Comment by ars

> 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.