Jobs used to laugh at Microsoft for all manner of inconsistencies in behaviour and user experience with Windows, but now Apple is contending with the same problem, in part due to exposure as macOS has never been so popular and prevalent, and now there are ever growing amount of eyes calling them out for those inconsistencies that have been appearing more and more frequently without Jobs' leadership style.
> Now at least everything is consistently bad. #Programming
When Adobe suite was de facto standard for designing and coding interfaces (you know, Flash) their own software was so immensely bad that there was enough material for a guy to make fun of them on a daily basis for a good couple of years.
defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES
Makes thing bearable....note log out to see it change.
You still need to then turn transparency off via settings see
this
https://tidbits.com/2025/10/09/how-to-turn-liquid-glass-into...
this is actually one of the reasons i ended up going all in on a tiling wm (aerospace). once youre tiling, windows are edge to edge so the corner radius thing mostly disappears. the trade off is giving up floating windows,
the DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES approach is clever though. making everything consistently rounded is way more pragmatic than fighting apples design decisions or disabling SIP.
True, the "blessing" of forced online accounts, telemetry and advertisement didn't arrive to MacOS, yet. But, I wonder how long it will take us to get there.
Rounded corners are just...bizarre. Just because the laptop casing is physically rounded !? (Yet the menubar squares it off off at the top, and the bezel squares it off on the bottom...)
And the updates to Music (formerly iTunes) are so bad the entire team should be dressed down, Steve Jobs style.
If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
It's not gonna make me leave my darling Linux, ofc, but i think this whole debacle can only be interpreted as praise.
On second thought, it might also be considered a mediation on people's tendency to bike-shed.
My computer was running so slowly that I had to minimize transparency in system preferences somewhere. I think I also turned off opening every app in its own space. And I hid the icons on the Desktop in Finder settings somehow, which helped a lot. There are countless other little tweaks that are worth investigating.
I also highly recommend App Tamer (no affiliation). It lets you jail background apps at 10% cpu or whatever. It won't help with WindowServer or kernel_task (which also often runs at 100+% cpu), but it's something.
I can't help but feel that there's nobody at the wheel at Apple anymore. When I have to wait multiple seconds to open a window, to switch between apps, to go to my Applications folder, then something is terribly wrong. Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades, but now it's reaching the point where daily work is becoming difficult.
I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples. Then we can finally boot up with better alternatives that force Apple/Microsoft/Google to try again. I could see Finder or File Explorer alternatives replacing the native ones.
If you use SIP and use package managers (npm, cargo, pip, etc) outside of a VM you are substantially more vulnerable to attack than someone who doesn't use SIP and doesn't use package managers.
So if you want to fix your corners, you can do it guilt-free by adopting some better security practices around the malware delivery systems / package managers that you have installed on your computer.
Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt like a bizarre assumption to me.
The platform would aggregate by major/minor version, and you could see in totality whether the current version of macOS/iOS would make Steve proud of miserable.
Ultimately I decided against it, for defamation/cease-and-desist reasons, and not wanting to find out. But it needs to exist.
Now they sell expensive but nice hardware and they have mediocre software.
It seems you can only choose one out of three, nice hardware, nice software, good price. Apple is always choosing high price, and they either gave customers nice hardware or nice software, but not both.
Ads in a start menu can die in a fire though.
Not really, if you have malware that has root access on your system I think you're already pretty screwed, especially considering that you don't even need root to read all your saved passwords and personal files https://xkcd.com/1200/
The number of times I have noticed the corner of my windows is precisely zero because each important application gets its own workspace, so the window frame doesn't get rendered. Sometimes I'll tile two windows side by side on my external monitor but even then this is a complete non issue for me.
Are you guys just running everything on the one desktop workspace in windowed mode? That seems like madness.
I get the UI consistency thing but it's okay to transition to new UI things gradually than making radical changes all at once. If this is still an issue 2yrs from now it will be more of a concern about their commitment.
Currently, MacOS has the worst window management compared to Windows and (all) the Linux desktop environments. I mean, where else do you have such problems with resizing windows or just switching between windows, not to mention the inconsistent feature sets when you want to work with virtual desktops...
Even if that would be possible, you can't run commercial software. And for many people, the software they run is more important than the OS.
IMO, this has been their assumption for years, and it actually turned me off when I tried getting used to Mac circa 2006-2007. Coming from Windows at the time, I just couldn't get over a weird anxiety that my application window wasn't maximized, because it didn't look like it completely snapped into the screen corners.
Now, using 34-inch ultrawide monitors almost exclusively, I never maximize anything... it'd be unusable.
Apple then made things go full screen, but in a special full screen mode, so macOS worked more like the iPad.
By the time they added a way to maximize windows in the way Windows does, the idea of maximizing an app has largely worked its way out of my workflow. It was always too much trouble, and I find very few apps where it provides much benefit. Web browsers, for example, often end up with a lot of useless whitespace on the sides of the page, so they work better as a smaller window on a widescreen display. In an IDE, it really depends on what’s being worked on and if text wrapping is something I want. Ideally lines wouldn’t get so long that this is a problem.
With the way macOS manages windows, I often find it easiest to have my windows mostly overlapped with various corners poking out, so I can move between app windows in one click. The alternative is bringing every window of an app to the front (with the Dock or cmd+tab), or using Mission Control for everything, neither of which feels efficient.
I could install some 3rd party window management utility, I suppose, but in the long run, it felt easier to just figure out a workflow that works on the stock OS, so I can use any system without going through a setup process to customize everything. It’s the same reason I never seriously got into alternative keyboard layouts.
I’ve never found a setup with multiple desktops or similar with a way to quickly switch between apps I’m using more than “editor slightly more left, browser slightly more right, …” and just clicking on a border I know brings that app to the front. I’m sure many think I’m crazy. That’s ok. :)
That said, I generally hate the new OSX UI. Every UI element that is non usable just became larger and wastes space I should be able to utilize. Likewise, it made some operations insanely frustrating (here’s looking at you, corner drag resize!).
I haven’t maximized a window in years. They look ridiculous like that. Especially web pages with their max width set so the content is 1/4 the screen and 3/4 whitespace.
There are things which definitely do bother me like the Liquid Glass, but the window corners really don't bother me. And I'm into design and constantly inspect parts of ui with Digital Color Meter app.
Apple traditionally burned out its talent, and is no longer structured to follow Jobs original vision. There is a lot of goodwill with the users, but just like Sony/HP/IBM/Microsoft/Sun it can't last forever. The process-people entrench themselves, and ruin everything... just as Jobs predicted. =3
If you want ads in Spotlight or Launchpad, telling people to tolerate "opinionated, and likely worse but also not breaking" features is exactly how you get it. It's how Windows got there.
That means there are exactly two of us.
Or to stay it another way, if we see shit like this then we know the whole thing is a hack.
This argument would also make Windows 11 a pretty decent OS by extension via "If the biggest flaw of a OS is the position of the start menu you've got yourself a pretty decent OS".
In general I could use any minor nuisance as a proof of decency - or inject some to form this argument on purpose as a manufacturer.
People don't like if their environment changes in minor unsolicited ways. There's always gonna be fuzz about these things and that means that the fuzz itself can't be used to make any strong argument whatsoever.
The assumption is that the window should be the size of the content of the document inside.
It turns out that this approach works well for many applications, especially what the mac was designed for in the 80s and 90s. And it's horrid for modern "pro" applications.
However, after the internship I went right back to fullscreen/window tiling in linux, so I can't say I really preferred it. Even now as a Gnome user with a big monitor and magic trackpad on my desk - which gives me ~equal access to either approach - I fullscreen everything.
But for other apps where interactions tend to be brief like Finder, Messages, Notes, Music, etc - yeah I don't usually expand them to full screen.
On large external monitors, I think it makes total sense not to have every window maximized, though. Probably less usable that way.
Why? No one has shown that LLMs produce particularly good code. You can get a lot of useful shit done with what is still slop, but there is no reason to believe there's any evolutionary improvement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282085#47310011
Probably my least favorite redesign in the whole update. Why is everything an oval? It's just bizarre.
My neurodivergency makes me feel actual distress over those corners. I am not being dramatic. It sucks.
To my designers eye it was the first thing I saw, to him it was nothing.
I still think it's bad and a sign of a change in apple focus/style, but it's clearly not an issue at all for a lot of people.
Said colleague did get cross when he struggled to resize a window though. Turns out inconsistent corners means inconsistent handles. And that is a real problem.
Full screen one. Switch to the other. Now, use just cmd-tab and cmd-` to get to the full screen safari window (cmd-` switches between windows in the same application, which is literally never the right thing, but I digress).
For what it's worth, the third party tool 'altTab' mostly fixes this.
Bonus MacOS UI bug: I had to exit altTab to confirm they still hadn't fixed cmd-`. When I re-opened it using cmd-space, finder defaulted to the version in ~/Downloads instead of /Applications, then read me the riot act about untrusted software trying to change accessibility settings.
One more thing: I'm still not using MacOS 26, so all my complaints are about the "last known good" release.
Except Safari, which just fills out the window's height vertically. Kinda weird to make an exception like that but I don't hate it, because I generally use Safari for reading, and shrinking the browser's width forces lines of text to not get too long if the website's styling isn't setting that manually.
It works well for me, makes it easy to get two things side by side without wasting space.
Full Screen Mode was their answer to maximize, going back many years now (10.7).
Browsers only ever get maximized to the left/right half screen for me too
Which is something macos should really improve on though, the ux is pretty bad compared to Windows and Linux there
I maximize windows of graphics and video editors.
If I ever accidentally full screen a window, and it’s not in night mode, I am instantly blinded by a wall of mostly white empty background!
My actual biggest pet peeve with this setup is the vast number of web sites that deliberately choose to limit their content to a tiny column centered horizontally in my browser, with 10cm of wasted whitespace on each side.
I sometimes maximize something - other than video calls: those are always full-size - on the laptop screen, but otherwise not at all.
I can see how a full-screen IDE makes sense, but I don't use one, so I always want a couple of terminal sessions running alongside my editor.
There are vanishingly few contexts in which I find full-screen helpful. Not criticizing anyone else, or recommending my way of working, but it's what works for me.
[0] I would like better support for desktop management: naming and shortcutting, particularly. Years ago I tried some (I think it was Alfred, or a predecessor) add-on that promised that, but it was super flaky. Does anything exist that works well?
I think there's a conflict between the users who use it on studio displays and users who use it on 13 inch laptops. The Mac team at apple won't pick a side or come up with two solutions.
That's not completely true, they've been pushing swipe between fullscreen apps for a while.
But that doesn't make any sense on an iMac.
So the recommendation from pro users is to use Alfred to manage windows.
The other day I was explaining to one that their designs fixed width looks silly once it got up towards 4k resolutions. But the designers main concern was if people actually used full screen browsers on 4k monitors and if there was any point in thinking about the design at that resolution.
There are plenty of times I enjoy have 2 browsers side by side of even 4 browsers in a square, and being able to do that is one of the benefits of having a 4k monitor. But without a doubt the majority of my time is spent with a full size browser window open, and I observe the same from all the other windows/linux users I manage that use a 4k monitor.
In service of keeping this post simple, I've ignore system display/ui scaling. But still... the question/assumption from the mac designer completely blew my mind.
I use cmd+tab and cmd+~ a ton also as I have multiple browser profiles and windows open and usually a few instances of ide with different projects.
And always close tabs with cmd+w and apps with cmd+q to avoid running apps with no visible windows.
I feel super productive with this workflow, never need to fiddle with manual resize.
When someone is screen sharing and they have a bunch of random sized windows it drives me crazy.
There are apps that they need to run in the background, sure. They have a spot in the menubar.
Oh no I forgot, you can only have 5 of them. Not 6. Why? Because FU. Go buy a third party app (bartender) that records your entire screen to do basic app management that the OS should do.
I hate MacOS.
they tried to do something with remembering "how you left things" between sessions, and even when disabled things are still weird...
Also some power management related hooks are not working as well as before. Like if you put the computer to sleep at night, and wake it up in the morning, the automatic dark-to-light theme switch doesn't trigger. at least not always.
Still the best system to work with though!
I used to roll my eyes at the complaints until I actually had one of these, and it is appallingly bad engineering. Especially since the previous design, which was functionally identical just needed a 10 second battery swap.
As someone who works on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Windows stands alone in my opinion as the "stepping on legos with no socks on" of operating systems.
I've been hearing this complaint for decades and I'll never understand it. The suggestion seems completely at odds with my own experience. Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.
I remember a time when I could visually see the screen repaint after minimizing a window, or waiting 3 minutes for the OS to boot, or waiting 30 minutes to install a 600mb video game from local media. My m2 air with 16gb of memory only has to reboot for updates, I haphazardly open 100 browser tabs, run spotify, slack, an IDE, build whatever project I'm working on, and the machine occasionally gets warm. Everything works fine, I never have performance issues. My linux machines, gaming pc, and phone feel just as snappy. It feels to me that we are living in a golden age of computer performance.
That's because some app is spamming window updates.
It's been an ongoing problem for many releases. AFAICT, WindowServer 100% CPU is a symptom, not a cause.
SIP guarantees that you will be able to turn on your computer in safe mode and remove the malware, whereas without it your OS is toast.
Do you have a system in mind that prevents the user from doing this?
This very much depends on what hardware you have and what you're doing on it (how much spare capacity you have).
Back in university I had a Techbite Zin 2, it had a Celeron N3350 and 4 GB of LPDDR4. It was affordable for me as a student (while I also had a PC in the dorm) and the keyboard was great and it worked out nicely for note taking and some web browsing when visiting parents in the countryside.
At the same time, the OS made a world of difference and it was anything but fast. Windows was pretty much unusable and it was the kind of hardware where you started to think whether you really need XFCE or whether LXDE would be enough.
I think both of the statements can be true: that Wirth's law is true and computers run way, way slower than they should due to bad software... and that normally you don't really feel it due to us throwing a lot of hardware at the problem to make us able to ignore it.
It's largely the same as you get with modern video game graphics and engines like UE5, where only now we are seeing horrible performance across the board that mainstream hardware often can't make up for and so devs reach for upscaling and framegen as something they demand you use (e.g. Borderlands 4), instead of just something to use for mobile gaming.
It's also like running ESLint and Prettier on your project and having a full build and formatting iteration take like 2 minutes without cache (though faster with cache), HOWEVER then you install Oxlint and Oxfmt and are surprised to find out that it takes SECONDS for the whole codebase. Maybe the "rewrite it in Rust" folks had a point. Bad code in Rust and similar languages will still run badly, but a fast runtime will make good code fly.
I could also probably compare the old Skype against modern Teams, or probably any split between the pre-Electron and modern day world.
Note: runtime in the loose sense, e.g. compiled native executables, vs the kind that also have GC, vs something like JVM and .NET, vs other interpreters like Python and Ruby and so on. Idk what you'd call it more precisely, execution model?
If Apple would give insight about this, the developers wold get bug reports and complaints
Similar to the electron shit
If I had malware then the fate of the hardware is at the bottom of my priority list, I'm probably going to be replacing it anyway. I'd be more concerned that someone is going to steal my AWS credentials to run a cryptominer and I get a bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars!
The only solution to malware is to not install it in the first place. By the time SIP is useful you are already very screwed. SIP makes you safer in the same way that having a parachute on a plane makes you safer, technically yes but the difference in safety is marginal.
Why is it that some of the most useful features in Apple products are impossible to find on your own? I recently also learned about "three finger swipe to undo" in iOS instead of shaking the damn thing like it owes me money.
Alongside the various bugs you get, one of the issues of upgrading to MacOS 26 is that it has one of the most notorious inconsistency issues in window corners. I'm not sure what exactly pushes product designers to like the excessive roundness11. One of the ugliest roundness examples I've ever seen is the current one in the YouTube UI design. I believe that UI design is the most influencive22. that's to say, contagious form inwards field ever since designers just try to follow whatever big companies do (in fact I see this a lot in my work, when two designers are having an argument, one of them would resolve it to, let's see how Apple draw that button), which means that we are probably going to see this ugly effect elsewhere very soon.
Anyway, recently I had to upgrade to macOS 26. And I found the edges ugly, like everyone else did. However, what's even uglier, is the inconsistency. Many people try to resolve this by disabling MacOS system integrity protection, which results in making them possibly vulnerable33. Arguable, since you just lose security over /root, which is not a big deal if someone already gained access to your machine, at least for me. Edit: I learnt that this is not the case from comments, however, I still believe that if you're already pwned, SIP can't do much there.. The reason why you need to disable SIP, is that to edit the dynamic libraries that system apps like Safari (which has crazy bad corners) use, you need to edit system libraries that exist the root. To me though, I don't find the corners so bad, but I find the inconsistency very annoying. So I think a better solution to this is; instead of making everything roundless, make everything more rounded, which requires you to edit only user apps (i.e. no SIP disabling needed). I forked a solution that makes things roundless to modify it to have my approach. It's simply as follows:
#import <AppKit/AppKit.h>
#import <objc/runtime.h>
static CGFloat kDesiredCornerRadius = 23.0;
static double swizzled_cornerRadius(id self, SEL _cmd) {
return kDesiredCornerRadius;
}
static double swizzled_getCachedCornerRadius(id self, SEL _cmd) {
return kDesiredCornerRadius;
}
static CGSize swizzled_topCornerSize(id self, SEL _cmd) {
return CGSizeMake(kDesiredCornerRadius, kDesiredCornerRadius);
}
static CGSize swizzled_bottomCornerSize(id self, SEL _cmd) {
return CGSizeMake(kDesiredCornerRadius, kDesiredCornerRadius);
}
__attribute__((constructor))
static void init(void) {
// Only apply to third-party GUI apps; skip CLI tools, daemons, and Apple system apps
NSString *bid = [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundleIdentifier];
if (!bid || [bid hasPrefix:@"com.apple."]) return;
Class cls = NSClassFromString(@"NSThemeFrame");
if (!cls) return;
Method m1 = class_getInstanceMethod(cls, @selector(_cornerRadius));
if (m1) method_setImplementation(m1, (IMP)swizzled_cornerRadius);
Method m2 = class_getInstanceMethod(cls, @selector(_getCachedWindowCornerRadius));
if (m2) method_setImplementation(m2, (IMP)swizzled_getCachedCornerRadius);
Method m3 = class_getInstanceMethod(cls, @selector(_topCornerSize));
if (m3) method_setImplementation(m3, (IMP)swizzled_topCornerSize);
Method m4 = class_getInstanceMethod(cls, @selector(_bottomCornerSize));
if (m4) method_setImplementation(m4, (IMP)swizzled_bottomCornerSize);
}
Then compile, sign, and store:
clang -arch arm64e -arch x86_64 -dynamiclib -framework AppKit \
-o SafariCornerTweak.dylib \
SafariCornerTweak.m
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/
sudo cp SafariCornerTweak.dylib /usr/local/lib/
sudo codesign -f -s - /usr/local/lib/SafariCornerTweak.dylib
cp com.local.dyld-inject.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.local.dyld-inject.plist
You can have this plist too to load it in once your computer loads:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.local.dyld-inject</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>launchctl</string>
<string>setenv</string>
<string>DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES</string>
<string>/usr/local/lib/SafariCornerTweak.dylib</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>
Load it:
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.local.dyld-inject.plist
Now at least everything is consistently bad. #Programming
One of the ugliest roundness examples I've ever seen is the current one in the YouTube UI design
that's to say, contagious form inwards
Arguable, since you just lose security over /root, which is not a big deal if someone already gained access to your machine, at least for me. Edit: I learnt that this is not the case from comments, however, I still believe that if you're already pwned, SIP can't do much there.
Now in iOS 26, you can just be typing in Notes or just the safari address bar for example, and the keyboard will randomly lag behind and freeze, likely because it is waiting on some autocomplete task to run on the keyboard process itself. And this is on top of the line, modern hardware.
A lot of the fundamentals that were focused on in the past to ensure responsiveness to user input was never lost, became lost. And lost for no real good reason, other than lazy development practices, unnecessary abstraction layers, and other modern developer conveniences.
Photons travel about 1 foot per nanosecond ... so the CPU can executes MANY instructions between the time photons leave your screen, and the time they reach your eyes.
Now, on Windows start Word (on a Mac start Writer) ... come on ... I'll wait.
Still with me? Don't blame the SSD and reload it again from the cache.
Weep.
10% of the time, Windowserver takes off and spends 150% CPU. Or I develop keystroke lag. Or I can't get a terminal open because Time Machine has the backup volume in the half mounted state.
It's thousands of times faster than the Ultra 1 that was once on my desk. And I can certainly do workloads that fundamentally take thousands of times more cycles. But I usually spend a greater proportion of this machine's speed on the UI and responsiveness doesn't always win over 30 years ago.
The modern throughput is faster by far. However, what some people mean when they talk about "slower" is the latency snappiness that characterizes early microcomputer systems. That has definitely gotten way worse in an empirically measurable fashion.
Dan Luu's article explains this very well [1].
It is difficult today to go through that lived experience of that low latency today because you don't appreciate it until you lived it for years. Few people have access to an Apple ][ rig with a composite monitor for years on end any longer. The hackers that experienced that low latency never forgot it, because the responsiveness feels like a fluid extension of your thoughts in a way higher latency systems cannot match.
FWIU there's really no backpressure mechanism for apps delegating compositing (via CoreAnimation / CALayers) to WindowServer which is the real problem IMO.
Sure, macOS could adopt an iPad-style security system that refuses to run all software outside the App Store. It works on iPhone and iPad just fine, all the prosumers love it.
It's not like native darwin triples are a popular compilation target. There wouldn't be any vast tragedy if the macOS shellutil authors were told to use zsh in a VM instead, it would separate the parts of macOS that Apple cares about from the parts they don't seriously support. WSL and Crostini achieves this on vastly weaker hardware with great results.
Obviously all of that works better if Finder windows don't usually fill the screen, but it's not a hard requirement.
Spotlight doesn’t make sense either.. caches get evicted, but there’s no logic that prevents it from building it back up immediately
Log processes are fine, but they should never be able to use 100% / At the same priority (cpu+io)
But when RAPL and similar tools to throttle CPU are used, the CPU time gets reported as kernel_task - on linux it would show similarly as one of the kernel threads.
When I use the Window menu, Zoom replicates what double-clicking the top title bar does, while Fill maximizes the window. This holds true with the behavior you describe in Safari as well.
It just seems like a lot of apps treat Zoom and Fill the same now (I tried Calendar, Notes, TextEdit, and NetNewsWire), which adds to the confusion.
(IMO the spacial Finder was designed around floppies and small folders and didn't work so well with hierarchical folder views, so no big loss...)
It’s probably a me problem, but I’m going to open stuff and then leave it scattered around all day. It’s fine.
I don’t use more than a couple of virtual desktops either. Just one for current tasks and one for background apps.
It’s so ingrained I tend to get frustrated on other desktops, which are nearly all built around the Windows mentality of keeping displays filled to the brim with tiled or maximized windows.
Even on the handful of times with maximize/tile on macOS, it’s with a gap of a few pixels of desktop peeking through so it doesn’t feel as “boxed in” and claustrophobic.
Another component is how ability to overlap windows is emphasized, allowing the currently relevant portion of them to be visible without taking center stage or stealing any space from your main window(s).
Both are part of a larger difference in mentality and workflow style.
Not because they necessarily cared, but because it functions as an easy-to-verify proxy for whether the venue actually read the contract.
Hover over the green button in the top left of the window. I recently found out about that menu for moving a window between screens, which is also an option it has. (I also just found them in the Window menu if you prefer that. I dont; the options take an extra level of hovering to get to.)
I frequently use macOS on a projector, it doesn't quite fill my wall floor to ceiling but it comes close. I don't use full screen often, but I do it occasionally as a focusing strategy, and it's fine.
1. On a screen share support call with a mac user
2. Asked them to pull up a webpage
3. They pull up a super tiny ass browser window to the point I can't really see anything
4. I ask them to full screen the browser so we can actually read shit
5. The mac user just straight up panics or acts like like I've spoken an alien language to them.
The same process happens when I need a mac user to get to an apps settings that on a windows/linux computer would normally be under something like File > Preferences/Settings. They have no idea what I'm talking about or know just barely enough to know they don't remember how to do it and panic.Then I have to go google it and remember that CMD+comma(⌘+,) exists and reveal it to the mac user like it's actual black magic. And then I immediately forget about it until 6 months later when I need to support a mac user again and I repeat the whole cycle again.
That was the Mac in the 1990s. It was designed for, and highly usable with, a one-button mouse. It didn't have hidden context menus or obscure keyboard shortcuts. Everything was visible in the menu bar and discoverable. The Finder was spatially aware with a high degree of persistence that allowed you to develop muscle memory for where icons would appear onscreen every time you opened a folder.
There was almost nothing hidden or lurking in the background, unlike today (my modern Mac system has 500 running processes right now, despite having only 15 applications open). We've had decades of feature creep since the classic Mac OS, which has made modern Macs extremely hard to use (relatively speaking).
As a related anecdote, my friend said my car was ugly. I asked him what cars he thought looked good. He said “I don’t like cars”. As a result I realized his opinion was worthless
After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back. Even on Windows I find myself working the way I do on macOS. Full screening every app made more sense on a 1024x768 screen (or smaller). Once I moved to a widescreen display (which happened to coincide with getting my first mac) running full screen felt like the wrong move most of time.
Web pages would look something like this:
| <- whitespace -> | <- content -> | <- whitespace -> |
| | Lorem ipsum | |
| | dolor sit amet, | |
| | consectetur | |
| | adipiscing | |
| | elit. Morbi | |
| | convallis ante | |
Making the window smaller meant less wasted space and less blinding white space. Once I got used to that idea, it carried over to most other apps.I guess you are only interested in the desktop looks part which on Linux is done by different window managers (like KDE, Gnome, Sway, ...) which can compete with MacOS in my view.
I was recently forced to switch from Gnome to MacOS Tahoe and the UX is so bad it's frustrating. Mission Control has no features apart from switching windows it seems (can not close windows, not change dock icons which all works on Gnome). Password fields often have no option to view the cleartext entered. This is especially confusing because symbols that I used daily are suddenly not printed on my keyboard anymore and I have to memorize shortcuts to enter them. In finder I see no way to go to the parent folder, isn't that something people on macs do? It just feels like it's years behind open source alternatives...
Concerning your car story: have you tried other Operating systems? Otherwise your opinion might be worthless here...
Apple design is only different on release, after a few months I start getting force fed apple-isms in programs that don't have anything to do with them.
Some apps do respect it, but sometimes it's hardcoded, and OS settings don't seem to override it. Even the OS doesn't respect it in some cases, but I think it used to. Flutter apps? Forget about it.
It doesn't render for me either, but is in the HTML at path...
.../html/body/div/div/main/div[3]/div[6]/div/div[2]/div/p
Edit: SIP has a series of control bits for a diverse set of protections. You can see what these control (and which bits "csrutil disable" toggles) in this include file: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/f6217f89...
I am currently running a 16" display at a similar fractional scaled resolution (because Apple stopped understanding DPI after shipping the first LaserWriter, apparently).
Over that time, my eyes have not gotten better to match display DPI, so I'd rather have web sites just adjust the font size so that there are a reasonable number of words per line instead of rendering whitespace.
Non-full-screen windows would make more sense if Apple supported tiling properly, like most Linux WMs and also modern Windows.
MacOS sort of supports tiling in a "program manager shipped it + got promoted" sort of way, but you have to hover over the window manager buttons, which is slower than just manually arranging stuff. If there are any keyboard shortcuts to invoke tiling, or a way to change the WM buttons to not suck, I have not found them.
[1]: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite [2]: https://github.com/paulmcauley/klassy
As for tiling in macOS...
You can use the mouse to drag windows into tiled positions. Grab a window and when your cursor hits the side, corner, or top edge of the screen, it will indicate the tiling position, much like AeroSnap on Windows from some years back. You can also hold the Option key while holding the window to get the tiling regions to show up without moving all the way to the edge.
Keyboard shortcuts exist as well. Go to Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts... In the dialog that opens, go to Windows. There you can see all the options and customize them if you'd like. Or set shortcuts for things that might not have one yet.
If for some reason dragging the windows around doesn't work, go to Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> the Windows heading. There are toggles to enable or disable dragging to tile, and the Option key trick. You can also turn off the margins on tiled Windows, which you'd probably want to do.
I've never been a big fan of window tiling myself. There was a time when I needed a lot of different windows visible at all times, but that hasn't been the case in a long time. I find tiling makes things too big or small, it's never what I actually want. I drag the window up to the top of the screen to invoke Fill from time to time, but that's about it.
Fuck Tim Apple! Seriously, fuck him hard in the arse! Why would they hide this. I've been dealing with this shit for two decades and I find out via a HN comment that Apple was hiding this feature behind a green dot‽‽‽‽
All the rest I'd prefer to just summon as-needed and then dismiss without navigating away from the windows I care about.
sway/niri want me to tile every window into some top-level spot.
Took me a while to admit it, but the usual Windows/macOS/DE "stacking" method is what I want + a few hotkeys to arrange the few windows I care about.
It sounds like the scratchpad may be especially close to what you want.
Obnoxiously, it's part of the recent trend of overloading the Globe/Fn key, so it's hard to do with third-party keyboards.
If you're using a monitor in the dark the way you use a projector, you should turn the backlight down. If you're using it in a well lit room, the brighter backlight should have less of an effect.
The fact that it's bright outside when the sun is up might help, but it's nowhere near enough to compensate!
It sounds to me you've never actually looked at a monitor display large swaths of white before, it's brighter than light hitting a wall for sure, even with the brightness down, extra so when the ambient lightning is dark too.
This is the biggest reason I love Linux. I can choose my own desktop, or even forsake the desktop entirely for a simpler window manager, without changing operating systems. Some are hyper focused on a tailored experience (gnome) while others let you configure to your heart's content (kde).
There's sacrifices to be made, of course, but not having to live under the oppression of Apple's beneficiary dictator designers is absolutely worth it for me.
Every MacOS app has a menu item explicitly made for this exact thing. It's often the third item in the menu:
File Edit View
But they refuse to put these viewing options under the View menu item. Why? Why would you not put these really great viewing options under View?