Comment by ecshafer 5 days ago
As a regular linux user for the last 20 years, who had used windows for games for about 25 of the last 30 years. When I had gotten a macbook pro for work in a company that was all apple there were three things that stood out: The M processors are amazing, the apple hardware is really good, and mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.
> Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.
And this is why many like me prefer Linux. We have our own opinions, and Linux enables us to enforce our opinions.
I've been a Linux guy for 25 years, and used Windows at work for the last 15. I now have to use MacOS at work.
I miss Windows. It wasn't totally better, but I managed to overcome most Windows headaches with workarounds. I haven't found the alternatives yet to MacOS.
From my perspective, both Windows and MacOS suck - but in different ways. I think the problem many Linux folks have with MacOS is that it is the "uncanny valley" of Linux. You get happy that you can use your usual UNIX flows, and then you find out that you can't.
I really want a good tiling window manager. I have yet to find one on MacOS that has the features AwesomeWM have.
It really sucks not being able to rebind keys to use Ctrl instead of Cmd in many apps. For basic tasks (opening/closing browser tabs), I have to use one set of keys in the daytime (at work), and another at night (at home). Why won't MacOS let me change them?
I got used to the Mac keyboard layout and I think it makes more sense - I now remap all Linux (using keyd) to actually use the Mac layout. The main thing that I like is that it's more ergonomic for me to press command + something with my thumb, than it is to press control + something with my little finger. So command+c, command+v, command+Tab, command+`... are all easily reachable when my fingers are still in the writing letters position, just slightly moved to the left.
MacOS lets you rebind Caps Lock, Ctrl, Option, Command, and the Globe/fn key in Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard shortcuts... > Modifier Keys. Does that not work for you?
I don't recall what problem I had with it, but it was a case of solving one problem and introducing another.
I don't want to globally swap Ctrl and Cmd. For some apps, the keys are identical to that on Windows. For others, it isn't. I need to be able to do it on a per app basis.
Most of the stuff isn't really personal preference, more like being temporarily used to a different way.
Btw search "modifier keys" in Mac sysprefs if you want to rebind command to control. I'm also sick of using separate shortcuts at work, but the other way around, gonna rebind Ubuntu.
I use Karabinier to remap keys. Mac OS makes you work hard to enable it the first time, though.
I can give you a few examples:
Packages are not done well compared to linux. Brew is a poor replacement. It feels like the terminal and everything involved is constantly out of date.
The OS just has a lot of weird things, like the ribbon at the bottom taking up so much space. When I made is smaller and hidden except on mouse over it was incredibly rough.
Window management is decades behind windows or linux. It doesn't like maximizing windows and doesn't make partitioning screen space easy. I had to download a third party app to make it better, which was still worse than windows even in windows 7, and miles worse than linux with i3.
Mac has a lot of rough spots. I have two external monitors and occasionally after updates one monitor would be fuzzy or different resolutions, and it wouldn't go back until the next update.
I found myself really frustrated trying to use MacOS at work, because I'm a heavy user of virtual desktops. Turns out, I couldn't find a way to disable animations to switch between virtual desktops on MacOS. If there is a way, I'd be surprised.
Shortening the animation to minimum was not sufficient for my preference.
When did you use a Mac last, 2010?
You can run nix on macOS now. You can also drag windows into corners or edges to tile them, it is almost exactly like Windows 7 or 10. You can even have tiling window managers on macOS that emulate i3.
Your complaints with the dock seem like a personal choice... I like the dock behavior but if you don't, probably not a lot that will fix that, it will always suck.
Sad to report that external monitor support is still terrible.
MacOs is extraordinarily opinionated about how everything should work and frequently attempt to predict your workflow.
Linux/Windows (historically) were straightforawrd, each tool did exactly what it said it would do, and it was up to you to learn how to use the tools available.
On linux/windows, if a button was "capture image", it would just capture the image on the screen. On a mac a "capture image" button could do anything from displaying the image on the screen, to saving it in a photos folder, to saving and syncing it to an iCloud account. Whatever the apple PM decided the most common use case was, and god help you if you want to do something different.
If you've been in the mac ecosystem for a while, you've grown used to this and don't notice any longer. You may even occasionally express happiness when a function does something unexpected and helpful!
If you're coming from anywhere else, its unbelievably painful.
I’d frame it slightly differently.
With Linux/Windows you’re supplied with a toolbox and from that toolbox you’re expected to cobble together a workflow that works for you and maintain it.
I spent a significant amount of time trying to learn Tasks inside of Outlook and come up with a system that would make it remotely useful. I failed repeatedly. They eventually bought Wunderlist and replaced it with that, which still has some rough edges (last I tried) due to the legacy Outlook Tasks integration.
Apple, more often than not, is looking to identify a problem and give an opinionated solution on how to handle it. If you’re ok with their solution, great, problem solved. If you’re not, you end up either fighting with the Apple tools or finding a 3rd party toolbox style app that lets you cobble together a workflow. I found just going with the opinionated solution removes a lot of needless stress from my life. There are some places I do go 3rd party, but I reevaluate often to ask if I really need these things and if they’re worth the trouble.
It ends up being a question of what my goals are with the computer. Am I looking to work on the operating system and apps to tune them to exactly what I want, or am I just looking for the system to fade into the background so I can do other things. When I was younger, I found tweaking and playing with everything to be a bit of a hobby. These days, I just want to do what I need to get done and move on with my life.
Home/End don't work correctly (external keyboard).
Cmd-Tab switching between applications instead of windows is utterly stupid. (Yes I know there is some magic keystroke that will do it, but who even wants the standard behavior? Like why even do that?)
If there is a window under another window, and you click on something in it, the OS will ignore the click, it will just activate the window.
So now you have to click twice, except what if it's actually active? So now you have to always check if a window is active - which is harder than necessary because of how Macs have the toolbar on top, not near the actual window. (This is especially bad when you have two monitors.)
The toolbar is far from the window, leading to extra mouse movements.
There is no maximize button, instead it's a full screen button.
If you manage to get a window off-screen, there's almost no way to get it back (you have to pick tile windows or something like that to make the mac move it). If you do show all windows, and click on it, nothing obvious happens.
I'm trying to add the screenshot app to the launch bar - I can't, I click on Launchpad and find it, but you can't right click on any of the icons in there to do anything with them.
The finder is an utter disaster - I can not for the life of me figure out how to go up one level in a directory. It's like finder is trying very hard to pretend there's no such thing as directories.
If you have two monitors you can't have an app halfway across both of them, it's always on one of the order.
If I move an app to the bottom right corner the OS will "helpfully" move it back up, even though I moved it down. (This is especially funny when you realize it frequently manages to place windows off screen - why can't it be helpful then?)
When you drag a window sometimes you get this white outline that will resize the window for your screen - I have yet to figure out when this activates and when it doesn't.
When you drag a window from a larger monitor to a small one, it will resize it - sometime. But despite that it manages to place the window offset - so it's the right size, but like 40 pixels to the left.
Every single time I reboot, if I have to unplug my external monitor, and keyboard, login, then plug them back in. Otherwise it refuses to talk to them.
> Every single time I reboot, if I have to unplug my external monitor, and keyboard, login, then plug them back in. Otherwise it refuses to talk to them.
HOLY SHIT, my work Mac does this all the time and my personal Mac does not, I cannot for the life of me figure out why, nobody I have talked to understands it, it drives me absolutely insane.
Everything else in your post is either a personal preference and/or not a problem for my workflow
I hate mac os window management as much as the next guy, but I do find that it's much easier to tell which window is actually active than on newer versions of windows where all windows look the same. Hell, I've typed my password in the wrong window more times than I can count, because even though the window which just appeared was on top, had a blinking cursor and everything, it wasn't active. This even happened with the UAC prompt, but I think it's been fixed now.
I also like the first click in a window to not be passed through. I don't want to have to make sure I'm not clicking on some active part which will immediately have an unwanted effect. I've actually configured my Linux WM to behave that way. It still passes through the scroll wheel, though.
> The finder is an utter disaster - I can not for the life of me figure out how to go up one level in a directory. It's like finder is trying very hard to pretend there's no such thing as directories.
You can enable a clickable bread-crumb panel somewhere. Also, cmd+up. cmd+down goes down one level, instead of enter. This was very frustrating to me at first.
> I'm trying to add the screenshot app to the launch bar - I can't, I click on Launchpad and find it, but you can't right click on any of the icons in there to do anything with them.
Never tried to do that, but I loved that there were system-wide shortcuts to access it, with an easy switch between modes (cmd+shift+3/4 for screen / area if memory serves).
> Every single time I reboot, if I have to unplug my external monitor, and keyboard, login, then plug them back in. Otherwise it refuses to talk to them.
On Windows, I have the opposite problem, kind of. It only detects my 5k external screen as such if it's plugged in when booting up. Unplug while it's running, or sleep/wake the laptop and it's gone. Linux, again, works fine.
> Home/End don't work correctly (external keyboard).
macOS tends to use the arrow keys for this, with various modifiers. Command + the arrow moves to the start or end of things (documents or lines), Option will be at the word or line level. Adding Shift to either of those will highlight those regions.
> Cmd-Tab switching between applications instead of windows is utterly stupid.
I've never been a cmd-tab user, so I don't notice thins. Once Exposé (now Mission Control) came out, I just stuck with that. I bind it to an extra button on my mouse.
> The toolbar is far from the window, leading to extra mouse movements.
The reason for this dates back to the original design of the Lisa. Bill Atkinson explains it in this video. It's a trade off between having issues with menus when windows are small, and having to move more. I believe this is why they added mouse acceleration, so no matter where you were, you could get up to the menus fairly quickly.
https://youtu.be/Qg0mHFcB510?si=yc0uCunQiMufGc75&t=416
> There is no maximize button, instead it's a full screen button.
They're starting to get better on this. The full screen button has a menu to do many things, and one of them is to maximize (they call it Fill). You can also just drag the window to the top edge to maximize it, like Aerosnap on Windows.
> If you manage to get a window off-screen, there's almost no way to get it back
Windows > Center, will bring the active window to the center of the screen.
> I click on Launchpad and find it, but you can't right click on any of the icons in there to do anything with them.
You can drag icons from LaunchPad to the Dock to add them. They'll still be where they were in LaunchPad, but now also in the Dock for quick access. LaunchPad is gone in macOS 26 though, so you can either right-click it in the Dock while it's there to tell it to keep in there (or just drag it over to the left and it will remember it)... or find it in Finder /Applications/Utilities/Screenshot
> I can not for the life of me figure out how to go up one level in a directory.
I usually show the Path Bar whenever I get a new Mac. In Finder, View > Show Path Bar. This shows your path at the bottom of the Finder window. You can click on any parent directory to go to it.
If you don't want to do that, or want another way, right-click the folder name at the top of the Finder window. This will show you a dropdown menu of all the parent directories, pick however far you want to go up the tree.
> If you have two monitors you can't have an app halfway across both of them, it's always on one of the order.
This one annoys me a bit too, and can lead to that window off-screen thing you mentioned earlier. It's one of the reason I went with a large primary monitor instead of having 4 external displays, like I had before.
> If I move an app to the bottom right corner the OS will "helpfully" move it back up
I think this has to do with the horizontal area the Dock is on being "protected" for lack of a better word, so nothing gets trapped behind the Dock. I agree, that having it do this for off-screen windows would be nice.
> When you drag a window sometimes you get this white outline that will resize the window for your screen
This is what I mentioned earlier to maximize. It works pretty much like on Windows. It activates not when the window hits an edge, but when your mouse cursor that is holding a window hits an edge.
Top edge: Maximize Side edge: Half the screen Corner: 1/4 of the screen
By default there will be gaps between these tiled windows, which some people don't like. You can remove the gaps in the Settings.
> When you drag a window from a larger monitor to a small one, it will resize it
I think this has to do with scaling of the monitors, or just that one monitor is dramatically smaller. My main setup is a laptop + a large monitor. The windows on my main display are bigger than the entire laptop screen, so it makes them smaller so they fit.
> Every single time I reboot, if I have to unplug my external monitor, and keyboard, login, then plug them back in. Otherwise it refuses to talk to them.
On my work setup I use an CalDigit dock and I occasionally have this happen after a big upgrade. I don't have to disconnect everything, I just have to login using my laptop, then trust the dock.
On my home setup, I use my monitor as the dock for my mouse and keyboard. With this, every time I reboot I need to login with the laptop and then approve the monitor as the dock for the other things to work. I don't have to unplug/replug anything (thankfully).
I tried looking into this once or twice. People online talked about various trust settings, but nothing seemed to stick. I really only reboot when there is an update, so it's pretty infrequent. If I was rebooting daily I'm sure it would drive me insane, to the point where I'd stop using the monitor as a dock.
Not just this. I'm linux/macos user since early 2000's and still sometimes hate macos because they have very annoying bugs that are never fixed, and annoying corpo decisions.
E.g. it keeps opening Music app whenever I connect bluetooth earbuds. I can't delete Music app, it just keeps popping up with imbecile message about "user is not logged in" or something. I run a script that monitors that Music.app is running and kills-9 it.
Or blinking desktop background issue, that's been there for years, accumulated many support threads, and still not fixed.
Random services like coreaudiod that suddenly start consuming 100% CPU for no apparent reason.
Macbook throttling (thanks God, gone with M cpu's)
I can keep going but my point is macos has legit problems that can't be simply shrugged off with "they just hold it the wrong way".
Like any other mass product tbh, except rare ideal products like Factorio game or sqlite.
I haven't had that Bluetooth issue (but I haven't tried connecting my non-airpods to my mac).
Have you tried this? I saw it as a fix over on Reddit.
Privacy & Security > Bluetooth > Click the + > Add Music from Applications > Toggle to disabled
(This is insane to have to do, but better than running a script to monitor for it and kill it)
> and mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use Mac.
Not sure about other people, but in my case I spend 99% of the time using software made by 3rd parties so my exposure to the OS is very limited.
Latest OS is making life miserable though, compared to all the previous releases.
Anything in particular? I get that it takes some tweaking but so does Linux. The biggest thing that you'll probably never get the way you want is window tiling - it's my personal bugaboo with MacOS. Maybe there's a way to get what I want ...
For me, the biggest pain point is the way it decides which window to bring to the front. If I minimize a window, and then click on the application in the bar, it won't show the window just minimized, instead it always seems to show the older window. Really annoying when using an app with many windows
right, but if you cmd-tab, it brings up ALL the windows: say you had multiple browser windows open, and only want to go back to the one you just used before (think reading some docs while coding).
There's a couple but nothing I've found at the level of i3 or whatever the hyprland equivalent is.
Shouldn't need to install third party stuff for such a basic feature. One more thing that will possibly break with updates or not play nice with something.
No it's not. It's one of very few things that Windows does better
Windows explorer got significantly better in 11, except for fucking context menus. Also it's incredibly slow and unstable now and frequently crashes, taking the taskbar down with it (???).
But, at least it has tabs. Jesus Christ, took long enough.
Interesting. My experience over a decade was that (expensive) Apple hardware was unreliable or poorly designed ... from the IIsi to the iMac. One exception: the murdered Power clone was great. The iMac vertical screen-stripe fiasco (affected hundreds of users within the warranty period, before they shut down the forum, then took years to respond to) was capped with a hard-drive fail after a year. My 'never again' still in effect 15 years later.
My home-made AMD tower is in its 6th year (running Linux) with no, zero, fails.
Man, we didn't have this all along.
Six years ago everything was stable and solid, but Apple's board of directors seems to have decided that new Mac users can't handle a computer interface anymore and started merging it with mobile OS interfaces. And the result is absolutely terrible.
Windows is absolute garbage, I agree. But the application windows behave normally, maximize when I want them, will take half a screen, quarter screen, etc. with just a quick hotkey. Mac doesn't have that extremely basic functionality without a 3rd party extension, which is absurd. But I don't use windows other than if my work gives me one, I am purely linux otherwise.
Hover on the green button. Also, Mac has a really robust keyboard shortcut system. Including shortcuts for tiling.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/tile-app-windows-mc...
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/create-keyboard-sho...
> mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.
I hear this from a lot of people when they get their first Mac. When they get specific about what their issues are, it tends to be that macOS doesn't do a thing how they are used to doing it, which is more of a learning curve issue, or rigid thinking. Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.