I just checked out DockDoor and I could not find anything related to multiple desktops in it at all.

The solution is that you as the nerd should be able to prove your skills once instead of every time. This is why I’ve personally never had an issue with Gatekeeper—one `spctl --master-disable` and a trip to the Settings menu and you’re done. Why can’t TCC work like this?

> As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this.

You seem to have understood the problem. But then you didn't follow. If there was a way to disable this, first thing that the grandma would do is watch a video how to disable that and lose security from then on.

Of course it is not perfect, but their approach here is really decent. And also, if you find yourself needing to go through that often I think that's not a good sign security-wise.

That’s likely not quite the reason. It is to make you have to pause to think if this is the action you want to take.

On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications. I almost never do. I was looking at settings recently and surprised how often I’d clicked yes by accident (maybe about 5% false click rate?)

Maybe I just missed it, but I don't see where DockDoor has anything at all to do with spaces.

I oftentimes think that as a nerd, it's easy to walk around like my shit doesn't stink, but then I realize I too have been the victim of clicking through popups mindlessly and probably have done some 'risky computing stuff' I'm unaware of beyond that.

As nerds, do we have a higher capacity to fix a mess than a grandma? Sure, probably, but that doesn't mean that we don't make messes.

That is a solution. But the underlying problem is that they didn't go far enough. There's no good reason to bundle arbitrary screen recording with window snapshots, or bundle arbitrary keylogging with hotkey activation. Just off the top of my head:

For previews, Apple could provide an API for this very common task. The OS can provide the images, and they could be sampled at refresh rate that makes it unusable for arbitrary recording.

For key chords, they could repurpose the emoji key, which is currently not available for external binding, to effectively allow capture only following that magic sequence. The OS should manage this centrally, allowing a program to define its commands and then delivering only the command without the specific associated keys presses. We get the benefit of centralized management with deconfliction, too, which is a real pain on macos as it stands.

I don't know if these solve every problem, but they solve some. There are probably better ways. Apple has plenty of smart programmers. The product team needs to let them solve the problems that they surely know bother their professional users.

Making the prompts understandable helps a lot when it comes to preventing your grandma from installing a keylogger. I don't mind the setting not being obvious exactly because people who don't know computers shouldn't be tricked into toggling them.

But it is funny to see the daily barrage of permission prompts fly through when macOS made an entire ad ridiculing Vista for half the popups and permissions macOS requires these days.

Ironically, my first thought was using Automator or AutoHotKey (there's a different one for macOS I think? But you get the point) to just identify those dialogs and click yes/allow/whatever.

Even though a bunch of the responses are "well you don't want a keylogger" when the first solutions I can think of are also (potential) keyloggers. :)

But we're not talking about Dock Door. Respect the Maker by giving him his time.

The scary thing to me is how Apple makes you jump through hoops to install or use any sort of app, but when it comes to adding items to your login items, they don't even require you to grant permission.

Tried some little throwaway app and realized you don't need it? Sucks for you. It added itself to your login items and it'll start up in the background every single time you turn on your computer. And it won't even tell you. Thought you deleted the app from your Applications folder? If you didn't check your login items, there's probably some little script that deeply installed itself and it'll reinstall it in the background during your next startup.

Adobe is the fucking worst with this. Their Creative Cloud spyware keeps enabling itself and reinstalling itself so long as you use photoshop. And it'll constantly find ways to turn itself back on. Steam also adds itself to login items, which is fucking annoying because you'll reboot and be hit in the face with game ads. At least it respects your decision when you turn it off, but login items should be opt in, never opt out.

This particular permission is pernicious, ponder for a picosecond the possibilities:

It’s used for writing keyloggers.

That’s it. It’s the permission that lets you write a keylogger. It SHOULD NOT be just a click away. It should require some extra song and dance, because this is an especially dangerous permission, and the extra friction is justified.

For a long time, I’ve believed that the actual solution is to make the system transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious. Imagine playing hide and go seek in the salt flats

> If I'm gonna be reviewing all day...

I think the point is:

Pre-LLM: 1. think, 2. write code & check, 3. review.

LLM: 1. think, 2. write prompt, <LLM writes code quickly>, 3. review.

If the thing that you enjoy about programming is writing code, you can have the LLM write code in the style you like. If you enjoyed getting to explore and understand a system, an LLM can help you do that quicker, too.

"Use LLM without thinking" won't get you substantially useful results.

> cmd+tab was a bit too slow

Using that app, if I cmd+tab from one space to another, will I see 0 (and I mean zero) animation whatsoever? The exact same behaviour as if I were switching between two apps on the same space? Because that's what I need to go anywhere near Spaces, and that's what seems impossible.

I was a linux user for some time in my youth, then corporate appeared and with that the locked windows Thinkpads, the MacOS's and such. I am finally back in Linux at home and I find it so amazing, and all my video games work too!

I switched to MacOS a few months ago from sway and I really try to be as open as possible to the mac way of life, because I don't want to fight my OS. But, boy, mission control is unusable crap. I was really shocked how dumb everything around this feature was made. Things that were possible a few years ago, are not possible anymore. Like switching to desktops/workspaces by keyboard. Or the grid.

With the app "AltTab" I can at least switch between my apps without using the mouse and with raycast I can position windows, but it is painful how much slower switching and positioning things in MacOS is, than in any tiling window manager.

It might be nice to have more than 8 MB of memory available.

The article mentions that feature and how it doesn’t work for the author.

yup, that's alt-tab : https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos I've been using it daily for last 3 years, it's awesome !

They already have that, it's the Apple Support Community. Apple still manages to neglect most complaints on the site.

Honestly, people have been complaining about Apple's decision on every semi-Apple-related forum forever. Still didn't prevent them from rolling out Liquid Glass. Not sure another one would do the job

There's already an app called Hyperspace, it reclaims disk space through use of APFS features

>On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications

One of the first things I disable on any new Firefox setup. I want zero notifications from websites (or in general, one of the objective improvements of Windows 10 over Windows 7 is that you can just disable notifications entirely, while disabling balloon alerts in Windows 7 was a huge battle that never fully worked)

I agree with you, but then to me this is a great reason why macOS (and Apple products in general) just aren't made for me. And that's ok, that's the beauty of diversity.

I use Niri workspaces that way. I name my spaces (usually after branches) and have a browser, editor and usually a few terminals open on a workspace. It's also great that a workspace has infinite space so that I can never have to think about creating workspaces just because some workspace has run out of room.

KDE tries to do this with Activities¹ (I personally haven't found it useful).

¹https://blogs.kde.org/2026/01/17/streamline-plasma-with-acti...

To be fair, so are many other UIs. Windows 95-style boxy buttons and bevels make the content look organized. Every possible action gets its button that looks like a button. You often see the total set of available actions by looking at a toolbar. You don't need to second-guess whether some piece of content itself is clickable / editable or not.

Also, everything has excessive padding now. Modern Windows control panel UIs often feel like a multicolumn wall of text with lots of empty space and a few switches dropped in, and to fit the same amount if options as the older UI they had to either hide some toggles because "known needs them anymore" or introduce extra intermediary navigation steps. As a result the new Control Panel feels bloated and less useful.

I think this behavior can be changed in System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Automatically Rearrange Spaces based on most recent use (turn it off)

PaperWM is the closest to this approach. There's also a macOS port:

https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon

I would. I love linux desktop, but the apple hardware just smokes anything else. I've had a little success with asahi, but not enough to let me switch.

I use KDE at home after leaving OS X when it became clear Apple became more interested in mobile OSes than desktop OSes, and using various combos of Linux and Windows for a bit. Gotta agree. Powerful, customizatable, and predictable at the same time.

Seriously, it's honestly pathetic at how little Microsoft and Apple have pushed UX in the past two decades.

Something like quickshell-overview feels so smooth and delicious compared to the painful use of virtual desktops on Windows/MacOS.

[0]: https://github.com/Shanu-Kumawat/quickshell-overview

> rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2"

I never noticed that behaviour because I only use mission control in full-screen mode. If you swipe up with three (or four) fingers from a full-screen window the previews are visible immediately. I have no idea why we need a different preview for desktop vs full screen however.

The part of this UX that annoys me is the spaces get re-ordered for no apparent reason. I usually have a few IDE windows open and it's tiring to have to double-check the window hasn't moved.

Yeah okay. But at least we have decent font rendering.

Agree! That "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2" view is so annoying, and given we have higher res monitors now, it serves no purpose if the intention was to save space.

Reading the article as a Linux user was almost infuriating. I can't imagine having my workflow, something I've refined for my needs over the years, taken away from me at the wish of a company. Before I switched to Plasma and Wayland I ran XFCE with the exact same config for maybe 15 years, unbothered by updates.

This assumes that every designer is on the bell curve at the big tech firms in the roles that can influence this. I am not defending modern UI/UX, but that is quite an assumption.

I want to use full screen apps. But they are not in the command-tab order. So… no good.

Part of the reason I wanted to to make the app is because _I actually do like fullscreen apps_. Or at least maybe I learned to after they took away the grid. In any case I certainly wanted this app to work with them.

Their approach is not decent. There should be some kind of master key to get full admin access. Leaving al the keys in the hand of a mega corporation is asking for trouble.

It's gone so far that even tech people now think that having root access to a mobile device is somehow scary. Well guess what that root access is still there for the manufacturer. It needs it for stuff like updates. It just shields you from having any kind of input or visibility on what is going on.

And once you've given up your admin control to the mega corporation, your government is going to be next. They'll be demanding backdoors and regulatory bullshit like age verification and snooping backdoors. Even today the EU launched yet another chatcontrol proposal. Eventually they'll manage to get it through when they've paid off enough representatives.

Keeping full control is the only way to prevent this.

you really underestimate the will of people to not change anything that annoys them about their OS. they will click 1 million times a popup away before even considering that it could be resolved indefinitely by an option change. i think Apple's system works well to keep the average user safe.

> If there was a way to disable this, first thing that the grandma would do is watch a video how to disable that and lose security from then on.

My grandma absolutely would not watch and follow a video on how to e.g. disable Gatekeeper, nor do I think she’d be able to if she tried.

Your grandma sounds substantially more tech savvy than my grandma. Good for her, she seems to know what she wants. Grown adults should be allowed to knowingly opt into an additional level of risk.

but the damage of notifications is almost zero compared to keylogger IMHO

Could make it disable-able only from the terminal in recovery mode. That one would be too hard / bothersome to fend off most cases I feel like

I feel like Arc nailed this perfectly with the vertical tabs and multiple "spaces", and since almost everything happens in-browser these days, this was 99% good enough. I can't understand why more power users don't find this setup ideal. I'm hoping Zen Browser can become a solid replacement.

I make a version of this happen with Aerospace on macOS.

Funnily enough when Aqua was new i remember thinking Platinum looked so much better.

We can do this natively in macos, isn’t it?

Is it different from Rectangle? (I've been using it for ages)

I like the concept. Assuming you were the inspiration for this (very possible) how do you feel about the usability?

I spent an hour today trying to get it working the way I’d expect and it still does odd things, like after disabling automatic reordering based on usage the order is different when 3 finger swiping previews as opposed to actual windows. The visual order is as expected but the swipe order is not linear.

FWIW your video is amazing. make it 2D and add hotkeys to go to spaces and I'll use it right away

Thank you for confessing!

I hate that design and what it has done to Gnome.

A grid was so much better.

It is absolutely, positively mind boggling that you have to sit through those animations. And key presses don’t even take effect if your new desktop until the animation is done. It’s just lunacy.

How does a company with infinite resources and talented designers come up with shit like that??

I have a Kwin plugin so my laptop is always the same, but my external monitor is a grid. Iirc by default, KDE makes them all share the same grid

I have a separate grid on each screen. Each with different grid sizes. I have a 3x3 grid on my main display a 2x2 grid on my display to the left and leave my laptop display with no grid constantly locked to my works video conference application.

It works well for me, but as you can see from the comments everyone is different :)

> besides 1-2 days a year, when my mental faculties are lowered and I decide to _fix it_

God this is so recognizable, it's truly at my lowest moments that I decide I need a new terminal emulator and spend 6 hours in a brew install rabbit hole. The worst thing is that I'm still using Warp of all things

If you're attached to Gnome, this won't be a solution, but if you're willing to consider other options, KDE allows configuring the number of virtual desktops and their arrangement.

Is the video still around? Share a link!

It's every action on Mac and iOS that does this, and it has been increasing in intrusiveness for a decade. I can't be sure why they do it, but it comes off as though their visual designers are immature, thinking we want to see their impressive animations not just in a demo, not just in a tutorial that we go through once, where we are meant to grasp the relationships between the things, but over and over again, all day long, for decades.

I freaking don't. One time was plenty. I don't want any animation. And the "reduce animation" feature's implementation is a slap in the face: all the delay -- that part is non-negotiable apparently -- but with blurry crossfades instead.

You can also do Ctrl-UpArrow then click the space you want. This isn't instant, but it might be a little better than repeatedly cycling through each desktop, especially if you have a lot of them. Turning off "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" is also a must IMO.

Personally, I only open one app per desktop and just use Command-Tab. If you hold Command after Command-Tab, you can select an app with having to cycle through all of them.

yes! it's the worst!

I've been using Instant Space Switcher (which got a small callout in tfa) as a targeted fix for this, and it's lifechanging

> A global fzf

alttab.app recently went paid, but it'll do that

Tried this? defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.05; killall Dock

> If you swipe up with three (or four) fingers from a full-screen window the previews are visible immediately.

Previews are also visible immediately if you set Mission Control as a hot-corner action. In never see the title-only spaces — i forgot it even did that until this discussion.

I also wish I could name the Spaces. "Desktop N" is pretty useless.

so does linux since when infinality-lite was ported into fontconfig, harfbuzz, and friends.

> I can't imagine having my workflow, something I've refined for my needs over the years, taken away from me at the wish of a company.

The great Gnome 3 rollout did this for me... to be fair I guess that was a decision of the distributions, but it was in concert with the developers who decided to make a hard changeover, EOL the gnome 2 line there and then, and (deliberately?) scupper the possibility of installing both 2 and 3 on the same system.

Either way it sucked and that pushed me to Xfce, which I still use on linux. But it goes to show it can happen in FOSS.

They are, but it's nuanced. If you have one app with a single window, it will always be selectable via Cmd+Tab, even if it's full-screened. If you have an app with multiple windows, one of which is full-screened, and you select a non-full-screened window from that same app, you won't be able to return to the full-screened window using Cmd+Tab. Which kinda makes sense, since Cmd+Tab cycles apps, not windows.

As a fellow fullscreen liker (there are dozens of us! dozens!), this looks quite intriguing to me. A grid layout always fit better with my mental model of how these types of spaces should work, since I could use rows as categories of work and columns as specific applications within that category. Or one of a few other mental models I've used over the years.

She would ask a grandchild or neighborhood kid to fix it, and then it would be disabled.

The full-screen mode handling might be a clue about what went wrong: if you swipe up from a space that contains a full screen app, it has an animation where the app goes into a slot in the preview strip, but that animation doesn't make sense visually for a non-full-screen space. So, perhaps someone was implementing that animation, didn't want to implement an alternate animation for the non-fullscreen case, and decided to minimize the preview strip instead? And because this was after Steve Jobs had died, there was no one left in charge of UX to explain why that was a bad idea?

I loathe that I can't even rename the desktops.

Wouldn't it be great to have them named "Design", "Dev", "Productivity", "Games". Or whatever makes sense given your needs, instead of simply desktop #.

that's a setting you can turn off. settings -> desktops and spaces -> reorder spaces

> I can't imagine having my workflow taken away from me

You never ever had a single software change its workflow?

You're right, it is a big assumption, but it's not unfounded. I've worked at F50 companies and founded my own startup. It's a lot easier to get two really great designers from the far right side of the bell curve when you're a small startup. As an organization reaches even 1000 people, you're now starting to draw from the middle of the bell curve. In fact, you have to. If you try to hire only from the far right of the bell curve for all positions, you end up with a lot of egos that will clash. In the best case, you hire leaders from the far right of the bell curve and followers from the middle. But at some point those mediocre followers start asking for promotions and your hotshot leader leaves for greener pastures. Controlling for that in your hiring practices at a large organization is virtually impossible, particularly if you have standard (middle of the bell curve) HR people. BTW, this is exactly why startups out-execute large companies every day of the week. A small startup can carefully control its hiring, select from the right side of the bell curve, and avoid all the large company HR crap. But as soon as it starts to scale, the bell curve becomes a looming threat.

Doesn't the government already have root to whatever machine via the NSA? It's the downstream government, the state-level governments that are squeaky wheels with the age verification and other nonsense.

Agreed. It just doesn't occur to most people. To even come up with the idea that maybe there's a setting for something, never mind searching for a tutorial on how to change it, you already have to be a power user for some values of "power".

This is evidenced by the people who constantly dismissed the Wi-Fi pop-up on iOS. Which is just about everyone I know with an iPhone.

Notification requests add to decision fatigue, which can lead to bad things.

Did you know that Facebook actually has a message styled with color and different font sizes that pops up in the browser console when you open the inspector for Facebook.com with instruction not to paste things you're told to paste there, with a link to https://www.facebook.com/selfxss for more information?

Zen has been working as a full replacement for Arc for me since the Atlassian acquisition. There are only minor things that I miss from Arc ("development mode").

For anyone wondering, you can use Aerospace purely as a workspace switching solution without the tiling: https://www.boronine.com/2025/02/09/Instant-Workspace-Switch...

Thrilled to see it's FOSS.

https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace

No, it would just become something you ask your tech-savvy nephew to fix for you. Windows is (or used to be) full of things like this.

Oh nice, looks awesome, I will give it a go!

Yes, mostly, since macOS 15

Yeah I guess, just a bit clunky I think. For $5 Magnet is awesome!

No. Mac window management is inexplicably awful.

My criticism of MacOS Spaces is one I have of all Apple's window management efforts over the years: It's a great start and a foundation to build upon, but they never really followed through with iterative improvements informed by real-world usage.

In Spaces' case, the problem is a combination of an overly rigid model (only two full-height windows per space) and high friction to management (the process of moving full-height windows from one space to another requires multiple steps). Traditional free-form windows are a little better, but it's easy to lose track of them because the overview itself requires two steps to access (open Mission Control, hover the top bar to expand thumbnails). These could have been gradually improved over the past 14 years, but Apple has somewhat frustratingly left these core workspace features to wither on the vine.

From the time of very early viruses, malware has spent effort modifying the tools that make the system transparent to lie to you. So your approach demands that there must be things that are absolutely impossible to change. I have yet to see a system where that is actually true.

I agree, however the fundamental problem here is that transparent systems are on the far side of the axis from user focused systems, think about it, the whole point of building a user interface is to hide and remove choice from the user, to change the system from "A steady hand with a magnetic needle" to "point and grunt" the whole point is to build a shiny facade that hides the inner working of the machine. So while you and I and many other people like to see the machine, the inner workings whirling around in grandiose majesty. Millions of man hours have been spent hiding that stuff away keeping it from view, pretending it does not exist. And thus the transparency of our computing environments have suffered correspondingly to this focus on hiding things.

Ah, I remember that video, seeing it as the future of window control. Very nice.

That seems ≈impossible in a world where you're running arbitrary, Turing-complete code. A modern consumer machine can do so many different things—often a bunch at a time—that there is always a massive amount of space to hide bad behavior.

There might be some way to design a system from the ground up to avoid this problem (some kind of declarative, capability-based security?), but retrofitting that onto an existing behemoth of a system does not really work.

If I log into my system it's safe. If someone reads my password off my screen post-it and logs into my system it's quite thoroughly compromised. How would you demonstrate which of the two sessions are compromised, during the act?

I'm using cwm (x11) without a compositor (never noticed tearing). And it's so nice when everything is not trying to be cute with shadows, animations and round corners. Animation only makes sense when there's a direct action that controls it (like when swapping spaces or hovering) or the system wanting to inform us (notifications). And it's better be fast. Otherwise it's just visual effects that quickly become tiring after a few days.

I like the app ‘Lingon X’ I think is the name, to help with this. It’s a viewer/editor for all the startup and recurrent background tasks on your Mac. But also it has a feature to notify you of any edits/additions to the startup/background items that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about.

> I only open one app per desktop

So what benefit do you get from multiple desktops?

Yup. Doesn't work.

Thanks!

Just checked their site, but I don't see "jump to a tmux pane / browser tab" in the features there...

Depends on what you allow and what your level of sophistication is.

My mother recently had "There are antivirus notifications taking over half the screen, do I need to click on them and renew Norton?"

She'd been somewhere and done something that had allowed an unscrupulous site to flood her with alerts directing her to give payment information to a scam site pretending to be antivirus renewal.

When I finally got over there (she doesn't live on the same continent) I went in and disabled notifications on all of her installed browsers.

As far as I'm concerned the whole 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.

Right, that’s why you get a simpler yes/no dialog for notifications, and a conplex “navigate to this settings pane and click a separate button” flow for a keylogger

Never underestimate the ingenuity of a motivated fool.

My litmus test for this sort of thing is Excel - I think we all can agree that Excel is used for way more than it should be, and the most complicated, unhinged uses of it are done by non-technical folks looking to get a task done through desperation.

That is correct. Platinum still looks fantastic, carefully hewn out of the HIG. Early Aqua is a bit ostentatious and at the very least indulgent. Still better than the fucking flat-slop plus glarse vomit we have to put up with now.

looks pretty much identical!

All the permissions are treated the same way though. Microphone access. Screen sharing access. etc. Yes, all could be used to spy on you in evil ways, but the replacement of a straightforward "Want to grant this app the following permissions?" with these stupid little spelunks through the garbage app that is Settings irritates me every time.

Apple should throw this whole thing out and replace it with first-launch lists of permissions, with toggles for each. This app 'Zoom' wants "Record the screen, microphone, camera." Then you're done and you don't have to keep searching for it in little lists and relaunching it.

What does that actually mean?

I get notifications that an item has added itself to your login items.

I've also switched to Instant Space Switcher, it is soo good! Previously I used BetterMouse for only this feature but they made the space switching worse in later versions (slower, on-par with the default macOS speed).

Here's the link if anyone is curious: https://github.com/jurplel/InstantSpaceSwitcher

I try to always install with Homebrew. Because then you can uninstall with the --zap option, for example:

  $ brew uninstall --zap aerospace

Usually it blows away everything associated with the app, including cached files, configuration in ~/Library and ~/.config, etc. Very useful. It'll leave a non-functional login item which isn't active and can't be active.

Windows has had the rename feature for ages and I don't know why Apple can't just copy that. They've copied plenty of other stuff, why stick with the weirdly restrictive desktop naming scheme?

Ah thanks!

The setting is "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" which explains why the behaviour felt so intermittent.

The animation for the full-screen case serves a useful purpose: drawing the eye to the window in the preview.

The non-fullscreen (desktop) case uses an animation for the same purpose, locating the current app window in a sea of others.

So what would the preview be in the swipe-from-desktop case? A preview of the window-sea, or the desktop as is? What should the animation be? I suspect those questions are why they chose to just name the desktop.

I think it would be more consistent if the tab based preview only existed for the desktop window-sea and transitioned to the actual space previews when swiping between spaces.

On the other hand, just working at big tech doesn't mean you are especially great. Conformance and criteria other than raw skill matter. As you say, promotion games, etc... I would just lump all of that under conformance. So, you aren't wrong.

However, why startups outperform big companies isn't just the skill gap. Even if you have the most amazing leadership in big tech it is monumentally difficult to move the needle on some problems purely because of size not because of incompetence. All I am saying is don't overindex on perceived intelligence. A big org can start looking pretty dumb even though it is still far right of the bell curve compared to even a startup (hypothetically). Org size and the constraints that brings are a significant factor.

> 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.

Yes and no. Prompting for it modally the way they do now is for sure wild, but for some webapps (e.g. Slack) it makes plenty of sense. I think Firefox used to have a UI they used for some things where they'd inject a non-modal bar with a couple of buttons inside the content area. This sounds like the right type of UI, maybe at the bottom of the viewport.

  site.com can send notifications when you're not on this site.  (Get Notifications from site.com) (Dismiss)

> As far as I'm concerned the whole 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.

It's a symptom of the whole "we converted our document platform into an application platform" debacle that typifies the modern web.

Notifications make no sense for the majority of websites, but if you use, say, a web-based email client, then you probably do want them.

They are not all treated the same. Microphone and even Location or Local Network can be permitted direktly with the dialog.

Both apps look like a slightly less flexible version of Divvy (which I've been using since 2010):

https://mizage.com/divvy/

However, they're also cheaper ($0 or $4.99 vs $13.99).

We dont have to put up with it. At some point the collective “we” could consider using some other machines with other, more free, operating systems.

I also used to use BetterTouch tool just for this feature, no idea what they have been thinking over at Apple with this delay.

I do as well, but no app should be able to add itself to the login items: ask me or better have me navigate to the login items settings pane and add it manually.

Does it work nowadays? Back in High Sierra days whenever I tried turning this off it did absolutely nothing and still reordered my shit.

People have been using emacs for how many decades? Or vim and terminal? Linux DEs rarely change entirely without the ability to run old versions, with the notable exception being gnome 3 which is still divisive to this day in large part because of it. And even then it was still possible to keep your workflows with MATE, the continuation of gnome 2. Libre office just recently implemented the ribbon and you can still disable it.

Radical workflow changes with no recourse is the standard in proprietary software, not so much in FOSS.

The grandma is going to follow the video on how to disable system security because scammers are making these videos and she think she has a virus.

Not because she wants to install brew or something.

I'm in Europe not the US. But NSA and their likes are a very expensive resource. They're not going to use that for small fry cases. Also, any evidence they obtain is not legal for any purpose so it has limited use.

And even NSA backdoors could be discovered more easily if we had full access to our phones, obviously.

Which pop-up do you mean?

I’d like a dialog where you are simply asked to repeat a sentence like «yes, record my screen» or «yes, record what I type» into a text field to approve. Straightforward but still makes you think.

At that point it's a them problem.

Honestly, I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with, I think it just kinda sucks and doesn’t do its job. Apple is kind of fixing it but there is a long way to go.

There have been alarm bells ringing in my head for a long time with all these settings, and the fact that they’re buried in the settings app gives me a lot of peace of mind. I’ll click through a lot of boxes and alerts and grant permissions that I shouldn’t. I’m SUPER glad that I won’t accidentally grant, you know, full disk access or accessibility to an app just by clicking on a box that appears at startup.

I remember back in the bad old days when I was constantly making extra user accounts just to run some program. Kinda sucked. Hard truth is, you sometimes want to run code that you don’t fully trust.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats — the salt flats are extremely flat (as the name implies), and because of all the salt, no vegetation can survive. Look at the pictures: there are no trees, no grass, no hiding places at all. Anyone standing (or even lying prone) on the salt flats is visible to anyone else for miles around.

GP was saying that systems should be "transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious". I'm not entirely convinced that that's possible (On Trusting Trust should have taught us that compromised systems can create places for the compromise to hide), which means that the salt flats analogy is not a great analogy, IMHO. But at least now you understand the analogy.

I like the app uninstaller included in Forklift. You open Applications folder, and delete an app. A window appears with all the associated files Forklift can find (which is extremely accurate, BTW), and you can uninstall everything you want from there.

For .pkg files, there's UninstallPKG which reads the package manifest and properly uninstalls it.

Turning off "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" keeps the spaces in the order I left them. That's nice. Three finger swipe between spaces when not using the preview seems to work.

However, swiping beetween the previews, it sometimes jumps to random places in the order - which is not nice.

Possibly a bug, but I might as well just write this as a letter to Santa because it's got more chance of being read than a feeback.

KDE 4.0 has entered the chat.

Jokes aside: yes, I can see how it's technically possible to never experience a workflow change. But also using the same tools at work, your kids school, family you help etc. I just find not very probable.

You can have the full access to your phone. See: Librem 5.

AWS Console has that, but it's infuriating that it has different prompts for different resources, it asks you to type "delete" or "confirm" or the name of the resource.

But like most of the AWS Console, each service is different in a unique way.

It's a setting that iPhones had for a long time, where they would prompt you to join the nearby WiFi networks. I don't currently have one, so I don't know what it's currently like, but a large number of people would pull out their phones, start doing something, dismiss the pop-up, and continue, many times in a day. Probably they almost never actually used it to join a WiFi network at all. You could turn it off in settings but they didn't.

Good point.

*shrug* I bought my mom a specific laptop to prevent "them" problems. I'm sorry that you're mad that every laptop doesn't conform to your use case, but perhaps this is a good time to realize that not every product is for you, and not every product has to conform to your view of the world. Sometimes, you can just not buy things that don't function the way you want.

I would like to take this moment to rage against Apple for shipping that package installer, literally 25 years ago, and never once having apparently even considered a native, out of the box way to uninstall programs that were installed that way.

Speaking of packages, even more embarrassing, Microsoft Windows literally beat them to shipping a first-party package manager. I feel like Apple lives in a fantasy land that the drag’n’drop app install method from the classic macOS is some kind of platonic ideal — never mind that they can’t stop half the apps out there from going outside that paradigm and installing their crap all over the place.

Yeah, it always seems weird to me how we deem most adults responsible enough to own a car and not drive into oncoming traffic or how people are allowed to buy actually dangerous tools from big tool stores without a second glance. And sure, there's safety training available and in the case of driving you gotta first prove you're able to follow the rules. But after that? You're on your own, only in computer land do the manufacturers and so on keep holding your hand trying to make sure you're not figuratively cutting it.

With that in mind it ends up being weird to me in a way I can't articulate because after all I can speedrun losing a limb if you left me loose in Harbor Freight or speedrun losing all my money and becoming debt-ridden if you give me a laptop with internet connection.

Anyway, I know there's more nuanced discussion to be had still I sometimes wonder how would the ideal approach actually look like without requiring people to have a digital(ing) license before being allowed to connect to the internet.

> At that point it's a them problem.

Except when it becomes a reputational problem for the OEM: Excel sucks at X (i.e., don't use it for that) and Excel sucks can become equivalent in many people's minds.

Sometimes it is actually a problem of people 'holding it wrong' (as the meme/trope goes). And who gets the blame?

> I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with

Well, if you feel that way, they do make platforms that sound like a better fit: iPad, iOS, even Android kinda fits that mold. I would call them "toy computers" but that is my bias. It's not a real computer to me if I am not even in control of what code runs on it.

I don’t think the analogy was the issue. What does it mean for a system to be so transparent that it’s obvious when it’s compromised?

I think GP was more talking about having your main workflows changed out from underneath you not so much never having to interface with something outside it. I haven’t had the luxury of a non windows workplace but if I worked in a Linux shop I’d be matching my home workflows. I see plenty of anecdotes on here about users who haven’t worked outside of emacs in decades. Not a probable scenario though I’ll agree with that.

There's nothing you can do with that.

And yeah you can root other phones too but then you end up getting blocked in apps, that's the problem. It should be none of their business that my phone is rooted.

Imagine office refusing to work on windows because I logged in with an admin account?

Ah, I can see what you’re getting at. There is actually a system which is a better fit for me, which is the Mac. I can still run the software I want on it, and even though the security model isn’t tight enough, it’s improving.

Linux is also doable, but there’s extra work involved with setting up separate user accounts for running specific pieces of software, configuring namespaces for those processes, that sort of thing. But this is backwards. I’d rather start with a secure default state and have to configure exceptions. Back in the day I could get that from SELinux strict policies but it seems like those have fallen by the wayside.

> You're on your own, only in computer land do the manufacturers and so on keep holding your hand trying to make sure you're not figuratively cutting it.

Well, firstly, newer cars are now equipped with tons of safety features like various kinds of auto-braking, various warning systems which monitor blind spots in the car, and driving aids like lane assist, lane monitoring, what have you. And then they also have advanced telemetry features that don’t keep them safe, but their insurance company hopes will identify them as bad drivers if and when they get into accidents so they can be denied coverage. These could be analogous depending how you look at it.

Additionally while there’s not much out there for tools, I think that’s less to do with it not being an issue and more to do with it being kind of impossible? That said a few tools have things like sensors that detect the presence of fingers near saw blades and will not only stop operating, they’ll usually destroy the tool in the process to ensure the operators safety, because fundamentally, more saws exist, more fingers do not.

Like despite loving track driving, I wouldn’t think that everyone tearing around in V8 monsters with stripped interiors and roll cages is a good idea.

That isn't true at all.

To attack your specific example, cars have added all kinds of things that "hand hold" the user and keep them (and others) safe: Seat belts, air bags, anti-lock brakes, traction control, automatic emergency braking, back up cameras, lane keep assist, blind spot monitors, etc, etc, etc. (Oh, and guess what, per-mile traffic deaths are WAY down from a few decades ago).

I'd say, the reasonable person test, if the mistake sounds like one a reasonable person would make, then fine.

I guess sadly the press will gloss over all the intricacies for a few clicks.

I also feel that dumbing things down probably just exacerbates this problem as "reasonable folk" have no clue how you actually get from a to b.

I was thinking it would even go so far as to make the background red if it failed some heuristics.

I can’t speak for the ancestor, but I think making every screen recording app prominently visible in the status bar would fit the bill.

That what apps have permission to access/record what at what times they use it, shouldn't be hidden or scaterred across several Settings panels.

Huh, I always forget about the newer safety features of cars because I generally see older cars around me and I used to drive cars where ABS, ESC and beeping where as far as it went for safety. And sure you could argue that telemetry used this way could be a path to price bad drivers out, if I understood your point correctly, yet while it would be effective when deployed to this goal I still instinctively regard telemetry as an invasion of privacy (in a space I assume by default to be private) but that's veering towards a different discussion.

Generally I have to admit that society is trending towards making things safe(er) by default but as always with every trend some attempts at following or complying are executed poorly (intentionally or unintentionally). Here's where I agree that while some safeties are universally good and people that disable them suffer from overconfidence I have seen some examples like experienced people removing the shields from brush cutters because they can get in the way and increase the risk of a tangle when cutting overgrowth (though you have to be mindful and careful to not fling small rocks around afterwards).

And yeah, I see your last point and generally agree but for fairness sake I would like to present the other extreme end where a person on a bicycle against a pedestrian is also dangerous albeit less so. That said I'm about to accidentally argue in favor of the "guns don't kill people..." rhetoric and I really don't want that so I will concede that for the time being it's better to (thoughtfully) design safe systems instead of relying solely on operator diligence.

Oh how I dislike that objectively I recognize the need for safety yet subjectively I disdain the fact that my tools try to nanny me and I can't reconcile these two views :/

All of which are trivial for a user to override, disable, or ignore completely except the primary airbags, which I believe is the whole point. The user is in control and its all in the owner’s manual to boot.

> And sure you could argue that telemetry used this way could be a path to price bad drivers out, if I understood your point correctly, yet while it would be effective when deployed to this goal I still instinctively regard telemetry as an invasion of privacy (in a space I assume by default to be private) but that's veering towards a different discussion.

A discussion on which I think we'd absolutely agree. But yeah, it's a thing, whether we agree with it or not.

> Generally I have to admit that society is trending towards making things safe(er) by default but as always with every trend some attempts at following or complying are executed poorly (intentionally or unintentionally). Here's where I agree that while some safeties are universally good and people that disable them suffer from overconfidence I have seen some examples like experienced people removing the shields from brush cutters because they can get in the way and increase the risk of a tangle when cutting overgrowth (though you have to be mindful and careful to not fling small rocks around afterwards).

Oh 100%. I would argue most safety features, even when implemented well, will encumber those who were already skilled, which is why you rub against the ones in MacOS. It just... I don't think there's a way around that, you know? Think it's just an immovable law of the universe.

> Oh how I dislike that objectively I recognize the need for safety yet subjectively I disdain the fact that my tools try to nanny me and I can't reconcile these two views :/

I struggled with this for a long time too, but for me, it kinda resolves with the following reasoning:

On balance, safer... everything... makes for a better society, because it enables more average people to do more things, to go more places, to use more technology, to make their lives better. And the fact is, for more experienced people, we can get around this.

Like the security constraints in MacOS are a great example: they are fucking ANNOYING when you're configuring a new Mac, completely agreed, because every last thing requires so many steps. However how often do you really find yourself needing those options in daily driver use? I can count on a hand the number of times I needed system access the last couple of weeks (and usually it's just an app update where I have to give the app the go ahead by typing in my password). The last time I had to open security options and do that whole procedure... it would have to be weeks at minimum, perhaps even months.

Many are not, and ma y of the ones in the pipe line, like speed limiters and drunk driver detection are going to be legally mandated to be nondisableable..