KDE beats macOS(old.reddit.com) |
KDE beats macOS(old.reddit.com) |
If you are tired of macOS, I wholeheartedly recommend giving Kubuntu 22.04 LTS a try. (You can always buy a second GPU and run macOS inside a QEMU virtual machine, 99% stable at native UI speeds with GPU passthrough.)
> Missing native Alt+Tab and individual window switching (only does app switching)
This is simply false, and the whole list is by someone who just hasn't made an effort to learn how to use a new OS they are not familiar with. For example, I just use Command-tilda, two keys right next to each other, to switch between windows of the same app, and Command-Tab to switch between different apps altogether. Is this not what the author wants?
Today, however, I couldn't imagine going back. Having separate toggles for switching apps vs. switching app windows is so much faster and useful - once you get used to it. But it does take retraining muscle memory.
(Note: that keyboard combination should also make sense on ISO keyboards and be available without third-party apps)
> It's a different way of thinking about desktop hierarchy. Physical screens, virtual desktops / fullscreen apps, applications, and windows are separately navigable items on macOS. On KDE it's essentially just windows, regardless of where they belong logically or physically.
However, if I had to choose one, I will likely stick with Mac though. The performance of the new Apple Silicon chips is amazing and it's going to get even better.
> Impossible to create a dotfile from Finder (only terminal)
Yeah most people don't need this ever. If you're making dotfiles you know what the terminal is.
> Lack of native clipboard
Not sure what this is supposed to mean. It obviously has a clipboard.
> Finder's weird shortcuts for rename vs open file (no way to open a file with keyboard?)
Cmd-Down I think, but I agree the shortcuts are super weird.
> Taking screenshots requires to click the preview in order to copy to clipboard, which also causes to save it to Desktop. There is a global shortcut to save directly to keyboard, but it requires 3 button presses. With KDE you can setup the preferred behavior and always copy to clipboard while at the same time saving to a specific path (and not always Desktop!)
Mac's screenshot support is really good. Yes it requires 3 modifier keys but I still miss it on Windows.
> Surprising lack of apps in the store (Firefox, Bitwarden, Zoom, Teams, VLC are all quite popular, yet only Bitwarden is there). The others require download from the website (basically a Windows-like experience)
True but try installing an app that isn't in "the store" (which one again?) on Linux. There are pros and cons.
> Finder: no side by side view for easily moving stuff between unrelated folders/paths
You can open multiple windows.
Typically Discover or Gnome Software. They integrate with several package managers (Apt, pacman, etc.). Discover does even more; being a single stop not only for apps, but also DE extensions.
There is no paid app store, if that is what you meant, except on ElementaryOS.
Some apps are still download-and-run or download-and-install. MacOS is strictly superior in the former case, as you can install apps by dragging them to the Applications folder (in Gnome and KDE you need to 'find' .local/share/applications). Downloading and running does generally work, unless you're on something without a standard FHS (e.g. NixOS).
Overall, MacOS is strictly worse (as a development machine) than Linux in this regard: it has no native package manager.
Containers are also still a fucking nightmare, even with the heroic efforts of the people behind Colima/Lima.
Perhaps that's why the OP needs to hide them.
You can find something to complain about with any DE.
Imagine quitting your job over an operating system.
...unless the current folder contains no folders, in which case I have to navigate up one directory (via keyboard shortcut -- this cannot be done natively in Finder) and then right click on the target folder (especially annoying if the parent folder contains many directories).
I can only assume that I'm misinformed because the current paradigm makes no goddamn sense.
I use mac because I like (Next/Open/Gnu)Step so maybe that is why things are more intuitive for me.
For me it is either gnome or i3/sway + rofi.
I love that kde exist and is a great alternative for the people who don't like gnome but it is not for me. I hate windows and am confused by MacOS which feels totally unintuitive to me.
Continues to be one of my favorite quotes. Yes I can spend endless hours getting arch installed with only the packages I want/need making sure it's totally optimized and then what, every single other part of my workflow now has to work around the limitations of linux. One day perhaps, but for now, macOS will do.
Then you haven't tried KDE's, which is so good that people started packaging it for other desktop environments as well.
Sure, for Fedora you have to add the Flathub repo (1 click on a website) and if you have a nvidia gpu, then you have to enable the RPMFusion repo (also 1 click on a website).
I'd argue installing Homebrew requires more effort.
As already mentioned in the comments, I will take any OS other than Windows 10/11, but my preferences are macOS and Intel's Clear Linux. If Clear would work on non-Intel hardware in a full featured way (that is, with support for AMD's virtualization) or on M1 at all, I would likely use both every day. As it is, I just use macOS. It more or less works.
Additionally, I love that people will hate on macOS for lacking features and therefore requiring helper programs but will at the same praise GNOME Shell which requires even more.
I could spend hours downloading third party apps to add basic functionality like windows snapping or tiling, HDMI volume control, Cm + Opt + T to launch terminal, package managers like brew or I could just use Linux and get all those things out of the box.
See how that argument works?
Installing Linux takes literally the same amount of time than any other OS and if you are a developer, it just works. It was on every machines at a previous company and well, it worked fine.
To be honest, even Windows mostly works fine nowadays. I’m still puzzled by why the animation of their expose equivalent takes so long but apart from that I don’t remember feeling that an OS was in my way for ages.
I don't believe you've ever actually used (or maybe setup) linux because I don't know of a single workflow that your average linux distro ships ready to develop on. You still need to download packages, dependencies, editors/IDE's to do anything.
Linux is still leagues better than windows. But it has nowhere near the reliability and software support as macOS. Anyone saying it does is outright delusional.
With user-friendliers distros like Ubuntu, you usually are "plug and play", ready to go.
I'd love to Linux 100% for work, but unfortunately as a mobile dev I need Xcode.
I'm a little salty as just after I had a working setup on macos, the ventura upgrade crashed and I had to wipe my system partition to be able to install ventura - and then had to set up most things all over again (minus a few config files I had in a git repo).
Say what you will about Debian/RedHat/SuSe - but at least they come with thousands of binary packages that are tested together and generally work out of the box, and come with a stability guarantee and security patches.
macOS has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, and you can add even more from both apps and Applescripts
I'll hype Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite once again for solving that.
Don't like the new update? Messed up /etc in any way? Tried a questionable third-party RPM and what a surprise, it doesn't do what you wanted? Roll back in a single command, even from the boot screen.
If 'ostree admin' was usable from the GUI [0], showing a screenshot of it would blow the mind of people using other operating systems.
The downside is that upgrading RPMs now requires a reboot, but your apps are going to be Flatpaks (or AppImages, or Podman services) so they don't have that limitation.
[0] Which will hopefully arrive soon to KDE: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/-/merge_requests/166
You need to download a development environment on any platform if you want to develop. MacOS used to come with widely outdated versions of Python and had you download Xcode before being able to do anything interesting. Plus you have to use homebrew which is a pile of garbage. Relatively speaking it’s easier on Linux.
Seriously without being delusional, I enjoy macOS for the rest but the development experience on it is approximately the same than on Linux.
If you need to spend "effort to learn" anyway, you might as well just go with something like KDE, where on top of having learnt the environment, you can now also customize it.
just out of curiosity opened: https://www.apple.com/macos/ventura/ . Not a word on intuitiveness and effortlessness.
* Taking screenshots requires to click the preview in order to copy to clipboard, which also causes to save it to Desktop.
No, it doesn't.
* Surprising lack of apps in the store
Says someone defending KDE? But hey, strangely enough I'm typing this in Firefox. I've got Teams running, and Zoom. There really is more than one way to install an app.
* The stupid amount of app icons in the "tray" bar. Not collapsible, not hideable.
What does that mean? There's no tray bar. Is it the menu? Is it the Dock? In both cases, it's untrue, or the writer means something else.
* No easy way to open a path in Finder
Cmd-shift-G or Go > Go to folder isn't easy enough? What's KDE's super brilliant solution?
* Finder: no side by side view for easily moving stuff between unrelated folders/paths
Can't open two windows?
And even if all were true, it misses so many other points, it's embarrassing. What OP means is: I've got a fixed workflow, and now I have to learn a few new shortcuts.
My additions:
* Poor to non-existing window tiling (at least Rectangle has very good defaults and works well)
There are apps for that, like writer mentioned - so what's the problem? I'd argue that using Expose, Mission Control, Multiple desktops and controlling them with touchpad swipes is faster, more convenient, more intuitive and flexible than tilling window management, but it's personal biased opinion, just like the writer's.
* Missing native Alt+Tab and individual window switching (only does app switching)
I either don't understand the problem or what's wrong with `cmd-tab` for app switching and `cmd-~` for app window switching.
* Finder keyboard shortcuts not shown in context menu (makes them far less discoverable)
Most, if not all, apps have their keyboard shortcuts shown in the menu bar next to menu bar items.
* Lack of native clipboard
To be fair - I am intrigued what does writer mean with `native clipboard`? Some sort of built-in app for clipboard management?
* Finder's weird shortcuts for rename vs open file (no way to open a file with keyboard?)
`cmd-o` to open, `enter/return` to rename, `space` to quick look. Just because OP is not used to different shortcuts - does not mean it's weird. Also many shortcuts are very consistent throughout whole system and throughout different apps.
After writing all this - I feel like I fell for the troll [0], but will leave my opinions as it may help for other Macos beginners. IMHO it's just a thing of muscle memory and learned workflows.
[0] I think it's trolling, because clearly he/she haven't read anything about Macos, because there are plenty of sources (even official ones) for first time Macos users. Something like hiding menu bar and/or dock are the most easiest things that you can do while skimming through `System preferences` on your own. Original writer seemingly opened Macbook for a first time, it didn't work same as KDE so he/she decided to rant about it on reddit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The fact that they have two different shortcuts and you need to think about which one to use. It's a reasonable complaint in my mind, if you're used to only thinking about windows, now you have to spend extra brain power on thinking if you want to change app or window within the same app.
The reverse also applies, if you're always thinking in terms of windows grouped by app, then being forced to iterate all windows is annoying.
It really comes down to your mental model and what you are used too. If you try something else, it will most likely require deliberate effort to get used to it.
It's why I can only work in Linux. I'm too old to change my ways at this point, it's not worth the effort. When they finally kill X in 10-15 years, I'll hopefully be retired.
> To be fair - I am intrigued what does writer mean with `native clipboard`? Some sort of built-in app for clipboard management?
You don't know native clipboard? It's like a universal second, "quick" clipboard in Linux. You select something somewhere - copied. You middle click somewhere - pasted. It's so much faster and super convenient, it supports terminal and is independent of the "main" clipboard so that you can (ab)use it to gain two clipboards at the same time if you so wish.
I always use Command+Down.
Not sure about KDE, but every OS (admittedly not many), other than Apple's macOS and previous iteraitions I've used, have had an address bar with the file path. Both of the options you mentioned weren't obvious to me and I only found out about them from your comment.
This isn't only an issue of familiarity but also an issue of features being discoverable.
KDE does have a different target audience from macOS and Windows, but even as a dev/architect/sysadmin, I'm not sure if I would have found it. I've got a GNOME setup at work, but no idea if it has a similar feature.
They're clearly talking about the area on the right of the menu bar. You know, the one you can't (temporarily) hide entries for without a third-party app, which is functionality that exists in both Windows and KDE.
By being on kde subreddit. Obviously the post is preaching to the choir there.
How do you take a screenshot that saves the screenshot to a specific spot that isn't the Desktop and ALSO stores the screenshot in the clipboard?
cmd+shift+3/4 doesn't store the screenshot in the clipboard. It just stores in on the Desktop. You can click the preview and it will move it into the clipboard as well as save it.
The other method, that puts the screenshot directly into the clipboard with ctrl+cmd+shit+3/4 but it doesn't save the screenshot.
What's the single keyboard shortcut command to take a screenshot and have it saved to your machine as well as have it stored in your clipboard?
I'll enjoy watching people down vote learning and knowledge sharing.
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location <path>
It gets upvotes from the hurr durr Apple bad crowd.
If you haven't, then it makes absolutely no sense. I first touched an apple device in my 20's, there was nothing intuitive about it. I couldn't do anything and was extremely frustrated. I'm sure the same applies to apple folks trying gnome/KDE/windows.
People are getting introduced to touch devices from a young age now days. I bet they will find things intuitive based on the devices their parents gave them. It's kind of like religion at this point, did you grow up using Android or iOS? Switching would be a deliberate effort, like not following your families religion (with hopefully significantly less judgement).
"If you've been using KDE for years and are new to OSX." should be appended to the headline.
I'm not going to defend OSX here. It is as obtuse as any other GUI system.
My dad was always a KDE fan, I suspect because he had CDE/CDE like GUIs for a long time, and muscle memory is hard to overcome. I never really liked it, however for the longest time it did have more features and polish than gnome.
I really don't like modern gnome (>3) its a pain in the arse to make it do what I want. However if you use it as the gods of UX intend, then its reasonably friction free.
I've recently come back to windows 10. Its fine, has virtual monitors, keyboard shortcuts and powershell. I imagine that with me bothering to learn WSL it would be really rather quite good.
However I have nothing really against OSX, apart from it insists on stacking windows ontop of each other, which is deeply annoying.
I have a terminal open 99% of the time and I almost never open finder or Gnome Files.
pacman or brew? really I don't care. Both install what I want with one command.
VS Code is basically the same on every system.
Gnome/KDE/MacOS all of them have there pros and cons.
Right now what wins for me is the apple silicon. I can develop stuff without a fan running for 8 hours.
Once Framework laptops come with a ARM Laptop were I can run gnome I can consider to switch again.
Here's an example of what I consider a valid complaint: the placement of a Mac's app menubar at the top of the screen, instead of the top of an application window, is wrong. Two pieces of evidence: (1) it leads to confusion with multiple monitors and (2) new Mac users invariably have trouble remembering to look for app-specific choices at the top of the screen. Mac-users rebut this by claiming that Apple's design adheres better to Fitt's law, but time has proven the disadvantages outweigh that. If one chooses a window metaphor for an app, the app's controls should appear in close proximity to that window.
In contrast, the list items here are mostly just wrong ("Lack of native clipboard") or superficial ("Can't create new file from Finder context menu").
*though imo Mac OS was lovable as recently as a decade ago.
I'm not saying you're right, but you're less wrong than you would have been when low-resolution monitors were the norm. That is, when Fitt's Law was developed.
Another factor: there wasn't much reason for the original Mac team to think about multi-tasking. If the original Mac had supported multiple app windows open at the same time, they might have designed menubar behavior differently.
The rest of the points go about design choices and decisions made by Apple, which is fair enough: some opinions you will agree with. Some others you won't. And that's ok.
I would be interested in hearing precisely which things you are referring to (just out of curiosity on my part).
Everyone else is absolutely horrified by the idea of maintaining a UI option used by less than 20% of the user base. For things that are used by more than 20% of users, they actively make it worse so that people stop using it and they can justify removing them.
i decided to install KDE just to see what was going on and holy damn, it's SO GOOD. the only thing i installed (and configured) was a tiling window manager (bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/) and that was it.
everything is working perfectly, it looks great and it's suuuper smooth.
How does BSD avoid this? I guess package manager installed software does get lumped in, but is that really 3rd party software in a meaningful sense? I very much like how it's all in one place.
User-installed software usually gets installed into /usr/local or /opt, which is separate from the system-managed trees.
After using both for a long time, I have to say KDE is less painful and faster in operation.
MacOS has a lot of inconsistent or weird keyboard shortcuts. There's no proper window management, HDMI volume cannot be controlled, can't launch apps like VSCode or Terminal using keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+ Alt + C and Ctrl + Alt + T. The shell takes like 2 seconds to load when opening terminal.
Yes, MacOS is more beautiful OOTB but KDE hands down wins in the workflow and UX department.
If you want to scan something, you have to go via system settings instead of running an app. Wuh?
They keep breaking drivers for important things, especially USB things, especially if it so happens that they decide to sell them themselves (like external keyboards). About a year ago I had an issue where previously functional USB UART drivers stopped working, result being I had to buy a Linux laptop for firmware work. Then, just last week, my Cherry mechanical keyboard stopped working, the windows key had previously functioned seamlessly as 'command' but ceased to do so. No amount of fiddling seemed to fix it. At this point I'll never buy another Apple device.
Fixing anything hardwareish requires remembering undocumented key combinations at boot time.
No rollback support on config changes.
One could go on...
Drag and dropping a named folder on the desktop where a folder with the same name already lived resulted in the desktop folder content being replaced with the dropped folder content and the loss of all its content. I was expecting a merge or a copy/overwrite dialog, not the overwrite of the desktop folder content.
Fast-forward to a month or so ago, I finally decide to get a mac to try it out, and the really strange thing about it was, Fedora felt more like MacOS than MacOS (or at least, it felt more like my vision of what MacOS would be). I do really like my Mac and I'm still using it for now at least, not saying either one is categorically better than the other, but that has stuck with me.
I should probably try out KDE now as well, it looks a bit more windows-like but could be interesting
When I use Windows, I notice immediately that the thematic direction of Windows 8 and onward is just a sad and shallow veneer over a mountain of legacy icons and other cruft they don't believe matters, along with spyware and adware built into the stock os image, and the likelihood of needing to completely reinstall at some point. By comparison, this list of issues seems rather petty, and I guess that means macOS is doing pretty well. Nobody likes being forced to use something they're not familiar with or desire though, so I do sympathize.
Haven't installed Ventura yet though...
How can you configure macOS to have a keyboard shortcut that also makes sense on ISO keyboards to switch between all windows of all apps in a single UI?
The only answer I can think of is "running on non-Apple hardware"
I use KDE - it works well, it's full-featured and lighter in resource usage than GNOME. I have a older macbook, but I don't like the lack of default UI features I just got used to in KDE. (Window tiling, robust clipboard, the more than acceptable file manager, the underlying OS's package manager, simple way to put graphs and monitors in my panel(s)). It's not all perfect, but 'perfect' is not a problem to solve. I can't justify using macos with these things that just work well enough.
Also, if I had to use a Mac again as a daily driver, the first program I would install is a VM and install like Debian or FreeBSD on it and then setup KDE.
What really sold me on MacOS though was multi-finger touchpad gestures, like three-finger drag and four finger desktop switch. It's difficult or even impossible to get that on Linux (at least it was a couple years back when I last tried).
Then there are other small things like the consistent availability of emacs-like keybindings. I'm using Ctrl-t to exchange ('transpose') two adjacent characters all the time to fix typos in-place. Under Linux this is very much hit-and-miss and depends on the app toolkit.
Bottomline: one you're used to MacOS it's not worse than KDE (which is still great BTW).
It is also missing the whole development experience with XCode, Swift, Objective-C, Metal, Instruments,.... versus KDE Frameworks and KDevelop.
Okay, thanks for letting us know up front that you went into this unwillingly and you aren't interested in doing a balanced review. I was able to close the tab very quickly!
Simply try to edit/move the bottom bar in edit mode, or change the global theme, and watch it fall apart.
At least from my experience with ~15 years of mac, ~15 years of on-and-off linux and windows, macOS has remained more consistent, because the primitives are much more universal.
Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work. Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries. Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides. Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets. Or looking up words in the built-in dictionary.
The amount of effort the mac team invested to re-use ux interaction modes is really crazy coming from other platforms, and it extends to abstractions such as disk images. One of the things that impressed me the most was how you could clone mac volumes to usb or firewire disks, boot from them, clone volumes to compressed images and restore them - all seamlessly, without messing with disk sizes, sectors, boot records or bioses - and it would just magically work.
Granted, the story is no longer that easy with APFS and M1/M2 macs, but I still think this is a bar that no other operating system has reached.
Is intuitiveness the right word? I make the same arguments about Vim, that it's one of the most logically consistent editors once you learn the basic set of primitives (not perfect of course). But I don't think anyone would call it intuitive.
> Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work.
Why do you need to alt drag? Why can't you just drag? You can drag a lot of stuff in windows and it "just works".
> Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries.
Why does it not show all the options all the time? How are you supposed to know to press alt?
> Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides.
This is pretty universal.
> Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets.
I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens.
The disk image stuff is cool I guess, but I'm guessing it's possible because Apple controls the hardware and software. I'd be pretty pissed off if some tool automagically changed my boot records.
I'm having a hard time understanding this, even with your examples. It might be possible that I simply haven't figured out the primitives, or an underlying logic to the OS?
In my experience, MacOS is the worst offender (excluding Windows) of inconsistencies. MacOS is filled with UI elements that, as far as I can tell, only appear once. (For example, the green 'status light' when activating SSH, compared to the slider buttons used everywhere else in the OS.)
My experience is roughly ~5 years MacOS (mostly as a child), ~10 years Windows, ~10 years Linux.
In all, it feels like Apple demands a "larger" language one needs to learn, compared to various Linux distros.
What should not be forgotten, however, is how much of the basic UX primitives are being thrown away with the new Catalyst iOS style apps.
However, most people would balk at this workflow. Workflows are just very personal and a reflection of how one thinks. How one thinks is also influenced from what they've used in the past, especially in formative years. Trying to justify why any user interface as unequivocally better than another is an exercise in futility.
Here's an example. Closing all document windows doesn't close the app. This is a design decision from 1984 (at which point we knew far less about the usability of Desktop UIs than we do now) which imho hasn't quite aged well. What's the point of keeping an app open without documents? Most people open docs from the File Manager or Desktop (which might load the app as well if there isn't one already running). And not by going to an inactive app (with a hanging toolbar) and then doing File -> Open.
Now 2.5 years later I switched back due to not being able to make friends with the apple UI despite trying for that long. It feels so constrained and inconsistent to me.
The pixel phone I got now is a dream in comparison. The keyboard just works, sharing between apps just works. Keepass didn't really integrate with ios, in android I can select it as my own "autofill provider". I can have firefox with ublock. The
Switching either way was not really a pain for me as I never go all in on something so I just had to find app replacement.
As a note to the article itself, I also run KDE on arch linux on both my work and private computers and since it matured from the 4.0 transition mess it has just been great I think. Having used linux as my desktop os since ~94-95 I am just a huge question mark when someone puts me down in front of mac os!
I have almost the exact opposite experience as you describe: I switched from Android to iPhone a couple of years ago for two reasons: 1) my Google phones (I had a pixel at the time: previously had written it was a Nexus, but it was not) kept bricking; 2) I got an old model iPhone (it was an iPhone 8) to use as my work phone.
The iPhone 8 performed better and had a much better UX than my then-current Nexus. It just wasn't even a fair comparison, really. I upgraded my personal device to the latest iPhone and haven't looked back. I haven't even touched an Android phone since then, and unless something really compelling happens to force it I probably never will again.
Same thing with my laptop, actually: around the same time I decided to give a macbook a go. I haven't regretted it at all.
I've been using an iPhone for almost exactly 2 years now and I didn't realized until like a month ago that you can change the default password manager. Unless Keepass just didn't tap into the API (which would surprise me), but Enpass works like a charm and I felt like an idiot for manually going into the app and copy-pasting this whole time.
Settings > Passwords > Password Options
And then set "allow filling from" to your password manager
Password managers work without any issues, I'm using Bitwarden happily.
Sharing between the apps is also a thing? I'm not sure what exactly do you mean but I have zero issues navigating, copying stuff between the apps, the only issue is with Google Photos when you remove them from local storage, as sharing in iOS won't detect those unless you manually download them again or share from within Google Photos. Learned to live with that.
I agree with lack of uBlock for Firefox, though new Safari has 'mods' and Hyperweb helps.
Keyboard is something I genuinely don't understand. How a company the size of Apple can make such a shit keyboard app is beyond me. It's nearly impossible to use if you speak two languages, their dictionaries are terrible and general feel is generally lackluster. I switched to GBoard which I like, even though Google doesn't care enough to fix few bugs and clear performance issues in it.
It's funny you call iOS UI inconsistent while most iOS apps are way better designed, actually adhere to styling guidelines and are much more intuitive to use once you get used to iOS gestures and behaviours. Unlike Android where it's literally wild west and Material Design changes so quickly that no sane developer is able to keep up with new 'redesigns'.
I switched from Android over a year ago as an ex-fanboy(I also worked as an Android Developer for a while) and I would never come back. Amount of shit that constantly goes wrong in Android ecosystem is baffling, while Google got ahold of permission system, insane battery degradation is still my main issue. Even though I loved my S9, barely a year in it wouldn't even hold a day on a single charge. Even after battery replacement, it just barely did. Android is so poorly optimized that background services can do practically anything they want. People learned how to work around Doze years ago, hell, I made commercial products that did exactly that. Apple's politic regarding background use is way more pro-user. The same thing happens to every Android phone I ever had, it works great for a year, then battery and overall performance goes to hell slowly over the next year, until it's just annoying to use. I actually considered buying a Pixel device but Google is clearly too small of a company to offer their products in more than few countries and the amount of issues on release made me go with Apple. I'll pay premium if the thing just works and does what I want it to.
In the Lion era I was issued a Mac as a work laptop on a contract. Plugged into an external monitor, and that worked fine. Maximised one screen and... the other one displayed only the brushed metal background. Because, obviously, intuitively, you would only be able to have one maximised app at a time, right? Right?
For a Linux (by choice) and Windows (under duress) user who'd totally bought the "Macs have better usability" myth before that it was astounding.
My father had a lot of trouble getting used to his Android phone (he came to smart phones late) despite a highly technical background, just because a lot of stuff wasn't obviously something you could tap on. He did get used to it, but it was a slog for him to figure out. The death of skeuomorphism was a tragedy and I hope it comes back.
Personally I also miss proper manuals. There's so much software I use where googling around for someone who was trying to solve the same task is a more productive solution than reading the meagre documentation.
For example, the post actually makes a mistake when mentioning macOS doesn’t have Alt+TAB window switching. It does. You just have to do Alt+’. That being said, even though the OP is wrong, there’s a massive kernel of truth in that the majority of ordinary Mac users are unaware of this.
Another one is that many regular users cannot distinguish between closing all windows and closing the app. See a regular users desktop and you will often see open but unused apps sitting in their dock because they closed all the windows and didn’t realize they had to do something different to close the app as well.
Alt-Grave is not Alt-Tab. Alt-Grave only cycles between windows for a particular app. Standard Alt-Tab behavior should cycle through all possible windows. Apple copied the behavior incorrectly.
This is true for every OS. Go observe non-tech office workers using Windows some time. I'm not certain things like hierarchical FS layouts (you know, the way every halfway-common filesystem and file browser works, and has approximately since desktop computers started existing) are really understood by a majority of people who've been using computers for a decade or more, let alone deeper concepts.
Windows surely also have lots of hidden function. By I never see it hide something that is so critical to a hidden menu or something similar.
I remember when I first came to macOS from Windows (around 2003), these were the things that made me wonder why they were ever done any other way:
- Volumes simply had names! No "C:/" drive or "D:/" drive. Just "Macintosh HD" or whatever name the mounted volume was given. I felt the names were more intuitive than arbitrary "drive letters"
- Installing an app: drag it into /Applications. Uninstalling, delete it from /Applications. Felt way more intuitive than Windows
- File organisation felt more sensible. There was /Library for all my system files, and then ~/Library for all my user level system files. Each one had the same directories, it was really easy to understand
- Not having to install drivers
- Every app appeared to have the same shortcuts and the same common menu items. Preferences was always Cmd+, or App Name -> Preferences... in the menu.
- Drag and drop appeared to work everywhere. The OS clearly indicated via the icon being dragged, previewed things, in a way that Windows never did
- My Mac laptops went to sleep when closing the lid. And woke up instantly when opening the lid. I don't know if you remember Windows laptops in the 2000s and even the 2010s, but they did not sleep consistently, wake up consistently, they would crash, etc.
These were a few of the things I found more intuitive on Mac. There were other things I liked better (but weren't necessarily more intuitive)
One example that comes to mind is more powerful/prominent search features. In the 90s, as a home user, you had a folder with some documents and in total, the number of installed games plus apps was probably around a dozen. So it was ok that on Windows, searching for files was hidden in a sub-menu and rather slow. Today, you have a bazillion tools and apps, games, documents from 30 years of migrating to a new system, backups, so you make search faster to access.
People value consistency and gradual development, not failed, half-baked overhauls like the Windows 8 debacle. And obviously that stuff actually works. Which is continuing to be a big downside of KDE or Linux in general. Too many components working together, maintained by different teams and ever-changing. It's basically up to the Distros to find the perfect combination of library and software versions to get a good experience.
I remember receiving a company iPhone years ago. I went to an app store product page, and couldn't find any install button. Totally confused I looked for some menu options or whatever. Turned out you had to click the "free" text behind the app title. Not a button at all, not clear at all. That is just bad UX.
Just got an iPad through work, and i tried to install an app - there was just a loading circle animation, without any context or information. Guess what, it didn't work (but of course it wouldn't say it isn't working, it just kept spinning for tens of minutes), i had to set up a payment method first (for a free app, Obsidian, that supports payments for extra features). What the hell? Why no error message? Why no actual status instead of a useless animation?
Similarly, on macOS, the scroll direction cannot be changed between mouse and trackpad. There is a parameter in both menus, but they switch each other.
Yes, that is terrible UX.
No, it is not. The word "intuitive" is defined by Merriam-Webster as "readily learned or understood" and "knowable by intuition". If the UI is not one of these things, then it is not "intuitive" in the general sense of the word.
So many of us are used to the UI of one or more ecosystems that you're going to report on the subjective intuitiveness of any UI based on what we're already used to.
For all intents and purposes intuition is subjective and so is "intuitive".
There's value in building things that are "intuitive" to people who are used to existing UIs/systems _even if those existing UIs are bad_. There is also value (harder earned, for sure) in ignoring those existing patterns and bringing something truly better to the table...but you'll have people CORRECTLY pointing out that it's counter intuitive along the way.
Take doors handles or light switches. Must be learned.
KDE has always been bit of an awkward horror, and I've given it a shot now and then for their whole existence. The latest incarnation, Plasma, is quite a lot better than it used to be, granted.
It probably has the least resistance to use if you are a windows user that try the linux desktop the first time.
My daily driver personal laptop is a macbook, it's the best machine I've ever owned & my next laptop will most likely be a macbook. My work machine is also a macbook.
But they are not intuitive nor highly "usable". After many years going through various osx/macOS transitions, it's an OS with objectively bad ux in many ways.
That's not to say it's bad software. Apart from the hardware of my personal laptop being great, I also like the OS for a few reasons. UX has multiple components outside of intuitiveness & ease of use:
1. reliability. Things work. It has its bugs but generally speaking the utility functions within the OS work well much much more frequently than windows or linux. Peripherals work. Suspend/sleep/hibernate work. Wifi works. Bluetooth works. Everything works. Without fiddling.
2. Builtin apps are sensibly functional & comprehensive. Disk tools have been built-in & better than Windows forever (even Linux usually has none unless you install gparted). Preview supports pdf editing & annotation (& saved signatures!) - these are things that literally every person needs at some point & I'm not even aware of any windows/linux apps that do these other than paid Adobe Acrobat. That's absurd. Screenshot/image preview support better image annotation than Windows (& still trying multiple linux utilities for this that don't have any annotation at all). Very basic day-to-day shit like this has actually been priorities and covered.
3. Unix-y stuff is good enough. I'm a linux guy so this is still a bit of a step down but it's actually fine. Anything that takes place in a terminal is very comparable to linux (& the builtin emulator is a lot better than what comes bundled with many linux DEs).
But. Everything about the macOS desktop experience is terribly unintuitive and bad. Maximising doesn't work (not configurable, ctrl-click remains hassle forever). Multiple windows within one app is badly supported. Finder window closing behaves different to everything - alt-tabbing to it rarely brings anything to the fore. It took them years to add a way to manually lock your screen without a hot corner.
All of these things are bad for both experienced users & new. There's no trade-off: you don't get some hidden benefit by learning to work around these difficulties. They remain bad.
TL;DR: People use macOS for good logical reasons, despite its objectively bad usability.
Not because it cant run them, but because apple doesn't want you using that machine anymore.
Legacy opencore patcher is proof that these machines can run the OS but the installer blocks it.
For frame of reference, I moved from using linux exclusively to MacOS around 2 years ago. I'd avoid buying real mac hardware over this because it is expensive planned obsolescence. I have a laptop running Ubuntu which is like 8 years old and still runs the most recent version just fine. How long will your mac continue to receive updates?
PS - Question for you. Why are there so many threads on the net on how to install linux on a macbook?
Yeah, try to use an external non-Apple mouse with your macbook - your mouse will scroll in the opposite direction - changing it in setting will reverse the direction of your touchpad. Additional buttons will also not work.
or try to connect an android phone to your macbook via USB-C. You will not be able to access the file system to copy files or do anything else.
Printing doesn't work, unless you use Airprint... which will require you do disconnect from internet...
Half of Apple devices use USB-C and half of them - obsolete Lightning cable...
Many people have issues with Airpods connecting to the closed macbook.
and I don't even talk about Docker working 20x times slower than on windows and 100x slower than on Linux.
How so? Finder seems to behave the same way as other multi-window apps, if you cmd-tab to it and a window is open, it will appear, and if there isn't the app will focus and you can press cmd-t to open a new window. This is consistent and in line with how macos deals with apps vs windows/documents in every app.
Counterpoint: no it doesn't. My work MBP cannot sleep (even if i click on Apple -> Sleep), and my Sony headset always connects to it even if it's in my backpack supposedly sleeping.
> Builtin apps are sensibly functional & comprehensive
Yes, with builtin features such as saving in a different, proprietary format. Open a .doc(x) in Pages, Save it and you get a .pages document instead of the original being updated.
Sometimes the system broke, sometimes the filesystem limitations and the performance was always bad, especially with anything involving a large number of files. It was just an awful experience all around. I think anybody who uses WSL over real Linux is only doing it because they either do not want to learn something better & different or they have hardware issues with Linux.
So glad I moved to a real installation after wasting a whole month on WSL. Couldn't be any happier.
10 years ago I was running that workload just fine, but today, on a ryzen 5950, it's slow?
I wonder if Hyper-V is the culprit.
As long as you don't care about the fact that brew is slow as hell, or can't actually handle versions and dependencies properly (installed `gpg` the other day, it updated Python and SQLite and 50 other packages to the latest version, regardless of major or minor), yeah, it's a package manager. Kind of. It still boggles my mind Apple haven't replaced it with a better, official version.
Brew is actually my favorite package manager for this reason.
All around, Brew's my favorite package manager I've used. And yes, I started with Macports, so I've used that too.
It would be good if it was a bit smarter like the linux ones.
Also to not install something that needs sudo.
On windows I used Scoop. I installed fonts through scoop and to update them I first needed to uninstall them and then install them again.
But sure in the end nothing is better then pacman with aur.
I agree with you though - all of the modern OS’s are mostly good enough and have been for quite a while. It feels like a solved problem.
The person who wrote the comment on Reddit may love KDE, but that doesn’t really matter if they need to run XCode. Application requirements drive OS choices and the OS may dictate the hardware.
As a side project I work on a flutter mobile app.
So one of the best features of MacOS is how easy you can simulate an Iphone compared to android. I wanted to setup a Pixel 6 with google play services and I for the love of god could not figure out how to do that. So I needed to go with the Pixel 4.
1: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx/thinkpad-x13s-(13-inch-snapdragon)/
2: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/vh1xse/setup_linux_on_x13s_snapdragon_thinkpad_megathread/
3: https://youtu.be/YWRbNogRBTw&t=1755Also for the price the performance you get is questionable at best even compared to a m1.
I'm also a burned child by the build quality in the last years by lenovo. My t480s was at best good. But not as good as a macbook or a asus zenbook
*Except for Outlook on Mac, what a useless turd compared to Outlook on Windows.
Once you've got used to it you just can't go back.
Third party software also doesn't help. I shit you not I had to install some Asus software that legit started sending me offers through the main OS notification widget.
Using Windows is like walking through a very crowded Chinese market with lots of nagging merchants trying to pull you in plus AI enhanced security cameras everywhere. SIR HAVE YOU TRIED THE NEW EDGE BROWSER? WHY ARENT YOU USING EDGE?
It's an ad platform that can run program nowdays. I might start calling it BonziBuddyOS.
Now if you compare it with the clean default desktop macOS popular Linux distributions offer out of the box it makes a lot of sense for someone to avoid Windows.
For development I tried WSL and WSL2 both have problems.
Last time I installed WSL2 with ubuntu on it I could not figure out how to connect ubuntu to the internet because of some strange DNS setup in WSL.
Windows Terminal is a good way forward but CMD is not as good as bash or zsh.
Scoop/WinGet/ect are nice but way way way behind brew or pacman.
I could install npm/node/git/etc directly on windows but its just so much more painful to setup and keep it running
Windows and its legacy/new/newNew/window11 ui is just to messy for me.
Haha, true i once made a bet that i can survive a week with 9front/Plan9 at work..well it worked since 9Front has SSH and i was always on servers. ;)
One place i know uses Java exclusively, but the devs all have macbooks because they are cool?
How/why does a macbook improve java app development vs the standard issue Lenovo's?
It is like these old and boring companies think that by using macs they are suddenly "trendy and hip" and the millennials will flock to them?
Many smaller companies also prefer managing Macs rather than Windows. Though I’ve rarely seen a technical company reject Linux outright.
Oh, you say, I'll maintain my own Linux laptop! But no, all company-owned computers must be managed by IT, and many of the tools they use to do so don't support any flavor of Linux. So what you're asking for is really quite a lot more work for IT, if possible at all, and not worth it, despite occasionally losing people as an employee.
I have no idea which is available for Mac but I think all modern hypervisors support multiple monitors nowadays.
Especially with the mac terminal being Darwin which is virtually just Unix, and with Brew you can install literally anything you need for your workflow.
I use arch btw.
Not unintuitive different to what you are used to.
> If you want to scan something, you have to go via system settings instead of running an app. Wuh?
No, you use Preview.app, which is the default image viewer in macOS, and always has been.
> They keep breaking drivers for important things, especially USB things, especially if it so happens that they decide to sell them themselves (like external keyboards). About a year ago I had an issue where previously functional USB UART drivers stopped working, result being I had to buy a Linux laptop for firmware work. Then, just last week, my Cherry mechanical keyboard stopped working, the windows key had previously functioned seamlessly as 'command' but ceased to do so. No amount of fiddling seemed to fix it. At this point I'll never buy another Apple device.
No different to any other OS. Fedora managed to break my wifi drivers in the last update. More often, it's hardware manufacturers dragging their heels.
> Fixing anything hardwareish requires remembering undocumented key combinations at boot time.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201255 looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
> No rollback support on config changes.
Sort of, though using Time Machine is very effective.
> One could go on...
One could, and one woud still be mostly wildly incorrect...
> Not unintuitive different to what you are used to.
At the semantic level it's fundamentally mixing two separate concerns. Further, resolving this quandry requires opening a next-level menu and further analysis, it cannot be done immediately/visually. IMHO, this sort of thing is the objective definition of "unintuitive" in an interface.
> use Preview.app [to scan]
Never heard of using this to scan, and you even said it's an "image viewer". So that's unintuitive also. I now see it has an 'Import image from scanner...' function. Wow, that's ... not what I was looking for. I will always scan many pages at once.
> No different to any other OS.
Incorrect. I've never seen Linux drop support for hardware except ultra-ancient hardware (>40 years). What you describe with wifi is likely a closed source driver with special binary blob firmware requirements. These are the fault of the device manufacturer, often because they've bought closed IP for their chip. Dropping open source drivers or published third party drivers is the fault of the OS/distro. Linux doesn't claim to be easy to use, but it can be configured to be very stable. This is much preferable to OSX which IMHO every 6 months likes to "upgrade" you to a non-working system without recourse.
> [Somewhere on the internet has information...]
Yeah, great. If you're such an Apple documentation fan, try finding out how to fix my keyboard on the Apple site then. I'll send you a hardware gift if you can solve that one. Tried everything hinted at on the internet, no help.
> Time Machine is very effective
I don't trust closed source single vendor systems with my data, sorry.
With KDE I don't need to go find a 3rd party app for decent window snapping, I don't need a 3rd party app to put files on my Android phone over USB, I don't need a 3rd party app to have the trackpad and scroll wheel mouse directions be "natural" and "unnatural" at the same time, I don't need a 3rd party app to be able to use the volume buttons to change the volume level of a sound device connected by HDMI or Display port, I don't need a 3rd party package manager to get the software I actually want to use, I don't need to give my terminal permission to display my fucking documents folder, I don't need to give every 3rd app I install special accessibility privileges to be able to it's damn job, I don't need to do things like manually copy over my R binary so I can use a debugger attached to it, etc.
It's interesting that you bring up this point in defense of KDE, because that's exactly my problem with it, especially when contrasted with macOS. Every issue I have with KDE boils down to: "there are too many options, and none of them make the system feel right".
> decent window snapping
In my opinion, no window manager gets it right. I've made a shot at it with my Hammerspoon config[1], it will move/resize/tile floating windows in a 2x2/3x3 grid using custom hotkeys. It's annoying though, that the code works on macOS only - I could probably refactor it to work with an X11 window manager.
[1]: https://github.com/rollcat/dotfiles/blob/master/.hammerspoon...
> put files on my Android phone over USB
I think integration within the Apple ecosystem is what really outshines all competition. I've never had to plug my iPhone over USB to a Mac, and yet I can just copy on the phone, and paste on the computer, like they are one device. Files, mail, contacts, calendar, photos, notes, todos, bookmarks, are all synced - heck I can use the phone camera as a webcam, all out of the box.
> I don't need to give my terminal permission to display my fucking documents folder
Sounds like you never had to fight SELinux or AppArmor. Personally I'm happy that desktop OS's are trying to improve end-user security (why do I have to type the root password to install a game, but I don't need one to run a cryptolocker?), but let's be honest, all attempts so far have ended up half-assed. The root of the issue is that desktop OS's must remain general-purpose tools, otherwise we could just as well call PCs glorified toasters.
It's such a dumb complaint. OSS is just infringing the patent, that's it. That is why no other commercial OS has it out of the box.
As for the rest, sure...but like a lot of them are just silly complaints. Android uses Microsoft's PNP connectivity for data transfer. Once again...OSS.. The Scroll wheel direction thing is eh, personally I use both natural but I get it. The volume button thing has to do something with the display. I have a number of displays including a TCL TV that do have volume control. But fair. That 3rd party bit is a little silly and based on software acquisition preference, Windows also falls into that. I would rather a system that doesn't assume access to user data, it prevents malicious scripts on normal user's machines from just reading data willy-nilly. The accessibility thing is a little silly and needs better names on Apple's part but needing to give software permission is a strong security model.
Also Macs taking a more cautious approach to app access to your filesystem and accessibility privileges is a good thingTM actually?
The Finder's Go menu seems like a reasonably discoverable location.
That being said.... I kind of wish you could type and tab-complete paths in the Find window (cmd-F in the Finder) and Spotlight (cmd-space in any app.)
Besides directly summoning windows with hotkeys I've assigned, it's pretty much the only way I ever switch windows on Plasma.
Ha that's funny, because I'm also struggling with that one!
The general idea that Apple is good at UX is very wrong.
> PS - Question for you. Why are there so many threads on the net on how to install linux on a macbook?
There really aren't relatively speaking. Asahi is a fantastic achievement but most mac users use macOS. For better or for worse. Fwiw I've run Linux on an ancient macbook pro in the past (which was past supporting osx/macos): it worked great.
If you do have a regular layout, the 2 ALTs are indeed supposed to work together.
I remember when I first used a Mac in like 2004 I thought this was fantastic. That’s because at the time Windows (or at least the machine I had windows on), was incapable of rendering individual windows when Alt+Tabbing… So you’d Alt+Tab and try and distinguish between the window you wanted by the name or just plain luck.
However, computers ar better now and are capable of showing little images of the windows in Alt+Tab. The MacOS style is strictly inferior at this point IMO.
> Clipboard
> "Share the clipboard between devices."
> With this, you can simply copy text from your computer and it will be immediately available to paste on your phone, and vice-versa. This does not work with images though.
Also I'm hesitant to even try it. I use PopOS and I've never managed to get a plugin to work properly, and the crazy "you need to install a browser plugin that can read all your data to use plugins" puts me off a lot.
I use a Logitech mouse with my macbooks. Natural scrolling is available in Windows & Linux these days (as it's a user preference many have grown to prefer of late, on all platforms). I also use a Magic Touchpad 2 with a Linux machine & changing natural scrolling settings there will also affect both mouse & touchpad equally, so not sure which of this is specifically a mac problem? This is an odd complaint - scrolling on macbook touchpads presumably works in reverse to your own non-mac machine but you don't seem to have noticed?
> Additional buttons will also not work.
wfm ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
have had more issues on Linux here: all the many ways to get them to work do work fine I think, they're just a lot of fiddling. Piper's a cool project but doesn't seem to support many models in practice, GHub installation is patchy, which leaves fiddling with XOrg/xmodmap... if you're not on Wayland...
> connect an android phone to your macbook via USB-C
I've done this a lot to use adb, but haven't had a lot of need to copy files directly, so haven't noticed this issue. Does it just not show in Finder as a device or is it some deeper issue? Is it related to the USB connection mode in Android's settings?
> Printing doesn't work
wfm ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Never used AirPrint. Dunno what that is.
> obsolete Lightning cable...
True. This is awful. As are all of Apple's (many) hw lock-in practices.
> don't even talk about Docker working 20x times slower
Entirely a docker problem.
---
I'm contradicting a lot of your points but generally Apple are terrible in many ways. No disagreement there (and as I said one of them is usability). It's a trade-off though & in my experience (& I hear most people's) one of the things they do get right more often than others are things "just working". Windows actually used to be better at this I feel (did I imagine this?), but maybe regressed.
What does it mean when a company buys a few dozen macbooks, but has zero mac experience and when they fail they end up in a drawer because no one knows how to fix them?
To me this screams "poor planning". When the lenovo's failed they were sent to the in-house tech team, usually they were simply reimaged and put back into production. One of the macbooks sat in a desk for ~8 months due to some "boot issue".
If it boils down to "taste" and your entire company is based on Lenovo laptop/desktops then moving to a mac would seem odd. Again more odd once you realize you cant support them.
MS developed MTP but at this point it's a part of the USB standard. Many Android devices lack exFAT support but do support MTP which suggests to me it's not patent encumbered. Google has an app for Mac OS too, so no it's not just OSS once again. It's more like Apple deliberately knee-capping non-iPhones to steer users towards iPhones.
Windows 11 includes a package manager, winget.
This has fallen away with time now, which saddens me.
I’m thinking that whichever keepass client OP was using (there are multiple on the App Store) didn’t actually take advantage of the password API.
Which ties into why I haven’t been able to switch to keepass: client quality is all over the place and even if you find one you like, there’s no telling when it’s going to go dark and if you’re lucky get forked.
But yeah I didn't know about that option either in iOS after 2.5 years.. It says something about the UI I think.
I think for me the major issue is that I don't like any of the default options in the iphone and the 3rd party keyboards kept bugging out, even swiftkey and gboard would act really weird. Also the undocumented gestures drove me nuts.
And not being able to just have a normal browser with proper ad block and simple things like that.
I've got complaints about Apple and they make mis-steps all the time—and I'm really worried about their getting into ads more heavily—but everyone else doesn't even seem to be trying to compete with what they're doing, so there's no real alternative.
Given the friction and cost involved in getting that working, it's probably smart to just run Linux bare metal unless you're doing work akin to what led me to that (e.g. needing to work with a Windows corporate environment while configuring Linux test clusters).
I don't wanna imagine this. Would be too stressful for me to use Windows for development, PTSD.
I also hope that Frame.work will release some day a good laptop with an good ARM chip.
But I think this is like 3 years away.
You can use the web version of Office. You can install Office under Wine. I personally have Office 2010 installed on Linux. It works.
My point was that people tend to favor whichever approach they're most used to. Switching only at the window level does "lose" information about the hierarchy, while switching with the hierarchy in place requires one to track the hierarchy which they might prefer not to do. One is not necessarily better than the other, and there are use-cases for both.
The problem is “for a given app”. If I want to switch back to the previous window, I have to use a different shortcut depending on whether that window was from the same app or not. Similarly, if I want to switch back to the window before that, I may have to first use one shortcut to switch back to the other app, and then use the other shortcut to switch within that app. If the windows represent documents, this roughly means that when switching between documents, you have to use a different shortcut depending on whether the type of the document you’re switching to happens to be the same or different from the one you’re currently on. This isn’t really intuitive, and arguably entails more cognitive overhead.
I agree that a lot comes down what you’re used to, but there are also good reasons to prefer one approach over the other.
And the macOS desktop environment is missing a ton of shit that you can take for granted across a dozen Linux desktop environments. They add up to a sense that the desktop itself on macOS is neglected and barren in its very fundamentals.
On some linux environments I can't take for granted that I will see an image preview in the file picker, so there is that.
That is indeed a jarring and annoying limitation! I'd count that as likewise failing to meet reasonable minimum expectations.
I don't really have some complete, ideal feature comparison in mind. If you take an experienced, dedicated (that is, not having used other computing environments regularly for many years) user of macOS and an experienced, dedicated user of Plasma and sit them down at each other's computers, both might reasonably feel like on balance, things are missing and the experience is lacking.
I have strong intuitions about what parts of a whole desktop computer system are 'operating system features' or part of 'the desktop environment'. But the reality is that the demarcation (and whether one cares about it) between is cultural. My view of that is shaped by my own experience and preferences.
Still, the impression is overwhelming when one comes to macOS as a power user from elsewhere that lots of the basics are missing, and that the majority of Apple's efforts go into the integration of applications that sit on top the core operating system and desktop environment rather than the software that comprises those things. That impression is made much more grating by macOS high reputation as well-designed and something that 'just works out of the box'.
For me, at least, some of the third-party applications which add back in macOS' missing features just irritate me more. Consider what has to be done to disable mouse acceleration on macOS, for example. Why does that OS care so little for flexibility or accommodating common use cases that a precarious driver hack which intercepts my mouse input events and relays them to the operating system as tablet presses or some crap is necessary for such basic configuration as linear mouse movement? Should I be grateful that I can pay for the privilege of a workaround that Apple will almost certainly break in some future OS update? And what about the depressing process of discovering, first, that none of the still-documented `defaults write` secret config changes work, and neither do any of the other third-party drivers or utilities? Often, the bit of missing functionality comes with its own miserable journey of discovery. The Plentycom developer is great, SteerMouse is brilliant and I'm glad they figured out a way. But nothing about that situation leaves me with a positive impression of macOS itself!
On macOS, there's a concept called "Proxy Icons". These are little icons that are shown in a title bar of a document-based applications (e.g. "[ICON] My File.txt"). You can interact with these icons as if they are an actual file on the disk.
For example, you have "My File.txt" open in TextEdit, and you want to reference them in Terminal, you can just drag the icon into Terminal.app window and it will resolve the full path. Or you're editing the file, but realized you need to make a copy of that file before making changes, you can alt-drag on the icon and copy it elsewhere. Or you're working on a file and want to navigate to the containing directory, you can right click on the proxy icon and it will show the full hierarchy for navigation, etc.
This is something I missed quite a lot when using other OSes.
It's how copy/paste intents are supposed to work, the receiving object or program might want to use the object sent in various ways so you can extract image data or path if it's an image for instance. Konsole just grabs the path from all that is sent to it that is not clear text.
I did try your text file example from kate (text editor), but that didn't work. otoh, kate does provide the path to the file for easy copying right below this icon :)
I can drag the file from kate, however konsole doesn't accept the object. I suspect kate doesn't encode the path in the copy/paste object, perhaps something I should fix.
The other really nice part about the sgi file explorer were the little buttons above the address bar to quickly go to a specific part of the hierarchy. Windows got this in 7(10 years later) and it works well but is via a hidden state. I am less familiar with mac's finder but I think it can do it, again via hidden state.
https://software.majix.org/irix/screenshots/screen.5.big.jpg
here you can see a drop pocket(the blue folder icon to the left of the address bar) that takes paths. and the very nice irix address bar.
You can "just drag", but if you alt/option drag you get a copy operation instead of a move operation.
Sure, using option/alt to get a copy isn't "intuitive", but that wasn't the point. The point was to note that the consistency in macOS is such that even less known things like alt dragging has been consistently implemented essentially everywhere.
As far as I know, VI is actually an acronym that stands for Very Intuitive
Finder behaviour is technically consistent, all things being equal, but it's inconsistent in practice as a knock-on effect of other limitations: the root of this is the (inability) to quit Finder*. If you never quit any apps you ever use, you could probably get consistent behaviour across them, but broadly speaking if you do quit apps you're not using, opening those apps will tend to bring up a new window. Since Finder can't be quit, "opening" it afresh constitutes switching to it in its windowless state. Technically consistent (same as switching to any windowless app) but inconsistent in practice (switching to any other app you have quit will bring a window to the fore).
I suspect this is one of those engineers-vs-ux things where engineers will close this as "works as intented" without considering that the "way it's supposed to be used" isn't necessarily a good model for actual user behaviour. The other potential excuse is "but Desktop icons", which is just rooted in the leaky abstraction of devs tending to DRY-ify desktop rendering by hard-linking it to the app that provides file mgmt. windows.
*: You can work around this with the `com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem` setting at the cost of Desktop icons, but we're talking default settings here.
I don't have it set - it's got drawbacks (aforementioned Desktop icons) but mostly I prefer to run with defaults so I'm less annoyed at fresh installs :)
> What the fuck? The window manager can barely manage windows!
> What the fuck? The volume mixer can't mix volumes!
These are the core functionality of the desktop environment. It's a whole host of absolute basics that are missing.
This also extends to lower levels. The filesystem has huge chunks of functionality missing to the point that it seems to basically defeat the point of running a CoW filesystem at all. Containerization support is pitiful. What the hell happened to multimonitor support?
Setting up your first Mac as a Linux user ends up feeling like a ton of work involving a ton of disappointing dead ends. That's what GP means by 'unusable'.
It's worth noting that this is not about being accustomed to doing things only one way. Most of these unmet expectations in DE functionality are part of a common minimum among Linux DEs. Sitting down at a GNOME desktop and getting to work is not nearly as frustrating for a Plasma user as trying to limp along with the builtins on the desktop that macOS provides.
How is that a meaningful or interesting defense of macOS? How does it enrich (or challenge) anyone's understanding of the ways that given a different context, macOS can actually seem not just alien but shoddy or incomplete?
> At the semantic level it's fundamentally mixing two separate concerns. Further, resolving this quandry requires opening a next-level menu and further analysis, it cannot be done immediately/visually. IMHO, this sort of thing is the objective definition of "unintuitive" in an interface.
No, different to what you are used to. For nearly 40 years it has worked this way in the OS. I have no problem with you not liking it, but your reasoning isn't reasoned.
> Never heard of using this to scan, and you even said it's an "image viewer".
You didn't look very hard, clearly. It was used to scan when it was part of NeXTStep. In fact, in the olden days, when scanners were still a thing for most people, you would 'preview' the scan first!
> I now see it has an 'Import image from scanner...' function. Wow, that's ... not what I was looking for. I will always scan many pages at once.
Wow. It says 'scanner' in the fucking menu item. What more do you want! I know, I know, "work like my favourite OS".
> [Somewhere on the internet has information...] Yeah, great. If you're such an Apple documentation fan, try finding out how to fix my keyboard on the Apple site then. I'll send you a hardware gift if you can solve that one. Tried everything hinted at on the internet, no help.
You claimed that you needed "undocumented key combinations at boot time." I linked to official documentation! Would you rather a printed manual autographed by Steve Jobs? And if you tell me what's wrong with your keyboard (i.e. symptoms of the issue) instead of whining about it, I, and many others could help.
> Incorrect. I've never seen Linux drop support for hardware except ultra-ancient hardware (>40 years).
I gave an example of hardware that was broken. I couldn't give a shit that you think it's the manufacturers fault. The rest of us don't feel the need to Open-source all the things. We just want shit to work. Not including binary blobs is idealism at its worst. Fundamentally, an update broke it. This came from the distro. It. Is. Bad. User. Experience. And that lies with the distributor of the OS as much as the hardware vendor.
I haven't reinstalled macOS since I took the 2018 machine out of the box. It's running Ventura now without issue.
> I don't trust closed source single vendor systems with my data, sorry.
Right. That's, like, your choice, man.
All in all, save for the possibility that your keyboard issues are genuine, everything you listed isn't down to the system being 'unintuitive', it's down to your ignorance and at times not RTFMing. You are stating opinion as fact which doesn't lead to constructive conversations.
The truth is that you have struggled to understand something largely due to pre-existing bias. You had learned a way to do something and expected to be able to map that to a different workflow without any learning. It really is that simple. It made you feel stupid, and you are confusing that with something being unintuitive. macOS isn't perfect, far from it, but claiming it's unintuitive because you couldn't immediately scan a document is nonsense. Scanning a document in KDE requires additional software to be installed, which is also an option for macOS, but with Preview.app, it's already there. Lack of familiarity is not the same as unintuitive. Claiming things are undocumentented when it takes 30 seconds to find official documentation on that very subject is nonsense. Moving the goalposts after being shown something is a asshole move.
That may be, but a good OS should offer the same level of integration with devices of all kinds. Like the good old "Mac vs PC" ads suggested back in the day.
KDE has KDE Connect for shared clipboard, sending files between devices, and such functionality. Which even supports Windows on PC, and allows syncing between multiple mobile and desktop devices, so you can have a shared clipboard across all your devices from all manufacturers.
And while you do need to download KDE connect to get the fancier features on KDE, out of the box you do still get USB file transfer. Which is great when you want to give someone a file that's on your phone. They don't need to download anything, link accounts or need a device from the exact same manufacturer as you. Unless they use MacOS.
defaults write com.apple.universalaccess showWindowTitlebarIcons -bool TRUEI'm sorry, but doesnt MacOS do this too? You can skip it in both MacOS and Windows but MacOS will prompt you later to create an account.
MacOS also wants you into its "iCloud" service badly....
One such example is the Fortinet VPN client. It refuses to connect when running on Win 2019 and 2022 for some reason.
... so? I can also rm most or all of my home directory without sudo, and that's far bigger problem. If this happened it would be a minor annoyance at worst. Also, this is 775 on my system, and most of the contents are 755, so it's not even true except for one of my users.
> Or replace /usr/local/Homebrew/bin/brew with something malicious.
If I go out of my way to make that globally writable, sure. I just checked mine, though, and it's not.
Unless you mean that a program running under my user could replace that file with something malicious without my knowing about it, but there are a bunch of other ways it could accomplish similar things if a malicious program is running under my account, so yeah, I'm gonna give it a pass on that. About the only thing it makes a little easier is putting malicious code in the hands of other users on the system if the compromised account has write access to that file, but hell, if the same thing happened on a Linux system the malware would probably have my sudo password and a ton of other even-more-important info before long anyway, so it's not like that's any better.
A big part of it is that Mac users don't generally think of or treat macOS as a multiuser operating system. It's a single-user Unix, baby!! (:
But even without that choice, malicious aliases for brew, or PATH changes and a malicious ~/.local/bin/brew would be possible.
Documentation is an admission of failure. - Eric S. Raymond, The Art of Unix Usability (2004)
Secondly, please accept my humblest apologies for a poor choice of proverb; a better one may have been 井底之蛙 whereupon the well in question is Apple-land.
And you can run iOS apps on macOS, so nope, this argument is invalid.
Basically every argument about things "not working" OOB on macOS can be reversed and applied to Windows: yeah, macOS won't transfer files over USB to Android, but Windows won't talk to an iPhone either. We have two huge silos (you can keep arguing who's done a better job, but the key point stands: "cross-play" is not here), and third-party efforts like KDE Connect, that require more setup almost by definition.
> They don't need to download anything, link accounts or need a device from the exact same manufacturer as you. Unless they use MacOS.
I know it's another Apple-only tech, but have you seen/tried AirDrop? It uses Bluetooth (for discovery) and a custom variant of P2P WiFi; transfers are insanely fast and you don't need to install anything, link accounts, etc - you just need to be in range of another person's device. People I know who are working in the video industry (>100gb files being common) swear by it, and throw rocks at any and all cables.
Again, most arguments end up applying to both Windows/Android and Apple; as soon as you step outside of your silo (e.g. by choosing the independent KDE), things are getting complicated. Perhaps we should be angry with the whole of Microsoft+Google+Samsung+Apple+etc all doing their own things, rather than sitting down in one room and agreeing on a strategy that benefits the users of all of their devices?
No, it's not the same. That's ARM only, is a limited subset of apps and is NOT the literal app on your phone with whatever data/state is there.
> I know it's another Apple-only tech, but have you seen/tried AirDrop?
Yeah of course. I did try going all in on the Apple ecosystem. It was fine when it worked. At one point I could do all my devices together (iPhone, MBP, Mac Mini and iPad) except the iPhone and the Mac Mini refused to talk to each other. Why? I have no clue all the devices were +-1 year of being introduced from one another and all ran the latest versions of their respective OSs. And yeah you need the ridiculous expectation that everybody is using the same manufacturer which severally limits usability. Google and MS do also have a similar feature they both annoyingly call "nearby share" (the two aren't compatible with each other).
Windows failing to be able to transfer files to an iPhone without iTunes is Apple's fault. Apple is the one who decided they should use whatever proprietary crap to do it. You'd have a good point if the iPhone was using some well established standard MS was just being jerks about not implementing but that's not the case.
You're right that there's plenty of siloing done by all the big tech companies but Apple is the worst and the least likely to play ball. They do the absolute bare minimum.
You mean, standards like USB-C, WiDi transfer, MTP, etc?
Because it's Apple that refuses to use those standards. I can use the same standards, no matter if Windows Phone (RIP), Android, Sailfish.
As long as you're outside of the Apple Silo, everything works fine, no matter the phone, no matter the OS.
It's only Apple that intentionally does its own thing to lock you in.
I don't disagree that Apple is often the worst offender, but let's not pretend like the rest of the industry isn't pulling all sorts of user- or developer-hostile crap all the time.
https://digitalitskills.com/how-to-stop-windows-server-auto-...
Linux uses CUPS, even Chromecast uses mDNS, and KDE famously invented WebKit (and still uses it).
It's not these standards people complain about, it's the custom, walled-garden, proprietary stuff.
Like Lightning, which could have been a global standard, if it didn't encrypt all transfers with custom chips, a custom handshake and custom protocol, all of which only apple controls.
I love this about macos. Its consistent: eg, you close documents with cmd+w one by one, until they're all gone. Then you press cmd+n to create a new document. This is consistent and logical. On other OS, cmd/ctrl+w does something different if you're closing the last document.
Another example of the inconsistency it causes is in browsers when you close the last tab and it asks you "closing the browser will cancel the in-progress download, are you sure?" and so you have to keep an arbitrary tab/document open to keep background downloads going.
Also in a practical sense it is useful for slow-starting applications to be running and ready to load a document without needing to keep open a blank document.
The equivalent behaviour on other systems is achieved by MDI applications which are much less elegant IMO. Or for apps that have to keep running but don't have a specific window to show, they implement something similar to mac anyway where the application appears in the system tray.
For example, on MacOS, alt-tab not cycling through the list of windows feels so absurdly broken to me that I don't even bother trying to use that shortcut anymore. Focusing apps that don't even have a visual presence on screen is also a source of heightened frustration.
I wish there were Linux distributions that took an app-centric approach similar to that of macOS. It just gels with my brain better.
I want to keep some applications running so it continue to receive its own thing in the background, but I do not want to accidentally open the window during Alt-Tab, e.g. my email client, my chat application. (On macOS it's still showing up on Cmd+Tab, but selecting the application doesn't activate the window).
I think this design decision still makes sense in 2022. On Windows and Linux, applications can have no window open by installing a background service (ugh) or hide to status bar, but application need to explicitly implement the behavior. On macOS, this is the expected behavior.
Yeah, but the number of apps which require this behavior is far less than those which don't. Hence in my view, not a good reason to default to it.
That said, I still like KDE Plasma more than macOS as a desktop. But this and the proxy icons are two things that I missed the most.
This is a part of what I was saying. Apps are cold-starting much faster today than it was back in the days of disk spindles. There are also ways to keep it hot, while not being active.
I recently got an M2 Air and Illustrator loads the fastest it ever has - I'm staring at the splash screen for all of five seconds before it's ready to get to work. Normally it's been more like 20-120 seconds for the past decade. I am quite sure Adobe will find a way to make their apps take several minutes to start up on the M2.
As a consequence, Illustrator cold-starts when I log in; the only time it stops running is if it crashes, or if I need to quit it to update plugins or the app itself. If I go off and do something else for a while it quietly gets swapped to disc by the system; the instant I switch back, it gets swapped into memory, ready to get back to work.
Why are desktop versions of TODO lists, note-taking applications, and time trackers constantly polling the server in the background? Social apps and web apps I understand.
- Obsidian for note taking. Configured to sync with Obsidian Sync.
- OmniFocus as my personal GTD. Configured to sync with Omni Sync Server, and also sync to my phone (though on Linux I use OmniFocus for Web)
- Clockify (Desktop) for time tracking. Required for work.