanted it, etc.
Probably my favorite laptop I’ve ever owned. Powerful machine, still sees work, runs great.
It introduced USB-C before it was ubiquitous even on smartphones, at least in my area. All the peripherals still needed a dongle, it was the dongle era. The keyboard was okay to type on once I got used to the short travel, but the keycaps easily broke off, and dust would get in and the keys wouldn't register. Also, the whole laptop would get very hot, at least the 13" pro without the touchbar. I prefer the older 2015 model, before the butterfly, that's the one I had at work but had to give it up, and I regret waiting for the new models instead of purchasing the same one.
Compared to my old NixOS with tiling window manager, I’d say MacOS panes just doesn’t work. I have Rectangle, but it’s no comparison to the full tiling experience. I switched for Apple Silicon nothing more
I use Aerospace and it's an okay but not great tiling window manager. Note that AeroSpace really is among the best on macOS, but I'm guessing the OS APIs simply don't expose enough hooks.
Most people wouldn't touch "NixOS" or a Linux-style "tiling window manager" with a 10-ft pole, though. For them, the tiling window manager is a good in-between.
what is the full tiling experience like? I was never a tiling WM guy, on Linux I'd just set some KDE shortcuts for moving and resizing windows. On macOS I used Spectacle and then Rectangle but not sure what I am missing out on, I was always content with Spectacle
Even if this was a "custom workaround" this argument would be extreme "all or nothing" binary thinking.
An OS can "just work" for of the stuff a user does, and just need some tweaking here or there. Doesn't mean if the "just works" stuff is not 100% you're just as good going to Linux.
Anyway, this is not some "custom workaround", it's a regular Apple-provided macOS toggle. It's just not exposed in the UI, because for most users, the regular way "just works". I know all kinds of "defaults" toggles, and barely use 1/100 of them, because the actual defaults are fine.
But, believe it or not, is very customizable (and previously very scriptable). I have Shift+Command+M (maximize) bound to resize to fit the content (different from full screen in macOS). Anything that’s in a menu can be bound to a keyboard shortcut without any additional utilities.
I kind of agree with you, but on macOS I still don’t have to ever think about drivers. The hardware just works. Linux isn’t quite there yet. My work XPS laptop running Ubuntu is close, but not quite the same.
Yes, the mac user faces incredible disillusion when he discovers that "just works" was just another marketing gimmick (to the likes of it doesn't get viruses!)
As a long-time Mac user, "it just works" actually meant "it either works or it doesn't" - a *binary*. Whereas other OSes were shades of grey - it _might_ work if you spend time searching and trying random combinations in settings.
As a 20+ year heavy mac AND linux user, both are true.
It doesn't get viruses, especially if you don't install random junk from warez sites and stick to MAS, brew, and a few trusted vendors. Even if you do install crap, it's trojans not viruses, which are more like the Yeti (something like that might exist, but few have seen it) than a problem mac users have.
And things "just work" way way way way more than they do in Linux (and I've started using it professional as desktop and for dev work in late 1990s, I'm not weekend tourist to it), which is exactly what I expected as a pragmatist. Only some non-existing carricature user that exists in strawman arguments expected everything to be perfect.
The "they don't catch viruses" is a bold lie, but back then when i worked in tech sales the apple promoter wanted us to repeat the lie ad nasueam. They definetly catch malware and it's as easy as in any other platform (also because today the malware will likely be running in a headless chromium instance)
I've had a macbook since 2010, and to me its software quality has been going downhill since snow leopard, today it's completely unrecognizable.
I think apple jumped the shark more or less in 2012 with the flay layouts, when they also started changing ages old defaults, hiding and then removing features for power users, too much handholding and telling you what's best for you, things like that.
My macbook from that era is still with me, but it runs debian now, same as any other PC i use for work or leisure, and it's really so much better for me as a programmer and as a user. Freedom. It's really freedom (and KDE's ergonomics really clicks with me). I recently had to install unsigned software on one of our worplace's mac minis (which i'm glad i don't have to use anymore) and it was so incredibly frustrating i wanted to smash that thing.
>The "they don't catch viruses" is a bold lie, but back then when i worked in tech sales the apple promoter wanted us to repeat the lie ad nasueam. They definetly catch malware and it's as easy as in any other platform (also because today the malware will likely be running in a headless chromium instance)
Malware is not a virus. And it doesn't catch malware if you keep to trusted sources and keep on OS protective layers like SIP.
Install junk from warez sites and the like, and YOU installed something (still not a virus: a trojan). If you couldn't install it at all (also totally possible) you'd be crying how macOS restricts you.
In over 20 years of OS X use I've never had any virus, nor did anyone I know. Over 30 years of Windows I've had plenty.
>They definetly catch malware and it's as easy as in any other platform
If you install it, it's not a virus (and you can't avoid that in any OS, unless they lock you out of arbitrary program download and execution and only have you run in sandboxes).
Even so, you can very well install and not give it privileges, and then it can't even touch important directories. If you install it && enter your admin credentials to let it do whatever, it's on you.
>I've had a macbook since 2010, and to me its software quality has been going downhill since snow leopard, today it's completely unrecognizable.
It has, but that has nothing to do with now allowing viruses or even malware (in fact, regarding the latter, is more secure than it was in 2010 via multiple measures).
Windows is also the "it just works" operating system, and it has hundreds of useful things you can only do through registry hacks.
It's not a very useful test.
I look at the good things about macOS over desktop linux like how cmd-c/v works across all apps, and it would be amazing if it were just a cli command to bridge the gap.
It's the ambition as a home user OS though, like macOS. And in the discussion of "it just works" operating systems, who else are we to go by than the vendor ambitions? Personal opinions? In that case, neither is because both struggle to always work in all scenarios since their respective inceptions.
When the phrase originated, manually updating CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT were expected skills of a home PC owner. The idea of buying a device, plugging it in, and having it work without a complex setup was unheard of. "It just works" on the Mac meant the absence of a DOS layer, IRQs, command lines, etc.
AFAIK Windows has never been known or marketed as "it just works". It goes long way to maintain backwards compatibility, but lets not kid ourselves that it has any semblance to what Apple's "it just works" is supposed to mean.
I think it was a mistake for Apple to put some of the best QOL, not just accessibility, enhancements behind the Accessibility section of the Settings, rather than on the Trackpad settings. Three finger drag is a game changer, and a lot of my colleagues had no idea it existed.
The weird thing is that setting used to be in the trackpad settings! I have no idea why they moved it. It's one of the first things I enable on every device I use.
Exactly, same, and same. I was in the company HQ a few weeks ago and one of my colleagues just got a new machine. I was watching them set it up and was like, "How do you live like that, clicking the top and holding to drag to move the window?" They had no idea three finger drag was a thing, life changed.
Probably due to the longstanding bugs with it. I still use it on all my laptops, but Finder in particular gets tripped up with what the drag state is when using it.
The macOS Settings app is broken in all kinds of ways, as far as UI/UX goes. It's been this way since they redesigned it a few years back. Not that it was great before, but the redesign just made it worse.
Works great for me. I enabled that functionality alongside resizing on RMB by using "Easy Move+Resize" from GH. I also use Raycast to bind most window management stuff, it's instant unlike the built-in alternatives on Tahoe.
I don't think I know how to confirm that command is correct, and I've been a Mac user for decades. If Apple's solution to problems is "trust the CLI command you found on a website" then I might need to sell some shares.
I used to use the Sawfish window manager ... before it fell out of maintenance, oh and before I switched to DEs with the window manager bolted on.
The thing I miss the most from Sawfish is that it let me resize any window. There are a lot of fixed-sized modal dialogs with scrollbars that wouldn't need them if they were taller, and there's a lot of room on my portrait monitor!
Probably just simple resistance to use of modifier keys in non-technical users, at least on the Windows side. A lot of users never touch a modifier except for Ctrl for copy/paste and maybe Windows for start menu search.
On the Mac side where key combos and modifier use is more widespread among users, it’s probably because there’s no intuitive visual that can be associated with the interaction.
It's not like Apple would frown about the idea of an action having "no intuitive visual associated with it". On iOS, you can scroll to the top by pressing on the status bar as one example.
Oh, I get having a visual way of doing it with just a mouse for sure. But for power users or even just-a-little-bit-of-knowledge users it's super quick and convenient. When I had to use Windows for work it drove me nuts that the option wasn't there (ended up finding AltDrag thankfully).
For window move I think it's a reaction to the popularization of putting UI in the window titlebar so there's nothing to grab onto. I don't mind it but I wish there was a dedicated "grab" button on the mouse because I find it clunky to have to use both hands to manage windows.
I know it's been around for a while, but I don't recall people talking about it like it's a killer feature of Linux window management until after the "UI in the window titlebar" trend started.
Recently getting a new Mac for work, coming from Hyprland has been tough, but I feel like I’m getting there. Aerospace and Karabiner-Elements have gotten me most of the way there. Have had to write a few scripts to get the workspaces working the way I’m used to, but overall I got a significant part of my workflow to mirror my Linux setup, but would still love to get the super+right click to resize working somehow (there is a native way to move windows with ctrl+cmd+left click which was nice).
Not OP but it's the best auto tiling WM I've found for MacOS so far. Yabai requires SIP disabled for what I would consider core features which is a no go on a work laptop. Aerospace sides steps this and MacOS's horrible window management by just not using the built in spaces. I've only had to restart it a couple times over the last 4 months due to bugs.
Yeah I use a third-party add on for macOS that does something similar.
The only annoyance is situations where you are moving the mouse while also starting to press a ctrl+ or cmd+ key combination and unexpectedly move or resize the window in the process.
Tiling window managers used to be a thing in the old days, they predate the invention of overlapping windows, there is a reason it is only a minority that reaches out to them nowadays.
Tilings are no better or no worse than floating. There are many users who would benefit from them (people who typically keep all their windows maximized), but have had literally zero exposure two them due to MacOS and Windows.
Complaints about lack of window snapping in MacOS vs Windows, a loose copy of tiling, are consistent across the internet. If MacOS and Windows had native tiling support, you'd see a fight fiercer than tabs vs. spaces.
The reason floating windows are used is because "that's the way it is done." Windows 95 wowed the world and established the status quo.
Not to mention the direction that the likes of Paper and Niri are going, these are things that very few users get to experience and therefore couldn't possibly have an informed decision on what they prefer.
> Not to mention the direction that the likes of Paper and Niri are going, these are things that very few users get to experience and therefore couldn't possibly have an informed decision on what they prefer.
niri is great because it gives you the best of all worlds.
Scrolling by default but you can easily float and tile things as needed. It feels so intuitive for how I use computers.
Having used Windows for 25 years, there's no chance I'll ever go back. This environment is already substantially better. That's after tricking Windows out with virtual desktops, global hotkeys, window positioning tools, launchers, multiple clipboards, heavily WSL 2 driven, etc..
I tried to switch a few times over the last decade but was always blocked by hardware issues on this machine, those blockers are gone now.
Yes, which is why people complain about MacOS vs Windows. People wouldn't complain about the lack of quasi-tiling in MacOS if they didn't care about it (which is the gist of your gp comment). The only reason they have experienced it is because Windows has quasi-tiling.
Yup, but "normies" do need menus or at least some way to do things that has some degree of visual affordance (e.g. a persistent cmd/ctrl+p, which I think Office has/had).
That reason being that there is a minority of people who reach out to anything instead of just using what they're given. Compounded by baby duck syndrome, of course.
I have a guess as to why this fix was delayed—on the release candidate, you weren't able to resize windows in Stickies. I filed a bug for it. This felt like a last-minute addition—the previous betas didn't have the 'fix.'
Let's think about why: if the width of the handle is based on the radius, and the radius is 0 for a window, there's nowhere for the grab handle to be.
I assume this wasn't the only app with fully square windows, and so the fix actually caused more problems. Respinning a release candidate is expensive, and they were out of time for this one. So the patch gets reverted and the fix gets iterated on for the next release, where they'll presumably figure something clean out that's conditional on exact window shape.
26.4 could be the spring hardware release or it could be the spring services release. I would give it a 2/3 chance of landing in 26.4, and a 1/3 of being moved to 26.5.
>In total the thickness went down from 7 to 6 pixels, which is a 14% decrease, making it 14% more likely to miss it.
Pedantic, but chance of miss is actually less than 14% more likely since the user's click location is not uniformly random over the thickness area, it's biased toward the center (normally distributed).
never thought about it before but after playing with it a while i notice i tend to approach from the right, which means moving out if i'm inside on the right side. i think this is because my positioning accuracy seems to be higher moving leftwards than rightwards...
Yeah, and not to mention the increase in likelihood click events the user intends for the application will make it through successfully, rather than being stolen by the window manager.
Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
Back in the days when it was common for Macintosh to have 640x480 screens (or even smaller), they still fully visible window controls that were impossible to miss.
>Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
And despite things being smaller, there's also white space everywhere so there is less information on your screen.
The trend in UIs is making filenames into discrete icons instead of lists. In outlook this morning all I got 3 attachments and it's 3 icons that all are something almost identical like "<word icon>2026-02-13_A....docx" and I have to hover over them to figure out each filename. I don't get it.
I'm a Solidworks user. It's a 3D CAD program. From about 2012 to 2018, it was unusable with a display higher than 1080p because it did its own bad scaling of UI. Text elements would overlap and be cut off. Since then it works in general but to make 2D drawings I still change to 1080p. Making drawings involves a lot of clicking on lines and vertexes to add dimensions, but the hitboxes are 1 dimension thick, or even 1 single pixel. It's maddening at 4K. There are selection filters that help, but since it's sluggish in general in 4K I just admit defeat and use 1080p.
I launched spotify on my phone today and it had a grid of playlists I could chose from. The grid showed a maximum of 6 characters per playlist over two lines, but there was certainly a lot of whitespace available, and some random album art that told me nothing.
It was basically unusable, but I'm sure some designer thought it was slick.
I’ve been a mac user since 1994, system 7, and it feels to me like the overall Mac user experience and reliability (stability, speed, etc) really peaked with Snow Leopard, 10.6.
This probably has a lot to do with the vastly improved hardware design around then - the touchpad specifically on the “blackbook” Core 2 Duo era macbooks was a step change, and they keyboard was pretty great too. Multi-monitor support was fantastic compared to everything else too.
You have to wonder what the design principles of pre-X MacOS paired with modern Apple hardware could achieve.
My first mac was a 09 MBP with snow leopard, shortly after they updated and started removing random features and closing down customization. For some reason, you couldn't be trusted with more than one right click method anymore.
A solid 15 years later I try macs again, had a nice m3 air at work and bought a personal M4 air. A few months later Tahoe comes out. I bought the thing because modern darkmode macos looked so great and was such a pleasure to use. Now it's full on bubbleboy.
Word must have gotten back to Cupertino that I was back in the ecosystem...
I have the feeling the regions are the same since the EGA's 620x200 (and hercules mode!) days of windows 3.x for almost all operating systems. Some window managers have updated it a bit but if you look at the increase in pixel density (640x480 on a 14" crt is 57ish ppi, and that is being very generous, vs my home display of 110ppi and the retina displays with 200+ ppi) I get the idea the regions have stayed the same in pixel size despite display scaling and such.
Or we all go (back) to tiling window managers and get rid of all the resizing with the press of a key, or even no press.
The interesting part, for anyone who actually reads the article - the change was fixed in an RC and then reverted in the final release.
Which implies there was some regression, some issue, some incorrect behavior or negative impact. One has to wonder… what could it have been? What could the issue with having a more accurate clickbox for the corner of the window possibly be?
For example: imagine you have 2 windows, the lower right corner of one window almost touching the upper right corner of the other, so that the bounding rectangles overlap but the graphics don't.
With the inaccurate "false square" corners, you just had to check the bounding rectangles, to know which window to resize, now you have to check the actual graphics (or more likely, a mask).
I am not saying it is the problem, but that's the kind of thing that can happen. Or it may be a simple bug, like a crash, memory corruption, an unhandled exception, the usual stuff, but they couldn't fix it in time and it is better to revert instead of leaving the buggy code or pushing an untested fix.
Just revert the code back to pre-26! This is ridiculous, it can't possibly be this hard and if it is, it just points to the degradation in the quality of Apple software! This is maddening!
This is already the pre-26 bounding box, isn't it? It's the new graphics that don't line up. (Not a great excuse, but the graphics are here to stay at least for a little while.)
> the graphics are here to stay at least for a little while
And that's the reason why I won't buy a new Mac.
Tahoe and Liquid Glass are so horrible that they're going to lose customers because of those. They should realize what they did and just backtrack: it wouldn't be the first time they admit they made a mistake [1].
In addition to vertical scrolling, the Magic Mouse can do horizontal (or diagonal) scrolling, zooming in and out, and a couple of other tricks. This makes it worthy for the people who need this for their work. There are mice that can do horizontal or vertical scrolling -- but not both at the same time.
People who do their work on large documents (pics in Photoshop, videos, CAD, music, even Excel, etc.) use these capabilities every day, and they like their Magic mice very much. If you are not one of these people (software development, for example, can be done with vertical scroll only, for the most part), it doesn't mean it's a bad product -- all it means it's a product which is not for you.
I don't use Magic Mouse but am very far from expecting Apple to admit "the magic mouse was a mistake" though.
The magic mouse have been there, almost unchanged, since 2009. That is a lot for a tech product, and retiring a product after 16 years is not admitting to a mistake. For example, the Logitech G5 mouse and its direct evolutions were among the most successful Logitech products, and it didn't last that long.
No, it is not just refusing to admit that the magic mouse was a mistake, it is considering that it is the best ever. That USB port on the underside is still one of the great mysteries though, maybe it is some quirk of evolution, because it is certainly not intelligent design.
I am using Sequoia and the windows are definitely rounded! Though the radius is pretty small (the curved region is about a quarter of the mouse cursor area), so the fact you can drag it from outside the window doesn't look ridiculous.
I think it shows how difficult it is to ship a seemingly easy thing inside the Apple machine.
I'm more interested in how or why this bug was approved up be worked on so quickly after it was surfaced, rather than other longstanding and arguably more impactful bugs.
It's because the bug got publicity. Apple marketing prioritizes what does and doesn't get built. Someone saw bad publicity on the front page of HN and requested a fix.
The answer is probably a ho-hum combination of different teams work on different issues, and this one having annoyed one of the devs who could work on it.
macOS does have weirdness with windows that span multiple screens. I bet some of that kicked in to an unacceptable level. It can create incoherent moving/snapping, for example. Has been kind of crazy-making for a while, for my set-up where screens are not joined but adjacent in a triangular configuration.
Yeah, that's something that was unambiguously better back in the "Classic MacOS" days (probably starting with the Mac II). Windows could overlap multiple screens and they were always drawn correctly.
At some point in OS X in the switch to hardware acceleration, they started rendering windows on one screen only.
I get that you hardly ever really want a window spanning two screens, but when you accidentally misplace a window it would be handy to be able to see it on each overlapping screen so you can track it down. Right now you can put a few pixels of the title bar on the wrong screen, and the rest of the window just vanishes.
These regressions are weird given that modern hardware is vastly more powerful than a Mac II.
What astounds me the most about this whole thing is that the sort of hit testing involved here is a solved problem in UI, and has been for decades, yet there are still plenty of others here and elsewhere arguing about how it isn't. Even with those horrid rounded corners it's not hard, as shown in the article, which makes me wonder whether there is some internal fight between those who didn't want rounded corners (developers?) and hence tried their hardest to make it buggier, and those who wanted them (designers?), with lots of back-and-forth that eventually gave us this outcome. A disturbing amount of time and $$$ was probably spent on it, as is usual for any bureaucracy.
Mobile Safari has some horrific hit-testing for touches. There's plenty of places where touching near a control incorrectly snaps the tap to the control (sometimes with rather nasty usability consequences).
Ideally there should be some way to control the tapzone within CSS.
Last time I needed to fix the problem on a page I was responsible for it required adding an HTML element, which was far from ideal. I seem to recall I also had to explicitly add an onclick handler too (registering an onclick handler silently modifies touch behaviour on Safari - a nasty hidden side effect). There's some new badness with stealing taps in iOS26's Safari - ugggh.
> Ideally there should be some way to control the tapzone within CSS.
Please, no. Let’s not have every site react differently to how I tap a control. HTML/CSS/JS already delegate too many aspects to the application that should firmly belong in the realm of browser/OS.
Yesterday I thought the same thing about web app UI - solved problem, why GCP has to re-invent it and do it worse? Same thinking applies here - is it due to a fight between developers and products?
The updates shipped by apple introducing more bugs every cycle. It is across the board, macos, ios and ipad os. The fact there is a group inside apple, that is capable of standing against common sense and users best interest for so long, tells how wrong things are internally.
It is the steve balmer - satya nadella moment of apple.
1. Plugging my laptop to the same desktop screens requires rearranging displays almost every time.
2. Airdrop stops working for no apparent reason.
3. Copy paste across devices no longer a stable mechanism.
4. The stupid new preview app crashing if you scroll pdf pages too fast.
And on and on. Those are all newly introduced critical bugs i have been facing since that flameboyant liquid glass virus took over.
Apple is a sillicon valley pioneer from the generation of hewlett packard (before it was called HP) bell labs and others. Watching a decay at its beginning is mind boggling and tragic.
Also MacOS completely crashes if you have ethernet cable connected and decide to also turn on the WiFi. No "hey, choose whatever you wish" or "hey, disconnect from ethernet first" errors, just complete crash to reboot, lol.
I abandoned MacOS back in 2018 since I found it too quirky and poweruser-unfriendly (the main thing that comes to mind is neatly indicated by todays other MacOS related frontpage article on resizing). Now we can add overt instability to the list.
This is exactly the type of issue Steve Jobs would notice and then you're fired. The UI is the main event. If you can't get it right you don't work on it ever again.
Here is what I don’t get tho: you have UX designers/engineers creating a new interface. What do you tell them? Just to do whatever? They probably spent months designing the new interface but why not fix this? They must have seen it is unusable…
All they have to do is make a better UX than Google and Microsoft. As it turns out, that particular bar is at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, so they treat it as such. Money spent on making sure your UX passes basic muster is money not given to a series of retirement and pension funds that make up the bulk of shareholders for companies like Apple.
What do you want more: decent UX, or the Smiths to be able to sell their house and swing on - and off - the course at some golf-based retirement village in Florida?
Since we talk resizing windows, for months I was _sometimes_ unable to resize windows at all, and couldn't figure out why. I thought it was a random bug of macOS.
Finally I realized the issue: if a window spans across two displays, it won't resize. Insane!
(I have an external monitor up, laptop down, and it's easy to move a window such that it stretches a few pixels from monitor to the laptop. No resize for you!)
Window management isn't macOS' strong suit, but external monitors make it act absolutely crazy. Connecting monitors will do anything from keeping all windows in the same position to restoring previous positions to launching them across screens, sometimes completely outside visible screen space, seemingly arbitrarily.
I get why Apple wants you to make every window either a small tile or a full screen application now, their window manager simply can't cope with anything else.
Whatever they're doing is somehow worse than both Windows and the major Linux desktop environments. Maybe there's some obscure preference among old school macOS users that like having their windows placed so that only a small corner pokes out of the bottom left when attaching an external monitor?
On the topic of multi monitor messiness, NOTHING gets my blood boiling quite like the taskbar (or whatever it's called, the bottom application drawer) moving between monitors, seemingly arbitrarily
Keep your cursor hovered over the bottom of the 2nd monitor? It moves. Want to move it back? I have tried everything I could think of to try get it back, I still to this day after 5 years of being on Mac because work forces it on me cannot see the logic or heuristic it chooses for when to move the fucking dock. I swear it's basically random, and it's a daily occurrence for me that I have to just shake my cursor violently to get the stupid thing to eventually move.
The worst part is you can't even disable this dumbass behavior! You can't tell it "Hey, dock should ONLY be on monitor 1", so you just have to live with this anti feature
As far as I can tell, the dock appears on either the left/rightmost display (when docked to the side) or on the main display.
What is the "main display"? You can find out by going to settings > displays, where you find a "use as" dropdown that can be set to "mirror", "main display", or "extended display". If you want to move the dock, change the main display. This also affects a few other, smaller things.
I personally put the dock to the side so it doesn't take up precious space (windows don't seem to want to cover the dock if it's at the bottom, even with the setting for that disabled).
I remember early OS X (10.4 / 10.5? - damn, that was 20 years ago?!) with a laptop and external monitor.
It was farcical, as the menu bar was always only on the primary monitor, so you had to use/click menus on that monitor, even if the actual window the menu was for was on the other monitor.
Around 10.7 or so they started putting menus on both monitors at the same time to at least make this scenario a bit more sane.
Oh, the Dock. Try to have a setup where you have two displays vertically, BUT you want the Toolbar and Dock both be on the top one, stably - impossible.
Workaround I found: you can configure the monitors to be a pattern like this instead:
1
2
touching only in the corner. Then it works, the Dock is on monitor 1.
It seems to be a common issue, and despite googling I wasn't able to find a solution that worked (back in Aug '25). For some reason, it does not happen if you position the dock on the left/right side rather than the bottom
If your monitors are arranged horizontally, you just need to touch the bottom part of the screen you want the dock to be on (I set mine to autohide). If they are arranged vertically, it's best to have them in zigzag or put the dock to the sides, not the bottom.
It's infuriating, which is why I prefer to use spotlight (actually Alfred) or the app switcher.
Easy to stretch a few pixels? Easier to move windows with super+arrows so they snap perfectly to the monitor borders, and then you'd never have this issue. I rarely drag windows "by hand" (by mouse) anymore!
Damn, so this is the thing that caused all the floating windows to become unclickable and impossible to interact with... I'm the creator of the apps from https://lowtechguys.com/ and I was replying to 10-15 support emails per day, all week, because of this.
It's a bit scary to see that the software we rely on every day is such a complex behemoth that even a seemingly small change can have so large repercussions.
The problem is that AI only helps add even more complexity since it's so simple to just add more code now that we don't have to write it.
It feels like Apple has gone deeper and deeper into tech debt over at least the past decade, to the point where I see little prospect of their software reaching former quality levels again.
I switched from macOS to Linux ten years ago and haven't looked back. At the time, I compared Linux vs. macOS to living at home vs. in a hotel [1]. Since then, I feel things have only gotten better for Linux, and more restrictive and arcane on macOS.
I’ve so far resisted using HN for tech support, but I’ll jump on the macOS hate bandwagon. My MBP M1 Max with 32 GB RAM has become near-unusable with Tahoe. Trying to switch users? Frozen. Click on something? Beachballs. There’s visible stutter and hangs in the lock screen animations. I hate it so much.
I'm running Tahoe on an M1 Air with 16GB RAM and it's been smooth for me. Might be worth trying a fresh OS install? Something seems off with your setup.
Intel very recently seems to be making progress thanks to what the previous CEO kicked off. People are comparing Panther Lake to M1 (but we'll see when it is in reviewers' hands).
Intel's demise is fairly well-understood; their CPU designs were fine, but the DUV Intel-fabbed silicon was not. Their recalcitrance towards EULV nodes meant that they were never going to remain competitive for the market segment they appealed to.
Apple's failure to improve the Mac seems pretty straightforward looking at their profit breakdowns. The Mac really is not ever their priority.
I had a hard time with Gnome but now I got used to it and it's amazing for me. I just can't believe they still haven't implemented scrolling speed setting...
Gnome had a scroll speed setting but it broke and disappeared somewhere around the switch to Wayland without getting replaced.
Gnome says libinput should deal with scroll speed. Libinput says GTK+ should deal with it. Patches have been lying around for both but neither has gained any traction.
I like Gnome's DE in general but this issue showcases the rough edges of open source collaboration the Gnome project is infamous for.
Even KWin's (original?) implementation of the feature wasn't great and caused issues with applications, apparently: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4672#not...
Broken as though it might be, at least they're trying something, which I appreciate more as an end user than the complete lack of scroll settings.
I was a Mate user for ages. It's great. Unfortunately, the lack of development is starting to show. For example, no fractional scaling for 4k monitors.
I've configured KDE Plasma to look almost identical to Mate (the defaults are similar to Windows, nice, but I prefer the Mate layout):
- top panel / bottom panel
- desktop switcher bottom right
- task bar on bottom
- desktop button bottom left
- clock top right
- app indicators top right
- app icon launchers on top bar
- app menu top left
It's not just layout, either. Gnome can be configured to do much of this, but it just feels terrible. Task bars can't be dragged to re-order. Desktop switchers just have numbers instead of contents. Animations are slow and annoying. Etc. Etc.
I love gnome, at least how it's implemented by recent Fedoras. Whenever I go back to Mac I wonder why spotlight and mission control are two different functions
Spotlight and Mission Control (and the dock) being separate is good, and them being tied together on Gnome is horrible.
I just want to type which app to launch or do some quick math or search for something, I don't need my windows and UI to fly in 14 different directions and then back again every time I need to do those things. Ditto for just want to lazily do something on my dock with the mouse. It's seriously one of the most ill designed off-putting UX things about Gnome.
Agreed. Even Windows has some nice stuff when it comes to windows management IMHO. Every time I end up on macOS I miss the various Windows/GNOME behaviours e.g. window snapping to the right/left half, pressing the Win key to see all open apps, maximise buttons that doesn't put the whole app into full screen mode, etc.
Instead of win key, you can press F3, or just set a hotkey that works for you in the System Preferences
Instead of clicking the red maximize button, you can double-click the window header / title. This will use an algorithm to try to resize the window to the best size for its content.
Technically it’s zoom, and how it functions is dependent on the app. In Finder it used to resize the window to a size that contained all the icons. Clicking it again would revert the window size.
The app still gets to decide though! Most programs do go full size with an alt+green click, but not all. A column-style Finder window, for example, seems to go taller but no wider.
macOS gained window snapping last year, and you can bind some keyboard shortcut to the “exposé” view (which is triggered by a trackpad gesture by default)
full screen is still its own thing as you mention, though
Gnome has the same issue, it's just less noticeable because the radius of the round corners is smaller. The draggable area of a window is 90% their drop shadow.
Except when it's a Qt application, which has no drop shadows because client-side decorations shenanigans.
The other incredibly annoying glitch in here, is that the resize cursor is only shown for foreground windows - but background windows are still resizable (despite the missing cursor) if you happen to drag their edges...
I’ve tried many apps for window resizing on Mac, and none feel like they’re nearly as good as FancyZones (the PowerToys module for Windows). I don’t want secret squirrel key combos. I don’t want hot corners.
I want two things:
- Predefined zones à la FancyZones
- Tied edges (there’s surely a better term for this) so that I can grab the edge between two apps and have them both resize together (one gets smaller as the other gets bigger).
Please someone tell me this exists without a subscription!
I think for preexisting solutions, the "best" one is Rectangle Pro, but it isn't free, so maybe that doesn't count. That said, eventually I realized I don't even want the whole "window split" stuff and I'd prefer to just have a few keybinds that throw windows into specific coords on my screens, so I installed Hammerspoon (free) and wrote a screen's worth of Lua to do this for myself. It is written for my two adjacent 1440p monitors and personal preferences, but the code is really obvious so if you're comfortable with making your own bespoke solution, this is pretty nice, and free.
Swish⁽¹⁾ lets you drag the divider to resize multiple windows at once. BentoBox⁽²⁾ is inspired by Fancy Zones. And Lasso⁽³⁾ is a grid-based window manager with custom layouts. There's also MacsyZones⁽⁴⁾ that appears to resize multiple adjoining windows but I've never used it (it appears to be open-source with an option to pay to support the author).
Winamp was like 5MB. Starcraft 1 was something like 900MB. None of the two dozen apps are doing anything that should take so much space. It's probably all bloat from various dependencies. People's expectations of software quality have gotten very low.
Funnily enough, I bought BentoBox a long time ago (Nov 2024), but I forgot about it entirely. I'm wondering if maybe it didn't have Windowed mode at the time, as I do rely a lot of overlapping windows so I can switch between content more quickly when I'm just using my mouse.
Thank you for mentioning it again so I could get it set back up. I do like that the experience is almost exactly like FancyZones!
I have never vibed with macOS's seemingly default mode of floating windows layered over one another like scattered paper on a desk (mimicking a desktop I suppose). Instead ive been using https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace for the past couple of years and just flicking around via hotkeys. Not perfect but much less friction for my use cases
As a long-time Mac user, I'm comfortable with this UI style, but I do recognise that it's weirdly inefficient. It's very strange that this is the UI that won out in the 80s (to the extent that Windows became a massive hit in the 90s, anyway).
A tiling UI would have been much easier to implement! But the original Mac had overlapping windows with pixel-perfect drop shadows. It's a bit nuts when you think about it.
I actually like it, but only when you have virtual desktops. But the MacOS implementation, Spaces, is not great. It clashes with their window management model (you switch between applications, then you can switch between windows). There's no way to restrict the switcher to applications that have windows in the current space.
Floating works great when you can filter the current set of windows using virtual desktops. And when the switcher follow suits. My issue with tiling is that it works great on laptop, but on bigger screens, it sends things to the far side when splitting.
It's amazing how much effort is wasted adding various OS degradation features (like poorly readable redesign) while bread & butter basics are broken for decades (it's a bad primitive to require pixel-perfect precision for resizing) and even get worse following those design gimmicks like rounded corners
(and, of course, custom radii would've helped, but users can't have such powers, Apple knows best)
I’m a Windows guy, but was given a MacBook for my current job. Fair enough. But I laugh at how horrendous such a simple thing as resizing windows is. Want Slack to take up the right third of a screen then fill the rest with browser? In Windows, it takes 2 seconds. Not on Mac. I have to resize the window myself? There’s no auto-snap?
I’m sure someone will buzz in with some hidden way to do it. ‘Hold cmd-shft-9 then say these magic words and voila!’ No. Dragging the window with the cursor should suffice.
Edit: I’ll also add that having to buy a huge $200+ display adapter so you can connect 2 external monitors to a MacBook, whereas a slimline $30 device will do the same for Windows laptops, is total bullshit.
Yeah window management and the desktop experience in general on Mac just feels like I'm dragging my hands through tar.
For example, "open two file browsers, navigate to $home in one and $downloads in the other, move and rename a few files between them" is a 10 second task on Windows (Win+E x2, quick clicks on the explorer links, easy to scroll around, move files, drag, rename, anything you want). On Mac I get about 7 system ding sounds and Finder windows bugging off the side of my screen while simultaneously deciding the best way to show downloads in a list is alphabetically and with 256x256 tiled icons. It's just an indescribably bad and slow experience to do any kind of file management on Mac.
Another example. Take a screenshot and quickly redact some info with a black box. Easy on windows that I can type it out exactly (win+s, drag box, win key "paint" enter control v box tool save boom). On Mac?? After command shift 4 to take a screenshot I think it's actually physically impossible to edit it within 60 seconds.
> After command shift 4 to take a screenshot I think it's actually physically impossible to edit it within 60 seconds.
This is completely incorrect, and the solution is way more discoverable than needing to know obscure things like Win+E. Click the thumbnail that appears in the bottom right, then click the marker icon.
> For example, "open two file browsers, navigate to $home in one and $downloads in the other, move and rename a few files between them" is a 10 second task on Windows (Win+E x2, quick clicks on the explorer links, easy to scroll around, move files, drag, rename, anything you want).
Similarly, if you know the platform-specific shortcuts, this is less than 10 seconds on macOS. Click finder in dock, hit Command-N twice for new windows, drag each window to one of the L/R edges of the screen to tile, click downloads in the sidebar on one, click the home icon/username in the sidebar on the other.
The bottom right thumbnail thing really bugged me and confused me when it came out, because I always just want the screenshot on the desktop right away, as it used to be. I don't know why they couldn't have the delay/thumbnail AND put the file somewhere I could reach it immediately. But IIRC, there is some setting that disables the thumbnail behavior and lets the file be written instantly.
For me I want it to hang around longer actually. I will take the screenshot I want, open up mail or messages or something to dump it there. Right as my mouse is hovered over it and a milisecond before I can click it, it jumps away. I've resorted to sometimes giving it a partial drag which resets the counter while I am still getting situated over to wherever the screenshot is going.
This would be okay if it hung around longer. I just need it to be somewhere I can drag it. I don't see any use in its disappearing. If it's on the desktop immediately, at least I can find it quickly.
I use a trackpad exclusively with MacOS. If I want it immediately on the desktop then I can just "swipe away" (to the right) the thumbnail and it skips the pause.
Not perfect but I do value being able to edit it from there, or right click and save to clipboard. So it works for me.
This is an extra step PIA. CMD-OPT-H hides all the windows and there's the desktop. My desktop is clean AF, so I know which icon it is. I open it in photoshop or preview, or I just drag it into the email I'm about to send.
Funny, I never want the screenshot saved to a file and I literally never look at the desktop. I either use ctrl to store the screenshot in the clipboard or want to use marker tools and then copy the clipboard. This new flow was an improvement to me.
I'm sorry but this is a skill issue. This is the second hotkey you learn in Windows, after Win for start menu, and before win+left/right to snap windows to sides of the screen.
Regardless, the whole flow both of you are talking about can be done on Windows without ever touching the mouse. Win+E Win+E Win+Left Enter Alt+D "destdir" Enter Alt+Tab Alt+D "sourcedir" Enter (arrow to whatever you want) ctrl-X Alt+Tab ctrl-V.
I use Linux with i3wm at home, I haven't used Windows as my main OS in nearly a decade and I can still play out those keystrokes in my mind without thinking about it.
Now, win+E -> click folder -> alt+D -> "powershell" -> enter? That's power user shenanigans.
I think that the only windows hotkey I know is Windows key to open the start menu. But I've been using Windows only 1994-2008, then Linux. I still connect to some Windows 10 / 11 machines of a customer to check processes and log files, but that doesn't matter.
And I hate windows snapping. I disable it in GNOME at every new OS install. UIs must fit people preferences and any single person is different.
I haven't used Windows since the early days of 10 when I moved wholesale to Apple, but let's be really real - Apple users mocking "obscure shortcuts" in other OSes is throwing stones in a glass house:
Cmd+` to scroll through windows of the current app?
Cmd+Option+H to hide other apps?
Cmd+Shift+Ctrl+4 to clipboard copy a screenshot?
Quick, is Mission Control a three finger swipe up? Or down? Or is that Expose?
Cmd+space,Cmd+B to search web from Spotlight
Cmd+tab, release tab, press Q - quit app without switching to it
The mac desktop works on a totally different paradigm than the Windows-like model most other desktops have adopted. It’s built around not managing windows and instead letting them be whatever size fits their content and pile up like papers on a desk, complete with having relevant bits of some windows peek out from underneath other windows.
For those it works for, it works really well. For those who came from windows always being maximized or split into a grid, it’s a nightmare.
Pretty similar to differences in real world desk styles, actually.
That used to be the case, but in 10.7 they changed the green window button from being "zoom" (snap the window to fit its content) to "fullscreen". They let you change the default behavior back to zoom for a few years but seem to have gotten rid of that setting. You can still access the zoom behavior by option-clicking the green button, but on basically every program I've tried, zoom just means "maximize" like on Windows now. The only exception I've found is Preview, where "zoom" seems to mean "make the window take up most of (but not all of) the screen and scale the image up to some random value". One image I tried got scaled to 146%, another got scaled to 207%. I would think it should mean "scale the image to 100% if it's smaller than the display resolution" but who knows, I don't work at Apple.
Edit: Finder still has the correct zoom behavior, it's the only program I've found so far that does.
The behavior of the (now option-clicked) zoom button is actually determined by each individual program. Most stock apps will either fit to content or toggle between the last two recent sizes, but a lot of third party apps (especially those built with foreign UI frameworks) tend to turn it into a maximize button.
It looks like "apps built with foreign UI frameworks" includes all the stuff Apple's written in SwiftUI, as all those apps (Mail, Calendar, Messages, Music, Podcasts, Notes, etc) treat zoom as maximize.
Which is one the reasons I keep being a Windows/UNIX/Linux person, and only use Apple hardware when it gets assigned to me on specific project delivery.
The stuff with Objective-C and Swift is cool, but not enough to justify fully migrating into Apple land.
On Windows you have to change a few settings, on Mac you're suggesting all third-party software to manage core functionality. Apples Vs. oranges.
I mean, yes, Windows has PowerToys which is an installed add-on, but on Mac we're not talking about Mac Vs. PowerToys, Mac isn't even competing with basic Windows features. PowerToys is competing with the PAID third-party software for Mac.
I don't think this is a meaningful distinction. Most people here likely change more than just a 'few settings' and either download one of the debloat tools or generate an autounattend.xml before installing, and some replace the default search with Everything.
Unless you're working in an environment where absolutely no third party tools are allowed, it's expected for someone to spend at least a little bit of time adjusting the workspace to their preferences.
Additionally all of the tools I listed technically have paid plans but they're all free to use, I've never paid for Raycast yet even the free features blow out of the water any desktop management/productivity tooling I've used on Windows or Linux.
We are in this discussion sometimes talking about things that are "missing" from Mac that are actually outdated omissions, no longer accurate. For example, Snap Layouts is now a built-in feature in macOS, but some folks are talking like it's impossible to snap windows in macoS. It's just not as robust/customizable as third-party tools and I think most people who started using the third-party tools should stick to them.
We can go the other way around if we cherry-pick in the other direction:
PowerToys Peek is a separate install, but Finder has this built-in as the Spacebar shortcut (Quick Look)
Preview App: This has been the best free PDF app on the market for decades now and Windows still doesn't have something that compares well in 2026
Spotlight: Still clearly superior to the Windows Search/keyboard-based app launching experience
AirDrop: I know, I can't include this because it's a hardware ecosystem feature, but I'm including it anyway because KDE has a better solution than Windows, and I find that totally insane. I use it on Windows, too!
Migration Assistant: I realize that Windows PCs have a lot of OEM variation, but I think Microsoft could implement a similar experience if they tried.
Backups: I don't really give Apple many points for Time Machine because (1) I don't think many people use it, and (2) I don't think it's really the greatest on its own, but it sure beats what Windows has going on with Windows Backup.
Save as PDF: This isn't a problem anymore, but for many years/decades, Apple's built-in support for turning anything that can be printed into a PDF beat out Windows by a longshot, and I remember how I used to need to install third-party tools to accomplish it.
Full device encryption: I just think the user experience of Bitlocker is piss poor, while Apple makes this a very smooth experience with a very low chance of screwing up and losing data (so long as you tie your system to your Apple ID to add that as a recovery option). The end result is that most Windows users are running unencrypted, while I imagine most Mac users are encrypted.
POSIX utilities: Now, it's not like Apple includes the greatest set of POSIX utilities, and you have to install xCode command line utilities to get many of them, but still, I am not really sure why Microsoft doesn't just port and install many of these utilities natively rather than having you either learn PowerShell, install Git for Windows, or install WSL. I think it is very clear by this point that most people who want to spend time in a terminal in the first place want to be in POSIX-land. They've got cmd.exe, PowerShell.exe, might as well add a third terminal.
Perhaps we can even make the argument that 100% of Windows users are going to install a third party text editor as using plain notepad.exe is pretty much insane, while a reasonable amount of Mac users will be 100% happy with vim.
Going beyond basic utilities, it's also worth pointing out that Apple has traditionally provided a lot more free software than Windows. iLife and iWork come to mind. Microsoft has somewhat half-heartedly followed suit with apps like ClipChamp. I don't think Microsoft ever shipped anything that came close to the quality of free app you got with GarageBand and iMovie.
I also think Microsoft has a lot more platform abandonment that affects Windows device and OS users. If you bought an original iPod and iTunes music, Apple never pulled the rug from under you. Microsoft couldn't decide between PlaysForSure and Zune, and killed both. Same deal with things like TV show and movie purchases. Windows Media Player died, iTunes (Apple Music, not to be confused with Apple Music the service) is still here, still working with original hardware, and still getting updates.
Apple just killed iTunes Movies' wishlist and they were nice enough about it to email me the full wishlist so that I could "favorite" them (which isn't 100% analogous but they were nice enough to not leave me high and dry).
I think at this point, though, I'm veering a little far off-topic.
I'm also struggling with a macbook for work, but hold your mouse over the green circle in the top left for a few seconds and it'll pop up. (You don't get the nice snapping that windows does though)
Holding option while hovering gives you more placement / sizing options too. If you click and drag a top bar to the right or left it'll snap to the right or left half of the screen. Dragging it to the top or double clicking will snap it to full size. Dragging to corners will snap to quarter.
Also takes 2 seconds... You don't need 3rd party apps like everyone's saying, only if you want tiling or to copy Windows behavior.
Press Control-Up Arrow (or swipe up with three or four fingers) to enter Mission Control, drag a window from Mission Control onto the thumbnail of the full-screen app in the Spaces bar, then click the Split View thumbnail. You can also drag an app thumbnail onto another in the Spaces bar.
you're not wrong, but for convenience's sake you should probably know that you can hold option and click the green "expand" button to fill the workspace
Lmfao yeah so much worse than the OS you have to run massive Powershell scripts from the internet to turn off all the telemetry, OneDrive, and other various degrees of bullshit.
Install Rectangle or anything macOS Sequoia or newer and move on.
You have to wonder what’s actually going on under the hood when the curve of the hitbox is different to the curve of the window? I’m very curious to understand how Apple have got to this point.
This is relatively common. The mouse interaction code doesn't necessarily look at the visual asset, and in many UI toolkits the ability to have interaction targets located and sized differently from visual features is a feature.
This is a perfect example of why I use raycast & their window management shortcuts:
alm - Almost Maximise window
tf - Toggle Full-screen
lh - Left Half
rh - Right Half
Mac has always had horrible window management. Made worse because applications and windows are a separate concept. Used to seem clever but in the world of multiple workspaces it's a terrible decision. Now it's even worse trying to manage multiple llms and projects.
Yes, but it's much worse than that because it makes multiple workspaces essentially unusable. Try them on Windows or any Linux desktop. When a window is also an application it makes handling them much more seemless. Not to mention the animation on Macos (slide or fade) takes multiple seconds, then when it completes it takes 500ms to actually focus. That's if it actually focuses to the right window when switching, which is currently a bug. Been there for years.
Edited. I'm not strictly saying this was caused by AI, but more of a general point that AI is really good at producing crap work which would make the generator spin faster.
I don’t think the problem is resolvable to everyone’s satisfaction, which speaks to the poor decision to make the windows that shape in the first place.
I’m not sure who (outside of Apple, and perhaps even inside seeing as Alan Dye quit) is satisfied with the extreme round corners we have now. No one asked for that, and it doesn’t provide a single benefit.
It's easily resolvable - you just need to allow custom forms, then every user can pick one of the 3 most popular forms or tweak them to his unique preferences.
Of course, this should also be true for window shape so you can remove the rounded corners
You think this is bad? Try using Apple Music with a traditional mouse. You can’t even right click on half of the interface, dragging elements near to scrollable edges doesn’t trigger any scroll, and UI elements like the star on favourited songs just don’t show up. It’s marginally better on a trackpad.
> In total the thickness went down from 7 to 6 pixels, which is a 14% decrease, making it 14% more likely to miss it.
But also a 14% higher chance that you won't hit it by accident.
This is not a situation where bigger is simply better. If the thickness was 50 pixels, that would make it pretty much impossible to not resize the windows. I am one of those who believe that there are still people at Apple who care deeply about user interfaces. Given the amount of attention paid to the regions for resizing by dragging the corner, I actually assume that they also took a second look a dragging the edges, and concluded that 6 pixels was better than 7.
As thrilled as I was when seeing the first round window
on X11's xeyes, it is not a good use of developers' time and compute resources to deal with rounded corners.
The reduction of UX quality that goes along with the lesser space for grabbing a window's corner are unacceptable for me.
There are few recent innovations in UX, and many regressions. One thing that I appreciate is the "split window" in Chromium instead of adding yet another tab.
Resizing windows is easier when you don't have to grab the corner. Some people are talking about holding a key to resize on Linux but I don't want to be forced to use the keyboard.
My favourite solution on macOS is an app called Swish which lets you do trackpad/Magic Mouse gestures to throw windows into corners, along edges, etc.
> Some people are talking about holding a key to resize on Linux but I don't want to be forced to use the keyboard.
You don't have to use your keyboard.
For example I never use my mouse's DPI button which is a little button next to the wheel mouse. You can remap that to whatever key you need to hold to resize a window and now you have a fully mouse driven solution for resizing.
Using a trackpad gesture is just as quick, easier, more spatially natural, and only uses one hand.
My left hand is not always on my keyboard. I'm not always typing. I'm not modelling 100% of my computer usage after "how to get RSI the fastest"; sometimes, I allow myself to lean back in my chair and just scroll the web, documents, photos etc. from time to time.
Definitely not, many of swish gestures require you to move the mouse cursor to the title bar, which takes time, also holding a key and performing a simpler gesture can’t be slower than performing a more complicated gesture (which it needs to be to deconflict with regular mouse use)
Also many gestures have a delay built in so you can cancel or double down for a different functionally (close windows vs close app), so it’s slower by design.
> easier
It’s harder because you have to memorize more gestures and perform more complicated ones.
> more spatially natural
That makes no sense, the spatial movements are the same, can you give an example for resizing?
> and only uses one hand.
Yes, that’s the only potential benefit, unless, of course, your other hand is always near a corner, so it doesn’t matter
> I'm not always typing
That's fine, you don't need to type to have your left hand rest near the left near corner of the keyboard (it doesn’t even have to rest on the home row since you only need the corner)
> I'm not modelling 100% of my computer usage after "how to get RSI the fastest"
Well, you're, you've just moved your RSI to your right hand
Also hands have same length, so leaning back doesn't prevent leaving one finger on a modifier
Anyway, place your hands wherever you like them, it’s just that none of your arguments support it.
> sometimes, I allow myself to lean back in my chair and just scroll
WHAT??! This cannot be allowed!! /s
It's clear from reading programmer geek thoughts on peripherals over the years that autistic types love the "Use keyboard 100% of the time!" dogma because it is black-and-white thinking. The idea of someone knowing how to do things in a multitude of ways and changing it up based on mood is displeasing.
>> sometimes, I allow myself to lean back in my chair and just scroll
> WHAT??! This cannot be allowed!! /s
We just lean back with the keyboard and scroll with the Space key. Also using cwm, I move my windows with Super+{h,j,k,l} and resize them with Super+Shift+{h,j,k,l}.
i encourage everyone here to try a tiling window manager like i3/sway on Linux to experience a snappy way to manage window (sizes).
on MacOS i will never not use something like rectangle, the out-of-the-box experience on MacOS has always been dogshit in my opinion, it just screams for a third-party software to do the heavy lifting.
What drives me nuts is if I slam my cursor against the right side of the window with the intent to click and drag the scroll bar of a maximized window up and down then the 1px wide window border gets selected and the whole window moves up and down. This has been a bug for several years.
When I select there, if I pull away from the window it resizes and won't drag. If I move the pointer up-down on the right or left side, it moves the window and won't resize.
Which seems like a sensible and convenient choice to me.
It's definitely neither sensible nor convenient. I expect it to trigger the scrollbar, not move the whole window. The only way one should be able to move the window is to drag the title bar. There's no reason clicking and dragging the 1px window border should ever move the whole window. Every Linux window manager, Windows, and IIRC Mac System <= 9 behaves this way.
It's kind of nice, though, because you can click anywhere on a window to focus it. If you want to interact with a background window without focusing it, hold Cmd and click.
I've used Linux as my daily OS for 20 years and got so used to alt-right resize and alt-left drag that the macOS and Windows way of actually needing to move my mouse to the corner or edge of a window feel almost barbaric in comparison.
I still have found no way free equivalent on macOS.
This is a design flub which we are told Jobs simply wouldn't have let out the door. The Jobs who made people shave 50ms off boot times. The Jobs who demanded the no button mouse.
I get the cult of Steve is a bit oversold but the proprietor liked to check the finish on the car rolling out the end of the line and if his fingers felt a rough edge on a panel he had no compunction stopping the production line to find the problem. The current generation have a bit too much "fixed in post" going on.
Even without the rounded corners it was more difficult than it needed to be. The corner resize should take up way more of the sides of the window. If my mouse is 90% of the way to the corner, what are the odds that I want to resize the window only horizontally or vertically?
it isnt perfect, but with BetterTouchTool you can toggle resizing -- e.g. three finger double tap on a trackpad, move your cursor around to resize, double tap again to exit the mode.
I use Yabai, which is pretty good -- and you don't have to completely disable SIP.
For moving windows around (floating if using Yabai), I just hold HYPER and move my cursor around (Start Moving Windows). Release HYPER and it stops.
Half the time my Mac doesn't show the resize cursor when in regions where it works to resize windows. It's annoying. But not quite the same issue as seen here.
Oh, this is probably related to why I cannot resize "live caption" windows at all on the latest version of MacOS. They have been mucking around with resizing and not testing it well.
It's kinda hard because the CPU that makes MacBooks so power-efficient is Apple's own design, not from an external vendor. So Lenovo can't use it, nor can anyone else; they'd have to design their own, or partner with Qualcomm maybe. And we just don't see anyone working on ARM-based laptop CPUs right now unfortunately.
Were the wrong graphics used in the two examples shown? I overlayed them in Paint (yeah that's right Windows), and aside from the numbers in the top left they appear identical.
* Nevermind... Firefox wasn't showing the animation on the first one so all I was seeing was the first frame.
Not just similar, it's exactly the same issue caused by exactly the same kind of change, and is probably hard to fix for almost exactly the same behind-the-scenes complexity on Windows.
The Windows UI has been a trashfire since Windows 8. I think the expectation that it sucks has been baked in at this point, though Windows 11 represents an increase in the slope of increasing suck.
I don't know what all this fuss is around. I'm not a fanboy and I just use my macbook as a tool.. and the resizing works fine. Is it maybe a mouse thing? I use the touchpad
I'm really baffeled the same mistakes and errors are being made over and over again in both Windows and macOS.
Just use KDE approach and it's done.
It's really disappointing that new OS versions are being marketed by a new look, which is not new at all, just rehashed look that was in use years ago but thrown away.
> And in fact, the release notes have also been updated: the problem went from a “Resolved Issue” to a “Known Issue”.
So they finally admit that they are unable to solve a ridiculously trivial problem of their own making. This is a farce. Apple has managed to lose the last remnants of respect and good will on my part. And I cannot trust a platform that is so blatantly mismanaged.
How is it not pathetic that Apple can't fix this and bring it back to normal behavior? Who is fighting for this stupid behavior? It's driving me crazy as well.
Many moons ago, I invented* a rule that "you can always make people feel what you want about a #. either use percentages where they don't make sense, or whole numbers when a percentage does"
I hear it when I read 7 px -> 6 px means 14%(!!!!) less likely to find the horizontal/vertical only drag area.
Fitts's Law is logarithmic, not linear, and at these sizes the dominant factor is whether the target is discoverable at all, not its sub-millimeter width. "14%" smuggles in precision that doesn't exist in the underlying motor reality; it takes an imperceptible physical change and launders it through a ratio with a small denominator to produce a number that feels alarming. You could just as honestly say "we moved the edge by 0.097 mm**" and nobody would blink.
* I think? It feels like there'd be prior art on this
**
ppi = 262
inch = 1/ppi
mm = inch \* 25.4
# 1px ≈ 0.097 mm ≈ 0.004"
With Tahoe, I've been occasionally having this glitch that when I click on a icon, it doesn't bring back the window that's open... even after multiple clicks.
It really has gotten to the point where Linux offers the best option for a sane desktop experience. Watching Windows and macOS implode while KDE and Gnome slowly get better and better has really been something. Not quite at the point I'd recommend them for grandma and grandpa, but not that far off, either.
I've been using a Mac basically full time for years now, due to work. It's easily the worst UX and it's sort of shocking, after decades of hearing "it just works" or whatever. Hidden windows, hidden desktops, obscure keyboard shortcuts, etc.
I actually don't even know how to use the mac for the most part, I've learned to live in the terminal. I contrast this with Linux where I can just... idk, browse files? Where windows don't suddenly "escape" into some other, hidden environment, where I can just use a computer in a very sane way, and if I want keyboard shortcuts they largely align with expectations.
I was extremely frustrated while on a call using a mac. I made the video call full screen, which then placed it onto essentially a "virtual monitor" (ie: completely hidden). I had no way to alt tab back to it, for whatever reason, and I had no way to actually recover the window in any of the usualy "window switching" means. I knew there was a totally undiscoverable gesture to see those things but I was docked so didn't have access to the trackpad.
I figured out if you go to the hidden dock at the bottom and select Chrome, as I recall, you can then get swapped back over to that virtual desktop, "un full screen" the window, and it returns to sanity.
Mac UX seems to go against literally every single guideline I can imagine. Invisible corners, heavily reliant on gestures, asymmetric user experiences (ie: I can press a button to trigger something, but there isn't a way to 'un trigger' it using the same sequence/ reverse sequence/ 'shift' sequence), ridiculous failure modes, etc.
I can't believe that people live like this. I think they don't know how bad they've got it, I routinely see mac users avoiding the use of 'full screen', something that I myself have had to learn to avoid on a mac, despite decades of having never given it a second thought.
MacOS definitely has its issues but this just makes it sound like you have different expectations of how an OS should work. Different isn’t always bad. Hiding applications is a pretty key concept in MacOS. Shortcuts are pretty straightforward? Cmd+H to hide, Cmd+Q to quit. Spaces aren’t hidden- there’s lots of ways to access them, but it seems you haven’t bothered to learn them. In your example pressing ctrl+right would have switched the first full screen space. You could also have right clicked the Chrome icon in the dock for a list of windows.
BTW the dock doesn’t have to be hidden, and idk if it was a typo but alt+tab isn’t a default shortcut. Command is the key used for system shortcuts, so maybe you should have tried that? Like yeah it’s different but that doesn’t make it bad. If you been using it for 10 years without figuring that out…
—-
I’m with you on the 1st party apps though, and the stupid corners on Tahoe.
I call it "alt tab" because that's how my brain maps the keyboard. The reality is simple - I struggled going from Windows to Ubuntu about 20 years ago but ultimately made it to the other side knowing how to use both well. With macs, I didn't. 10 years later and all of my adaptations are to avoid the operating system. In 10 years the main thing I've learned is how to get myself out of a jam and stick to the parts of the OS that don't feel like shit. I mean, it's not like I haven't learned these things, I know how to gesture, I know how to exit full screen, etc, it's not like I didn't ever learn, I'm explaining that the experience was dog shit.
Anyone is free to claim that I just didn't try, or didn't give it a fair shake, or perhaps I'm just some idiot who doesn't know computers or whatever.
Maybe I just think an OS should work differently, but okay? I've never said that I have some sort of access to a platonic ideal of objective operating systems and that macs don't meet it. I'm saying that I think it's bad and I gave examples of why. And I think I can easily appeal to my experiences seeing others use the OS - I don't think they find anything you're talking about appealing either.
Years ago, they changed the behavior of the green button to be "fullscreen into a separate space." As someone who never uses spaces, this is never what I want.
You can escape it by moving your cursor to the top edge of the screen and clicking the green button on the titlebar that appears to exit fullscreen.
In this case, because I had docked my laptop, the entire window moved to a virtual desktop that didn't actually map to a real desktop. Meaning that the video call continued in a virtual desktop that I literally could not see, that I could not mouse over. I don't know if that's just a multiple-monitor bug or whatever but the behavior is stupid even without that failure mode.
Apple presumes you have a multitouch pointing device. You can three-finger-swipe between spaces. I know there's a keyboard equivalent, but you'd have to look it up.
It used to be that Macs would use single button mouses because the user would otherwise need to know which one to click, but now we have to know how many fingers to use and in which direction to swipe, so much for discoverable
> Apple presumes you have a multitouch pointing device.
I think that's really bad design. Is that even controversial?
It’s certainly “bad design” if we’re designing specifically with the OS convert who has a grudge against trackpads as the target user. But multitouch and its functionalities has been a fundamental part of macOS for nearly two decades now. For better or worse, a traditional mouse makes about as much sense for a macOS environment as it does for an iPad at this point. It’s workable, and it has certain advantages, but it’s really not recommended as your only pointer. At best, it’s used in tandem with a trackpad.
If you don't have a multi-touch pointing device, I suppose. Though, it's like trying to use Windows with a single mouse button.
You can also hit ctrl-left or ctrl-right to move spaces without one or ctrl-1, ctrl-2, ctrl-3, etc. to switch to a specific virtual desktop directly.
You can also hit ctrl+ scroll wheel if you have one. Or add mission control hot corner to one of the screen corners.
You're making multiple desktops sound very confusing when it's really not. Every desktop OS has them and macOS' implementation is quite good. You want bad virtual desktops, try Windows.
Maybe you're better suited for an iPad.
I've used multiple desktops before. I love virtual desktops. They really shouldn't be confusing. It's a testament to the bad UX of macs that they are.
The fact that a full screen window creates a whole new virtual desktop is hilarious and I dare you to justify it.
Appeals to "Windows is bad" or whatever mean nothing to me. Stupid comments like "get good" mean nothing to me.
It sounds like you don't actually want the app in fullscreen. Fullscreen is "I only want to be in this one app window with no distractions." I pretty much only use it for watching videos.
If you want the window taking up the entire screen while staying on the desktop, double click the window chrome and it'll expand to fill the screen. And if you want the dock not taking up space, there's a setting to auto hide the dock (which I always enable)
> It sounds like you don't actually want the app in fullscreen. Fullscreen is "I only want to be in this one app window with no distractions." I pretty much only use it for watching videos.
I do want that. Every other OS has no issue with what I'm describing. Who said I don't want distractions? I want the video content to be expanded as widely as possible, that is what "full screen" means. Who said "full screen" means a separate desktop?
Ridiculous tbh
> And if you want the dock not taking up space, there's a setting to auto hide the dock (which I always enable)
Yes, me too.
> The fact that a full screen window creates a whole new virtual desktop is hilarious and I dare you to justify it.
I can kind of see the idea here. The alternative is that all the other windows in the working desktop get hidden behind the fullscreen window. That's pretty bad UX. I personally avoid it on Linux by always moving a window to its own desktop before fullscreening it.
That said, the implementation is awful, and exposes the rotten foundations of Mac's window management paradigm.
IMO floating windows always fall apart and should be reserved for modals and transient dialog boxes only. Everything gets a lot easier to understand when applications can't occlude one another or occupy the same space.
> The alternative is that all the other windows in the working desktop get hidden behind the fullscreen window. That's pretty bad UX.
How? It means I could have a full screen video and then overlay something smaller over it, or maintain my alt-tab behavior as it plays in the background, etc. I'd maintain the same UX. Why would full screen have such a weird behavior?
You're right that it's more consistent to have windows behave as you describe, and Windows and Linux both treat fullscreen windows this way. I posit that Apple cares more about not hiding windows behind others than it does consistency. This also shows with their new window placement algorithm that results in an absolute mess of windows all partially occluded but with some corner or edge peeking out of the stack for a user to visually identify and click to focus/being-to-top. Compare to Windows that (at least when I last used it) opens new windows at a slight diagonal offset from the last focused window, almost like building a neat deck of cards. Apple's ethos is also on display in the design of Stage Manager, which groups windows into these messy clumps and creates a visible shelf to swap between window bundles. Everything is optimized for hunt-and-peck visual users. If you're the type to organize your windows and workflows then you're fighting the system.
If you click the full screen window, your little window is now behind it…
> I figured out
Or you could maybe learn how to use the OS, in linux lingo RTFM. I don't want to be rude, but the critique was very flippant, the arguments vague, all about expectations based on years using a different OS, doesn't seem you want to give it a fair chance.
This is pretty funny.
> the arguments vague
I gave both generalized and highly specific cases where I felt the UX failed. I referenced principles of UX as well as literal "here is what my experience was in a concrete story".
> , all about expectations based on years using a different OS
No? I mean, again, funny. I explained how I've been using MacOS for years. Actually a decade, now that I count it out.
> doesn't seem you want to give it a fair chance.
a decade lol
Plenty of people use an OS for years without learning. And you admitted to spending time in the terminal, which indicates lack of will to try and learn macos shortcuts, gestures, windowing model, spaces, and so on. And the comment used sweeping generalizations, without referring to any specific principles broken which aren't just personal dislikes or unfamiliarity with a different way of doing things.
> I gave both generalized and highly specific cases where I felt the UX failed.
No guidelines named, no principles defined. No comparison standard is established.
The earlier fullscreen story is a specific case, maybe a discoverability argument, but not not that UX violates every principle. MacOS spaces and fullscreen apps follow a workspace concept, it's not a window resize mode.
> Asymmetric user experiences
What’s asymmetric is not the command — it’s the spatial context. The claim that it’s violated is arguable.
> Heavily reliant on gestures
Not sure which guidelines this breaks, but every gesture has a keyboard shortcut alternative, there is mission control key, menu bar, dock.
> Ridiculous failure modes
No failure mode is defined.
> And you admitted to spending time in the terminal, which indicates lack of will to try and learn macos shortcuts, gestures, windowing model, spaces, and so on.
It indicates no such thing, other than that my preferred UX on a mac has landed on the terminal. It doesn't indicate whatsoever that I never tried to learn, or that I haven't learned, unless you presuppose that learning would necessitate using the computer a specific way.
Indeed, I have learned quite a lot of the various gestures, spaces, etc, unsurprisingly. I avoid them because they suck, and the learning experience was shit.
> And the comment used sweeping generalizations, without referring to any specific principles broken which aren't just personal dislikes or unfamiliarity with a different way of doing things.
All design principles are going to boil down to personal dislikes lol but no, nothing was "unfamiliarity" you can stop saying that thanks.
> No guidelines named, no principles defined. No comparison standard is established.
I could cite guidelines if you think it would help. Microsoft released a UX guideline years ago justifying why magic corners etc are a bad idea. Of course, they obviously don't follow that guide these days. What would you like?
I'm not interested in debating this. I'm perfectly fine with how I've expressed myself, I'm just not motivated enough this late in a Friday to get more detailed, so you'll have to just try to decipher what I've said and find if there's value to you or reject it, which I think is your prerogative.
And if you bring up these points to an Apple fanboy, they'll tell you that "you just don't get it" or "forget all the 'bad Windows habits' and just learn the Apple way of things. It's soooo intuitive!!".
> "forget all the 'bad Windows habits' and just learn the Apple way of things
I mean I'd be willing to say I don't get it, because I sure as fuck do not get it. But I think I'd absolutely reject the "forget all the other stuff, learn this". It's been literally years on a Mac. I remember the frustration of going from Windows to Linux, I look back at that adjustment and laugh, it's hilarious to me that that felt frustrating when I contrast to my Mac adjustment. At least the Linux adjustment was tractable, the Mac adjustment is a total joke.
I actually suspect that people don't "adjust" in the sense of learning how to do things with a mac but instead adjust to not doing things with a mac, like how many mac users I know of outright say they just don't use full screen mode because it's confusing.
Agreed. On MacOS, I use a variety of smaller apps and scripts to make it less awkward, e.g. Karabiner, BetterTouchTool, Hammerspoon, and, of course, "Alt-Tab" (https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/). I am even contemplating starting to use a dedicated window manager, such as Aerospace (https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/). But all of this is a massive time investment.
And yes, the fullscreen mode is the perfect example. It is so shockingly poorly implemented that I almost never use it. Even if someone thought it was 'good enough', that doesn't change the fact that there is a forced transition animation when going to/from fullscreen that is unreasonably slow and awkward.
I actually like the concept of an app in full screen creating a new virtual desktop.
I feel like it’s really intuitive when you switch desktops with the trackpad.
It’s just incredibly poorly implemented, like all the window management on macOS.
Disclaimer : I own MacBooks since 2010 and I have seen macOS rotting update after update. To me they achieved a really mature and pretty well thought OS with Snow Leopard and it’s been slowly rolling downhill since then.
I can totally say that KDE AND Gnome AND Cinnamon AND Sway AND even the immature Niri are all better experiences than macOS.
Personally replaced Windows 10 with Linux Mint on my very computer illiterate mother in law's laptop a few months back. Haven't heard any complaints so far.
Linux is ready for prime time for anyone not bound to Windows/MacOS software.
Personally, I'm still on MacOS for work, but all my personal devices run some form of Linux. It's been liberating to say the least.
I set up windows 11 on a laptop for my dad so he can read emails and browse the web. Came back 3 months later when he told me he couldn't see the PDF files anymore. Turns out he installed THREE different PDF viewers that he randomly found on google, they installed tons of bloatware/spyware, replaced browser toolbars and searches etc. to a point where I decided to just restore from a recovery point. Told him not to download weird stuff (again) and ask me when he needs help.
At that point I questioned myself: I really should have installed linux for him.
ChromeOS is a really great option for "just want to read emails and browse the web".
Oh yeah, at least with ChromeOS, Chrome isn’t installing itself like a spyware alongside any other software installer.
> replaced browser toolbars
This is still a thing? Browsers still have toolbars???
My go to for family is giving them no install rights, and adding a remote desktop app for me to connect to them when they need something to install.
I don't get called very often anymore, and when I do, it's for their work computer or something, to which I say, talk to your IT department, I can't fix that.
Browsers today view and can do limited editing for PDFs. No need for a dedicated reader. One does need a dedicated authoring tool if you need to create PDFs from scratch. Most OSes support print to PDF as well if you only need conversion.
My daughter did this for her boyfriend's grandma, except she used Kinoite. The immutable aspect of it makes it very difficult to break.
She was over there recently and the downloads folder was littered with malware .exe files, so the grandma is trying her hardest to break it.
UBlock origin will fix most of that problem.
But it creates other issues, especially for a non-techsavvy user
I've never seen a website break because of ublock, at least not in the default config. If it's that much of a problem you can just remote in on grandmas computer and disable it for whatever website.
I think that beats remoting in when granny inevitably gets scammed by an ad.
There really is no excuse in my mind for not running an ad blocker. It's as vital to personal computing security as firewalls and anti malware.
Blocking ads helps grandma not accidentally leak private information that could have disastrous consequences, for example, getting scammed out of their money.
Not blocking ads helps grandma visit a few more websites that don't work well with adblock.
I mean yeah, Chrome and Firefox both run on Linux. And that covers 99% of what most "normies" need.
It's funny when people say Linux is difficult for their grandparents or siblings, when that's the place it covers best. And it keeps them from calling you about random adware/spyware/viruses they accidentally installed.
It's prosumers and professionals that have more issues with Linux, because they tend to rely on proprietary software that's problematic to install/use.
Before she passed, I had one of my Grandmothers on Ubuntu for about a decade... I had to set it up for her, and I ran updates every few months for her, but she really didn't have an issue... Her Windows 9x era games even ran under Wine when they wouldn't load on Windows (7 I think), correctly.
Email, browser and a few games... she was pretty happy with it.
I was so close to getting my parents to switch to Ubuntu in the late 2000s. It stuck until my dad needed some piece of software on the home PC for work that only worked with Windows. Today, they have iPhones and they think it will be more convenient to have a Mac to "sync things". Oh well...
Today, they have iPhones and they think it will be more convenient to have a Mac to "sync things". Oh well...
And for a very long time they would have been right. But it seems that all the commercial desktop OSes are in the maximize money extraction-phase now.
> Linux is ready for prime time for anyone not bound to Windows/MacOS software.
I suspect in order for this to be true we'd need a PR campaign that can shift culture on the scale of civil rights.
I'm not trying to be hyperbolic or deride Linux or anything—I agree that technologically it's probably ready. Overall UX I'm slightly skeptical. But the far bigger problem is culture.
There's already been a shift away from "PCs" among younger people. The majority of my kids friends have never touched a "regular computer." I've heard an unsettling number of reports of new hires who have never heard of a spreadsheet.
I'm bringing this up because if kids aren't using PCs as much in the first place and quite literally don't know what an operating system is (and please challenge this assumption; I'm going off of anecdata) it's going to be even harder to try to create cultural awareness and acceptance of linux.
But even disregarding that there would need to be a massive, massive coordinated campaign to create a real culture shift. I'm talking superbowl ads.
Again, not trying to be pessimistic, I'm trying to say that "ready for prime time" at this point has little to do with engineering or even design and far more to do with PR. Once I started launching my own products I quickly discovered (as everyone does) that making the thing is like 5% of the job and the remaining 95% is marketing.
The frustrating thing is that developers are some of the most reluctant to change. I'm sick of fighting docker on my Mac among the many other problems. But if we can't break away nobody else is going to either.
Even gnome tries to be too modern imo. KDE is perfect. I used to feel like KDE was too much like a toy. Now by comparison it looks utilitarian.
I've been using KDE for a decade and I completely agree. It used to be only better than GNOME because I could remove features from it and now I run completely stock KDE and it's solid compared to anything else.
I bought an SBC that booted into Gnome on the official disk image, and it didn't recognize my mouse. It was entirely unusable. In applications that were part of Gnome itself, like the settings menu, it was impossible to navigate using tab and arrow keys.
>settings menu, it was impossible to navigate using tab and arrow keys.
Huh? All you need is tab and the arrow keys to navigate the GNOME Settings app. I'm literally doing that right now. Maybe it was a later addition but it works perfectly fine in GNOME 49.
Gnome Shell in particular offers a ridiculously coherent, sane window management. Nobody agrees with all the choices the Gnome Team took to get here, but it sure is nice there being one way of doing everything that makes sense contextually.
I don't even know if Gnome and Gnome Shell are the same thing. One thing I do know is the default install of Gnome on Debian 13 leaves you without a dock, without a system tray, and without minimize/maximize buttons. They purposely remove the three most important tools the average user relies on for navigation.
It's like trying to make a car without any round edges because "square edges are better". Good luck with the wheels!
I can fix that somewhat with extensions, but every normal person I know will take one look at the defaults and abandon it. That's a reasonable choice in my opinion. Why use something where the first interaction gives you a clear indication you're going to be fighting against developer ideology?
I agree.
If you want to customize your DE a lot - Gnome isn't for you.
If you just want a clean and productive environment by default... Gnome is great.
Once you stop fighting it, sigh, and go with the flow... modern Gnome is genuinely pleasant in that I spend almost zero time thinking about it, and shit just works.
I still run other DEs for some specific purposes where "general use" isn't the goal, but I can reliably hand non-technical family members a machine with Gnome and they don't have to come ask me a bunch of questions.
My problem with GNOME (after having used it as my main desktop on my Linux systems for many years) is that it removes some really useful features and they are not just expert features, but also features that non-technical users are used to, such as system tray icons and menu bars. You can bring them back with GNOME Extensions, but for instance, the system tray icon extensions are very buggy.
KDE on the other hand just has these and is also great out-of-the-box (I pretty much run stock KDE).
I think you can absolutely set up a Linux box for grandma / grandpa.
Anyone who lives in the browser really. My mom and my kids all are on Ubuntu these days.
Anyone who lived in a browser was fine a decade ago.
At this point... it's basically anyone who doesn't want to play competitive mp games with poorly implemented anti-cheat, or who doesn't have niche legacy hardware (ex - inverters, CNCs, oscopes, etc).
Steam tackling the gaming side of things has basically unlocked the entire Windows consumer software ecosystem for linux. It's incredibly easy to spin up windows only applications with nothing but GUI only software on most distros at this point.
Crazy how much better a system with a modern linux kernel and Gnome or KDE is than Windows 11. I'm at the point where I also prefer it to macOS... which is funny since I think Gnome was basically playing "copy apple" for a bit there 5 years ago, but now has really just become the simpler, easier to use DE.
In the past few years, I’ve started to develop a form of “upgrade dread” when it comes to OS upgrades. What are they going to enshittify now? What are they going to drop support for now?
This somehow excluded Linux and its DEs, and I eagerly read any news, changelogs, and announcements in this space. They’re still not perfect in every aspect, but at least I see things improving instead of public turf wars between departments trying to improve their KPIs.
Why is there an extra URL handler for MS Edge that bypasses the default browser config? Why is the search bar this wide in the default taskbar config instead of showing a simple button? Why are local searches always sent to Bing with no easy way to switch it off or change the search provider?
> I’ve started to develop a form of “upgrade dread” when it comes to OS upgrades.
I've been going the other way on Linux.
I used to think it might be wise to postpone updates if you were traveling, especially using a rolling distro. Today, I would be quite confident running the updates 10 minutes before leaving.
Granted, this is also because I'm more confident than ever that I could fix most breakages, and worst case the smartphone is there, but I've also not seen big breakages for years.
Yep. I run NixOS unstable-small on my ThinkPad and there is rarely breakage in daily updates. If it ever happens while on the go, I can just boot into a previous generation. The immutable OSTree/bootc distros are similar, as well as openSUSE, which uses btrfs snapshots on updates.
Given that a lot of things happen in the browser, I think it wouldn't be too crazy. There are even distros that look like Windows if you're after that. What part of it do you think isn't ready for this scenario? (honestly curious)
I wouldn't know what to recommend for "just works" photo syncing from the phone à la iCloud.
In all fairness I wouldn't recommend macOS to my grandparent either.
This has to be sarcasm. Either that or you have never used KDE or Gnome even once in your life. No DE for Linux is anywhere near as polished as the DE in Mac OS. You have to spend hours customizing KDE or CFCE to get them to function even halfway near what an average user would expect. Gnome is okay but so bloated and even more opinionated than MacOS or Windows.
This is definitely not the case, and I invite anyone reading this comment to install a Linux distribution themselves in a VM or something to find out via direct experience. Fedora is a good place to start in my opinion.
If you want to compare on the basis of microissues like this one, then note that KDE Plasma has exactly the same issue with the resizing area of rounded corner windows aa the one pointed by TFA.
On the other hand, it does have Alt+right click & drag as a mechanism that doesn't require any manual dexterity to hit arbitrary edges.
Oh yes. Alt+right click + drag. How intuitive. (not)
Learnability and usability are related but independent concepts. This feature is difficult to find out about unless told, relatively easy to remember once you first learn about it, and very intuitive once you try it out. Dragging from the corner is slightly easier to stumble upon or infer, but most people will learn about it because they were told about it. The alt drag version (both for resizing and moving windows around without having to go to the title bar) is in addition, becomes second nature quickly and is significantly nicer once you learn it.
Of course I've been using Cosmic for most of the past year now... It's getting better, but still some rough edges... the launch bar still doesn't feel quite right, and there's still times where keyboard navigation doesn't quite work right/smoothly.
It's speedy though.
I set up Elementary OS for my 79 yr old mother. No issues.
Similar experience here: I setup Debian stable for my 76 yo mother, and for a 79 yo friend. Works like a charm, and the 2 years release schedule is perfect for people who don’t care about bleeding edge and would rather have stability.
Unattended security upgrades keep it secure, and in my experience a bit of initial “locking things down and simplifying” is valuable, but after this it’s smooth sailing compared to other older folks I help with Windows systems where MS is constantly throwing at them insane bugs, complete UX changes, ads, or Copilot everywhere.
You’ve never tried Haiku, you’re missing out on a remarkable desktop experience.
The main problem is that Apple wants to be opinionated. Linux is the polar opposite of that. People used to say the latter is bad, but it turns out the former is way worse (many hackers of course already knew this).
> Not quite at the point I'd recommend them for grandma and grandpa, but not that far off, either.
But at this point grandma and grandpa are the only ones I'd recommend to use Apple devices.
Opinionated design was great back when Apple's Human Interface Guidelines were based on concrete user testing and accessibility principles. The farther we get from the Steve Jobs era, the more their UI design is based on whatever they think looks pretty, with usability concerns taking a back seat.
It was good because it was both Opinionated (in other words, the path to write software that follows the design was easy, and the paths to write software that violated the design were hard), and also well-researched by human interface experts.
Now what we appear to have is "someone's opinion" design. A bunch of artists decided their portfolios were a little light and they needed to get their paintbrushes out to do something. I don't work at Apple, but my guess is that their HI area slowly morphed from actual HCI experts into an art department, yet retained their power as experts in machine interaction.
So here we are, we still have Opinionated design, but it might just be based on some VP's vibes rather than research.
I don't like to paint Apple as being completely incompetent (but damn have they been screwing stuff up), but I do think trying to solidify the experiences around a common codebase has become untenable. The idea is great thought - write one app that works on macOS, iPadOS, iPhoneOS, visionOS, etc. What a time saver that is for developers - but the problem is that screen sizes and interactions with those different platforms vary. Yes, resizing a window with your clunky finger needs a bit more wriggle room, while a pixel precise mouse or touchpad is a lot different.
And ironically, it has also gotten far less pretty. Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was beautiful. Tahoe is flat and generic looking.
Opinionation (heh, opinionatedness?)'s value is entirely different depending on the user category.
Hackers by and large don't want opinionated, because they're willing to spend the time configuring & customizing AND have the knowledge to do so.
Just about everyone else (as far as I can tell) very specifically do not want this, and for those who do, the amount of customizeability e.g. MacOS offers is enough. Having an immediately-useable computer (recent problems notwithstanding) is of much greater value.
So when you say "The main problem is that Apple wants to be opinionated" I can only conclude that you're coming at this from the 'hacker' POV. But I may be misunderstanding your comment.
I think the problem is that opinionatedness assumes that the average user exists and represents the majority of your users.
But every user is in many ways non-average.
Thus if you create a system tailored at the average user, then none of your users will be happy.
I don't love all the new tahoe stuff, and do wish I could go roll back, but this hand wringing around Apple is way overblown IMHO. What he is reporting is real, but in my actual usage I haven't noticed this at all- in other words, if this wans't called out, I am not sure I would have ever realized it.
Tbh I have always found window management on Macs to be annoying and something to be avoided- Rectangle or something similar is one of the first things I install and try to use the shortcuts to just put windows in either a quarter or half of the screen.
That said, I use Macbooks for the hardware, if for whatever reason I had to switch to Linux I would just shrug and not care one bit. It took me a few years to realize, but MSFT just disappeared from my life one day and I didn't even notice.
Also, for some reason KDE renders everything super-fast/smoothly on my 120Hz 4k display, whereas macOS on Apple Silicon is often stuttering (no, it's not the Electron bug). The tables really turned, when I first switched to macOS on the desktop in 2007, the GPU-based rendering was insanely good compared to... pretty much everyone else.
Rather than evolutionary improvements we get Liquid Glass and ads in iWork applications. The enshittification has started I guess.
I disagree.
I've actually bought a Mac Mini which I use for media consumption and run it besides my Linux (Cachy OS) gaming PC. I have a jellyfin server, but the media client for linux is totally broken.
And, when you use an nvidia card, you really have to do a deep dive on which settings and which render client you want to run. I now have a stable solution that runs KDE Plasma via Wayland, that allows for games to run smoothly. It took me a while to figure that out.
The Linux community also, quite frankly, sucks. When you need to figure something out, you really need to make it a study and only if you know the correct jargon, you are deemed worthy of help. Othrwise you're bombarded with rtfm comments.
My mother (age 70, non technical) uses Gnome with no issues.
Gnome is just perfect for non-techies :)
my mother and younger sister both prefer it over default Windows 10/11 design. mum says, "feels similar to my phone [pure Android 12] yet I can do so much more".
given that sister only really needs Steam Big Picture and everything mother uses is already in Flathub or defined in a Nix flake, they didn't experience any ecosystem issues
actually hunting for i9 macbook in good shape to switch to linux after decades on mac
As long as you stay far away from Wayland, flatpaks, and nVidia drivers
Wayland and flatpaks work perfectly fine. nVidia drivers on the other hand...
There are no good options for grandma these days. I've been helping my 85-yr-old mother with her computer stuff (she has an iMac) and there's so much user-hostile, broken stuff--not just on the Mac itself, but many of the internet-based services she has to use--it makes you want to take a baseball bat to the while affair.
If you're a developer or sys admin, sure. Or nowadays, if you're a gamer.
If your computer work is anything else, Macs are still decades ahead. With the highest quality software available for any task at cheap prices.
I can't work with a sub-par e-mail client, calendar, no good invoicing app, photo editing, etc.
And web apps do not cut it if working with these things is your job.
As for grandma and grandpa, iPad is their solution. With all the faults of the devices.
> "...while KDE and Gnome slowly get better and better"
These projects have been around for literally decades and really haven't changed much during that time. I think what you're noticing is that Linux desktops are as good as they always have been, but since Apple and Microsoft keep messing with theirs for marketing reasons, in comparison it seems that Linux GUIs are improving.
Gnome has improved significantly since the difficult Gnome 3 launch, and KDE Plasma was a massive upgrade that keeps getting better all the time.
This feels untrue. Granted I haven't tracked it closely, but the Adwaita design system and the GNOME HIG feel like relatively recent developments.
This is just not true at all. Yes Gnome and KDE are old, but they've changed SIGNIFICANTLY.
Gnome 2 => 3 was a bigger and more ambitious transition than anything Microsoft has done. Except maybe DOS => NT. Same thing with KDE 3 => 4.
KDE gets new features on a very regular basis and they're not just, like, little checkboxes added here or there. No. Theyre huge changes. New system resource monitor, new notification center, new widget editor, new panel editor, window tiling... the list goes on. And that's just, like, the past 2 ish years.
Linux GUIs are improving, and rapidly. Before, they were close. But the gap keeps widening. At this point, KDE is so unbelievably far ahead of windows in terms of UI, UX, usability, performance, and feature set that it doesn't seem fair. I don't know if Microsoft can catch up. And, if they could, it would take multiple versions of windows.
Sorry but you clearly haven't used macOS. Linux on the desktop is still about 15 years behind, and I tried it recently. It's such an inconsistent experience it's almost hilarious.
Speaking as a Tahoe user by the way who is not experiencing any issues to speak of (on 26.0.1 - and I can't reproduce the resizing inconsistency either). I've been using macOS since 2003 (back when it was called Mac OS X) and before that I was a Linux desktop user since 1996.
I used macOS as my daily driver from Tiger to last year, actually. I don’t know what the inconsistencies you’re referring to are, but I certainly prefer them to cloud account nagging and constant attempts to monetize user behavior, which is the modern macOS experience.
which desktop experience did you try
i'm a daily mac os x user (for a long time) and I think kde plasma is better
I'd be curious to hear more specifics regarding the "15 years behind" and "inconsistent experience."
Inconsistent experience maybe, but does this inconsistency really get in the way of actual work?
Since the first taste of Linux WMs, I believe the best and only good way of handling window move and resize is super+lmb/rmb respectively. No more pixel-perfect header/corner sniping!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/qv0vmz/missing_supe...
On Linux if you learn shortcuts for close/minimise/maximise as well, you can even remove window borders and title bars entirely. It's free screen real estate.
The gnome window title bars are obnoxiously thick and useless by default tho. I've found that Unity or even just Windows like styling in Gnome is a lot more respectful to your screen real estate.
I like the Gnome 2 title bars (Mate). Gnome wasn't always that bad.
Yes, Gnome looks very odd because of that.
That is a tradeoff that makes it nice when you have a convertible laptop.
I wish it was simply configurable from the settings dialogs.
It definitely needs improvement but for touchscreens it is good.
Luckily, 95% of Linux devices actually have touchscreens.
The sad bit is where you realize that GNOME is typically only found on the other 5%.
It's my preference too. What do you use?
I used to use "GTK Title Bar" gnome extension which was abandoned a few versions ago so had to write my own and it's X11 specific. The one drawback is that when windows are reopened, they are offset by the title bar height i.e. it messes up whatever is tracking the size/offset/location.
Anyone have other ways to do this in gnome and do they work on wayland too?
I'm on Fedora KDE so won't be much help to you, but there is a "Windows Rules" section in the system settings where I've added a rule that applies to all windows with the property "No titlebar and frame". Actually I'd quite like frame just with no titlebar, but that's not an option.
The AltDrag tool on Windows includes Super+double click to maximize/restore. I find it surprising that this does not come by default on KDE.
"AltSnap" is a continuation of AltDrag that's better on Windows 11. It is instrumental in making me loathe Windows 11 _ever so slightly_ less.
https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap
I drag the window to the top for this. On KDE there's also a (configurable) keyboard shortcut (Meta + prev page, TIL, might start doing this now).
Depends on the window manager.
> It's free screen real estate.
jim, does it get any better than this?
On macOS, you can enable window dragging by holding down the Control+Command keys with this command:
I use this with "three finger drag", and resizing at the window border hasn't been much of an issue for me.MacOS is the "it just works" operating system. As such, I think the moment that you need to declare custom workarounds like this, it kind of loses its legitimacy, and you should already be in Linux land.
I abhor the current state of macOS and Tim Cook’s leadership, but your take is nonsensical.
For one, “it just works” hasn’t been used in over a decade, same as Google’s “don’t be evil”, which does tell you something about their current philosophies.
But more importantly, “it just works” was obviously never about it “it reads your mind and does every software feature however you personally like”, it was about the integration of hardware and software and not having to fiddle with drivers and settings to get hardware basics working.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/7hd450/it_just_works/
I miss 2016 apple
When they ditched all the ports and added the butterfly keyboard?
While I get the butterfly keyboard hate (though mine is so far still perfectly fine) the USB-C ports were amazing. I have a 2016 MBpro and that thing still cooks really well. As somebody who worked in video production those ports were a godsend. No more waiting around for footage to transfer all the damn time. Complete game changer. Plus with one or two quality docks I could plug-in literally anything I ever needed. With the AMD GPU i could also edit pretty beefy 4K with no proxies most of the time. In 2016/2017 that was pretty awesome. Plus last good intel machine they made IMO, so good compatibility with lots of software, target display mode for old iMacs, windows if I wanted it, etc.
Probably my favorite laptop I’ve ever owned. Powerful machine, still sees work, runs great.
It introduced USB-C before it was ubiquitous even on smartphones, at least in my area. All the peripherals still needed a dongle, it was the dongle era. The keyboard was okay to type on once I got used to the short travel, but the keycaps easily broke off, and dust would get in and the keys wouldn't register. Also, the whole laptop would get very hot, at least the 13" pro without the touchbar. I prefer the older 2015 model, before the butterfly, that's the one I had at work but had to give it up, and I regret waiting for the new models instead of purchasing the same one.
Compared to my old NixOS with tiling window manager, I’d say MacOS panes just doesn’t work. I have Rectangle, but it’s no comparison to the full tiling experience. I switched for Apple Silicon nothing more
I use Aerospace and it's an okay but not great tiling window manager. Note that AeroSpace really is among the best on macOS, but I'm guessing the OS APIs simply don't expose enough hooks.
https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace
Most people wouldn't touch "NixOS" or a Linux-style "tiling window manager" with a 10-ft pole, though. For them, the tiling window manager is a good in-between.
what is the full tiling experience like? I was never a tiling WM guy, on Linux I'd just set some KDE shortcuts for moving and resizing windows. On macOS I used Spectacle and then Rectangle but not sure what I am missing out on, I was always content with Spectacle
I've used XMonad for a while now. Almost no fiddling with windows at all.
I've been using Amethyst for a couple of years now and it's been working quite well for me.
Even if this was a "custom workaround" this argument would be extreme "all or nothing" binary thinking.
An OS can "just work" for of the stuff a user does, and just need some tweaking here or there. Doesn't mean if the "just works" stuff is not 100% you're just as good going to Linux.
Anyway, this is not some "custom workaround", it's a regular Apple-provided macOS toggle. It's just not exposed in the UI, because for most users, the regular way "just works". I know all kinds of "defaults" toggles, and barely use 1/100 of them, because the actual defaults are fine.
But, believe it or not, is very customizable (and previously very scriptable). I have Shift+Command+M (maximize) bound to resize to fit the content (different from full screen in macOS). Anything that’s in a menu can be bound to a keyboard shortcut without any additional utilities.
I have multiple virtual desktops. Can I move a window to the next desktop from the keyboard without 3rd party software yet?
This used to be option exposed in settings.
I kind of agree with you, but on macOS I still don’t have to ever think about drivers. The hardware just works. Linux isn’t quite there yet. My work XPS laptop running Ubuntu is close, but not quite the same.
I found myself closing Linux windows sometimes only with alt+F4; sometimes only with ctrl+Q; sometimes with both; sometimes with none
You can close them with xkill and a single click.
Yes, the mac user faces incredible disillusion when he discovers that "just works" was just another marketing gimmick (to the likes of it doesn't get viruses!)
As a long-time Mac user, "it just works" actually meant "it either works or it doesn't" - a *binary*. Whereas other OSes were shades of grey - it _might_ work if you spend time searching and trying random combinations in settings.
And it was good because it saved time.
(Same used to apply to iOS too)
As a 20+ year heavy mac AND linux user, both are true.
It doesn't get viruses, especially if you don't install random junk from warez sites and stick to MAS, brew, and a few trusted vendors. Even if you do install crap, it's trojans not viruses, which are more like the Yeti (something like that might exist, but few have seen it) than a problem mac users have.
And things "just work" way way way way more than they do in Linux (and I've started using it professional as desktop and for dev work in late 1990s, I'm not weekend tourist to it), which is exactly what I expected as a pragmatist. Only some non-existing carricature user that exists in strawman arguments expected everything to be perfect.
The "they don't catch viruses" is a bold lie, but back then when i worked in tech sales the apple promoter wanted us to repeat the lie ad nasueam. They definetly catch malware and it's as easy as in any other platform (also because today the malware will likely be running in a headless chromium instance)
I've had a macbook since 2010, and to me its software quality has been going downhill since snow leopard, today it's completely unrecognizable.
I think apple jumped the shark more or less in 2012 with the flay layouts, when they also started changing ages old defaults, hiding and then removing features for power users, too much handholding and telling you what's best for you, things like that.
My macbook from that era is still with me, but it runs debian now, same as any other PC i use for work or leisure, and it's really so much better for me as a programmer and as a user. Freedom. It's really freedom (and KDE's ergonomics really clicks with me). I recently had to install unsigned software on one of our worplace's mac minis (which i'm glad i don't have to use anymore) and it was so incredibly frustrating i wanted to smash that thing.
>The "they don't catch viruses" is a bold lie, but back then when i worked in tech sales the apple promoter wanted us to repeat the lie ad nasueam. They definetly catch malware and it's as easy as in any other platform (also because today the malware will likely be running in a headless chromium instance)
Malware is not a virus. And it doesn't catch malware if you keep to trusted sources and keep on OS protective layers like SIP.
Install junk from warez sites and the like, and YOU installed something (still not a virus: a trojan). If you couldn't install it at all (also totally possible) you'd be crying how macOS restricts you.
In over 20 years of OS X use I've never had any virus, nor did anyone I know. Over 30 years of Windows I've had plenty.
>They definetly catch malware and it's as easy as in any other platform
If you install it, it's not a virus (and you can't avoid that in any OS, unless they lock you out of arbitrary program download and execution and only have you run in sandboxes).
Even so, you can very well install and not give it privileges, and then it can't even touch important directories. If you install it && enter your admin credentials to let it do whatever, it's on you.
>I've had a macbook since 2010, and to me its software quality has been going downhill since snow leopard, today it's completely unrecognizable.
It has, but that has nothing to do with now allowing viruses or even malware (in fact, regarding the latter, is more secure than it was in 2010 via multiple measures).
apt-get install logicalleap
Sudo apt-get install logicalleapd
Windows is also the "it just works" operating system, and it has hundreds of useful things you can only do through registry hacks.
It's not a very useful test.
I look at the good things about macOS over desktop linux like how cmd-c/v works across all apps, and it would be amazing if it were just a cli command to bridge the gap.
In my experience, Windows is very far from a "it just works" OS.
It's the ambition as a home user OS though, like macOS. And in the discussion of "it just works" operating systems, who else are we to go by than the vendor ambitions? Personal opinions? In that case, neither is because both struggle to always work in all scenarios since their respective inceptions.
When the phrase originated, manually updating CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT were expected skills of a home PC owner. The idea of buying a device, plugging it in, and having it work without a complex setup was unheard of. "It just works" on the Mac meant the absence of a DOS layer, IRQs, command lines, etc.
AFAIK Windows has never been known or marketed as "it just works". It goes long way to maintain backwards compatibility, but lets not kid ourselves that it has any semblance to what Apple's "it just works" is supposed to mean.
In what universe has Windows ever been a "it just works" OS? Not this one.
I think it was a mistake for Apple to put some of the best QOL, not just accessibility, enhancements behind the Accessibility section of the Settings, rather than on the Trackpad settings. Three finger drag is a game changer, and a lot of my colleagues had no idea it existed.
The weird thing is that setting used to be in the trackpad settings! I have no idea why they moved it. It's one of the first things I enable on every device I use.
Exactly, same, and same. I was in the company HQ a few weeks ago and one of my colleagues just got a new machine. I was watching them set it up and was like, "How do you live like that, clicking the top and holding to drag to move the window?" They had no idea three finger drag was a thing, life changed.
Probably due to the longstanding bugs with it. I still use it on all my laptops, but Finder in particular gets tripped up with what the drag state is when using it.
Wish it worked on all windows. For some reason Settings is exempt from this, for example.
The macOS Settings app is broken in all kinds of ways, as far as UI/UX goes. It's been this way since they redesigned it a few years back. Not that it was great before, but the redesign just made it worse.
It (partially) works, but only if the cursor is NOT hovering over the right portion of the window. So only 30% works.
I tried this on most recent MacOS 26 - it does not work here. Might it be because I have Rectangle installed?
Works great for me. I enabled that functionality alongside resizing on RMB by using "Easy Move+Resize" from GH. I also use Raycast to bind most window management stuff, it's instant unlike the built-in alternatives on Tahoe.
Same, tried with and without Rectangle running and haven't seen it work yet. Must be missing something obvious.
edit: I ended up trying Easy Move+Resize which is mentioned in a sibling comment, can recommend, works as advertised.
I don't think I know how to confirm that command is correct, and I've been a Mac user for decades. If Apple's solution to problems is "trust the CLI command you found on a website" then I might need to sell some shares.
if you search
NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture
you see how often this feature gets broken and type some other flag or install 3rd party app.
I used to use the Sawfish window manager ... before it fell out of maintenance, oh and before I switched to DEs with the window manager bolted on.
The thing I miss the most from Sawfish is that it let me resize any window. There are a lot of fixed-sized modal dialogs with scrollbars that wouldn't need them if they were taller, and there's a lot of room on my portrait monitor!
What a nice feature! Really puts the user in control. Is there any maintained WM allowing this? How are modals treated on tiling WMs?
Yeah, it was one of those things I noticed when I first started using Linux and wondered why every other OS didn't just copy it.
Probably just simple resistance to use of modifier keys in non-technical users, at least on the Windows side. A lot of users never touch a modifier except for Ctrl for copy/paste and maybe Windows for start menu search.
On the Mac side where key combos and modifier use is more widespread among users, it’s probably because there’s no intuitive visual that can be associated with the interaction.
It's not like Apple would frown about the idea of an action having "no intuitive visual associated with it". On iOS, you can scroll to the top by pressing on the status bar as one example.
Unless your status bar is on the bottom. Then scrolling up is really hit or miss
The status bar – as in: the area where the clock, battery and signal strength are shown – is absolutely always at the top of the screen on iOS.
Oh, I get having a visual way of doing it with just a mouse for sure. But for power users or even just-a-little-bit-of-knowledge users it's super quick and convenient. When I had to use Windows for work it drove me nuts that the option wasn't there (ended up finding AltDrag thankfully).
On Windows, I use AltDrag.
Altdrag doesn't work with scaling and is missing some other nice to haves, The Altsnap fork of it fixes this. Its one of the first things i install.
windows does support [win] + [arrow key] though
Mac supports the win (Cmd) + arrow key thing too; figured I'd mention since the story is about macOS window management.
Easy Move+Resize is great for this on macOS: https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize
This is the way, game changer.
For window move I think it's a reaction to the popularization of putting UI in the window titlebar so there's nothing to grab onto. I don't mind it but I wish there was a dedicated "grab" button on the mouse because I find it clunky to have to use both hands to manage windows.
I can tell you the feature of Meta/Super¹+L/R click to move/resize windows has existed on Linux long before UI in the window titlebar became a thing.
¹ aka Windows key
I know it's been around for a while, but I don't recall people talking about it like it's a killer feature of Linux window management until after the "UI in the window titlebar" trend started.
Recently getting a new Mac for work, coming from Hyprland has been tough, but I feel like I’m getting there. Aerospace and Karabiner-Elements have gotten me most of the way there. Have had to write a few scripts to get the workspaces working the way I’m used to, but overall I got a significant part of my workflow to mirror my Linux setup, but would still love to get the super+right click to resize working somehow (there is a native way to move windows with ctrl+cmd+left click which was nice).
Same here. I use both!
> get the super+right click to resize working somehow (there is a native way to move windows with ctrl+cmd+left click which was nice).
I've tried this with Hamerspoon to no avail and ultimately gave up... if you find a workaround, I'm all ears!
I really miss AHK...
How are you liking Aerospace? I miss i3. I tried a few TWMs in Mac but they felt quite janky, but it's possible I just didn't give them time.
Not OP but it's the best auto tiling WM I've found for MacOS so far. Yabai requires SIP disabled for what I would consider core features which is a no go on a work laptop. Aerospace sides steps this and MacOS's horrible window management by just not using the built in spaces. I've only had to restart it a couple times over the last 4 months due to bugs.
I also use https://github.com/acsandmann/aerospace-swipe to add trackpad support.
see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998527
i use this. it’s not maintained so you need to manually enable its access to assistive control in Settings but besides that still works great:
https://github.com/jmgao/metamove
it does exactly what you want coming from Fluxbox-style window managers
here’s how i configure it (it has a settings ui, this just automates setting it up) https://github.com/justjake/Dotfiles/blob/3d359f961b009478ef...
i didn’t notice the hideous corner grab areas for a few weeks after updating to 26 because i never tried to use the corner
Yeah I use a third-party add on for macOS that does something similar.
The only annoyance is situations where you are moving the mouse while also starting to press a ctrl+ or cmd+ key combination and unexpectedly move or resize the window in the process.
I use i3-wm
I never resize a window with its border.
I never minimize a weindow.
I sometimes move a window to a different panel but it snaps to the width / height of the column.
Overlapping windows is perhaps the worst GUI paradigm - it's like the first thing someone thought of for 640 x 480 screens.
Let it go.
Tiling window managers used to be a thing in the old days, they predate the invention of overlapping windows, there is a reason it is only a minority that reaches out to them nowadays.
Tilings are no better or no worse than floating. There are many users who would benefit from them (people who typically keep all their windows maximized), but have had literally zero exposure two them due to MacOS and Windows.
Complaints about lack of window snapping in MacOS vs Windows, a loose copy of tiling, are consistent across the internet. If MacOS and Windows had native tiling support, you'd see a fight fiercer than tabs vs. spaces.
The reason floating windows are used is because "that's the way it is done." Windows 95 wowed the world and established the status quo.
Not to mention the direction that the likes of Paper and Niri are going, these are things that very few users get to experience and therefore couldn't possibly have an informed decision on what they prefer.
> Not to mention the direction that the likes of Paper and Niri are going, these are things that very few users get to experience and therefore couldn't possibly have an informed decision on what they prefer.
niri is great because it gives you the best of all worlds.
Scrolling by default but you can easily float and tile things as needed. It feels so intuitive for how I use computers.
I've created a few posts and videos on using niri while going over my workflows in https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-is-niri-this-good-live-de... and https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/day-to-day-window-management-....
Having used Windows for 25 years, there's no chance I'll ever go back. This environment is already substantially better. That's after tricking Windows out with virtual desktops, global hotkeys, window positioning tools, launchers, multiple clipboards, heavily WSL 2 driven, etc..
I tried to switch a few times over the last decade but was always blocked by hardware issues on this machine, those blockers are gone now.
Windows does tiling just fine, it even has layout suggestions.
Yes, which is why people complain about MacOS vs Windows. People wouldn't complain about the lack of quasi-tiling in MacOS if they didn't care about it (which is the gist of your gp comment). The only reason they have experienced it is because Windows has quasi-tiling.
Not in a GUI though. Sun Windows was overlapping, GEM was overlapping and almost everything else since then.
I'm on a 5120x2160 monitor and tiling is super perfect.
Can't recommend it enough.
There were others out there, e.g. Oberon, Lilith,...
That's where I learned the power of tiling. Years of using the Acme text editor.
When you also learn drop down menus are not needed either.
Yup, but "normies" do need menus or at least some way to do things that has some degree of visual affordance (e.g. a persistent cmd/ctrl+p, which I think Office has/had).
not everyone can drive a Ferrari
That reason being that there is a minority of people who reach out to anything instead of just using what they're given. Compounded by baby duck syndrome, of course.
I have a guess as to why this fix was delayed—on the release candidate, you weren't able to resize windows in Stickies. I filed a bug for it. This felt like a last-minute addition—the previous betas didn't have the 'fix.'
Let's think about why: if the width of the handle is based on the radius, and the radius is 0 for a window, there's nowhere for the grab handle to be.
I assume this wasn't the only app with fully square windows, and so the fix actually caused more problems. Respinning a release candidate is expensive, and they were out of time for this one. So the patch gets reverted and the fix gets iterated on for the next release, where they'll presumably figure something clean out that's conditional on exact window shape.
26.4 could be the spring hardware release or it could be the spring services release. I would give it a 2/3 chance of landing in 26.4, and a 1/3 of being moved to 26.5.
>In total the thickness went down from 7 to 6 pixels, which is a 14% decrease, making it 14% more likely to miss it.
Pedantic, but chance of miss is actually less than 14% more likely since the user's click location is not uniformly random over the thickness area, it's biased toward the center (normally distributed).
Pedantic, you don't know the distribution, so the chance could be higher
The reduction was specifically to the in-window side of the edge, so it's definitely greater than 14%.
Interesting, I've always approached from the outside in.
I approach from whatever side the mouse happens to be on...
never thought about it before but after playing with it a while i notice i tend to approach from the right, which means moving out if i'm inside on the right side. i think this is because my positioning accuracy seems to be higher moving leftwards than rightwards...
Yeah, and not to mention the increase in likelihood click events the user intends for the application will make it through successfully, rather than being stolen by the window manager.
Technically correct is the best kind of correct.
I had similar thought but didn't want to be that guy.
My take is sometimes we get paid to be that guy and precision has its place and value.
We get lost when being right is seen as having value - instead of improving clarity and precision if needed in a specific context.
Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
Back in the days when it was common for Macintosh to have 640x480 screens (or even smaller), they still fully visible window controls that were impossible to miss.
https://erichelgeson.github.io/blog/2021/03/23/ultimate-syst...
>Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
And despite things being smaller, there's also white space everywhere so there is less information on your screen.
The trend in UIs is making filenames into discrete icons instead of lists. In outlook this morning all I got 3 attachments and it's 3 icons that all are something almost identical like "<word icon>2026-02-13_A....docx" and I have to hover over them to figure out each filename. I don't get it.
I'm a Solidworks user. It's a 3D CAD program. From about 2012 to 2018, it was unusable with a display higher than 1080p because it did its own bad scaling of UI. Text elements would overlap and be cut off. Since then it works in general but to make 2D drawings I still change to 1080p. Making drawings involves a lot of clicking on lines and vertexes to add dimensions, but the hitboxes are 1 dimension thick, or even 1 single pixel. It's maddening at 4K. There are selection filters that help, but since it's sluggish in general in 4K I just admit defeat and use 1080p.
I launched spotify on my phone today and it had a grid of playlists I could chose from. The grid showed a maximum of 6 characters per playlist over two lines, but there was certainly a lot of whitespace available, and some random album art that told me nothing.
It was basically unusable, but I'm sure some designer thought it was slick.
Screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ii0xb6fcnexdfpdudayj1/2026-02...
That’s actually unreal. You’d think with all the money they steal from artists they could afford UX that isn’t hilariously bad.
this is hilariously, almost unbelievably bad
I’ve been a mac user since 1994, system 7, and it feels to me like the overall Mac user experience and reliability (stability, speed, etc) really peaked with Snow Leopard, 10.6.
This probably has a lot to do with the vastly improved hardware design around then - the touchpad specifically on the “blackbook” Core 2 Duo era macbooks was a step change, and they keyboard was pretty great too. Multi-monitor support was fantastic compared to everything else too.
You have to wonder what the design principles of pre-X MacOS paired with modern Apple hardware could achieve.
I'm sorry guys, it's my fault.
My first mac was a 09 MBP with snow leopard, shortly after they updated and started removing random features and closing down customization. For some reason, you couldn't be trusted with more than one right click method anymore.
A solid 15 years later I try macs again, had a nice m3 air at work and bought a personal M4 air. A few months later Tahoe comes out. I bought the thing because modern darkmode macos looked so great and was such a pleasure to use. Now it's full on bubbleboy.
Word must have gotten back to Cupertino that I was back in the ecosystem...
I have the feeling the regions are the same since the EGA's 620x200 (and hercules mode!) days of windows 3.x for almost all operating systems. Some window managers have updated it a bit but if you look at the increase in pixel density (640x480 on a 14" crt is 57ish ppi, and that is being very generous, vs my home display of 110ppi and the retina displays with 200+ ppi) I get the idea the regions have stayed the same in pixel size despite display scaling and such.
Or we all go (back) to tiling window managers and get rid of all the resizing with the press of a key, or even no press.
> Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
Totally true. I have some some UX designers daily driving 4k monitors with 2k resolution to see things clearly!!
The interesting part, for anyone who actually reads the article - the change was fixed in an RC and then reverted in the final release.
Which implies there was some regression, some issue, some incorrect behavior or negative impact. One has to wonder… what could it have been? What could the issue with having a more accurate clickbox for the corner of the window possibly be?
It broke some NSWindow styles: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/814798
The sad part is we all know the real solution is to just UNDO THE DAMN FISHER PRICE ROUNDING
NO ONE CARED THAT THE WINDOW CORNER RADIUS DIDN'T MATCH AN IPAD, IT DOESN'T NEED TO
It can be some technical detail.
For example: imagine you have 2 windows, the lower right corner of one window almost touching the upper right corner of the other, so that the bounding rectangles overlap but the graphics don't.
With the inaccurate "false square" corners, you just had to check the bounding rectangles, to know which window to resize, now you have to check the actual graphics (or more likely, a mask).
I am not saying it is the problem, but that's the kind of thing that can happen. Or it may be a simple bug, like a crash, memory corruption, an unhandled exception, the usual stuff, but they couldn't fix it in time and it is better to revert instead of leaving the buggy code or pushing an untested fix.
Just revert the code back to pre-26! This is ridiculous, it can't possibly be this hard and if it is, it just points to the degradation in the quality of Apple software! This is maddening!
This is already the pre-26 bounding box, isn't it? It's the new graphics that don't line up. (Not a great excuse, but the graphics are here to stay at least for a little while.)
> the graphics are here to stay at least for a little while
And that's the reason why I won't buy a new Mac.
Tahoe and Liquid Glass are so horrible that they're going to lose customers because of those. They should realize what they did and just backtrack: it wouldn't be the first time they admit they made a mistake [1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/4/21246223/macbook-keyboard-...
Remember how long it took for them to give up on that stupid touchbar and "butterfly" keyboard. Don't hold your breath.
That’s a hardware issue. They backtrack on software issues fairly quickly. Remember the discoveryd saga and the revert to mDNSResponder?
Still waiting on admission that the magic mouse was a mistake though
In addition to vertical scrolling, the Magic Mouse can do horizontal (or diagonal) scrolling, zooming in and out, and a couple of other tricks. This makes it worthy for the people who need this for their work. There are mice that can do horizontal or vertical scrolling -- but not both at the same time.
People who do their work on large documents (pics in Photoshop, videos, CAD, music, even Excel, etc.) use these capabilities every day, and they like their Magic mice very much. If you are not one of these people (software development, for example, can be done with vertical scroll only, for the most part), it doesn't mean it's a bad product -- all it means it's a product which is not for you.
I don't use Magic Mouse but am very far from expecting Apple to admit "the magic mouse was a mistake" though.
The magic mouse have been there, almost unchanged, since 2009. That is a lot for a tech product, and retiring a product after 16 years is not admitting to a mistake. For example, the Logitech G5 mouse and its direct evolutions were among the most successful Logitech products, and it didn't last that long.
No, it is not just refusing to admit that the magic mouse was a mistake, it is considering that it is the best ever. That USB port on the underside is still one of the great mysteries though, maybe it is some quirk of evolution, because it is certainly not intelligent design.
> it can't possibly be this hard
Whenever I find myself saying this I remind myself it can in fact be this hard.
Pre-Tahoe windows didn't have these stupid round corners (which is the ACTUAL bug which should be fix).
I am using Sequoia and the windows are definitely rounded! Though the radius is pretty small (the curved region is about a quarter of the mouse cursor area), so the fact you can drag it from outside the window doesn't look ridiculous.
Most likely (and natural): they tested it publically and the response wasn't positive, so they held it back until they could do it better.
Maybe they reverted it because they are already planning to get rid of the super rounded corners!
I think it shows how difficult it is to ship a seemingly easy thing inside the Apple machine.
I'm more interested in how or why this bug was approved up be worked on so quickly after it was surfaced, rather than other longstanding and arguably more impactful bugs.
It's because the bug got publicity. Apple marketing prioritizes what does and doesn't get built. Someone saw bad publicity on the front page of HN and requested a fix.
The answer is probably a ho-hum combination of different teams work on different issues, and this one having annoyed one of the devs who could work on it.
Maybe it was just an oversight in the merge process? e.g. the diff was applied only to the RC and not to the release branch? idk
macOS does have weirdness with windows that span multiple screens. I bet some of that kicked in to an unacceptable level. It can create incoherent moving/snapping, for example. Has been kind of crazy-making for a while, for my set-up where screens are not joined but adjacent in a triangular configuration.
Yeah, that's something that was unambiguously better back in the "Classic MacOS" days (probably starting with the Mac II). Windows could overlap multiple screens and they were always drawn correctly.
At some point in OS X in the switch to hardware acceleration, they started rendering windows on one screen only.
I get that you hardly ever really want a window spanning two screens, but when you accidentally misplace a window it would be handy to be able to see it on each overlapping screen so you can track it down. Right now you can put a few pixels of the title bar on the wrong screen, and the rest of the window just vanishes.
These regressions are weird given that modern hardware is vastly more powerful than a Mac II.
I'm pretty sure screen-spanning was better before "fullscreen"...In Lion, I think?
The AI reverted the change and no one does proper code reviews anymore so it went into prod.
Nah then it won't show up in the known issues section. I hope.
Or it was just a botched git op
What astounds me the most about this whole thing is that the sort of hit testing involved here is a solved problem in UI, and has been for decades, yet there are still plenty of others here and elsewhere arguing about how it isn't. Even with those horrid rounded corners it's not hard, as shown in the article, which makes me wonder whether there is some internal fight between those who didn't want rounded corners (developers?) and hence tried their hardest to make it buggier, and those who wanted them (designers?), with lots of back-and-forth that eventually gave us this outcome. A disturbing amount of time and $$$ was probably spent on it, as is usual for any bureaucracy.
Mobile Safari has some horrific hit-testing for touches. There's plenty of places where touching near a control incorrectly snaps the tap to the control (sometimes with rather nasty usability consequences).
Ideally there should be some way to control the tapzone within CSS.
Last time I needed to fix the problem on a page I was responsible for it required adding an HTML element, which was far from ideal. I seem to recall I also had to explicitly add an onclick handler too (registering an onclick handler silently modifies touch behaviour on Safari - a nasty hidden side effect). There's some new badness with stealing taps in iOS26's Safari - ugggh.
> Ideally there should be some way to control the tapzone within CSS.
Please, no. Let’s not have every site react differently to how I tap a control. HTML/CSS/JS already delegate too many aspects to the application that should firmly belong in the realm of browser/OS.
Yesterday I thought the same thing about web app UI - solved problem, why GCP has to re-invent it and do it worse? Same thinking applies here - is it due to a fight between developers and products?
It's obviously not as easy as you make it sound, it was reverted since it broke some existing apps.
The updates shipped by apple introducing more bugs every cycle. It is across the board, macos, ios and ipad os. The fact there is a group inside apple, that is capable of standing against common sense and users best interest for so long, tells how wrong things are internally.
It is the steve balmer - satya nadella moment of apple.
1. Plugging my laptop to the same desktop screens requires rearranging displays almost every time. 2. Airdrop stops working for no apparent reason. 3. Copy paste across devices no longer a stable mechanism. 4. The stupid new preview app crashing if you scroll pdf pages too fast. And on and on. Those are all newly introduced critical bugs i have been facing since that flameboyant liquid glass virus took over.
Apple is a sillicon valley pioneer from the generation of hewlett packard (before it was called HP) bell labs and others. Watching a decay at its beginning is mind boggling and tragic.
For the first one (and all other screen-related bugs) you can use BetterDisplay to fix it: https://betterdisplay.pro/
Also MacOS completely crashes if you have ethernet cable connected and decide to also turn on the WiFi. No "hey, choose whatever you wish" or "hey, disconnect from ethernet first" errors, just complete crash to reboot, lol.
I'll chime in and say personally I do this all the time and have never experienced a system crash from this.
I abandoned MacOS back in 2018 since I found it too quirky and poweruser-unfriendly (the main thing that comes to mind is neatly indicated by todays other MacOS related frontpage article on resizing). Now we can add overt instability to the list.
Honestly, why should you choose something? I regularly use both. Also multiple WiFi chips are quite handy.
Does Apple mandate AI use the way that Microsoft does?
This is exactly the type of issue Steve Jobs would notice and then you're fired. The UI is the main event. If you can't get it right you don't work on it ever again.
Well Cook's Apple is mostly about money coming in, so as long as that's happening he's not obsessing over quality.
Here is what I don’t get tho: you have UX designers/engineers creating a new interface. What do you tell them? Just to do whatever? They probably spent months designing the new interface but why not fix this? They must have seen it is unusable…
All they have to do is make a better UX than Google and Microsoft. As it turns out, that particular bar is at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, so they treat it as such. Money spent on making sure your UX passes basic muster is money not given to a series of retirement and pension funds that make up the bulk of shareholders for companies like Apple.
What do you want more: decent UX, or the Smiths to be able to sell their house and swing on - and off - the course at some golf-based retirement village in Florida?
Since we talk resizing windows, for months I was _sometimes_ unable to resize windows at all, and couldn't figure out why. I thought it was a random bug of macOS.
Finally I realized the issue: if a window spans across two displays, it won't resize. Insane!
(I have an external monitor up, laptop down, and it's easy to move a window such that it stretches a few pixels from monitor to the laptop. No resize for you!)
Window management isn't macOS' strong suit, but external monitors make it act absolutely crazy. Connecting monitors will do anything from keeping all windows in the same position to restoring previous positions to launching them across screens, sometimes completely outside visible screen space, seemingly arbitrarily.
I get why Apple wants you to make every window either a small tile or a full screen application now, their window manager simply can't cope with anything else.
Whatever they're doing is somehow worse than both Windows and the major Linux desktop environments. Maybe there's some obscure preference among old school macOS users that like having their windows placed so that only a small corner pokes out of the bottom left when attaching an external monitor?
On the topic of multi monitor messiness, NOTHING gets my blood boiling quite like the taskbar (or whatever it's called, the bottom application drawer) moving between monitors, seemingly arbitrarily
Keep your cursor hovered over the bottom of the 2nd monitor? It moves. Want to move it back? I have tried everything I could think of to try get it back, I still to this day after 5 years of being on Mac because work forces it on me cannot see the logic or heuristic it chooses for when to move the fucking dock. I swear it's basically random, and it's a daily occurrence for me that I have to just shake my cursor violently to get the stupid thing to eventually move.
The worst part is you can't even disable this dumbass behavior! You can't tell it "Hey, dock should ONLY be on monitor 1", so you just have to live with this anti feature
As far as I can tell, the dock appears on either the left/rightmost display (when docked to the side) or on the main display.
What is the "main display"? You can find out by going to settings > displays, where you find a "use as" dropdown that can be set to "mirror", "main display", or "extended display". If you want to move the dock, change the main display. This also affects a few other, smaller things.
I personally put the dock to the side so it doesn't take up precious space (windows don't seem to want to cover the dock if it's at the bottom, even with the setting for that disabled).
I remember early OS X (10.4 / 10.5? - damn, that was 20 years ago?!) with a laptop and external monitor.
It was farcical, as the menu bar was always only on the primary monitor, so you had to use/click menus on that monitor, even if the actual window the menu was for was on the other monitor.
Around 10.7 or so they started putting menus on both monitors at the same time to at least make this scenario a bit more sane.
Oh, the Dock. Try to have a setup where you have two displays vertically, BUT you want the Toolbar and Dock both be on the top one, stably - impossible.
Workaround I found: you can configure the monitors to be a pattern like this instead:
touching only in the corner. Then it works, the Dock is on monitor 1.It seems to be a common issue, and despite googling I wasn't able to find a solution that worked (back in Aug '25). For some reason, it does not happen if you position the dock on the left/right side rather than the bottom
If your monitors are arranged horizontally, you just need to touch the bottom part of the screen you want the dock to be on (I set mine to autohide). If they are arranged vertically, it's best to have them in zigzag or put the dock to the sides, not the bottom.
It's infuriating, which is why I prefer to use spotlight (actually Alfred) or the app switcher.
I didn't think a window could span two screens - I thought it only appeared on the one that had most of the window.
You can turn this off in the settings, forgot exactly where. I actually found after 1-2mo I preferred not being able to haha
Easy to stretch a few pixels? Easier to move windows with super+arrows so they snap perfectly to the monitor borders, and then you'd never have this issue. I rarely drag windows "by hand" (by mouse) anymore!
It turns out the reason they reverted is likely regressions as noted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46999858
Damn, so this is the thing that caused all the floating windows to become unclickable and impossible to interact with... I'm the creator of the apps from https://lowtechguys.com/ and I was replying to 10-15 support emails per day, all week, because of this.
It's a bit scary to see that the software we rely on every day is such a complex behemoth that even a seemingly small change can have so large repercussions.
The problem is that AI only helps add even more complexity since it's so simple to just add more code now that we don't have to write it.
It feels like Apple has gone deeper and deeper into tech debt over at least the past decade, to the point where I see little prospect of their software reaching former quality levels again.
I switched from macOS to Linux ten years ago and haven't looked back. At the time, I compared Linux vs. macOS to living at home vs. in a hotel [1]. Since then, I feel things have only gotten better for Linux, and more restrictive and arcane on macOS.
1: https://fman.io/blog/home-and-hotel/
I’ve so far resisted using HN for tech support, but I’ll jump on the macOS hate bandwagon. My MBP M1 Max with 32 GB RAM has become near-unusable with Tahoe. Trying to switch users? Frozen. Click on something? Beachballs. There’s visible stutter and hangs in the lock screen animations. I hate it so much.
I'm running Tahoe on an M1 Air with 16GB RAM and it's been smooth for me. Might be worth trying a fresh OS install? Something seems off with your setup.
This doesn't sound like a tech support question. Sounds like stepping up to the mic at an emotional support group: "Am I the only one?"
Well no, this group is your people and you're speaking to the choir.
Instal Sequoia~~~ you probably can squeeze two OSes on same APFS container even.
How Apple allowed itself to get into this mess is a fascinating and not investigated enough question, IMO.
Same for Intel.
What is it that lets companies which are leaders in a particular field for decades suddenly unable to do the basics.
Intel very recently seems to be making progress thanks to what the previous CEO kicked off. People are comparing Panther Lake to M1 (but we'll see when it is in reviewers' hands).
Intel's demise is fairly well-understood; their CPU designs were fine, but the DUV Intel-fabbed silicon was not. Their recalcitrance towards EULV nodes meant that they were never going to remain competitive for the market segment they appealed to.
Apple's failure to improve the Mac seems pretty straightforward looking at their profit breakdowns. The Mac really is not ever their priority.
> but the DUV Intel-fabbed silicon was not.
Sure, but why? Why the company that was on the fab forefront for decades and participated in EUV research was reluctant to bet on it?
> Apple's failure to improve the Mac seems pretty straightforward looking at their profit breakdowns. The Mac really is not ever their priority.
iOS very much is and it's a disaster as well.
It's bad when stock Gnome is better. That's where I am now.
Switched to KDE Plasma last month and very pleased I can have square-corner windows again.
I had a hard time with Gnome but now I got used to it and it's amazing for me. I just can't believe they still haven't implemented scrolling speed setting...
Gnome had a scroll speed setting but it broke and disappeared somewhere around the switch to Wayland without getting replaced.
Gnome says libinput should deal with scroll speed. Libinput says GTK+ should deal with it. Patches have been lying around for both but neither has gained any traction.
I like Gnome's DE in general but this issue showcases the rough edges of open source collaboration the Gnome project is infamous for.
Even KWin's (original?) implementation of the feature wasn't great and caused issues with applications, apparently: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4672#not... Broken as though it might be, at least they're trying something, which I appreciate more as an end user than the complete lack of scroll settings.
Corners are great aren't they! :)
KDE plasma is the best DE that exists right now (once you configure it to mimic gnome 2).
> once you configure it to mimic gnome 2
Why is it better than Gnome 2 then? This is what I prefer (it's called Mate now).
I was a Mate user for ages. It's great. Unfortunately, the lack of development is starting to show. For example, no fractional scaling for 4k monitors.
I've configured KDE Plasma to look almost identical to Mate (the defaults are similar to Windows, nice, but I prefer the Mate layout):
- top panel / bottom panel
- desktop switcher bottom right
- task bar on bottom
- desktop button bottom left
- clock top right
- app indicators top right
- app icon launchers on top bar
- app menu top left
It's not just layout, either. Gnome can be configured to do much of this, but it just feels terrible. Task bars can't be dragged to re-order. Desktop switchers just have numbers instead of contents. Animations are slow and annoying. Etc. Etc.
Gnome 1 had the best design of all the Gnome versions.
I love gnome, at least how it's implemented by recent Fedoras. Whenever I go back to Mac I wonder why spotlight and mission control are two different functions
Spotlight and Mission Control (and the dock) being separate is good, and them being tied together on Gnome is horrible.
I just want to type which app to launch or do some quick math or search for something, I don't need my windows and UI to fly in 14 different directions and then back again every time I need to do those things. Ditto for just want to lazily do something on my dock with the mouse. It's seriously one of the most ill designed off-putting UX things about Gnome.
Agreed. Even Windows has some nice stuff when it comes to windows management IMHO. Every time I end up on macOS I miss the various Windows/GNOME behaviours e.g. window snapping to the right/left half, pressing the Win key to see all open apps, maximise buttons that doesn't put the whole app into full screen mode, etc.
I agree that macOS has become worse, however your examples don't really count:
Window snapping was implemented some time ago: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/06/12/macos-sequoia-window-ti...
Instead of win key, you can press F3, or just set a hotkey that works for you in the System Preferences
Instead of clicking the red maximize button, you can double-click the window header / title. This will use an algorithm to try to resize the window to the best size for its content.
Option-click green button does window maximise (normal click does full-screen)
Technically it’s zoom, and how it functions is dependent on the app. In Finder it used to resize the window to a size that contained all the icons. Clicking it again would revert the window size.
You can also hold ALT and press the green button to mazimze.
The app still gets to decide though! Most programs do go full size with an alt+green click, but not all. A column-style Finder window, for example, seems to go taller but no wider.
Maximize is green. (Any chance you might be color blind?)
Green is “Zoom window to fit content”, not Maximize.
macOS gained window snapping last year, and you can bind some keyboard shortcut to the “exposé” view (which is triggered by a trackpad gesture by default)
full screen is still its own thing as you mention, though
The key binding for Exposé is just F3 on most keyboards!
Gnome has the same issue, it's just less noticeable because the radius of the round corners is smaller. The draggable area of a window is 90% their drop shadow.
Except when it's a Qt application, which has no drop shadows because client-side decorations shenanigans.
The other incredibly annoying glitch in here, is that the resize cursor is only shown for foreground windows - but background windows are still resizable (despite the missing cursor) if you happen to drag their edges...
I’ve tried many apps for window resizing on Mac, and none feel like they’re nearly as good as FancyZones (the PowerToys module for Windows). I don’t want secret squirrel key combos. I don’t want hot corners.
I want two things:
- Predefined zones à la FancyZones - Tied edges (there’s surely a better term for this) so that I can grab the edge between two apps and have them both resize together (one gets smaller as the other gets bigger).
Please someone tell me this exists without a subscription!
I think for preexisting solutions, the "best" one is Rectangle Pro, but it isn't free, so maybe that doesn't count. That said, eventually I realized I don't even want the whole "window split" stuff and I'd prefer to just have a few keybinds that throw windows into specific coords on my screens, so I installed Hammerspoon (free) and wrote a screen's worth of Lua to do this for myself. It is written for my two adjacent 1440p monitors and personal preferences, but the code is really obvious so if you're comfortable with making your own bespoke solution, this is pretty nice, and free.
* https://www.hammerspoon.org/
* https://gist.github.com/joedrago/bfc54f4083b070fe998d519cc6c...
Swish⁽¹⁾ lets you drag the divider to resize multiple windows at once. BentoBox⁽²⁾ is inspired by Fancy Zones. And Lasso⁽³⁾ is a grid-based window manager with custom layouts. There's also MacsyZones⁽⁴⁾ that appears to resize multiple adjoining windows but I've never used it (it appears to be open-source with an option to pay to support the author).
⁽¹⁾ https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/
⁽²⁾ https://bentoboxapp.com/
⁽³⁾ https://www.thelasso.app/
⁽⁴⁾ https://macsyzones.com/
I like powertoys but it’s taking 1.17Gig of space. That should be illegal
There are like two dozen apps inside powertoys...
Winamp was like 5MB. Starcraft 1 was something like 900MB. None of the two dozen apps are doing anything that should take so much space. It's probably all bloat from various dependencies. People's expectations of software quality have gotten very low.
Common fonts are gigabyte downloads these days thanks to emoji support.
> FancyZones
I use BentoBox on my MacBook and it is just as good as FancyZones on Windows. I think I paid 9 dollars, and I have it for life.
Funnily enough, I bought BentoBox a long time ago (Nov 2024), but I forgot about it entirely. I'm wondering if maybe it didn't have Windowed mode at the time, as I do rely a lot of overlapping windows so I can switch between content more quickly when I'm just using my mouse.
Thank you for mentioning it again so I could get it set back up. I do like that the experience is almost exactly like FancyZones!
I have never vibed with macOS's seemingly default mode of floating windows layered over one another like scattered paper on a desk (mimicking a desktop I suppose). Instead ive been using https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace for the past couple of years and just flicking around via hotkeys. Not perfect but much less friction for my use cases
As a long-time Mac user, I'm comfortable with this UI style, but I do recognise that it's weirdly inefficient. It's very strange that this is the UI that won out in the 80s (to the extent that Windows became a massive hit in the 90s, anyway).
A tiling UI would have been much easier to implement! But the original Mac had overlapping windows with pixel-perfect drop shadows. It's a bit nuts when you think about it.
I actually like it, but only when you have virtual desktops. But the MacOS implementation, Spaces, is not great. It clashes with their window management model (you switch between applications, then you can switch between windows). There's no way to restrict the switcher to applications that have windows in the current space.
Floating works great when you can filter the current set of windows using virtual desktops. And when the switcher follow suits. My issue with tiling is that it works great on laptop, but on bigger screens, it sends things to the far side when splitting.
Agree + I highly recommend Rectangle or Rectangle Pro for the same reasons.
It's amazing how much effort is wasted adding various OS degradation features (like poorly readable redesign) while bread & butter basics are broken for decades (it's a bad primitive to require pixel-perfect precision for resizing) and even get worse following those design gimmicks like rounded corners
(and, of course, custom radii would've helped, but users can't have such powers, Apple knows best)
I’m a Windows guy, but was given a MacBook for my current job. Fair enough. But I laugh at how horrendous such a simple thing as resizing windows is. Want Slack to take up the right third of a screen then fill the rest with browser? In Windows, it takes 2 seconds. Not on Mac. I have to resize the window myself? There’s no auto-snap?
I’m sure someone will buzz in with some hidden way to do it. ‘Hold cmd-shft-9 then say these magic words and voila!’ No. Dragging the window with the cursor should suffice.
Edit: I’ll also add that having to buy a huge $200+ display adapter so you can connect 2 external monitors to a MacBook, whereas a slimline $30 device will do the same for Windows laptops, is total bullshit.
Yeah window management and the desktop experience in general on Mac just feels like I'm dragging my hands through tar.
For example, "open two file browsers, navigate to $home in one and $downloads in the other, move and rename a few files between them" is a 10 second task on Windows (Win+E x2, quick clicks on the explorer links, easy to scroll around, move files, drag, rename, anything you want). On Mac I get about 7 system ding sounds and Finder windows bugging off the side of my screen while simultaneously deciding the best way to show downloads in a list is alphabetically and with 256x256 tiled icons. It's just an indescribably bad and slow experience to do any kind of file management on Mac.
Another example. Take a screenshot and quickly redact some info with a black box. Easy on windows that I can type it out exactly (win+s, drag box, win key "paint" enter control v box tool save boom). On Mac?? After command shift 4 to take a screenshot I think it's actually physically impossible to edit it within 60 seconds.
you can edit the image with preview any time you want
> After command shift 4 to take a screenshot I think it's actually physically impossible to edit it within 60 seconds.
This is completely incorrect, and the solution is way more discoverable than needing to know obscure things like Win+E. Click the thumbnail that appears in the bottom right, then click the marker icon.
> For example, "open two file browsers, navigate to $home in one and $downloads in the other, move and rename a few files between them" is a 10 second task on Windows (Win+E x2, quick clicks on the explorer links, easy to scroll around, move files, drag, rename, anything you want).
Similarly, if you know the platform-specific shortcuts, this is less than 10 seconds on macOS. Click finder in dock, hit Command-N twice for new windows, drag each window to one of the L/R edges of the screen to tile, click downloads in the sidebar on one, click the home icon/username in the sidebar on the other.
The bottom right thumbnail thing really bugged me and confused me when it came out, because I always just want the screenshot on the desktop right away, as it used to be. I don't know why they couldn't have the delay/thumbnail AND put the file somewhere I could reach it immediately. But IIRC, there is some setting that disables the thumbnail behavior and lets the file be written instantly.
For me I want it to hang around longer actually. I will take the screenshot I want, open up mail or messages or something to dump it there. Right as my mouse is hovered over it and a milisecond before I can click it, it jumps away. I've resorted to sometimes giving it a partial drag which resets the counter while I am still getting situated over to wherever the screenshot is going.
This would be okay if it hung around longer. I just need it to be somewhere I can drag it. I don't see any use in its disappearing. If it's on the desktop immediately, at least I can find it quickly.
I use a trackpad exclusively with MacOS. If I want it immediately on the desktop then I can just "swipe away" (to the right) the thumbnail and it skips the pause.
Not perfect but I do value being able to edit it from there, or right click and save to clipboard. So it works for me.
You can also just drag it to the right.
This is an extra step PIA. CMD-OPT-H hides all the windows and there's the desktop. My desktop is clean AF, so I know which icon it is. I open it in photoshop or preview, or I just drag it into the email I'm about to send.
Funny, I never want the screenshot saved to a file and I literally never look at the desktop. I either use ctrl to store the screenshot in the clipboard or want to use marker tools and then copy the clipboard. This new flow was an improvement to me.
> needing to know obscure things like Win+E
I'm sorry but this is a skill issue. This is the second hotkey you learn in Windows, after Win for start menu, and before win+left/right to snap windows to sides of the screen.
Regardless, the whole flow both of you are talking about can be done on Windows without ever touching the mouse. Win+E Win+E Win+Left Enter Alt+D "destdir" Enter Alt+Tab Alt+D "sourcedir" Enter (arrow to whatever you want) ctrl-X Alt+Tab ctrl-V.
I use Linux with i3wm at home, I haven't used Windows as my main OS in nearly a decade and I can still play out those keystrokes in my mind without thinking about it.
Now, win+E -> click folder -> alt+D -> "powershell" -> enter? That's power user shenanigans.
I think that the only windows hotkey I know is Windows key to open the start menu. But I've been using Windows only 1994-2008, then Linux. I still connect to some Windows 10 / 11 machines of a customer to check processes and log files, but that doesn't matter.
And I hate windows snapping. I disable it in GNOME at every new OS install. UIs must fit people preferences and any single person is different.
Edit: of course I know Alt Tab too.
> needing to know obscure things like Win+E
I haven't used Windows since the early days of 10 when I moved wholesale to Apple, but let's be really real - Apple users mocking "obscure shortcuts" in other OSes is throwing stones in a glass house:
Cmd+` to scroll through windows of the current app?
Cmd+Option+H to hide other apps?
Cmd+Shift+Ctrl+4 to clipboard copy a screenshot?
Quick, is Mission Control a three finger swipe up? Or down? Or is that Expose?
Cmd+space,Cmd+B to search web from Spotlight
Cmd+tab, release tab, press Q - quit app without switching to it
Cmd+tab, then down - Expose.
Double-clicking the edge or corner of a window (anywhere a double-headed arrow cursor shows up) will resize it to the edge of the screen.
Hovering over the green dot in the title bar will bring up some simple window tiling options.
https://support.apple.com/guide/macbook-air/manage-windows-o... has more to say on the subject, more recent versions of the OS than I use have added more stuff in this vein, personally I just use Moom and have been for years.
Moom looks great! Is there a Mac app which enhances the functionality of desktops/workspaces?
The mac desktop works on a totally different paradigm than the Windows-like model most other desktops have adopted. It’s built around not managing windows and instead letting them be whatever size fits their content and pile up like papers on a desk, complete with having relevant bits of some windows peek out from underneath other windows.
For those it works for, it works really well. For those who came from windows always being maximized or split into a grid, it’s a nightmare.
Pretty similar to differences in real world desk styles, actually.
That used to be the case, but in 10.7 they changed the green window button from being "zoom" (snap the window to fit its content) to "fullscreen". They let you change the default behavior back to zoom for a few years but seem to have gotten rid of that setting. You can still access the zoom behavior by option-clicking the green button, but on basically every program I've tried, zoom just means "maximize" like on Windows now. The only exception I've found is Preview, where "zoom" seems to mean "make the window take up most of (but not all of) the screen and scale the image up to some random value". One image I tried got scaled to 146%, another got scaled to 207%. I would think it should mean "scale the image to 100% if it's smaller than the display resolution" but who knows, I don't work at Apple.
Edit: Finder still has the correct zoom behavior, it's the only program I've found so far that does.
The behavior of the (now option-clicked) zoom button is actually determined by each individual program. Most stock apps will either fit to content or toggle between the last two recent sizes, but a lot of third party apps (especially those built with foreign UI frameworks) tend to turn it into a maximize button.
It looks like "apps built with foreign UI frameworks" includes all the stuff Apple's written in SwiftUI, as all those apps (Mail, Calendar, Messages, Music, Podcasts, Notes, etc) treat zoom as maximize.
This has been built in since Sequoia. It’s literally dragging the window like aero snap.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-window-tilin...
This does require displays to have separate spaces though!
I've been using Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com/) for years now. IMO the shortcuts actually make it a massive improvement over Windows.
Which is one the reasons I keep being a Windows/UNIX/Linux person, and only use Apple hardware when it gets assigned to me on specific project delivery.
The stuff with Objective-C and Swift is cool, but not enough to justify fully migrating into Apple land.
The defaults in every OS are set made for power users (i.e. anyone doing more than browsing the web and using office).
With Windows you need to remove most of the cruft, Mac is no different; most people are using some combination of Raycast, Rectangle, Alfred, etc...
On Windows you have to change a few settings, on Mac you're suggesting all third-party software to manage core functionality. Apples Vs. oranges.
I mean, yes, Windows has PowerToys which is an installed add-on, but on Mac we're not talking about Mac Vs. PowerToys, Mac isn't even competing with basic Windows features. PowerToys is competing with the PAID third-party software for Mac.
I don't think this is a meaningful distinction. Most people here likely change more than just a 'few settings' and either download one of the debloat tools or generate an autounattend.xml before installing, and some replace the default search with Everything.
Unless you're working in an environment where absolutely no third party tools are allowed, it's expected for someone to spend at least a little bit of time adjusting the workspace to their preferences.
Additionally all of the tools I listed technically have paid plans but they're all free to use, I've never paid for Raycast yet even the free features blow out of the water any desktop management/productivity tooling I've used on Windows or Linux.
A few settings, huh?
https://gist.github.com/NateWeiler/f01aa5c6e8209263bc2daa328...
We are in this discussion sometimes talking about things that are "missing" from Mac that are actually outdated omissions, no longer accurate. For example, Snap Layouts is now a built-in feature in macOS, but some folks are talking like it's impossible to snap windows in macoS. It's just not as robust/customizable as third-party tools and I think most people who started using the third-party tools should stick to them.
We can go the other way around if we cherry-pick in the other direction:
PowerToys Peek is a separate install, but Finder has this built-in as the Spacebar shortcut (Quick Look)
Preview App: This has been the best free PDF app on the market for decades now and Windows still doesn't have something that compares well in 2026
Spotlight: Still clearly superior to the Windows Search/keyboard-based app launching experience
AirDrop: I know, I can't include this because it's a hardware ecosystem feature, but I'm including it anyway because KDE has a better solution than Windows, and I find that totally insane. I use it on Windows, too!
Migration Assistant: I realize that Windows PCs have a lot of OEM variation, but I think Microsoft could implement a similar experience if they tried.
Backups: I don't really give Apple many points for Time Machine because (1) I don't think many people use it, and (2) I don't think it's really the greatest on its own, but it sure beats what Windows has going on with Windows Backup.
Save as PDF: This isn't a problem anymore, but for many years/decades, Apple's built-in support for turning anything that can be printed into a PDF beat out Windows by a longshot, and I remember how I used to need to install third-party tools to accomplish it.
Full device encryption: I just think the user experience of Bitlocker is piss poor, while Apple makes this a very smooth experience with a very low chance of screwing up and losing data (so long as you tie your system to your Apple ID to add that as a recovery option). The end result is that most Windows users are running unencrypted, while I imagine most Mac users are encrypted.
POSIX utilities: Now, it's not like Apple includes the greatest set of POSIX utilities, and you have to install xCode command line utilities to get many of them, but still, I am not really sure why Microsoft doesn't just port and install many of these utilities natively rather than having you either learn PowerShell, install Git for Windows, or install WSL. I think it is very clear by this point that most people who want to spend time in a terminal in the first place want to be in POSIX-land. They've got cmd.exe, PowerShell.exe, might as well add a third terminal.
Perhaps we can even make the argument that 100% of Windows users are going to install a third party text editor as using plain notepad.exe is pretty much insane, while a reasonable amount of Mac users will be 100% happy with vim.
Going beyond basic utilities, it's also worth pointing out that Apple has traditionally provided a lot more free software than Windows. iLife and iWork come to mind. Microsoft has somewhat half-heartedly followed suit with apps like ClipChamp. I don't think Microsoft ever shipped anything that came close to the quality of free app you got with GarageBand and iMovie.
I also think Microsoft has a lot more platform abandonment that affects Windows device and OS users. If you bought an original iPod and iTunes music, Apple never pulled the rug from under you. Microsoft couldn't decide between PlaysForSure and Zune, and killed both. Same deal with things like TV show and movie purchases. Windows Media Player died, iTunes (Apple Music, not to be confused with Apple Music the service) is still here, still working with original hardware, and still getting updates.
Apple just killed iTunes Movies' wishlist and they were nice enough about it to email me the full wishlist so that I could "favorite" them (which isn't 100% analogous but they were nice enough to not leave me high and dry).
I think at this point, though, I'm veering a little far off-topic.
Lots of 3rd party tools to help, like Rectangle or Raycast. And at least the most recent macOS release has auto-snap and tiling features: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mchlef287e5d/...
There is also this option you can enable to drag windows around when holding a shortcut: https://petar.dev/notes/drag-windows-on-macos/
I'm also struggling with a macbook for work, but hold your mouse over the green circle in the top left for a few seconds and it'll pop up. (You don't get the nice snapping that windows does though)
Holding option while hovering gives you more placement / sizing options too. If you click and drag a top bar to the right or left it'll snap to the right or left half of the screen. Dragging it to the top or double clicking will snap it to full size. Dragging to corners will snap to quarter.
I don’t see options for thirds, though. Even on an UltraWide monitor.
tHaTs BeCaUsE wE dOn’T SeLL wIdE ScReeN DiSpLaYs YeT! -Apple Genius
Also takes 2 seconds... You don't need 3rd party apps like everyone's saying, only if you want tiling or to copy Windows behavior.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-apps-in-split-v...I feel like anyone reading that, and thinking that is a reasonable/intuitive design, may be quite far down the rabbit-hole.
It reads like a parody.
It’s significantly worse than I even imagined.
It's two gestures, a swipe and a click and drag.
I'm not even saying Mac is superior here, just that there's a quick way to do full screen splits
So the trick is five hidden things, not presented in the UI. Great!
Next Apple will be utilizing 12-finger and faceroll getures.
Raycast does it. You need Raycast anyway; spotlight sucks.
The answer, unfortunately, is to install a 3rd party program. Once you do that, it works well enough
You should look into the open source macos app Rectangle.
you're not wrong, but for convenience's sake you should probably know that you can hold option and click the green "expand" button to fill the workspace
Lmfao yeah so much worse than the OS you have to run massive Powershell scripts from the internet to turn off all the telemetry, OneDrive, and other various degrees of bullshit.
Install Rectangle or anything macOS Sequoia or newer and move on.
Rectangle Pro.
I'm actually agreeing with you. You shouldn't have to resort to third party apps.
Sorry to be that guy who buzzes in - I might be missing something, but don't you just mouse over the green button?
You have to wonder what’s actually going on under the hood when the curve of the hitbox is different to the curve of the window? I’m very curious to understand how Apple have got to this point.
This is relatively common. The mouse interaction code doesn't necessarily look at the visual asset, and in many UI toolkits the ability to have interaction targets located and sized differently from visual features is a feature.
Makes my recent decision to ditch osx for Linux with a tiling wm seem all the more fitting
MacOS has a few decent tiling WMs, too.
So I was thinking 26.3 will be me "my" version of Tahoe. But I'll just leave Tahoe out completly.
Absolutely. Hoping 27 winds all of this back but maybe we’re waiting until 28, or 29… or maybe this is just how it is forever now.
This is a perfect example of why I use raycast & their window management shortcuts: alm - Almost Maximise window tf - Toggle Full-screen lh - Left Half rh - Right Half
https://www.raycast.com/core-features/window-management
Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
Mac has always had horrible window management. Made worse because applications and windows are a separate concept. Used to seem clever but in the world of multiple workspaces it's a terrible decision. Now it's even worse trying to manage multiple llms and projects.
There's a generation of developers who seem to have forgotten an application can open multiple windows
> because applications and windows are a separate concept
Is this the reason why "closed" applications still show up in cmd+tab?
Yes, but it's much worse than that because it makes multiple workspaces essentially unusable. Try them on Windows or any Linux desktop. When a window is also an application it makes handling them much more seemless. Not to mention the animation on Macos (slide or fade) takes multiple seconds, then when it completes it takes 500ms to actually focus. That's if it actually focuses to the right window when switching, which is currently a bug. Been there for years.
Yeah the application is still loaded in ram.
Attach a generator to him and the AI datacenter energy needs are solved. Even better, the more trash that AI produces the more energy is generated.
> Even better, the more trash like this that AI produces the more energy is generated.
Do you have any "inside knowledge" that this was caused by LLM use or do you just attribute everything you don't like to AI?
Edited. I'm not strictly saying this was caused by AI, but more of a general point that AI is really good at producing crap work which would make the generator spin faster.
This reminds me of The Paperclip Game: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
Maybe the coffin's interior having very round corners would help?
So, there's still no option to adjust the corner radius?
Nope, hardcoded deep in the OS internals.
This is why I swear by Rectangle. Lots of options for snapping them and keeping windows nice and organized.
I don’t think the problem is resolvable to everyone’s satisfaction, which speaks to the poor decision to make the windows that shape in the first place.
I’m not sure who (outside of Apple, and perhaps even inside seeing as Alan Dye quit) is satisfied with the extreme round corners we have now. No one asked for that, and it doesn’t provide a single benefit.
It's easily resolvable - you just need to allow custom forms, then every user can pick one of the 3 most popular forms or tweak them to his unique preferences. Of course, this should also be true for window shape so you can remove the rounded corners
No, it cannot. But it does not have to be a moment of horror when you realize you might have to resize a window.
You think this is bad? Try using Apple Music with a traditional mouse. You can’t even right click on half of the interface, dragging elements near to scrollable edges doesn’t trigger any scroll, and UI elements like the star on favourited songs just don’t show up. It’s marginally better on a trackpad.
Tried that now. I have a USB mouse. Can't say I noticed any issues? Scrolling works fine, star works fine... resizing is fine.
Using Music.app on 26.0.1
> In total the thickness went down from 7 to 6 pixels, which is a 14% decrease, making it 14% more likely to miss it.
But also a 14% higher chance that you won't hit it by accident.
This is not a situation where bigger is simply better. If the thickness was 50 pixels, that would make it pretty much impossible to not resize the windows. I am one of those who believe that there are still people at Apple who care deeply about user interfaces. Given the amount of attention paid to the regions for resizing by dragging the corner, I actually assume that they also took a second look a dragging the edges, and concluded that 6 pixels was better than 7.
Easy Move+Resize and Carry On
https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize
As thrilled as I was when seeing the first round window on X11's xeyes, it is not a good use of developers' time and compute resources to deal with rounded corners.
The reduction of UX quality that goes along with the lesser space for grabbing a window's corner are unacceptable for me.
There are few recent innovations in UX, and many regressions. One thing that I appreciate is the "split window" in Chromium instead of adding yet another tab.
Resizing windows is easier when you don't have to grab the corner. Some people are talking about holding a key to resize on Linux but I don't want to be forced to use the keyboard.
My favourite solution on macOS is an app called Swish which lets you do trackpad/Magic Mouse gestures to throw windows into corners, along edges, etc.
> Some people are talking about holding a key to resize on Linux but I don't want to be forced to use the keyboard.
You don't have to use your keyboard.
For example I never use my mouse's DPI button which is a little button next to the wheel mouse. You can remap that to whatever key you need to hold to resize a window and now you have a fully mouse driven solution for resizing.
Why is keyboard a problem if your left hand is always on it? It's easier to do than a mouse only gesture and easier to remember
Using a trackpad gesture is just as quick, easier, more spatially natural, and only uses one hand.
My left hand is not always on my keyboard. I'm not always typing. I'm not modelling 100% of my computer usage after "how to get RSI the fastest"; sometimes, I allow myself to lean back in my chair and just scroll the web, documents, photos etc. from time to time.
> Using a trackpad gesture is just as quick
Definitely not, many of swish gestures require you to move the mouse cursor to the title bar, which takes time, also holding a key and performing a simpler gesture can’t be slower than performing a more complicated gesture (which it needs to be to deconflict with regular mouse use)
Also many gestures have a delay built in so you can cancel or double down for a different functionally (close windows vs close app), so it’s slower by design.
> easier
It’s harder because you have to memorize more gestures and perform more complicated ones.
> more spatially natural
That makes no sense, the spatial movements are the same, can you give an example for resizing?
> and only uses one hand.
Yes, that’s the only potential benefit, unless, of course, your other hand is always near a corner, so it doesn’t matter
> I'm not always typing
That's fine, you don't need to type to have your left hand rest near the left near corner of the keyboard (it doesn’t even have to rest on the home row since you only need the corner)
> I'm not modelling 100% of my computer usage after "how to get RSI the fastest"
Well, you're, you've just moved your RSI to your right hand
Also hands have same length, so leaning back doesn't prevent leaving one finger on a modifier
Anyway, place your hands wherever you like them, it’s just that none of your arguments support it.
> sometimes, I allow myself to lean back in my chair and just scroll
WHAT??! This cannot be allowed!! /s
It's clear from reading programmer geek thoughts on peripherals over the years that autistic types love the "Use keyboard 100% of the time!" dogma because it is black-and-white thinking. The idea of someone knowing how to do things in a multitude of ways and changing it up based on mood is displeasing.
>> sometimes, I allow myself to lean back in my chair and just scroll
> WHAT??! This cannot be allowed!! /s
We just lean back with the keyboard and scroll with the Space key. Also using cwm, I move my windows with Super+{h,j,k,l} and resize them with Super+Shift+{h,j,k,l}.
Sometimes my left hand is holding a coffee mug
i encourage everyone here to try a tiling window manager like i3/sway on Linux to experience a snappy way to manage window (sizes).
on MacOS i will never not use something like rectangle, the out-of-the-box experience on MacOS has always been dogshit in my opinion, it just screams for a third-party software to do the heavy lifting.
What drives me nuts is if I slam my cursor against the right side of the window with the intent to click and drag the scroll bar of a maximized window up and down then the 1px wide window border gets selected and the whole window moves up and down. This has been a bug for several years.
When I select there, if I pull away from the window it resizes and won't drag. If I move the pointer up-down on the right or left side, it moves the window and won't resize.
Which seems like a sensible and convenient choice to me.
Maybe it isn't working so predictably for you?
It's definitely neither sensible nor convenient. I expect it to trigger the scrollbar, not move the whole window. The only way one should be able to move the window is to drag the title bar. There's no reason clicking and dragging the 1px window border should ever move the whole window. Every Linux window manager, Windows, and IIRC Mac System <= 9 behaves this way.
Doesn't the cursor change into a pair of <-> arrows when you hover over the clickable area?
Only for the currently focused window which is inexplicably weird
A lot of the cursor weirdness on macOS comes from the window server owning the cursor and only passing events to active windows.
It's kind of nice, though, because you can click anywhere on a window to focus it. If you want to interact with a background window without focusing it, hold Cmd and click.
On every app but the System Settings app since it is so busted it takes 5 or 6 clicks before it focuses.
I miss resizing windows with alt+right click
Did macOS support that at some time in the past?
I've used Linux as my daily OS for 20 years and got so used to alt-right resize and alt-left drag that the macOS and Windows way of actually needing to move my mouse to the corner or edge of a window feel almost barbaric in comparison.
I still have found no way free equivalent on macOS.
Trying to get Liquid Glass to work is such a clown show. Incredible.
The UI wasn’t perfect before. It’s slowly been getting worse with each of their dumb updates to make it look more like iOS over the years.
What we’re forced to use now is just a joke. Ignoring all the visual design issues they can’t even make basic stuff fully functional.
The worst part is that Liquid Glass isn't even good on iOS.
This is a design flub which we are told Jobs simply wouldn't have let out the door. The Jobs who made people shave 50ms off boot times. The Jobs who demanded the no button mouse.
I get the cult of Steve is a bit oversold but the proprietor liked to check the finish on the car rolling out the end of the line and if his fingers felt a rough edge on a panel he had no compunction stopping the production line to find the problem. The current generation have a bit too much "fixed in post" going on.
"Fixed in post" meaning fixed in version XX.00.2 now. Fire QA and use community feedback seems standard now.
The Apple hiring process maybe needs even more tests to find an engineer who can just fix this sensibly. That must be it.
Even without the rounded corners it was more difficult than it needed to be. The corner resize should take up way more of the sides of the window. If my mouse is 90% of the way to the corner, what are the odds that I want to resize the window only horizontally or vertically?
Let's just go back to Macintosh OS 9 ... I LOVED OS 9!
How was that distinct from 8? I thought 9 was just 8 running in a VM on X.
it isnt perfect, but with BetterTouchTool you can toggle resizing -- e.g. three finger double tap on a trackpad, move your cursor around to resize, double tap again to exit the mode.
I use Yabai, which is pretty good -- and you don't have to completely disable SIP.
For moving windows around (floating if using Yabai), I just hold HYPER and move my cursor around (Start Moving Windows). Release HYPER and it stops.
Tahoe is the most frustrating daily driver I've endured in decades.
Half the time my Mac doesn't show the resize cursor when in regions where it works to resize windows. It's annoying. But not quite the same issue as seen here.
Oh, this is probably related to why I cannot resize "live caption" windows at all on the latest version of MacOS. They have been mucking around with resizing and not testing it well.
I wish all OSes just came with a reasonable TWM.
well this certainly goes a long way to explaining why i've been fighting with window resize on tahoe :p
it's stupidly difficult to grab windows by the flat edges, too
9 out of 10 times I dont even get the cursor change and I have to ‘guess’ if im in the right spot!
It is quite possible the proposed improvement was not implemented because it wasn’t good enough. Fingers crossed for the next version.
Why doesnt apple just hire this guy and fix this?
Because the problem is much higher than the ability to fix the bug
Try moving the spotlight search box. I swear you have to use tweezers to find the razor thing edge.
It seems that the Spotlight Search box (from CMD + Space) can be moved by clicking anywhere on it and dragging.
I think you can just click anywhere within it and click and drag it
I bet some manager came up with a perfectly reasonable explanation why it couldn’t be done in this release ))
I cannot believe we do not have a good arm Linux laptop with a comparable price and battery to a MacBook at this stage.
I am forced to use this abomination of an operating system just because.
Come on Lenovo, make it happen
It's kinda hard because the CPU that makes MacBooks so power-efficient is Apple's own design, not from an external vendor. So Lenovo can't use it, nor can anyone else; they'd have to design their own, or partner with Qualcomm maybe. And we just don't see anyone working on ARM-based laptop CPUs right now unfortunately.
It would be nice though.
Or maybe not Lenovo, I'd like my high-spec Linux laptop to come without a rootkit.
What the hell is going on at Apple?
Where are the engineers allocated to?
Who's driving the bus? Cause it sure ain't Siri either.
Hardware first, software second
It is more like,
Hardware first, software for iDevices second, macOS when time is available.
I wish whoever sacked up and gave the macbook pro its ports again would work for the iphone dept. Me want 3.5mm.
Rectangle Pro for the win
Rectangle is a must-have, it’s the very first thing I install after getting brew configured on a new Mac.
I used it for like 5 minutes the other day after install and immediately noticed something was off; thanks!
Were the wrong graphics used in the two examples shown? I overlayed them in Paint (yeah that's right Windows), and aside from the numbers in the top left they appear identical.
* Nevermind... Firefox wasn't showing the animation on the first one so all I was seeing was the first frame.
Microsoft Windows has a similar issue. I wonder why nobody is talking about that on HN.
Not just similar, it's exactly the same issue caused by exactly the same kind of change, and is probably hard to fix for almost exactly the same behind-the-scenes complexity on Windows.
The Windows UI has been a trashfire since Windows 8. I think the expectation that it sucks has been baked in at this point, though Windows 11 represents an increase in the slope of increasing suck.
Only Windows 11 had rounded windows though.
I used it for 2 minutes the other day after the install and immediately noticed this wth
I don't know what all this fuss is around. I'm not a fanboy and I just use my macbook as a tool.. and the resizing works fine. Is it maybe a mouse thing? I use the touchpad
Same, its just been working fine regardless of touchpad or mouse. I genuinely dont get the fuss some have been having with tahoe
Can't you just submit a PR?
For XFCE users, the old themes still work:
xfwm4-themes-4.10.0.tar
https://archive.xfce.org/src/art/xfwm4-themes/
macos went from quirky-functional to performative-dysfunctional in line with society
Hyprland
What the....
This is such poor execution on Apple's part.
Just fucking revert the UI at this point. It's a disaster on macOS.
KDE window management is current peak.
I'm really baffeled the same mistakes and errors are being made over and over again in both Windows and macOS.
Just use KDE approach and it's done.
It's really disappointing that new OS versions are being marketed by a new look, which is not new at all, just rehashed look that was in use years ago but thrown away.
This is the Apple quality that the premium price is so good to pay for, really how hard must one be into Apple cult.
I want a macbook for the insane efficiency of the M5 CPU but I hate the mac GUI.
> And in fact, the release notes have also been updated: the problem went from a “Resolved Issue” to a “Known Issue”.
So they finally admit that they are unable to solve a ridiculously trivial problem of their own making. This is a farce. Apple has managed to lose the last remnants of respect and good will on my part. And I cannot trust a platform that is so blatantly mismanaged.
How is it not pathetic that Apple can't fix this and bring it back to normal behavior? Who is fighting for this stupid behavior? It's driving me crazy as well.
Can you imagine the heavenly feeling of sociopathic project manager when they can ship feature that will mildly annoy millions of people?
One way to fix this would be to decrease the corner radius again with the additional benefit of looking better and more efficient use of space /s
finally
Many moons ago, I invented* a rule that "you can always make people feel what you want about a #. either use percentages where they don't make sense, or whole numbers when a percentage does"
I hear it when I read 7 px -> 6 px means 14%(!!!!) less likely to find the horizontal/vertical only drag area.
Fitts's Law is logarithmic, not linear, and at these sizes the dominant factor is whether the target is discoverable at all, not its sub-millimeter width. "14%" smuggles in precision that doesn't exist in the underlying motor reality; it takes an imperceptible physical change and launders it through a ratio with a small denominator to produce a number that feels alarming. You could just as honestly say "we moved the edge by 0.097 mm**" and nobody would blink.
* I think? It feels like there'd be prior art on this
**
14% over estimates it because the user isn't clicking with uniform randomness, their clicks are normally distributed about the center of the line.
Haven't resized a window with a mouse since using aerospace
With Tahoe, I've been occasionally having this glitch that when I click on a icon, it doesn't bring back the window that's open... even after multiple clicks.