I still don't know a better plattform. Linux may be fine if you like tinkering and can compromise on UX and Windows is the same but worse (but at least with Linux built in now).
I personally much, much prefer the UX on Linux. I may be suffering from some kind of Stockholm syndrome as a long time Linux user, but I have to use macOS for work and it absolutely doesn't work for me.
I find the UX quirky and akward to use. I hate how the window management works. I hate how annoying it is to get two windows to show side by side. I hate how there end up so many icons in the menu bar which are entirely unhelpful. I hate how space inefficient the dock is, but when you auto hide it, you can no longer see the notification counts at a glance.
I would honest to God rate macOS UX a 2/5 for design and a 5/5 for QA.
> I hate how the window management works. I hate how annoying it is to get two windows to show side by side.
Plenty of window management apps and tools available. Rectangle, for example.
> I hate how there end up so many icons in the menu bar which are entirely unhelpful.
The only ones I cannot seem to be able to remove trivially are the clock and the Control Center. Solved in mere seconds by typing "menu bar" into the System Settings search. You could literally even just hold cmd and drag almost any icon out of the bar. Not to mention any of the more involved menu bar customization apps and tools.
Why does it seem like such "macOS bad Linux good" comments always compare the default macOS experience to a personalized Linux environment?
Why does an out-of-the-box Mac have to fulfill the same requirements we spent hours configuring for on a Linux machine?
Where does the capability or mindset to install a tool disappear when we move from Linux to macOS?
Why does an out-of-the-box Mac have to fulfill the same requirements we spent hours configuring for on a Linux machine?
I think part of the problem is due to Mac and Apple have traditionally sold itself as intuitive and easy-to-use out of the box. People buy a Mac because they've been told that they don't have to spend hours configuring it. Hell Apple built a whole ad campaign around how the Mac is so much easier and more intuitive to use than Windows computers. However truth is that if you're coming from Linux or Windows, a lot of MacOS is incredibly unintuitive and weird out of the box.
Yes, I do in general agree with that. I suppose my confusion really only applies in this particular context of , e.g., HN; I would expect software engineers to look at these issues differently than your average home or office user. It seems to me that this "easy to use out of the box" marketing is aimed at a different sector of users, and I would expect software engineers be able to look through this. Perhaps my expectations and assumptions are wrong.
I am just curious where all the willingness to tinker and solve problems appears to disappear when we move to macOS.
Windows spying on you? Oh, let's install this tool X and change a whole bunch of registry settings to prevent that.
App windows behaving annoyingly on Linux? Oh, let's just switch to a completely different desktop environment/window manager or what have you.
Too many icons in the menu bar on macOS? Yeah, I'm returning this machine. :)
> Why does it seem like such "macOS bad Linux good" comments always compare the default macOS experience to a personalized Linux environment?
>
> Why does an out-of-the-box Mac have to fulfill the same requirements we spent hours configuring for on a Linux machine?
Pretty much all of their complaints are addressed out of the box by most of the major desktop environments. Install whatever popular distro of your choice and you can trivially put two windows side-by-side like you can on Windows.
For the window management, a big shoutout to `magnet` (for snapping windows) and `AltTab` (for sane alt tabbing).. for making the management much less frustrating (although not completely fixed).
The "windows should be grouped in terms of the applications" does not make sense to me AT ALL.
Most work is done on a project basis, which crosses application boundaries quite readily. E.g., one project might involve having an open Android Studio project, a PDF with documentation, a browser window and a note pad. "Cmd-tabbing", though, brings up the next window of the same application that I am currently on. Viewing a PDF with preview, this will bring up some random image most of the time? (Luckily this is fixed by AltTab)
No solutions for the dock from me though. Personally I hate how the dock can randomly move between two monitors if you just happen to drag a file through the area where the dock COULD go on your second screen.
Additionally, things I hate and have not been able to fix: how if you close a window of a specific application in MacOS, it moves another window of that same application forward (similar to the Cmd+Tab behaviour) and if you click on an application in the Dock, it brings forward ALL windows of that application (whereas I would expect only the most recently used one).
If you have the time to “play” with it Linux is amazing. But you have to defend yourself against upgrades. It was years ago that a routine upgrade from some Linux distribution to the next version completely changed my GUI in ways that I just didn’t want to deal with - I bought a Mac.
If I were ever to go back I’d run Gentoo or some other rolling release distro; at least then I get changes a little bit at a time.
There are addons and tricks to do window management in Mac OS - but the big one I do is throw that dock on the right hand side of the screen and leave it. Wide screens have space there, might as well use it.
Mac OS still has a bit of that “upgrade changes everything” going on but it seems more gradual and less painful - and in my experience pretty polished.
It is funny because this is actually one of the main things I like about Linux. My current setup is basically the same as the one I had 20 years ago. Things function and look the same. The only difference is that it the background lots of improvements started accumulating not to mention my much better PC.
With Linux it feels I can keep doing the things how I want them to do. True, there are some distributions and window managers that throw the baby out with the bathwater for every update, looking at Ubuntu and Gnome, but sticking to something more conservative and you are set for live. Also, every time this happens, somebody will always fork of the old code, like with Mate and Trinity.
With a Mac or Windows you are sort of stuck with wills and whims of some company. If Windows could still look and function like 2000, but just be better, I might still use it to this day.
> With a Mac or Windows you are sort of stuck with wills and whims of some company.
It's true, but I'd also say macOS as it is today looks pretty damn similar to screenshots of the first OSX version shown off 20+ years ago. Other than updated icons (which are still mostly based off the original icons) and an overall flatter aesthetic compared to the flashy, novel 3D of those days, it mostly functions the same. They only updated the Preferences app to System Settings in the last version with a design overhaul, and it was a pretty big deal because they don't do that much.
I've not had breaking changes in Linux for a long, long time. I generally use either a completely unmodified, default config Gnome, or Sway with my own config.
I've used a couple of different desktop environments or window managers over the past few decades, but these days I either stick with the default (which is so often Gnome) or use Sway, where I can just copy in my config file and everything works exactly as I'm used to.
> If you have the time to “play” with it Linux is amazing. But you have to defend yourself against upgrades.
That has not been my experience. If you are using something like Arch (rolling release distro) maybe, but Ubuntu and Debian stable have been pretty much that.
I also find it a little funny that a complaint about Linux is in the thread of a post showing how Apple will change things that break their users without apology.
This sorta feels like a parody comment, especially as I currently sit at my work macbook with an entirely redesigned and laid out settings UI (which now actually reminds me of the control panel view from windows XP - with it's new list of categories with lots of confusing, duplicate, and overlapping choices).
I’ve found that even if I have time to allot to playing with Linux, I can never get things tuned the way I want. If you want bog standard Win9X paradigm desktop (most DEs), iPadOS with a mild desktop bent (GNOME), or yet another minimal tiling WM those are easy to do, but reproducing other environments (mainly macOS) keeping all the bits that matter in tact isn’t currently possible. It’s quite frustrating for me.
If it weren’t for the fact that such a thing would progress glacially if worked on only in my spare time I’d write my own DE and maintain enough forks that my GitHub profile would look like a fork factory.
> Making a simple tweak like setting caps lock to an extra ctrl is a whole side quest on Linux
I've remapped CapsLock to Esc on both macOS and Linux/GNOME. It's just a checkbox/combobox in a settings in both cases. What is 'a whole side quest' you are talking about?
Part of the fun with that is there's about fifty different places you could do it, and the only one that will really affect everything is in the kernel (IIRC), anything else will affect the program, window manager, terminal, etc but not necessarily anything else. And some programs bypass everything and read scancodes anyway.
Whereas in Mac OS X it's a simple configurable option (a bit hidden, System Settings, Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Modifier Keys).
And if you do it in the kernel, then any other users on the machine are stuck with your choice. The MacOS setting is per-user, but affects very nearly everything, except the recovery environment and I guess the login screen, for good reasons.
It makes me wonder, how exactly would one go about implementing Linux remapping that works on everything on a per-user basis? Is there a way to hook into the USB HID implementation and change what it reports to X, Wayland, etc and flip it on/off based on user preferences?
You'd likely need to have the kernel be able to switch "keymaps" at anytime (and this is likely to be privileged and need to be done by root).
I know there was a way to load different keyboard layouts, but the problem with those mechanisms is they often cannot remap modifier keys, of which capslock is a special case of.
People will (and have) showed up to deny this, but what you describe is common enough that it can't be untrue.
At this very moment, I'm still going through the "play" phase. If you pick a distro and then never change anything about it, then maybe it will work out for you out of the box. But as soon as you try to "make it yours", suddenly you'll find yourself with a second day job with no pay, you'll wonder where all your free time went, and your muscle tone will be gone. Inevitably, you'll have some weird issue like a particular program acting slow and causing the mouse to lag, or maybe your Wayland compositor has the wrong cursor position, and nobody on the internet knows why, except for some guy with a script as long as the declaration of independence that you can run in your terminal to fix all your problems (um, no). Eventually you give up and run the built-in compositor within another compositor, and somehow that fixes the original issue. But now your keyboard/mouse configuration no longer works! Holy shit, it's almost Christmas? Screw this, let's install Debian stable. Wait, what? The installer can't find the installation media? You ARE the installation media! Fuuuuuuuuu...
I love Linux as a tool, but the desktop experience will never get its act together. Whether it works for you or not seems to be based on luck. I don't even want a complicated desktop experience; I just want something basic like Openbox and a web browser, but these days you can barely even do that without a bunch of tinkering (unless you want to stick entirely to X11).
It seems like the problem that makes it common is that Linux self-selects for people who want to tinker (that's why they're installing a non-default OS). The difference is that it also accommodates people who reach a point where they just want the computer to work and get out of their way. So you end up hearing both voices.
> If you pick a distro and then never change anything about it, then maybe it will work out for you out of the box.
Yes, exactly. Use a stable distro, don't touch things, and they won't change. It will continue to run exactly the same for years and years. This is in contrast to OSX and Windows. Windows is completely unrecognizable to me since stopped using it 7-8 years ago (the last version I used being Windows 7). My Linux desktop works exactly the same (with Firefox as an outlier that randomly removes/hides functionality). Apple is notorious for not caring about backwards compatibility, and just expecting everyone to accommodate whatever changes they want to make.
> unless you want to stick entirely to X11
Right, don't change things, and it will keep working. Wayland sounds like its benefits are all nerd stuff that I don't care about (a "better" architecture or whatever). Meanwhile, X works just fine. At some point, if people stop complaining about Wayland, and if it has some benefit to me, maybe I'll try it. Currently it seems that neither of those criteria are met. When I do try it, if it doesn't work, I'll just roll it back.
>Yes, exactly. Use a stable distro, don't touch things, and they won't change. It will continue to run exactly the same for years and years. This is in contrast to OSX and Windows. Windows is completely unrecognizable to me since stopped using it 7-8 years ago (the last version I used being Windows 7).
Unless you're willing to use Flatpak though, you'll be stuck with old versions of applications because user applications in the Linux world are typically tightly coupled to the system packages.
Right but that's the point. I'm fine with my stuff being out of date. I'm not trying to tinker. I don't need to use the latest versions of things because the current ones work fine. If there were something new I really wanted, then I can use one of those containerized versions until it lands in my distro's stable channel, which is every 6 months or so for feature releases.
> Wayland sounds like its benefits are all nerd stuff that I don't care about (a "better" architecture or whatever).
Kind of.
If you have a Retina display, for instance, Wayland is superior out of the box. Unless an application is written all stupid, it has a good chance of rendering at the correct scale while looking crisp. It's possible to do this with X11 or Xwayland, but I found it requires more tweaking of individual app settings and GTK environment variable to get it to look right. But even then, try using both X11 and Wayland apps together and get both kinds to look right on your HiDPI display without one or the other looking fuzzy or incorrectly scaled. I found it virtually impossible, thus it's better to just go with either one or the other. Although I think it would have been better to actually fix X11, Wayland does actually do most things better. HiDPI is one of them, and the other is vsync. I haven't seen Wayland cause horizontal tearing, but X11 always gave me this issue. A popular Stack Exchange question titled "Why is video tearing such a problem on Linux?" was written by me as a result of having tried my best to get my Linux installations to not experience horizontal tearing but inevitably failed no matter what display or graphics card I was using. I'm glad that someone in the Linux sphere decided to take vsync seriously and make it a non-issue with Wayland.
The average person doesn't need to know about Wayland, especially if they are going with a Wayland-based distro and not changing anything about it.
The only reason one would need to know about it, besides if they are writing a compositor, is if they are trying to customize their Linux distribution. In that case, they may be in for a world of hurt, because it may not be so easy as to install all the Linux apps they know and love and have everything look and play nice.
That's I think what gets to people like me. Linux is great for the server and containers, but as far as the desktop goes, it's still trying to figure out what it wants to be all these decades later. The idea that you can make it anything you want is true more in principal than in practice. Luckily, I think I have found my happy place with my customized version of Debian that I'm rolling for my own personal use, but that was after countless hours of trying things until they worked. If I wasn't willing to put in that effort and risk having nothing to show for it, I'd have dismissed Linux as a joke and just used macOS everywhere instead.
I suppose I occasionally notice a tear, but I can't say it's ever affected usability. I'm the type to turn off all animations though, so maybe that has something to do with it. I also use a cheapo $300 4k 32" monitor, and things seem to be fine at 100% scaling with a 10 pt font. If I had a $5000 monitor, I could see wanting to make it work. I also sit a little over 2 ft back from my monitor though, so the angular pixel resolution is still over 60 pixels per degree, so I don't see much point in going higher resolution than 4k.
I have read that HDR support will likely come to Wayland first (if it ever comes to X). That may be a compelling reason to try it out. Hopefully by then some of the kinks are worked out.
Back when I cared more, I was working with a lot of fast motion stuff in software like Maya, Nuke, etc., so the tearing was really bad and distracting.
> I have read that HDR support will likely come to Wayland first (if it ever comes to X). That may be a compelling reason to try it out. Hopefully by then some of the kinks are worked out.
As a side note, it's kinda crazy to me that we're talking about HDR "coming" in 2023; my graphics design teacher was telling us about HDR in 2009.
Another part of the problem (for me) is I would get something like an LTS setup the way I want (a CentOS or an Ubuntu LTS, but I honestly can't recall exactly what I was running on my desktop at the time) and it would be rock solid for years - until it finally was old enough (or out of support) and I wanted to install something new and I had to upgrade - and which point I get five years of changes right to the face, and spend a week or more tinkering everything to how I wanted it.
> But as soon as you try to "make it yours", suddenly you'll find yourself with a second day job with no pay, you'll wonder where all your free time went, and your muscle tone will be gone.
It's true for every OS. I went Windows -> Linux -> MacOS and I had to get used to every time.
I feel very similarly. Macs are polished and well built, but the amount of anti-features or weird UX decisions that I can't do anything about are maddening. I eventually switched to linux for my personal dev machine and after some initial bumpiness came to love it.
Unfortunately _entering_ Mission Control doesn't switch apps. On Windows it's a 3-finger swipe left/right. It seems like 'one of the bigger strengths of the Mac' is bigger on Windows.
That’ll switch spaces which makes more logical sense as they’re stably ordered left to right and apps (unless pinned to a space as a full or split screen app) are not.
On Windows it's 4-finger swipe left/right but it's not possible to switch between apps on macOS via gestures without 3-rd party apps. That's why I didn't get that 'compromise on UX' statement. MacOS gesture support is poorer compared to Windows (at least for my workflow) but on the hardware side Mac's Trackpad is superior.
Gesture based Window management has been around on Macs since early versions of OSX and is feature that Microsoft has attempted to copy, poorly.
> An interesting addition is the ability to use a three finger swipe up gesture to activate the new Task View feature of Windows 10. Not only does Task View look like OS X’s Mission Control (Exposé) feature, the three finger swipe up is the same gesture. Microsoft is also borrowing the three finger swipe left and right to activate switching between apps
Well, no. It's the part where you claimed that "it's not possible to switch between apps on macOS via gestures" that tells me you aren't familiar with how the Mac works.
