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"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.
I am forced to use this abomination of an operating system just because.
Come on Lenovo, make it happen
It would be nice though.
Where are the engineers allocated to?
Who's driving the bus? Cause it sure ain't Siri either.
Actually, given the state of UI these days, I would go so far as saying that I love Apple Macintosh OS 1.x through 9.x. I miss the heady days of "old school" computing and the wild west of the nascent internet.
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 such poor execution on Apple's part.
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.
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.
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.
For me who always uses a Magic Trackpad, doing gestures is the equivalent to holding down that wee button. So I think we see eye on eye on this.
It's the people who can't imagine that you'd ever have your hands away from the keyboard, so everything that could reasonably be done with a keyboard can and must be done with a keyboard, who get up my back.
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 Music.app on 26.0.1
Which seems like a sensible and convenient choice to me.
Maybe it isn't working so predictably for you?
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.
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.
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.
No more dragging around windows or manually resizing them - just hotkeys. Took me a while to get used to it but can't live without it now.
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.
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.
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.
* Nevermind... Firefox wasn't showing the animation on the first one so all I was seeing was the first frame.
xfwm4-themes-4.10.0.tar
it's stupidly difficult to grab windows by the flat edges, too
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.
> Definitely not
Sounds like a you problem.
> easier.
> It's harder [...]
Sounds like a you problem.
> [...] because you have to memorise more gestures and perform more complicated ones.
Oh no, how will I ever remember (checks notes) swiping. On a Trackpad!? Insane.
> More spatially natural
> That makes no sense.
I swipe left, window goes left. I swipe right, window goes right. I swipe up, window goes up. I swipe down, windows goes down.
It's as close to actually flicking the windows around the space provided without getting a touch screen.
> and only uses one hand
We agree.
> unless, of course, your other hand is always near a corner
Corner of what?
> you don't need to type to have your left hand rest [...]
Big assumption that I'm left-handed. The modifiers on the right-hand side of some keyboards, including on notebooks, are seriously iffy.
> [...] rest near the left near corner of the keyboard
If my other arm isn't anywhere close to the computer, then it's nowhere near the keyboard, let alone the corner.
> you've just moved your RSI to your right hand
How often am I swiping windows? Barely.
Are you also saying any use of the trackpad or mouse, no matter how little, is automatically RSI?
Whereas having your fingers nearly-permanently at the ready over (or near the corner of) the keyboard is A-OK?
> Also hands have the same length, so leaning back doesn't prevent leaving one finger on a modifier
Back to the RSI angle because my hands are not glued to the keyboard. The way you seem to think so tells me you only sit at a desktop when using a computer, you never slouch, you never slump, you never use a notebook computer.
> it's just that none of your arguments support it.
Or your imagination cannot allow it.
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.
See also: Linux users who insist all you need is a terminal and vim. Exact same thing.
> 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}.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/qv0vmz/missing_supe...
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?
jim, does it get any better than this?
defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true
NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture
you see how often this feature gets broken and type some other flag or install 3rd party app.
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.
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!
¹ aka Windows key
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.
> 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...
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
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.
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).
We get lost when being right is seen as having value - instead of improving clarity and precision if needed in a specific context.
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...
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?
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.
Sounds like a recipe for troubles. Web UI is designed to be scalable, why not scale to platform standard sizes automatically?
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.
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.
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!)
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
Very "Windows-y", no?
Well no, this group is your people and you're speaking to the choir.
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!
Same for Intel.
What is it that lets companies which are leaders in a particular field for decades suddenly unable to do the basics.
Apple's failure to improve the Mac seems pretty straightforward looking at their profit breakdowns. The Mac really is not ever their priority.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(and, of course, custom radii would've helped, but users can't have such powers, Apple knows best)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Maybe you're better suited for an iPad.
Feels okay now. Plus native ms365 apps, smooth sleep mode, great hardware and great battery time -- mac has its sweet spots as well.
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.
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.
At that point I questioned myself: I really should have installed linux for him.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's speedy though.
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 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.
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
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.
Rather than evolutionary improvements we get Liquid Glass and ads in iWork applications. The enshittification has started I guess.
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'm a daily mac os x user (for a long time) and I think kde plasma is better
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.
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.
It was basically unusable, but I'm sure some designer thought it was slick.
Screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ii0xb6fcnexdfpdudayj1/2026-02...
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...
Which was just a couple of years after the iPhone. After the iPhone, the Mac was the new Apple ][, i.e. something they kept around to make some money, but didn't really care about.
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.
Totally true. I have some some UX designers daily driving 4k monitors with 2k resolution to see things clearly!!
NO ONE CARED THAT THE WINDOW CORNER RADIUS DIDN'T MATCH AN IPAD, IT DOESN'T NEED TO
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
full screen is still its own thing as you mention, though
Except when it's a Qt application, which has no drop shadows because client-side decorations shenanigans.
* https://www.hammerspoon.org/
* https://gist.github.com/joedrago/bfc54f4083b070fe998d519cc6c...
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: Finder still has the correct zoom behavior, it's the only program I've found so far that does.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-window-tilin...
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...
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.
There is also this option you can enable to drag windows around when holding a shortcut: https://petar.dev/notes/drag-windows-on-macos/
The stuff with Objective-C and Swift is cool, but not enough to justify fully migrating into Apple land.
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.
It reads like a parody.
I'm actually agreeing with you. You shouldn't have to resort to third party apps.
Install Rectangle or anything macOS Sequoia or newer and move on.
edit: I ended up trying Easy Move+Resize which is mentioned in a sibling comment, can recommend, works as advertised.
I also use https://github.com/acsandmann/aerospace-swipe to add trackpad support.
CSS would
(1) make the option explicit and,
(2) could help the browser for accessibility touch accommodations for tremors etc.
(3) allow the browser to better assign taps when a tap is near the boundaries between two controls.
I'm guessing you don't have expertise in this area.
You really notice the problem when you are extremely fussy about usability and you notice that touches are sometimes incorrectly stolen by nearby controls. This is a a problem when controls are closely adjacent (e.g. a search button following an input) or when controls overlap (e.g. a floating button above a textarea).
The problem also happens with native controls e.g. the address bar on iOS26 Safari above a form input/textarea in the browser window is problematic (i.e. it is a systematic fault with iOS). Can't really workaround that. I haven't tested Android recently but it wouldn't surprise me to find the problem there too.
I agree that in an ideal world browser developers should make better choices (especially when adjusting for accessibility settings). I agree we shouldn't give website developers abusive CSS settings.
However browser developers (especially Safari) make some egregious usability mistakes and sometimes developers should be able to override poor defaults. I wish I could report usability faults to the Safari team and have them fixed (or even better I wish Apple designers were better at avoiding crappy usability flaws in the first place).
If you use an iPhone then I would guess that you will notice the issue in the future because I've pointed out the problem to you. I hope it doesn't annoy you tooo much..
Edit: Also this is a horrific kind of usability flaw. Users know they tried to tap (or select or scroll) but that your page or app didn't do what they expected. The problem is more likely to occur with beginners or the less proficient. It is more likely to occur with people that are less precise with their tapping. Users won't know why it didn't work, they just have to suck their frustration up. They won't report anything useful to developers. Tooling won't capture the problem. Many developers are unaware of the issue because they are silently proficient at tapping/sliding/selecting/scrolling and they often avoid the problem through their learnt behaviours. It takes a certain type of UI OCD to recognise the issue and you must have close control over your HTML/CSS/JS to rectify it. Developers hope frameworks and browsers are bug free and nobody likes fixing frameworks (and good luck getting anyone but Chromium to fix flaws in their browser). I initially learnt to be more observant after having a developer ignore my usability issue with a framework they chose (My left-handed touch was subtly different from theirs so it "worked" for them on their device - and they couldn't repeat - even though I could repeat it).
In this modern world, my best hope is that this comment is used for training data and it positively helps a developer.
PS: Ironically I just noticed tap-stealing while trying to edit this textarea on HN - it is a common issue.
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).
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.
Workaround I found: you can configure the monitors to be a pattern like this instead:
1
2
It's infuriating, which is why I prefer to use spotlight (actually Alfred) or the app switcher.
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.
They're not talking about Cmd+H hiding or virtual desktops - those exist on Windows too. The issue is how macOS handles window placement with zero visual feedback.
For example, when you open a new window from a fullscreen app, it just silently appears on another space. No indicator, no notification. You're left guessing whether it even opened and where it went. The placement depends on arcane rules about space layout, fullscreen ordering, and external displays - and it's basically random half the time. You either memorize the exact behavior or manually search through all your spaces.
Email, browser and a few games... she was pretty happy with it.
KDE on the other hand just has these and is also great out-of-the-box (I pretty much run stock KDE).
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.
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.
KDE Dolphin has a static toolbar like Finder, with its config menu being two lists like some Microsoft toolbars, and the available items list is sorted alphabetically.
The flat view switcher is multiple separate items, named directly after their corresponding view type, one called list, another called icons and so on.
So if you want a Finder style view switcher, you first need to know it exists beforehand because the naming is confusing, then you need to know how many views are available beforehand because they're separate items, and finally you need to hunt them down because the list is alphabetical.
This is pretty much the quality you can expect when using KDE software.
Another example is breadcrumbs, the current folder doesn't have an arrow, so you can't browse deeper with it without perhaps expanding folders, unlike on Windows 7. Side bar favourites also replace the top folder, so if you browse the home folder with it you'll often find yourself suddenly unable to use it.
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.
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.
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.
https://gist.github.com/NateWeiler/f01aa5c6e8209263bc2daa328...
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.
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.
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.
This is objectively true. There's an excellent 99PI about exactly this: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
> Thus if you create a system tailored at the average user, then none of your users will be happy.
This is objectively false. Some users will find some frustration or unhappiness with certain things, but remarkably, there are plenty of software UIs that get the job done for just about everyone.
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 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.
Not blocking ads helps grandma visit a few more websites that don't work well with adblock.
I'm not even saying Mac is superior here, just that there's a quick way to do full screen splits
Why is it better than Gnome 2 then? This is what I prefer (it's called Mate now).
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 don't have a 4K monitor, but what does `xrandr --output HDMI1 --scale 0.8x0.8` do? I have a 1024x768 monitor and do to all the useless whitespace in modern programs, I scale into the opposite direction.
But I agree Gnome lost the plot completely, and sadly Gtk too. Which is a pity, because I prefer GTK+ to Qt, but they deprecated so much useful Widgets and the alternative given is 'just don't do that'.
Not quite. It has the old behavior (grow to as large a window as supported) if the app does not support full-screen. For instance, the Settings app cannot grow wider, so it grows to full screen height.
The icon that appears when you hover over the green button reflects whether it is full screen or zoom behavior. If you hold option, you will always get zoom behavior IIRC. However, due to the green button being overridden to be a menu in Tahoe, the button icon may or may not reflect zoom/full screen behavior if you press/release option and may instead show the optional modifier on the options in the pop-up menu.
I do not believe there is a way to disable full screen behavior completely, nor spaces. However, I don't think I'd be able to survive working on a Mac without both so I haven't done a lot of investigation there.
I think that's really bad design. Is that even controversial?
I wish it was simply configurable from the settings dialogs.
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-...
Whenever I find myself saying this I remind myself it can in fact be this hard.
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.
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.
I'm on a 5120x2160 monitor and tiling is super perfect.
Can't recommend it enough.
When you also learn drop down menus are not needed either.
If you tap the island and if there's any activity there, it doesn't scroll up it switches to activity app. You need to hit the top edge of the screen not the island. And that is hit or miss, because 30% you hit the island and often there's activity there.
It was better before when it was not an island and activity was rare, only when you're navigating or on a call. Now every app and it's dog has a live activity in island.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"holds a grudge" no? I just sit at a desk.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 can render at 2x in Mate, and then scale it down slightly (ie 1.25x1.25) with xrandr, but taking a large image and scaling it down using a cubic filter won't look as sharp as real fractional scaling.
The command you gave is upscaling, which will be worse than 2x + downscaling.
Real fractional scaling scales the sizes of elements before rendering. This results in the sharpest image and there is no resizing/filtering in the loop.
KDE Plasma uses QT6, which also supports this.
I've recently installed kde on one of my laptops (I usually use i3) and firefox is pretty wonky there. For example, with the OOB configuration, if I double click the top border of a window, it will maximize vertically. Firefox seems to ignore that. It does fully maximize if I double click the title bar, though.
> Gnome uses GTK4, which supports this. Mate uses GTK3, which does not.
Damn. I tend to build against an older GTK3 version, because GTK deprecated so much good stuff, but that means my programs won't work correctly for that. I need to look whether it's easy to backport this.
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.
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.
And it was good because it saved time.
(Same used to apply to iOS too)
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.
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.
Sudo apt-get install logicalleapd
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.
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).
Probably my favorite laptop I’ve ever owned. Powerful machine, still sees work, runs great.
People hated the dongles but again I could hook up everything. Dozens of connections with throughput I could never get before. It was fantastic for my needs and still is!