I wouldn't say "even Windows" does window management better than macOS. Windows actually does window management pretty well. It's one of its strong points.
It *was* good with the classic taskbar. Ever since they did the taskbar grouping thing (and therefore hiding text) and added preview-pop-ups (that you can only disable via registry hack), the workflow greatly suffered for me. I will never understand why Microsoft (and a lot of the Windows userbase) think its better, if the huge 27" screen only uses a few icons on your left side of the taskbar, while all sub-windows get grouped behind the icon. You have to either use Alt-Tab or do this awkwad thing of moving your cursor to the program icon, wait for this window preview, *then* you can only start looking for the sub-window until you find it. This may not sound like a lot of used time, but oh boy, it adds up soooo much if you use Windows for a while. Classic Taskbar on the other hand: You look down, read the title of the window you want, you move your cursor down to the very wide button and click it. No waiting, no hidden text, no unwanted mousehover pop-ups. Personally i dont even need to actually read, since the taskbar is always visible the Windows and their text lines are printed into my consciousness, so i can switch to the window i want almost "blind" on classic taskbar. No other desktop design philosophy could ever reach this simple, quick and reliable windows management for me. This is also one reasons why i really dislike Windows 11 (despite many other reasons).
@@TheLinuxEXP Windows Vista was ahead of its time. I had a q6600 and George 8800gt so it worked faster and better than XP. After having the search and the window snapping I hated using XP machines.
@@LegioXXI Are you talking about only Win11? Because even in Win10 you can ungroup icons in the system settings. What was even more glaring to me was this Ne.nd.rthal acting like you can't put the taskbar on any edge of the screen. Maybe that changed in Windows 11, but most people are still using 10 or earlier.
Haven't you considered that you are on the wrong side? Because the predominant Desktop OS is Windows, not MacOS... and still, I can tell you Linux is better
Mac apps are actually not single files, they are directories with a special extension (.app) and internal structure, which is shown by the OS as just the icon of the app. It's actually quite nice to be able install/remove apps just by copying/deleting files. It's a paradigm users already understand. But ... a few apps also require a custom installer, and then you get the typical Windows experience, in which you also need a custom uninstaller to remove it. This confuses many Mac users, because they are not very used to it and struggle to remove these apps.
I can understand the confusion when you can't apt-get remove. If you are coming from linux and prefer to do things in a needlessly complex way, install brew and then you can brew install and uninstall to your hearts content. Us Mac users will continue to install apps by dragging them to the applications folder, and uninstalling by dragging to the trash.
@@ephemera-noctourniquet I wasn't aware my comment was hostile? I used linux for 8 years so I got a chuckle about macOS feeling old. Last year I tried to find a linux distro that works with 1 1080p and 1 4k monitor and literally failed to do so - always had issues, either outright, or dragging between monitors. Themes are inconsistent across apps due to some being GTK, some being Qt, etc. Don't get me started on Pulse VS ALSA VS Proton audio. The reason I switched off of linux is because at this point I need my computer for doing work, not to tinker with.
@@R0MUl0 I think XCode is absolute garbage, so no arguments there. To be fair, I consider visual studio on windows to be a slow piece of garbage as well. I use either vim, or jetbrains IDEs -- on both windows at work and mac at home -- have you checked out AppCode? I've had my M1 air since release and I've had absolutely no crashes whatsoever. It's been rock solid and I use it day in and out 7 days a week. I can't really speak for x86 as all of the apps I use have been ported to arm64 at this point. I know everyone has their own experiences -- but the last 3 or so attempts at using a linux desktop has ended in frustration and at this point I don't want to touch it unless it's in a kubernetes cluster or vsphere.
Yes, window management has been a pain on macOS for a long time and has only gotten marginally better over the years. One small correction though: you don't need to exit Mission Control to move a window from an inactive Desktop to another. You can use a three-finger swipe left or right, or use a keyboard shortcut (by default Control + Left/Right Arrow) to switch Desktops without leaving Mission Control.
It /does/ depend how you work. The only window management that I wish I could do on macOS that I can’t is a keyboard shortcut for “move to next monitor”. However, I agree that fullscreen is almost always useless, and maximize is what I want. But Mission Control means that I don’t need to do things like tiling.
@@natbarmore I disagree on that one. Maximize's role is to give as much space to a window as possible which is effectively what Full Screen does. Additionally, it moves the full screen window to its own desktop which is a better behaviour since, as a window is maximised, I don't want or need other windows in the way. If I'm working with a full screen window (say VSCode, Modelsim, Overleaf or what have you), any other window appearing should go to a separate desktop. Doing so is even better when tiling. macOS' practice of treating a pair of tiled windows as a single full screen entity is also great. As for the criticism of not being able to tile with only a single window open, I'm not sure I understand it. In what world would you want to have only a single window tiled? Personally, I believe that replicating macOS' full screen behaviour would be a good idea for any DE out there while taking inspiration of both it and Windows' behaviour for tiling would be a good idea.
Meh, I’m alright installing other tools for window management. While on Linux, I stick to FOSS, everyone on Mac understands that some slightly more elegant solutions essentially “nickel&dime” you. Sure if you come from Linux you expect to be able to install a window manager for free, but on Mac you’ll probably pay $2 or $3
Another gripe I have is how they seem obsessed to hide anything that is considered as "advanced" - even for simply access to "Save as" when saving something, you need a specific shortcut. And the finder which hides the actual filesystem folder hierarchy, more "special shortcuts" for simple things like deleting a file, etc. Manipulating large numbers of files is a serious PITA in general.
I am fine with some stuff being simple by default, as long as I can customise it so that what I need is quick to access. Macos takes this too far. I get annoyed with nautilus using ctrl+l to edit the file path, but not showing it is stupid
These days, you really have to use a trackpad to take full advantage of all the window management stuff. When you are in mission control, you can also use the three-finger swipe to move between desktops, which imo makes it easy to move windows around between them. I also don't understand why they don't enable App Exposé by default. If you set it to three-finger swipe down, it will show all windows from the current app, including those that are minimized. I would say in general, the most deficient aspect of Mac OS is the Finder. It's missing many things that should have been added in the past 20 years, and it's buggy enough that you can never really trust it if you are trying to do anything with a large number of files. Anyway, I'm glad Linux exists for you and Mac OS exists for me, because we each seem to like and prefer the conventions of each. Not everything has to be the same because people have different preferences.
+1 this. I like using macOS and Linux for different purposes. macOS is my main Desktop OS, while Linux is the working horse. Every time i need a pragmatic solution for anything, every time i need an efficient OS without a lot of resource waste, i will pick up a Linux distro that fits those requirements. Would never use Windows or macOS for example on a Raspberry Pi (instead of RetroPi), even if it was possible. Same goes for Admin systems. Linux may has the smallest desktop market share, but on every other usercase, Linux is king. You don't have to stick to only one operating system for *everything*. Its perfectly viable to combine different systems for different purposes.
Wouldn't know what a trackpad is to be honest. I mostly use a desktop nowadays, and even before when I regularly used a laptop I almost always connected a mouse to it. I'm also a windows guy so I'm a mouse guy. My current mouse is a MMO mouse and has 12 keys on the side that are mapped to various shortcuts. We windows guys like our mice and macros. We don't like having to use the keyboard that much unless we type, and we don't like trackpads because the accuracy and speed of a mouse is lightyears ahead.
I don't even know half the shortcuts mapped to my mouse. I just know what the macro does and have totally forgotten what keys I actually need to press on the keyboard to achieve it lmao.
And also btw I'm a Linux guy now. Windows 11 made me switch last year. But prior to Linux I had been using Windows since I was a kid. I've gotten fairly advanced with Linux, way more than I ever was with windows to be honest. Due to being an advanced user in general though, in less than a year I've managed to become way more advanced than the general Linux user that's been using it for many years. I know where everything is located, I can code my own stuff. The only parts of Linux I haven't messed with yet are kernel type stuff. And honestly I don't even want / need to. It was never my intention really to become this knowledgeable. It only happened because I made multiple messes initially and had to fix them (I'm an extremely arrogant person who will do things his way despite of consequences and risks - which should answer your question as to how I got there). I just want to use my computer to get stuff done and for entertainment.
ENT2 On Desktop Macs, many people use the Apple Trackpad instead of a mouse. Trackpads on Windows do not work as well and I don’t think anyone uses them on Windows desktop machines.
Some of this is painful to watch as a macos user :D But yeah, window management is much better on Windows and Linux. To be effective you have to learn the keyboard shortcuts and gestures.
"Just use gestures" is the deal breaker for me. I hate gestures with a passion. Though I also dearly miss trackpoints so maybe my take isn't very popular.
@@matthewriley5819 For me its quite opposite. The Apple Trackpad and its gestures were the main selling point of macOS for me. Without it, i would not use it. It just feels so liberating being able to bring up window overviews, to go a site back in the browser etc, without having to waste time shoving the curser to some buttons all the time. Especially with a large monitor its a great difference. On Windows the wasted microseconds of curser-shoving add up so much if you really spend a lot of time on your computer. I even get pain in my hand after a while, because i move the mouse so often every time when im not on macOS (and therefore also not using a trackpad). I guess its all preference at the end. But i can agree on one thing: Gestures being *mandatory* in order to probably manage your windows on macOS is a huge flaw.
Alright so a few notes that I'll sprinkle as I watch the video (as an avid macOS user that prefers it over Windows and all flavors of Linux- I've tried pretty much them all) 2:38 The best part about this "global OS menu" is that it's really easy to script and search. Just clicking on "Help" gives you a search bar that lets you search the menus a la Microsoft office. You can also easily script these to automate tasks for apps that have zero scripting functionality with AppleScript. 3:14 This is just one of the pitfalls of Apple's multi-instance ideology. Until OS X came up with this concept it wasn't common to have multiple documents for one app open. They designed the dock around the idea that an application can host multiple windows but the window isn't the app, so closing the window wouldn't close the app. They offer a "kind of" solution in that you can click Hide to hide all windows of the app, however. You could really go either way, and Apple chose the way more consistent with OS principles. Completely valid criticism though. 5:33 Honestly, I prefer this sometimes. Sure, it's fun to customize the crap out of your desktop but sometimes it's really nice where you can go to your coworkers computer and not have to figure out how their desktop environment works. We used to have themes but those went away in favor of the consistency (that app devs love too). I work in a development company and I had to do a presentation on my coworkers computer, which had a tiling window manager that I didn't know how to use. You can imagine how that went. 5:53 Most macOS users use Spotlight to open apps since it's much faster than finding your app's icon, but I presume an application-specific menu would be useful to those who want it. 6:40 Honestly my favorite part of Spotlight is the built-in calculator and the ability to run commands. Super handy. 6:58 Completely agree. For pretty much all Mac power users one of the first things we install is a window tiler. Apple tried to fix this but their implementation is terrible and they deserve all criticism for it. 7:58 It used to actually be a maximize button in OS X Lion, where the full screen button was on the right side. They merged them in Yosemite and now the shortcut for maximize is to double click the top bar, which is definitely easier but is less intuitive. 8:21 This really depends on the app. Maximize events are handled by the developer, so a maximize in Adobe software maximizes the whole screen while Safari only fits the content, something I assume is to aid responsive design (?) not really sure. 10:58 I honestly can't think of a single macOS user that actually thinks the App Store is the intended way to install Mac apps. It's an absolute joke, to the point where most of Apple's official apps have versions that you can just download instead of using the App Store. 11:10 There are a variety of reasons between the sandboxing of apps, invasive update policies, app store guidelines so strict that most open source apps could only have about 75% of their functionality, but perhaps the biggest reason is the fee to get into the App Store. It's $99 a year, which compared to the alternative (downloading a .dmg) is an unnecessary cost that makes updating and releasing harder. 12:46 The only time I've experienced this was with an old version of iPhoto, and that's it. Most Mac apps retain compatibility between versions, the only time this wasn't true was when they dropped support for 32bit apps with Catalina. 13:43 You didn't criticize this but I feel like some people might be helped by this explanation, it's a DMG file since macOS app files are technically just folders that house the resources and the binaries. That's why you can't just download a ".app" file. Some apps use .zip but DMG is still the common practice. 14:10 Even in this case, 90% of apps I've encountered will have a little popup offering to move themselves to the applications folder or outright not running at all until done so. DMG isn't an official app distribution format, it's just a disk image format and that's why it doesn't have it's own "application install" methods. It's literally just a folder and it's up to the developer to tell the user. 15:06 There's a little-known workaround for this, right clicking and clicking "open" will let you avoid going into System Preferences. Honestly, this video does highlight the main problem with macOS. Apple makes it "intuitive" but the way they do that is by sweeping most desktop management features under the rug. All of the intuitiveness is lost once you try to do power user things and most of it is kind of a "if you know you know" thing. I find Snazzy Lab's Mac Tips series really helpful and I wish Apple would be more obvious with what seems like pretty expected features.
You can actually double-click on a blank spot on the top of the window, the one the traffic lights are in, to maximize. You can also set it to minimize (but that is just straight up annoying). I really don't like the behavior of the green traffic light as well, but at least maximizing works.
@@a544jh Not really : GNOME, like any other OS basically, would maximize the window if you double-click it. macOS would not maximize it, but sometimes maximize, sometimes expand...
This will sound weird, but... I personally don't like monochrome tray icons. color helps me a lot at finding the application icon I'm looking for. When they're monochrome they sort of blend together to me and it takes me more time to find stuff.
Indeed! Doesn't sound weird at all! I will never understand why people want so much conformity in their small tray icons. All that does is to make it harder to find the actual icon you want to click on. It's form over function, and that's bad when you're regularly interacting with it. Colours, which don't even need to be bright, make is so, so much quicker and less painful to distinguish between icons.
I particularly thought someone saying I don't like traffic lights on the left was just a dumb comment. The global menu bar is on the left. Windows and Linux menus for each app are on the left. The left corner is the one consistent place vs. hunting around for how wide a window is.
for windows management I use Rectangle, the window interface in Mac OS is really outdated... with rectangle I even have keyboard shortcut that makes the desktop a joy. I found more easy to organize the windows in Mac OS nine than modern Mac OS
I swear by Rectangle, IMHO a solution superior to any mouse or touchpad-based one: I have all sides and corners of the screen mapped to the numeric keypad, including moving between multiple monitors. As I will have to migrate to Windows as my daily driver later this year (I'm an Apple user since the Apple IIe!), I'm circling the idea of reproducing its functionality with AutoHotKey.
Yeah like installing extensions on gnome to make it actually functional. Honestly god awful design. I would choose Win 7 or KDE over any other mac os like garbage
@@escifi I've never used Windows 11, but Windows 10 allows you to open apps (and the associated windows) with Super (Windows) + [0-9] if they're pinned to the taskbar. Windows 7 is better than any UI Apple has ever made, and I've been using Macs since the early 1990s. I haven't owned one since 1998, but I've used them too much. They are, IMO, the worst big company around: terribly anti-consumer and anti-repair.
I see quite a few people here who use Rectangle, which raises the question: why are you okay with having to use third-party tools to get basic UI functionality?
@@theglowcloud2215 The same reason they use Apple: they don't know any better. 95% of them could do the exact same tasks with a Chromebook. 80% of them could chuck their Macs and just use their phones to do their daily computer tasks. But who could live without their dock icons shaking and jumping around when a notification is waiting?
I honestly didn't expect it to be so bad. Also now I finally understand why every mac user I see use apps as a small square in the middle of the screen instead of just maximazing it.
I have a mac for work and I don't use the green maximize button but for some windows I drag the corners out to make them take up the whole screen. It's a bit silly not having a button to just do that.
@@msrsooraj the terminal is actually one of the ones I deliberately don't have full-screen. My terminal windows are all either 80 or 161 columns wide. (161 so that in vim I can have two buffers open side by side 80 columns each and one column of the separator character)
@@tefkah That just seems "logical" and I didn't realize this was an issue on Mac. That being said, I've never used a Mac or iPhone. I do own a 2018 iPad pro and I'd be a liar if I said it wasn't a great device. Maybe I should look into maximizing it's potential and seeing if installing a nix distro would be easily achieved
When I owned a MacBook a few years back, I always got the feeling Apple didn't want me to be productive. However, I erroneously assumed that by now they would have fixed those issues, but your video pretty much made it clear that they haven't.
Oh Apple do want you to be productive. It's only that they want you to be productive in their own very specific and lots of times ass backwards way. One example, MacOS seems to work better if instead of managing windows you manage workspaces or virtual desktops, swiping to change desktop, using everything maximised etc etc. Which is dumb, but 'works'
@@prgnify because of that alone I would never buy an Apple product myself. I'm forced to use it for work and use my 32 inch 4K monitor and have enough space to do all the work on it, but window management is ass. I rather curse the company everyday than they force me in to their way. One positive - after work I use my Linux with Gnome and appreciate all the freedom I have. :)
@@prgnify Couldn't have said it better. When I tried apple products while I was still using windows, I quickly came to the conclusion that they were made for noobs. Sure they make some stuff really easy, but there is a glass ceiling, and to break it, you need to exert a lot of effort. And that was from a Windows perspective. It would be even worse from Linux one.
@@prgnify Everything maximized isn't dumb. It's just poorly implemented on Mac OS X. Switching full windows (monocle mode) on dwm is as easy as pressing Mod + J or Mod + K. OS X wastes too much memory making everything pretty and adding useles animations so switching between apps feels very sluggish.
macOS gestures + Magnet was a very nice workflow for me, but I think that's particularly when you're using a trackpad to leverage the gestures. Without the gestures, window management is a nightmare unless you create a keyboard shortcut to the overview (I ended up setting CMD + q to show the overview, and just quit apps manually).
Overall, I prefer macOS since I'm most familiar with it, but I feel like macOS excludes mouse users so much and its one of my biggest complaints I have about macOS. The fact that I have to install an app to disable mouse acceleration is just stupid. And yes, you can double click on the empty part of window to maximize it but in my experience, there's like 50/50 chance of actually working and that really frustrates me every single time. Also I really miss cover flow on finder.
Considering macOS was one of the first operating systems to fully adopt the mouse, it seems strange that now macOS is probably one of the least intuitive operating systems to use with a mouse. Using macOS with a keyboard with tools like Spotlight or Alfred (Spotlight on steroids) then I find myself being really productive. Windows is kind of catching up with Windows 11 and PowerToys on Windows 10, but still not the same.
@@TheLinuxEXP To be fair, it's more of that the App Store *is not compatible* with GPL license. Specifically, apps downloaded from the App Store has DRM built-in, which is against GPL's "no imposing restriction of any kind are allowed". Apple wouldn't necessarily ban you from distributing GPL-licensed apps to the App Store, but the owner of the original code may complain due to license infringement.
@@SenaStuff Yup, this. There was a lot of drama in the iOS scene for a while about working with GPLed code too. A bunch of free apps that were repackaged GPL software got taken down because the original devs requested the source code, which the repackagers couldn't do because all of the Apple APIs were NDAed. etc etc. Honestly... it's why all of my code is just MIT licensed. I don't care for the GPL or die fervor.
To me the biggest problem is Apple itself. Their hostile take on right to repair and difficulties of not being fully in their eco-system turn me off the most. Like no DE is perfect and you just have to pick your poison, but theirs comes with several extra stuff.
They make high quality equipment. My MBP survived someone tossing it in the trash bin! My Macs are a decade old and are the last repairable Macs on the planet.
Because they didn't want to let go of the product they sold🤣 because if you asked me.. if I bought an Apple product for example iPhone that piece of hardware is already mine, so whatever I do with it for example change the hardware with a cheap one or put it in a oven or used it as a soap or etc then it's all up to me, because I already bought it I paid for it so whatever what I do with that piece of device Apple has nothing to do with it since I already own it, so the only thing that Apple own in that piece of device is the software so they should only prevent the users from tweaking that, that's why Apple preventing the right to repair doesn't make any sense to me🤷♂️
@Jim Allen not just a hardware, they earn more money because of their money making scheme that they always do like, (base on my personal experience) "we don't do repairs if you want we can exchange your broken device with a new one, but by paying almosts the same price if you bought a new one plus you have to gave up your broken device"🤦♂️🤣 paying almost the same price for a buying a new device + your broken device.. see that rip off Apple been doing? And did you know what the Apple store said to my sister's 1yr old iPad? "We can't repair your device because it can't be opened or no way to open it"🤣 while me thinking "how tf they assembled it if there's no way for it to be opened"🤦♂️ and guess what we looked for a 3rd party repair shop and the dude there just opened it like he's removing a booger on his nose🤣 Apple money making scheme is number in the planet, that's why they removed the earphone jack and the changing brick out of the box because they can sell the accessories needed for it separately, and with a higher price but bad services.
Right to repair is my only complaint about Apple. The sacrifice is well worth it. I left Linux for MacOS about 10 years ago and while I play with Linux, I couldn't possibly think about running a creative businesses off of Linux. Using Apple has saved me so much time and money over the years. I ran an entire business for 6 years off of ONE Macbook Pro 13". The thing paid for itself at an order of magnitude. I wasted NO time screwing around with my OS. Never had the kind of issues I had using linux. Linux is great for hobbyists, but not for getting serious work done. Unless you're a linux a dev. Haha.
They are just tools. When they wear out, I replace them and make sure they are recycled properly. I no longer have any grand illusion that my laptop will be of any real use in over 8-10 years. Currently, I’m on a 5 year replacement cycle. At the end of that period if it still works, great it’s a backup or something for the little ones to bash about on. Beyond that, I’ve got my value out of it and I move on with life. I have enough projects in my life, I don’t need to endlessly tinker with old technology and get a hemorrhoid about what style of screws Apple is using or if it’s simple to replace the battery or whatever… It’s actually pretty simple to solder and desolder components, but it’s not usually worth my time, just like repairing my family’s phones; the cost of most devices is relatively low and any major repair is going to approach the cost of replacement. The key trade off is time.
Was Mac since the late 1980's and still have an original MacIntosh! However, once Apple started leaving my expensive MacBook pro behind, I discovered Linux and Fedora just blows Mac OS away! Your video just confirmed that this was the best move I ever made!... Thanks!
Let's be honest, the absolute only thing Mac and Windows have over Linux is a few apps, or better hardware acceleration in some app. These are all third party and a have nothing to do with the OS. If we're talking about the base OS though, current Fedora for instance shreds Windows and Mac combined in every aspect, except maybe power management with laptops (I've only heard rumors - I don't use a laptop)
Totally agree. My experience to a T. I love the Arch distros especially. I love the whole Linux community and the innovation I find in the Linux family is innovation with purpose, and not disjointed is disconnected from the whole user experience.
@@ent2220 actually battery life is double on fedora 34 and 36 when compared to windows (Asus zenbook ux461 with i5 8250u). The computer fan is off, performance is smooth constant 60fps and it is ice cold.
@@ent2220 Third-party support is still huge. Nintendo has had issues with not having enough third-party support and they got crushed in a few generations. IDK how well GNU/Linux would be doing without Steam. I imagine a ton more people would at least be dual-booting because Wine is far from perfect. A Chromebook could shred a Mac just based on how they're typically used.
@@ent2220 And the power management and other such things are because of lacking proper drivers from the manufacturers. So, yeah, Mac and Windows have that on Linux: better drivers and several apps/games that are well tailored for their specific OS. In the general sense, Linux is much better. And the Linux shortcomings seem to get smaller and smaller as people start to embrace it and manufacturers see that there's a market forming for them there.
I really recommend using Rectangle for the window manager, MacOS has awful tiling supposedly because Microsoft patented the whole "drag to tile" thing.
@@Sancredo yeah. I assume that's because Rectangle is open source and Microsoft gave up on suing Foss projects some years ago. Most other projects by the maintainer are commercial, but he probably doesn't want to risk being sued by Ms.
Apple has a mandatory 3 week review for apps in the app store, and hence most third party developers distribute apps using disk images and not through the app store. Also, I agree on the default window manager too. That is why I install Rectangle which is a better window manager. And to install apps, I install homebrew, which is a command line package manager.
yeah, in this day and age, given the state of desktop Linux, my jaw drops to see how much cobbling has to be done to turn a MacOS computer into a day-to-day, useable, livable experience
@@shiroishii7312 Depends on the distro. If you want a solid normie build, there are plenty of distros like Linux Mint and Zorin OS that have the common stuff baked in, like competent window management, an office suite, media player, etc. Most of the cobbling is optional. Having to install a new program because the shipped DE is that terrible is just plain hilarious considering how boring and homogeneous Mac OS X is. And using Homebrew on Mac OS just defeats the purpose of using a Mac. Re: OP: 1. Apple takes a massive cut of sold apps in the App Store. 2. Nazi-esque enforcement of keeping apps in the IOS/Mac OS X theme so everything can look boring and the same. 3. Apple treats their devices they've sold as still belonging to Apple. They will deny any app that might allow the user to do anything that Apple doesn't want them to do. They can brick it if they think you've been naughty repairing your own home button. We're talking about a company that sends copyright threats and cease-and-desist letters to people posting repair manuals for Apple hardware. Using the Apple App Store is like using a food delivery app: the only people coming out ahead are the middlemen.
@@shiroishii7312 yeah, that's pretty much true. but it's become a bit less so in some areas than used to be the case. However, even with the recent Ubuntu 22.04 release, which has gotten mostly favorable reviews, there are still a couple of things that require cobbling: 1) Ubuntu refuses to support flatpak out of the box and stubornly clings to their Snaps, so it's necessary to install a package to enable using flatpak apps 2) I actually still use icons on the desktop and it's necessary to install a Gnome extension in order to get decent config UI to manage that, and it's also necessary to install a browser extension in order to be able to download and install Gnome extensions (which is just beyond weird, but there you go - the bizarre landscape of the Linux world)
There are 2 apps that completely smoothen macos experience. Rectangle for window management (for God's sake don't buy Magnet - it's worse and costs money) and Homebrew for package management. With them installed macos is the best system I've ever used (it's like linux but with apps)
The moment you need 3rd party to fix what 1st party couldn't it's just bad. To enhance it is something completely different. This goes for an OS, games, programs and everything else. Augmenting the already existing UX is good. Repairing (especially Apple environment) is just sad
macOs is meant to be used with a trackpad and keyboard shortcuts. Swipe 4 fingers up for mission control and define other behavior as you want. I also recommend Spectacle (free) which allows to configure window tiling - alt left and alt right to tile the window to each side, and alt up to maximize. You can do alt dow to minimize as well. This combo is super quick, easy to use and frankly should be a default behavior. Also I can remember the last time I opened an app NOT through spotlight.
One more thing. Configure the trackpad for 3 finger dragging - so if you want to drag something you just hold it wit 3 fingers on the trackpad. I can't use a mac without this enabled
I actually really like window management on Mac OS. The fact that I can have multiple fullscreen application and switch between them at ease is super convenient to me. At this point desktop is a place I rarely visit to do some microscopic task. Though it obviously doesn't change the fact those features are must have for most people.
It's the kind of feature I loved on my 13"Macbook, but really don't care about on my desktop. The integration with the trackpad made it as if that little laptop had multiple monitors to work on. On my desktop I actually have 2 large monitors, and I've never really been able to get into a multi-desktop workflow. I usually have enough space, and I just need to tile things correctly.
@@Niosus Rectangle is great if you don’t mind using shortcuts to control each window individually, and there’s also an auto-tiling window manager called Yabai that works well.
@@rikugo1 The MBP was retired a long time ago. It's a 2011 model. I don't even have a laptop these days, just a desktop and a tablet. But thanks for the tips, maybe someone else will come along and find it useful :)
I have multiple fullscreen applications simultaneously running on my main Linux box, and can switch between them with a single keystroke. That’s because I have KDE configured to give me 6 desktops, each with its own collection of windows. And on top of that KDE supports multiple “activities”, each with its own collection of windows across all desktops.
But those both things you can do in windows and linux distros. Now, try to minimize a app on mac and when you go to your desks, you cant find the app you just minimized. Mac is the only one that does this strange thing
Pro tip: brew calls itself the missing package manager for macOS. It works like pacman and is also available on Linux! And as a macOS user I can relate to your points. It's crazy that Apple rather features and relies on 3rd party tools for eg. window management instead of putting it into macOS itself. In the other hand I really like Rectangle for window management. With these tools it's a bit of a Linux feeling in terms of customization, some can even mimic i3 behavior!
The last proper Apple computer I had was an iMac G3, years later I decided to try and daily drive a hackintosh, everything worked fine, but even then I felt that OS X was stuck in place, especially when it came to the window management. It's impressive to see that Apple are still as stubborn as ever about the UI and the only way to be productive is to constantly use shortcuts.
They don't want to risk alienating or confusing their customers. Windows 8 was an unfortunate leap in UI design that left people hating it despite it being just a tiny bit ahead of its time.
@@dylon4906 The UI elements like settings being in a pull-out/pull-down shade, floating volume popup, notifications in app icons/tiles are present in mobile OSes like Android and IOS, granted both of those came out before Win8. It was touch-centric, but most PCs were still not using touchscreens and tablets, IIRC, hadn't really taken off as much by 2012. Win8 was a marked break from the previous Windows UI. People hate change, especially forced change. Windows 8 wasn't as bad as people think. It definitely wasn't the best Windows release ever, but it didn't deserve all the hate it got, at least not much more than Windows 10.
@@encycl07pedia- i realize in tech, you can't be too fast, you can't be too slow. actually, i think that goes for other fields too. I still don't like windows 8, because i felt the splash of colours annoyed me. I got it to work at work (and eventually format the company desktop to windows 7 -- i was an IT admin) but people don't like change. Windows users too. we complain, complain but then get use to it. I hated windows 10 tiles but now, i use it fully. Windows 11..i don't like it but design wise, i think it looks nice. some parts still boggles my mind. Like why keep two UIs? cannot keep one or let us choose during OOBE? I would keep control panel and have a more uniform design and update the windows explorer design. other than that, I feel i can power through it.
@@encycl07pedia- windows 8 was definitely a change in ui, it was the first windows release that started shoving mobile features into a desktop os. i want my desktop os to be an actual desktop os and not a desktop os with mobile features slapped onto it. it also killed the beautiful aero theme in favor of a flat boring theme in line with corporate oversimplification and its been roughly the same ever since. it did not bother to change the rest of the windows 7 features to fit more with its style and thus felt like windows 7 with a weird theme and a start menu hack, and 10 and 11 just kept slapping even more things onto it without removing the old (control panel still exists) leading to win11 being just an odd inconsistent mishmash of features from all the past windows versions since 7. 8 also introduced the msstore, ms accounts, telemetry, onedrive, etc but that has less to do with ui. this is all very subjective but it will always be my opinion that windows 8 is the worst windows because it started everything i hate about modern windows
Along with many useful UI features, I’ve come to believe one of the most useful features on MacOS is the universal menu bar. You always know where and how to configure your App in a consistent way, and is a time saver when learning how to use your software. Yes, to be hella productive on Mac, you must memorize some shortcuts. Cmd + , to launch Preferences is golden. For most all apps on MacOS, this key combination launches the Apps Preference. Again, not 100% but a large percentage. And for most all apps installed on Mac, the 'Help' menu item is consistent and useful. I know when I install an App on my Mac, I can click and search for Help about any menu command for that App, which is welcomed. The consistency is unmatched in Linux and Windows. Also, like others have mentioned, a simple Cmd+Tab provides a window into everything running on your Mac. Like with anything, there are Mac alternative ways to accomplish the so called deficiencies Nick mentions that just have to be learned. When I started using Linux almost 20 years ago, I had to learn the Terminal. Even today, anyone that wants to use Linux has to learn the basics of Terminal commands. Finally what made me switch to Mac was the availability of Apps. Let’s face it, Linux Apps are fine but lack the polish, usability, consistency and ease of use that Mac OS offers.
One thing that surprised me when testing KDE was it's shortcut manager. Basically whenever you have a Qt application (or another one that integrates with it's API), you have one central hotkey manager for both desktop and applications. It orders them by use case, warns you of collisions and even allows you to create custom commands to assign hotkeys to. Sure there is the problem of the non-API outliar but I'd argue within the system KDE does a spectacular job at being both consistent and flexible.
As far as I'm concerned, the menu bar and Spotlight are the only things Mac OS X does right. That's it. I'd rather have the ability to switch windows in a fraction of a second than put up with the resource hog Finder.
@Zaydan Naufal It had, by the 16.04 version, the best implementation of a global menu, with the option of having the menu on the title bar if not maximized.
The conclusion is kind of amazing, as free and open source stuff often can be a mess when it comes to looks and ui, and apple has the reputation of being amazing in those regards. Super cool to see linux actually being superior user experience, and I have to agree; I've had to use a MacBook and an iMac in the last couple weeks and and to my huge surprise as someone who hasn't used them much, especially when it comes to managing windows it's a very frustrating os to use. Linux and open source stuff in general has come a long long way!
Linux UI is not superior. It's just Linux fan boys and their channel crying about it for attention. I'm sure many people would choose Mac OS for its looks.
@@ArunG273 I'm not here to cry or bash one os or the other, just pointing out that in my own experience linux ui is less frustrating to use than mac os. I'm pretty new to both linux and mac os and used window for my whole life just to make that clear.
@@ArunG273 The basic desktop environments of Linux are fine. Especially the recent Gnome 42 has really made Ubuntu 22.04 a very user friendly, smooth and fast OS. The UI of the OS really isn't the issue. It's the significant holes in workflows that people expect to be able to do. This is things like missing applications, but also the "ecosystem" features that many in Apple land find hard to give up. If you've ever tried to game on a Mac, you'll run into the exact same frustration that other people run into when trying to use professional software on Linux. Some stuff straight up doesn't work, for other stuff you need to mess with the terminal to get things to run properly, and if things run it's slow as hell and crashes often. I'm not saying Linux doesn't have UI issues that it needs to fix. But so do Mac OS and Windows. They all have the basics nailed down, and people just want to get to the application or website they care about. That just needs to work. That's where people encounter problems.
@@ArunG273 An aesthetically pleasing UI isn't necessarily also one that's nice to use. What are looks going to do if one can hardly grab and use the UI they get? Take Windows 8 for instance. It looked nice but users couldn't stand having to use it. What we see at 09:10 looks pretty similar to how Metro apps snapped on the left and right, it's probably that Microsoft did a lower quality copy of what MacOS did, which fared much worse than the MacOS design. Also the assisted window snapping where you drag your traditional window and it snaps to the left/right which MacOS lacks has become one of the basic features people expect nowadays. Mac's snapping and maximizing behave in unexpected and limiting ways without offering a more sane alternative option, which doesn't seem to help with Mac's case for superiority. Who knows? Maybe Mac is more like those tiling WMs that not everyone can live with.
@@ArunG273 Looks aren't everything. I'd rather stick with my two-tone dwm than use freaking OS X's DE. That thing is an absolute joke when it comes to window management. I feel like I'm getting carpal tunnel syndrome just hearing him talking about dragging windows all over the place.
20 year Linux fan and 5 year macOS fan. With the exception of a little personal taste presented as objectivity, this was a refreshingly fair-minded review.
It's objective if you know nothing about Windows or think Windows 11 is the only Windows out there. 3:05 is either a bold-faced lie (taskbar in Windows since at least XP if not earlier has been dockable on top, bottom, left, or right.) or is only applicable to Windows 11 (I haven't used it). Lots of other things like him acting like Windows can't do WM well just proves he doesn't know what he's talking about.
@@encycl07pedia- It's NORMAL to compare the latest of anything and when comparing older systems people tend to get specific - so basically it's not a bold-faced lie. Windows 11 Taskbar sucketh. You can't move like in previous versions. You have to install 3rd party apps for their menus (Classic dock etc).
@@df3yt That would be a legitimate criticism except he admits at the very beginning he's not using the latest Mac OS X. Windows 11 wasn't out when Big Sur was released.
10:10 you need to do alt+right arrow or left arrow to move between desktops without getting out of mission control, this is a lot more intuitive with a trackpad on macbooks with gestures.
This video has the most proper title. Saying MacOS feels old doesn't sound bad when it has always been the best. It's exactly like saying "Rock (or jazz or blues) music feels old" when it has always been the most advanced and influential and more than half of the people doesn't understand it and never will because they've spent more than half of their lives listening to something else. Windows and several Linux distros have just recently accomplished a similar level of usability and productivity out of the box, but for mac users, UI/UX, intuitiveness system stability and hardware/software compatibility have never really been a big deal, and that remains to this day. Sometimes it's not that you stop getting better, it's just that the others are catching up, which is great news.
The alt resize is a old feature from macos prior to 10.6 or so. Before that there effectively was no maximize window button as Apple thought that most of the users do not actually want to maximize application windows to the full screen area. Instead this button was delegated to a "smart resize" button where the software developer would decide what's the larger most optimal size of the window when pressed. I named the button "resize random" because in reality it was depending on too many factors making it rather unpredictable until pressed.
I will say this. Mac OS has an entire ecosystem of apps that fill the role of Gnome Extensions. Intellidock gives intelligent autohide. Magnet or Mosaic add in the window management features the default OS have. Granted, you were reviewing the default experience so that isn't super relevant, my point is that the power users who care about the kinds of things that go into your complaints have alternative solutions. I think it would be cool if you tried this again but tried to modify Mac OS on its own terms and see if you can make a useable experince with it.
Using CMD + H to hide an application instead of minimizing it is the ideal situation on macOS. Although it has its own limitations like for example it hides all the windows for that application and you must have at least one application shown.
Let me try to explain the Apple mission control logic: People don't understand virtual workspaces, so they pile everything into one workspace. If you want to hide a window, open another window and the previous window is now below it. If you want to find the previous window, open mission control and it would show all three thousand windows in the current workspace, so you can find it and click it. If you want to maximize a window, you probably don't want to use another window at the same time, so a new workspace is created and your window is thrown there full screen. If you want to switch between a full screen window and another window, just switch as if switching workspaces. If you don't like the default behavior, then… Go use a third party tool…
I was a Windows user for a good time, then I migrated to Linux for a lot of years, then starting to use macOS on 2011, I think people complains about window management on macOS is pointless because desktop metaphor on macOS and Apple is very different, the "zoom" feature is to do a best fit of the content, not covering the whole screen, if you need that use fullscreen function... if you insist that you want a "maximise" feature like Windows or Linux you have either a way to mimic that or pay for a 3rd party software, don't blame Apple for that...
@@adanmirandaespindola521 it also doesn’t make sense all the time to maximize the window on macs. macOS apps are usually document based. Apps can have multiple documents or windows open at any given time. It’s why when you close the all app windows it may not actually close the app like on Linux or Windows. It’s also why the global file menu exists.
One thing I love about macOS is how the zoom button works and how if you hold it down it’ll create a new workspace you can split or just use that application as a fullscreen app. It’s not like the most important thing but it feels a lot less clunky than other fullscreen implementation.
8:30 You maximize a window by double clicking on any empty part of the top bar of that window. Still bad. But the functionality exists, at least. Also, I've noticed that the workspaces of fullscreened apps don't stay in consistent order. If I recall correctly, I had two separate fullscreened windows from the same app, and it just placed the most recent one to the left all the time.
That was a silly complaint on his part because using a double click on the title bar to maximize or restore has been working on Linux and Windows as well for at least 20 years. Sometimes on Linux you get rollup/rolldown but the behaviour has always been configurable.
"While we might lack... all the breadth of applications you might get on MacOS..." But that is the crux of the issue. Not a small, ignorable "rough edge". I run Linux on my home system (and at work). I am willing to overlook the disjointed desktop experience (some apps respect the theme, some don't. Some deal with a global menu bar, some don't. Gnome seems hell bent on hiding all functionality behind a completely un-needed hamburger menu simply because that is fashionable, etc.) I can overlook the absolutely horrible and complex power management issues on my laptop. I can ignore the need to dip into the terminal to fix basic things like my mouse not coming back to life after I use a USB switcher. , but the fragmentation between distros - and the corresponding difficulty in getting software to actually do work (vs. simply arranging windows) is a huge issue. Much of my software relies on me running CentOS 7. I wished I could update to a newer OS or different distro, but I can't. Some software that I WANT to run, however, is only available for Ubuntu. I can and do run flatpak (my preferred package manager for software) but not everything is available as a flatpak, and some of the stuff is packaged by a third party that I have no way of vetting. I agree that the windowing manager is better under Linux (and I find the overall Linux user experience to have some significant advantages over MacOS), but to gloss over the packaging/fragmentation/lack of software on Linux as a less important, dismissible annoyance vs. the core reason Linux continues to fail to gain market share as a desktop OS seems like maybe placing the focus in the wrong place?
well I don't know about CentOS but have you tried some other distro? I use Arch (btw) and a HUGE repository and rolling release make me basically never miss out on any software I might need. Ubuntu probably also works pretty well for that
@@kerstinhoffmann2343 Ha! Talk about a delayed reply on my end. Apparently I am just learning to use notifications on RUclips. :) I used to use Arch, but the problem I have is that the commercial 3D content creation software that I rely on (Autodesk products, Houdini, Clarisse) is certified on CentOS 7 and not on Arch. So if I have any issues I am left on my own to solve them if I am not using the certified OS. Even beyond this, just the effort of sourcing the libraries and getting the software running eats into my time getting actual work done. It is actually super frustrating since I would love to use a more mainstream Linux distro.
Great review my friend and I too shall have to do my own macOS review since switching to Linux review soon. As a long-time Mac user, over 20 years, and recent full-time convert to Linux, you were both fair and balanced. The most surprising thing I have found after 20 years of macOS is how little I miss it. Yes, I am a power user, and yes, I am a geek, but nevertheless, I am proof that you can leave the macOS for Linux. My computing life just feels better holistically from a mental and emotional perspective. Accordingly, at this stage in life it's just a matter of preference and I am glad that I finally made the switch to Linux. To be completely fair and transparent, I too still own a MacBook Pro from 2014 and plan to buy a new one soon to keep up with the macOS for my own blogging and RUclips videos. And I have a Windows 11 partition on my laptop, and I like Windows 11, as well as Windows 10. However, Linux is and has been my daily driver since November 2020, and I am convinced that you appreciate one platform without bad talking others. Again, great job and God bless,
My biggest gripe with the interface on MacOS is that the key combination to close a tab in Safari is Command+W and the combination to quit a program is Command+Q....YET, it doesn't prompt you if you accidentally hit Command+Q instead of Command+W. It just closes out all of your tabs at once. This is a horrible oversight. Yes, I could just use Waterfox or some other browser (which I do), but it's the principle of the matter. And automatic tiling would be great! I think there's an app to have that feature added, but I believe you have to buy it?
One of the upsides of MacOS is the dedicated userbase who have fixed most of its issues. Rectangle fixes window management, and Homebrew is a linux-style package manager. I like it because it's Unix-like without the awkward jank of Linux. I've never spent more than 10 minutes troubleshooting on Mac, meanwhile getting my old laptop's Nvidia drivers working properly on Linux took forever (and I'm not sure if I even did it right).
Always recommended macports over homebrew myself, it's just cleaner, smarter, more thought out where as homebrew makes a lot of security compromises in the name of not using "sudo" and using integrated apple libraries...
I’ve been using mainly macOS for 20 years, so I thought I would disagree with a lot of this. But it’s mostly spot on. The usability of KDE Plasma and GNOME has advanced considerably in recent years, and now they are stealing good ideas from each other every week. Advancing by leaps and bounds in ways they should have been doing since more than a decade ago. But on the flip side there is a robust market of free and paid utilities that can solve pretty much any usability issue with macOS you can name. And then there remains the elephant in the room. MacOS has access to a mountain of commercial software like Adobe CC and MS Office that millions of people are forced to use by their employers or clients. But macOS could definitely learn a few things about UX from the best that Linux currently has to offer.
@@fmlazar I disagree, many commercial software choices are Mac exclusives. And many are more optimized on Mac than on windows (Word being the ultimate example of this). Especially when it comes to photography or book publishing or many other creative tasks. Adobe is bloated and sucks on any platform at the moment so that’s kind of not the best example of cross platform apps.
@@a0flj0 Very true. I prefer Adobe, but Affinity just makes more financial sense overall as a one time purchase. There is no reason whatsoever that I can no longer purchase the Creative Suite except corporate greed. The experience I had with Adobe means I will now literally do anything in my power to avoid using them ever again. And the more “updated” it becomes, the more bloated and clunky it is. They are the industry standard because they got their first, not because they are a company people admire or emotionally support any longer.
I agree with almost all things you said about window management. The thing is that it does not show its age, it shows the weird decisions Apple makes. The could easily implement a much better window management system. Why they don't? nobody knows. The store never got the love it deserves from the devs, I guess mostly because of the yearly fee someone needs to pay to get their app on there. Most power users are going with brew (similar to aur). Not everything is there but there are plenty. and there s an app i think that provides a guide for it if you don't like the terminal
I actually prefer fullscreen over maximize. When an app goes fullscreen in macOS, it creates a new virtual desktop for itself, which means that I can switch back to the previous virtual desktop very easily, using either ctrl+arrow keys or a trackpad gesture. Fullscreen gives me a little bit more screen real estate than maximize, which is very important on a laptop. GNOME has fullscreen mode as well, but the app goes fullscreen in the existing virtual desktop, covering up the apps behind it. This adds an extra step if I want to access the apps behind it. And don't even get me started on fullscreen mode in Windows...
I also like the way full screen apps work in macOS, but I don't like the way they automatically open in another workspace because this creates inconsistency with workspace keyboard shortcuts. I actually like being able to have more than one full screen app on a workspace as is the case in Gnome. I do like the way you can reorder workspaces on the Mac though.
I switched from linux as my daily driver to macOS back in November 2020. I was running linux exclusively at home from 2015 until then. The window management is bad, as you note, though there are extensions that can solve that. The main reason I switched: working from home. I refuse to use the shitty ThinkPad T580 my work issued me - it's loud, somewhat slow at times, and just not very nice hardware in terms of the keyboard and the touchpad is trash as every non-Apple laptop's is. We use almost all web apps (Microsoft, unfortunately) along with Teams. Linux (and I tried every distro available at the time) just didn't work well with Teams or some other apps I had to use for work. Teams *looks* like it works....until you try to share you screen with others and all they see is a black screen! That was due to the Xorg vs Wayland shit that was going on at the time. Hopefully they've solved that but still, moved on for now and many others have as well. The window management and file explorer (i.e., Finder) in mac suck. And it sucks not having the free/open source community. But aside from those two things, everything in the apple ecosystem is better IMO. You understated the interoperability benefits. I wake up, come down to start work, jiggle my bluetooth mouse or hit a key on my bluetooth keyboard (I run my Mac in clamshell mode 90% of the time and use it as a desktop replacement) and then I immediately hear and feel my Apple Watch notify my it has unlocked my mac. I take a photo on my iPhone and move it to my mac....when on linux I had to email it to myself, or save it to cloud storage, etc...on mac I just airdrop it - takes seconds and is so convenient. I no longer need a document scanner - I just navigate in macOS to the directory I want to scan a document into, click a button to "Scan from iPhone" and boom - my phone wakes up, opens the camera app, and is ready to scan. I scan however many pages I want (which is always perfect due to the camera quality), hit save, and boom - the scan appears as a pdf on my mac. These are just SOME examples of interoparability. BTW - mac hardware is 1000x better than anything else and it's not even close. I've used top of the line Dell's and no, they aren't close even still to mac laptop hardware (and the Dell's that try are more expensive). All that said - Apple IS a walled garden. I get that and if I were retired/not working I would go back to linux purely for that reason. I like gnome a lot, Cinnamon is okay, and I just saw that Unity just had a release - that was the best linux DE! When I no longer have to work as part of a team with others who are using Windows then yeah, I'll go back to linux. But I'll definitely miss the apple hardware and a lot of the software is great too.
My biggest gripe with MacOS is when I full-screen videos, for example from RUclips, and it has to play the long animation and move the playing video to a new full screen space. Then, when I command-tab to a different window, it switches back to the previous workspace. But when I command tab back to my browser app, which usually has multiple windows open. It switches not to my most recently active browser window but to my most recently active browser window in my current workspace, which is not want I want.
You can keep the bar on top persistent in full screen apps now. Windows has the patent for windows snapping in commercial products, so unless it’s an open source package that is free they can’t bundle a snapping system into their windows managers, this is not me defending the decision not to have it by default (I use amethyst btw) it’s just an explanation as to why
@@endless_puns the thing this chromeOS is it’s built on an open source project and it can be argued easily that ChromeOS is free and not a commercial product so to speak, Apple refuses to say their OS is free and it has to be run on their products only not just off the shelf components
Windows management is pretty bad without secondary apps. However, the ability to give almost any app a dedicated "virtual desktop" is beyond great. Especially as a teacher I can have X amount of applications, powerpoints(keynote files) documents open and quickly AND fluidly swipe between them. I've yet to encounter a Linux distro that can do this as easily as MacOS. I am open to suggestions. But the ability to click that little green button (or 5 finger swipe up when using BetterTouchTool) is just...*chef kiss*
I have been a macOS user for the last 3 years, and this was hard to watch :D. But I do agree on most points to be fair. Window management is an absolute flaming pile of crap. There are free (Rectangle) and paid solutions (Magnet) to fix that, and they do it really well with keyboard shortcuts without cutting into performance or being too intrusive with the applications themselves (credit where credit's due). Howbeit, it is preposterous that macOS does not have this built-in in 2022. It would be surprising if they added it in macOS 13. The other thing I absolutely detest is the menu bar situation. It is massively annoying to scroll all the way to the top if I have a window snapped to the bottom half of a 34-inch monitor. It clearly goes on to show that window snapping and tiling were never meant to be featured on mac. You raised a good point about installing apps. There is a lack of coherency between how installers work. Some application distributions actually have installers which copy files all over (the /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin etc.) and also place the application package contents in the /Applications directory. However, others are "portable" so to speak, expecting you to mount the disk image and copy-paste the app contents directly. Others work with the AppStore and it doesn't install it the same way as others. Don't even get me started on package managers. Brew and MacPorts are good at what they do, and I do use them almost weekly, but installation paths are a nightmare. Also, as powerful as Spotlight search is, free applications like Raycast/ Albert take it to the next level with app-level shortcuts and plugins. Safari might be efficient, but my god is it ancient underneath at this point. This is controversial but I think we need to remember that people don't buy systems because one OS is better than the other, and it is a silly argument and a comparison for anyone who knows anything about computing. People buy computers to get work done. There are less than 2-3 mainstream manufacturers who ship laptops with a Linux distribution installed. On top of that, most people are used to Windows or Mac from work/ school. Also, adding to the shaky reputation and reliability of budget laptop hardware (I have been stung by that hard thrice), makes a compelling case for people to buy an M1 equipped Macbook Air, which has killer performance for the price. Also add to that resale value, overall hardware experience (trackpad, screen, speakers, device integration and support for third-party accessories). And then comes mainstream app support, which no one will EVER sacrifice just because there is a good alternative. The existence of an OpenSource alternative does not compel anyone at all to switch workflows just because of the virtue of it being free. Most people don't care for it, me included. More than 99% of computer users are not nerds. Most of us like to get our work done without having to spend 5 months tweaking the system to get it to absolute perfection. Not saying Linux distros are difficult, but remember, most people don't have any experience or don't want anything to do with installing OSs. So, it is a self-feeding cycle. All said I am excited about Asahi coming to Macbooks natively!
I understand why people don't necessarily feel comfortable installing their own os. It's a bit outside the normal things most people do with their computer, but it is pretty easy nowadays, and there are many advantages to linux that are hard to see from the outside, which is why people who use it love it so much, even if they are in the minority
@porteal Don't get me wrong. I love all 3 OSs for their strengths (I daily drive all 3), and despise them where deserved. But trust me as someone who teaches computing, programming and other things in general to people all the way from 6 to 70+ years, people don't like doing "things" with their computers, many developers included. Unless you "spoon feed" someone linux which is close to what they are used to, and do not have to touch the terminal, people will not use it. The mere existence of something good or better is not an incentive for most people to switch.
I agree with all of the above mentioned points, especially with the installation of apps. Also, I want to point out that starting from macOS Monterey, you get a option in System Preferences to choose if you want to keep the menu bar visible permanently on full screen apps or you like the default configuration where the menu bar is visible on hover.
@@MrProximace I mean, I kind of find it ridiculous that people don't know how to install an OS. I'm not saying they should be manually installing arch or something. but installing an OS should be common knowledge.
The answer to window management on Mac is to download an app to restore the functionality. They should obviously do that by default, but the apps I've used are great, and free so it's no a deal breaker.
For me an app that totally needs to be sherlocked by Apple is "Magnet" it gives you all the hot keys and stuff and drag stuff for window arrangement/tiling stuff. It is one of the few apps I think is essential to MacOS... a lot like a lot of people feel about bartender
"It also has one very annoying limitation: you can't minimize an app by clicking on its icon, which is very, very frustrating." Same on Ubuntu 22.04, insane.
I just want to say in general, MacOS is only limiting if you don't learn the keyboard shortcuts for everything or make your own. And since all apps are forced to use that global menubar, they are also forced to let you change the keyboard shortcuts for any 3rd party apps menubar options via the System Preferences.
Coming from Linux, there's also the terminal which you should already be familiar with, and Apple makes it easy with the Automator app to do all kinds of stuff with shell scripts. E.g. Apple TV has a nice library overview for all of your video files, but can't handle mkv files, so I wrote a bash script that converts them using ffmpeg, placing them in the "Add to Apple TV" folder, and Automator adds that as a one-click shortcut to any video file in Finder.
any time ive tried it has only worked in half the apps, or i was told not to do that. im sorry that i have 20 years of muscle memory and apple has terrible shortcut keys, i really hate using it
@@BenjaminKoop-i6d I can only recall one time it didn't work, and that is when I was using Microsoft Word on MacOS, and I wanted to set a keybinds for the MacOS "Zoom" functionality (a.k.a. maximize on Windows and Linux), but it wouldn't work because there were 2 "Zoom" items throughout the menu bar for that app: one to actually set the zoom of the page and one to maximize the window. Creating a custom keyboard shortcut for "Zoom" only sets it to the first occurrence of it in the menu bar. My solution: I stopped using Microsoft Word
@@BenjaminKoop-i6d What I love about MacOS keyboard shortcuts is that they are more ergonomic than having to use my pinky for the Ctrl key for almost every keyboard shortcut. The Apple keyboards have a shorter spacebar to make room for the Command key to sit within easy reach of my thumbs. And with that thumb resting on either command key, I can pivot my left hand to reach any key on the keyboard without having my elbows contort inward like I would if I had to use the Ctrl key on Windows and Linux
@@BenjaminKoop-i6d I've tried rebinding the Alt key to act as Ctrl for Windows and Linux before, but that just messes with my Alt-tab functionality, of of my most used keybinds. The second reason why I don't do that is because for non-Apple keyboards Alt is not as comfortable to press with my thumb as the Command key is because the spacebar is longer on non-Apple keyboards.
i've never once minimized a window on macos. mission control pretty much eliminates that need for me. there's simply no reason unless you are dying to stare at your background, in which case, make a new desktop. anyway, if you want to hide, option + click the icon. have fun.
One thing I would consider a plus for Mac OS, is the ability to run adobe software. I would love adobe software to run on Linux and would use it there if possible, but until that happens I'm forced to use either Windows or Mac OS for part of my work flow. And no. I don't expect adobe to ever develop their applications for Linux. :-(
I'd be content with the Affinity Suite to run on Linux. Serif has said they're still trying to iron out a business model for Linux porting that would work. They haven't figured it out yet. Their devs are all certified in the world of Apple and Microsoft. Linux is not up to par in the college education world. For decades, schools got special funding in favor of shilling for Microsoft. Old habits die hard. Especially in state universities.
I dunno if others have already commented this, but if MacOS refuses to launch a downloaded app, you can just right click on it, and choose open. You don't have to go into settings to allow the app every time.
I'd argue that macOS is meant to be used with a trackpad. The window management does kinda suck with a regular mouse, but it feels much better than many other window manager I've used on a laptop with not a ton of screen real estate and a trackpad.
I use the trackpad or magic trackpad 2 and think - with gestures and keyboard shortcuts - and I still think window management is bad on a Mac. It's almost - but not quite - enough to make me switch away from Mac.
I honestly like how macos handles full screen applications, creating a new virtual desktop and moving it to it so you can just scroll through desktops and have applications on each with maybe one for a bunch of floating windows. I would genuinely like to have that in Linux.
Some unorganized thoughts from a former Mac guy: * Maximize on Mac has always been app and not OS driven. Makes sense sometimes when windows have size or aspect restrictions. This ends up being a mixed bag. Sometimes apps handle this nicely, and sometimes they don't. I feel like both options kinda suck personally. :-\ * A bunch of the really weird features like mission control, the fullscreen or split screen modes came straight out of iOS. They kinda ruined the Mac for me honestly... Instead of making things better, they chose to make it more like a tablet OS without making the features work well with mouse and keyboard input. * ".app" packages are great! A lot of Mac users *hate* installers and don't trust them. It's not uncommon for stuff ported from Windows to use them to install crap all around on your drive. Apple does provide a standard installer infrastructure for ".pkg" files, but devs tend to avoid it on purpose unless they really need to install system components. Speaking as a paranoid type, I would always extract them by hand so that they couldn't install crap all around my drive. >_> * Running apps from a dmg is generally fine... if kinda dumb. Apps are *not* suppose to write anything to their parent folder as non-admin users don't have write access to /Applications. The exceptions are usually stuff ported from Windows since... restricting write access to unprivileged users still seems to be a new idea to Windows devs. * App Store + all the code signing crap... Ugh. This is the most significant reason I quit the Mac. We used to be able to sell Mac shareware and make a mild living off of it. When the app store came to the Mac, you lived and died by Apple choosing to feature you. It all dried up for us months after the app store launched. It's like winning the lottery now. :( * I'm amused how passionate Linux folks get about Window management. :) In the last 30 years, I can think of just a single Windows user I knew that was passionate about this. In the Linux world it comes up regularly. Same with sytem theming. Hehe
When I first tried OS X (as it was called then), I noticed a peculiar bug, I’m not sure if it’s been fixed yet. Try opening 2 apps, say A and B, such that you have 2 windows open in A, call them A1 and A2, and one window in B. Stack them so A1 is at the bottom, then B overlapping it, then A2 at the top. Now close A2. Which window comes to the top? You would expect it to be B, but for some reason it would be A1 instead. Does that still happen?
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Yes. I don't consider that a bug though. Mac has always been application and not window focused. Closing a window in general does not cause an application to lose input focus (menu bar, etc) even if it's the last window. It drives Mac users crazy how closing a window causes you to accidentally switch or quit applications in other OSes. For example, if you want to close a document, then open or create a new one... nope you switched applications instead. (Grrr)
Re minimizing: cmd+m, faster than clicking :) The strongest feature of MacOS for me is the preview. There is no program like preview in Linux. No, it doesn't just "preview files". It is a fully fletched PDF reader, allows you to remove pages, reorder them, insert signatures. It has photo editing features and so much more. Also, the search bar/spotlight is far more functional than equivalent in Gnome. The finder also has "tags", which don't exist in linux or windows either.
@@cassandrasinclair8722 Okular is just a reader. Think of it as doing one job, and doing it well. If I want to create/modify those file formats, I have plenty of other tools, more versatile than your inflexible, bloated monolith.
You can use Dock Exposé / DockAltTab to provide previews on the macOS dock, as well as enabling clicking dock icons to minimize apps. Rectangle for window snapping.
Mac OS used to have the green button maximize windows, without holding alt (option). They replaced it with the silly tiling and fullscreen options at one point, and delegated the usual "maximize" feature to an unexplained modifier. Also, running apps from a .dmg is actually fine in most cases, since preferences are saved in the user's home directory, just like on Linux. It definitely could be made easier, but Apple wants everyone to use the App Store (along with their wallets) instead. One of the many features that Mac OS has that I wish Linux DEs would copy is the ability to symmetrically resize windows. Holding option/alt on Mac OS will allow windows to be symmetrically resized which has surprisingly often saved a bit of time.
You should consider that most Mac users were iPhone users at first so they learned how to do multitasking and app switching on their phones So Mac OS with the window management that has Mission Control the apps that go fullscreen and gestures to switch between fullscreen apps it imitates the way multitasking and resource management is done on iOS So Apples goal with the UX is to be intuitive rather than efficient
It is possible to maximize a window without hiding the dock etc. by dragging it to the top of the screen or double clicking to top bar of the application. But yes, I do agree the window management on Mac is way behind on it's compertitors
This is where the difference between UI and UX comes into play. The User Interface on macOS is arguably better than any Linux distro if for no other reason because, as Nick said, app developers actually care how their apps look on macOS. This leads to a more consistent look and feel across applications. The global menu, the monochrome status icons, the various widget sizes that stack perfectly, the consistently rounded corners of every application - all these things lead to a better overall UI. However, Nick pointed out all the user experience (UX) issues with macOS that have not been fixed over the years, the worse offender being window management which I agree is absolutely awful out of the box on macOS. However, some of these UX pieces are made better by the excellent trackpad that comes with the macbooks. And the UX is further enhanced by the integration between macOS and other apple products. Apple's laptops also have a very, very good build quailty and with the release of M1, they also have great performance and unparalleled battery life. Sleep and hibernate on macOS is years ahead of windows or linux. It almost feels like macOS is designed with the Macbook in mind. That said, it is not an excuse to have all of these issues that have gone unfixed or unimproved for years and Apple really should do better.
I had a discussion about M1's performance, recently, with a OSX fan. Ryzen runs rounds around it. The only thing M1 has on its side is power consumption. However, my Asus ROG with Ryzen 9 has a large enough battery to give me several hours of full screen video watching (using Linux). OTOH, I was forced to use OSX a while ago, for a year, on a MacBook pro. The manufacturing of the hardware is exquisite, but even the hardware has usability problems - after hours of using the laptop, my wrists were hurting from the sharp edge of the aluminum case.
@@a0flj0 I would be interested in knowing whether you throttle or lose power unplugged. Traditionally that has been the biggest issue when it comes to other manufacturers. Apple gives you the same performance plugged in or not. Most of the other manufacturers did amazing while plugged in but performance was far worse once on battery.
@@ghost-user559 Never had that. Processor frequency is only decreased when the battery was close to empty, IME. The screen often gets dimmed instantly when you plug out the power source, but you can change that in any modern non-Apple OS via power settings.
@@a0flj0 That’s good to know. I’ll have to look up the manufactures that throttle when unplugged. I watched the comparison about a year ago or more. I think they were “gaming laptops” so idk if that has anything to do with the differences? Perhaps they use a different gpu for some models when unplugged for certain manufacturers? I am generally hardware agnostic although I prefer Apple as an ecosystem for work, I would definitely be in the market for a PC to game. More so when Steam OS and Linux catch up because I despise Windows at this point. But ironically I think Microsoft does very well with consoles so I don’t know if they just have more resources on their gaming than their actual desktop at this point?
Try minimizing a couple of windows. Then do the exposé effect to see all your open windows. Minimized windows aren’t there. Completely idiotic when what I want is an overview of all my windows including the ones I minimized in order to declutter this ungodly mess of a desktop.
Double click the titlebar to maximize the window without Fullscreen. Also us Mac users don't tend to tile windows. Most of the time i just use Fullscreen and the 2 split view
@@TheLinuxEXP even on Linux or windows I never used tiling. I guess it's just because I've been using small displays so tiling isn't really an advantage for me. If you really want tiling go install a different window manager. There's plenty of options that many mac power users use. I think the issue most of you linux users have is wanting your exact workflow on an OS that doesn't supply that workflow and shouldnt be expected to provide the exact workflow. So you complain it's not that good only because you didn't want to take the time to adapt properly. It's like if I went from macos to windows and called it bad just because it didn't have a menu bar and dock out of the box. I'd get called stupid for expecting that. Also what do you mean it "doesn't maximize"???? It does exactly what you wanted. Fits the content to the screen. Just because it doesn't fill the whole screen doesn't mean it isn't "maximized". If you wanted it to fit the whole screen just expand it out yourself. It doesn't do it on its own because it doesn't need to. It's like expanding a page to fit the width of a wide-screen monitor when the content is formatted for a vertical monitor. It leaves a bunch of useless space on either side. Maximizing is literally just fit the content to the height of the screen. macOS does that without wasting space on the sides. Apps like VSCode and Discord do in fact "maximize" like they do on other platforms. Honestly I never had an issue with that. Having used all 3 OSes as daily drivers for years I never had a problem with macOS window management.
I mean the target audience macOS has is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT from Linux. At least take that into account when reviewing it. You wouldn't review a game for kids and complain about how bad it is for adults. You would review the game with its target audience in mind. It is fine to voice complaints that you personally have but still think if that feature you're calling "necessary" would be actually necessary for the target audience when complaining. That's personally why I think Linux is such a mess. It's trying to appeal to everyone all at once with no sacrifices. You can't make everyone happy.
I have to say, I totally agree with most of your review here. I work across Windows 10 and 11, Fedora GNOME and MacOS and by far MacOS is my least favourite! You can maximise windows by double clicking the window top bar, at least in Monterey. But the window management is awful in MacOS. The AppStore is mostly "m'eh" once I have the apps I need I'm not going there to notice or care and most apps I install using brew. Everything else is fine and mostly works but the Window and task management is so terrible I swear at MacOS every day
@@terrydaktyllus1320 LMFAO! A Mac apologist saying Windows users have Stockholm syndrome. That's just hilarious. It's also funny that you blame Windows on you or your wife getting malware (quite possibly a trojan) that plays ads in the file browser. That's not a Windows thing. 100% PEBMAC. Windows 7, not Windows XP, was the apex of the Windows experience. It's been downhill since then but even Windows 8 had better window management than OS X. Windows 10 is sluggish and crappy on an HDD because the geniuses thought it should be installed on SSDs (real boneheads).
A cool thing they have which I tried to replicate in linux is sessions. The fact you can shut off a mac, turn it on again, and all the windows magically open in the same spot you closed them, without losing any progress (especially if you have a 2nd monitor plugged in!) is over the top. Wishing for linux to have that option soon enough, but I doubt it's in the roadmap...
Hibernation has been an option for a LONG time in Windows and Linux. I know it's, not quite the answer you were looking for, but it does technically do exactly what you want to. Just make sure you have a good SSD with a decent TBW rating. I always use hibernation though, it allows me to use my computers as if they are always just put in sleep mode, to save a teeny bit of power and to avoid any loss in power outages.
I modded macOS heavily, and ended up with the yabai tiling window manager, skhd and such, and hid both the top bar and dock. Then I use spotlight for launching apps and alacritty and neovim for software development. Great experience not gonna lie.
Floating windows is the way Mac OS has worked since System 6. Once you’ve used this for about 30 years you really don’t want it messed up. I prefer to work in floating windows and never use them full screen. I can always see what’s open and running on the same workspace. I love window management in Windows, but I use my windows the same way in windows. It’s really a workflow style that you develop of a user. There are quirks of Mac OS that really have travelled with the OS and it’s users since the time of MacOS on its 68k machines. But to each their own. But MacOS usually plays well with third party tools.
the window management is ultra basic and simplistic, but every time i have to use a mac, my problem is always the FINDER ! feels like going back in the 90's ever ttime i wanna manage some files :O
Reviewers seem to want things to be constantly changing (so they have something to write about?), however regular users might prefer consistency rather than a constant flow of new features and ways of working. Most people don't use all the various interface functions anyway, they're too busy doing what they need to do!
There's a lot of applications that, on being started, check whether they are ran from the original dmg and offer to copy themselves to the Applications folder. But there are cases where you just want to try or one-shot use an application before copying it into the applications folder, so it's nice that that's possible as well. Also, the out-of-the-box window management sucks, but there's a great window manager called Magnet which is usually the first thing I install on a new macOS installation.
It's crazy that Windows11 is basically a skin over Windows XP and yet MacOS is a more classic experience. I don't view that as a bad thing though, I'm all for that. Mac iterates on what works instead of making silly things like Microsoft does. I got reminded by this of a channel named OSFirstTimer, where a guy get's his mum to try out operating systems to test their usability to a new user. With Windows, she had a hard time on windows 8 but loved windows 7. She loved all the linux distros she tried (unless they were super weird ones like ratpoison). But what stuck with me is what she said about OS X. She was surprised when testing a 2016 version of the system that it was similar in functionality to the 2002 one she tried, and yet felt more modern.
Windows 11 is not "basically a skin over Windows XP".Your whole comment is full of misinformation and nonsense. Clearly just repeating someones trashcan video.
you didn't touch on 'homebrew', which is pretty much the best way to get FOSS software on your mac, with all the latest updates. I don't think anyone uses the app store for anything on a mac computer.
The macOS store is only good for proper paid apps like Affinity Photo (a Photoshop alternative) and the like. Besides those, it’s a complete joke, with all the missing FOSS and with all the scam apps with very limited to no functionality hidden behind a paywall. Typically stuff that is available for free on both Linux and Windows.
I think this nicely shows 2 trends: First the macOS desktop was the leading most modern and influencial UI for a desktop OS and is loosing ground and probably will soon or already has lost that lead on UI depending on your personal preferences. This i think has a lot to do with the changes in apples top management. The second is harder to see from the video but still makes a lot of sense in my humble mind and it is a shift of the focus from the desktop to smartphone or more general speaking Touch UI. In that for me apples still has the lead with the smoothest and most user friendly UI up to now. PS: Luckily you didn't compared apples with oranges( unity). More seriosly i am really happy how many choices you have based on your preferences for desktop UIs on Linux like Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, Budgie, Pantheon, Enlightment, Deepin, LXDE and someone is always pissed not mentioned his prefered one still. New ones are on the way like the one from Pop OS which bring in new ideas and the best of all some of them like Gnome and KDE even work together on the parts were it makes the most sense without loosing there conceptual different approaches to user interfaces.
@@TheLinuxEXP fair point. in mission control settings, you can turn on keyboard shortcuts for switching between desktops using ^ (left or right arrow) if its not on by default (it should be).
dang... you beat me to it. I literally partially scripted this exact video from my PoV for producing once I'm not busy developing stuff again. PS: Obviously I'm still gonna do it.
Also ayy lmao you also commented on the lack of Minimise on Click on Dock... that's literally one of the things I comment about in my script thus far... jokingly pointing out maybe THAT'S why Ubuntu does not either.
As with most operating systems, customizing fixes all the issues. Magnet + keyboard shortcuts makes window management better, and if you really want you can find a mac "tiling" manager
I had one of the first Intel MBPs back in 2007 and am daily driving a Mid 2014 MBP. I feel like the window management was actually a little better when MacOS went by big cats.
True. I can’t remember which version changed the green button to fullscreen but no one on the planet liked it and I never figured out how to fix it. That was the same time when they introduced slow animations for things like opening Safari 🤢
Not sure if this would be useful for anyone. But if you want better window management on MacOS, I recommend Rectangle, and Amethyst depending on what you like (I use both depending on the thing I am doing). Amethyst brings the feel of a tiling window manager, which while not analogous, do feel like i3/sway. Rectangle brings the snapping feature to mac, while also having lots of window configuration options to map keyboard short cuts to. Window management should be built in yes, but there are free solutions that do give you some choice depending how you prefer to work over on linux.
General remark: Learn and use hotkeys. Not a single Linux (professional) user I know, actually uses the small icons in the top left/right of windows and tabs. The huge advantage of macOS is here that almost alle apps implement the preferred hot keys: tab-t for news tabs, tab-n for windows, cmd-w to close tabs, cmd-q to close an app. Use CMD-h to hide windows, no need to minimise it to the dock. 6:00 Same here: Who starts an app via an "app manager" (?) in 2022? CMD-space opens spotlight: Type in the first 2-4 letters of the app name and click enter. App opened. Takes maybe 1 sec. 9:00 Use just an app like "rectangle" to achieve the behaviour you want to have. 11:00 Tip here: Install home brew and (basically) all OpenSource and Linux apps are available to you w/o any further work necessary. You can also define a LaunchDaemons for upgrading and updating brews. This includes VLC, GIMP, LibreOffice etc., etc. etc. So to sum up the video: You don't like the windows management. Fair enough, just use an app like rectangle. What you miss, but briefly mention at the end to the video, is the "handover" features and full integration of the system; and all productive measures of macOS: Send/share files between your devices via Airdrop, sync/share tabs in 1 sec, share documents via handoff in 1 sec, system integrated key chain access via FaceTime on the iPhone; unlock the MacBook via my Apple Watch w/o doing anything, seamlessly share Notes/TodoLists/etc. between Devices etc. etc. etc.
While I agree with most of your points, I would like to give a defense for Mission Control's window management issues: When using MacOS on a laptop with a trackpad, there are a lot of gestures which make Mission Control significantly nicer to work with. You can open Mission Control simply by swiping up with three fingers, and switch between desktops by swiping sideways with three fingers. Doing this does not close Mission Control, making it a lot faster to move a window to a different desktop. Furthermore, this three finger sideways swipe also works normally, making it blazingly fast to switch between desktops. These shortcuts supposedly also work if the user has a "magic mouse" (although I can't confirm this), which should act a lot like a trackpad in a lot of ways. If the user however has neither a trackpad, nor a magic mouse, I can completely see how this UI would suck, because it is designed with a heavy focus on gestures. There are however also some negatives which you did not mention, which I experience(d) quite regularly: By default, the height of the dock changes depending on the amount of icons shown (at least in the version I'm using, when the dock gets relatively full). This means that opening / closing / minimising applications to dock will create a giant mis-match in window height, since by "maximising" the windows will only open as far as the dock. This is especially a problem on smaller screens, such as on the Macbook Air, where the bar fills up quite quickly. While it is possible to disable this auto-resizing, this is only possible using the terminal, and this can't be done through the settings menu. It is also not possible to cut -> paste files like you would normally do with ctr / cmd + x. Instead you have to first copy the file with cmd + c, and then paste it with cmd + option + v to move it. This is just an annoying shortcut to do due to the layout of the keys: It is quite common to press the cmd with your thumb (which is already close due to normally being on the spacebar). If you then want to use the left option, you have to switch to a different finger for the cmd key since the left option is so close to the cmd key, or if you plan to use the right option key, you have to move your right hand away from your mouse / trackpad, where it is often located. This is just way more inconvenient than being able to use cmd + x for copying (which is actually used in every program on MacOS, except the file manager), and isn't clearly explained anywhere. This causes users to just resort to drag + drop, or copy + paste and then manually delete, because they don't know about this "short-cut".
5:33 For general use (which will be mostly 95% of the MacOS users) there's no need to create those kind of personalizations or event to concern about it. They just created one that simple works and work very very well (finder). "oh but I want to be able choose between 999 versions of buggy file explorers" err... on MacOs you won't. Customization, freedom not always means good quality or experience.
Something Linux sorely needs, especially in the age of big screens, is the "maximize to big enough" behavior. Not every app has to use the whole screen, and most windows users in contrast always work with everything maximized, they don't actually use "windows". A "big enough" size lets you easily multi-task without being cramped.
I have to admit I find some of your complaints a little weird. It would _never_ have occurred to me to try to minimize an application by selecting it in the dock. If it's a larger click target you want, you could bypass that entirely by just using a keyboard shortcut. I'm not sure when you would want to maximize a window without fullscreening it… like you want it to be the only thing on screen but you also don't? …but as others have mentioned double-clicking the window's top bar maximizes. Weird unintuitive control, yes, but the feature is there. The experience definitely _has_ changed since OS-X 1.0. Multiple desktops weren't a thing back then, and the way they function was reworked a couple of times. Mission control was completely changed. Fullscreening a normal window wasn't even a thing you could do. (The green button used to maximize.) The apps menu didn't exist. There were no widgets and no built-in notifications system at all. I'm not even sure if dock folders or the app store existed. The tiling does suck, though I admit I've never really used tiling. (Probably because MacOS trained me not to. :P) I think I know why it works that way: It seems to be directly copying how it works on iPadOS, probably as part of their effort to make their whole ecosystem work together. Is that an excuse for it being bad? No. :P
Wholeheartedly disagree. The criticisms brought up are criticisms of someone who hardly uses the system. It is quite weird because this usually is an argument of the linux advocates. App grid is not to your liking? Well, most people launch anything with spotlight and typing the two first letters of the app's name within the fraction of a second anyway. Window management? I don't think I have clicked any of the window scaling buttons in years because of the super practical window overview (the marketing term is mission control, i think) except for a tiny fraction of cases, in which it doesn't really matter. Therefore, I haven't felt the need to minimize anything in years (and if so by accidentally pressing the shortcut). And unlike most reviewers, I distinctly dislike the "layout options" that are now common in windows, some linux desktops, and mac os when the cursor hovers the maximize button. Honestly: Who uses this on a regular basis after the first few minutes when it is interesting because it is new? The only real criticism I share is the missing tiling option when a window is dragged to the screen's edge. A much more realistic way to set up a work environment is to have apps in fullscreen or side-by-side view in a bunch of desktops through which it is very easy to navigate via keyboard shortcuts or mission control. Regarding the apps, I actually don't see the problem. If it is not in the app store, just get it from the developers webpage. This criticism seems weird from someone who used to use elementary os with a basically empty store as his daily driver. The dmg-files do seem a bit antiquated, though. Particularly, having to unmount the single use dmg is a bit annoying. When it comes to major advantages that are supposedly lacking, there is the whole MS-Office-Photoshop-proprietary-software-debate even though most linux users dismiss this. If you need that stuff for work, this is a very significant argument. At the same time, I can install a bunch of linuxy stuff via brew, which is particularly useful for scientific stuff. I find it quite practical that I can use the same machine to develop AND test HPC code while having access to some proprietary mainstream apps. So, while I usually find the reviews on this channel relatively balanced it feels like you were looking for the proverbial hair in he soup with a magnifying glass just because the linux crowd really hates Apple for whatever reason.
Nick, if you hold the Option key you’ll get a different set of options in the context menu that pops up from the green button, that will just move the window to the left or right side, and won’t try to force tiling. “Make Fullscreen” will also change to “Zoom”, the lame macOS version of maximize that was inherited from Classic Mac OS. And you don’t actually need to long-press the green button. The context menu will appear if you just hover over the green button for a second. When in doubt in macOS, ALWAYS try the Option key. Many menus have items that change when the Option key is held down.
I agree most of the part with the review Nick! The reason why Apple's choice of not tiling the window apps is stated long time from Steve Jobs where he prefered having all the window apps to be floating instead of being stacked, because that would help Unix systems approach to the era of GUI apps. I will cover this topic in my next video (this profile channel)
@@gsgrzegorz98 thanks! There is a problem with my device, I'll try to fix it! However, a little support and generous comment like yours are always appreciated! ✌️🙂
God, this discussion of window management has just nailed my frustrations with MacOS. You basically have to install third-party software to allow for quick snapping and maximizing using keyboard shortcuts. It's awful. I feel like they also took a back step with workspace management too. I use two displays, and it used to be that if you switched desktop, it would only switch the one on the screen you were active in. Now it switches both screens at once. So if I have apps open in desktop 1 and 2, moving to desktop 3 also moves my second screen to desktop 4. I've basically stopped using different desktops for that reason, so frustrating to make it worse with no option to change back.
One behaviour I do appreciate in macOS is the Hide option. It’s nice to hide an app without minimising its windows and showing it by clicking its icon. Another thing to mention is that uninstalling apps often doesn’t result in relevant data and preferences being taken away with them. For example, an application may have a huge amount of data and extra plug-ins in the /Library or ~/Library folder. Apple never really made a way to get rid of those unless you use a third party utility or rebuild a user account. On that, I really like the NEXTSTEP-derived Library folders as it makes rebuilding a lot easier for accounts, and it’s a neatly conserved structure for the user, all users, and the system. Also, AppleScript/Automator/Shortcuts are amazingly useful applications if you have need for them. I wish that application scripting was easier in other OSes.
While it is true that it is not possible to minimize an application by clicking on its icon in the application bar, it is possible to hide it by option-clicking on it. Also, you can hide the active window with option+click on your desktop (Finder).
One thing to consider is that, like Gnome, there are third party tools for customizing some things and addressing some of the deficiencies of Mac OS. I use Better Snap Tool to provide window tiling. It has drag to top/side/corner to maximize, half-screen, or quarter-screen tiles, respectively (along with some other capabilities). For installing and managing apps, I use Homebrew package manager and avoid the dreaded App Store. I will say, however, that there are two things that Apple gets right. First, updating native Mac apps that are installed from the Store or the Web is the best experience I’ve ever had. When opening an app with updates available, it opens a dialog asking if you want to update, you click “yes,” and it downloads the update, closes the app, installs the update, and reopens the app where you left off. It’s fast and smooth as butter. The other thing I like about Mac OS is that the Preferences menu is always in the same place for all apps. There are things I like about Mac, but there’s a lot not to love.
Hi. I am a mac user since 2004 and watched your video with interest. It appears Linux users like to spend much time customizing the desktop or playing with the app windows. A lot of your critics were focused on how macOS reacts or does not react to your expected clicks. Well, this is because macOS is not Linux. Watching your video, I realize I focus on getting my work done with macOs rather than playing around with the desktop settings. Using the GUI is no "nightmare" for me but routine. I also do not want to customize my desktop down to the last icon, but to boot up my mac and get started on my work. So it is a different viewpoint I have but it doesn't mean that I call Linux a bad or complicated system. Both worlds do have fans and it's just a choice we make on which OS works best for us. Therefore I am happy Linux is the answer to your needs, macOs is mine.
Its a common argument that mac OS "just works", but it does only that. If you focus only on your work, youre missing forest for the trees. If you try to optimize your workflow, you may find that being able to tile windows with a simple gesture rather than couple of clicks will make you more productive. You don't need to spend hours optimizing your setup. Other OS's come with more sensible defaults, like not hiding taskbar/top bar whenever you maximize a window - yes it takes longer if you have to wait for the app bar to reveal itself rather than being where you expect it to be.
@@MichalDabski I can tile all windows with a single click, there's an app for that. macOS offers me exactly what I need to be as productive as possible, and that includes apps and the smooth interaction of macOS, iOS, iPadOS and the iCloud. I have respect for how Linux has developed, but for me the operating system is not an alternative - and I'm not looking for one.
uhuuu fisher price my first operating system.. all of his criticism is valid and saying window management is a nightmare isn't an attack personally on you. Mac makes even simple power user operatioms difficult, so now, for most of it it doesn't get out of the way, it's perpetually in the way. Try KDE Plasma sometime, you dont need to "tweak every option". KDE works very hard to give sane defaults out of the box. its usable for basic users and power users immediately.
Try OnlyOffice, the best open source office suite for Linux: www.onlyoffice.com/desktop.aspx
100% sure you are paid to say that
@@kenos8216 he did say he was sponsored soo.. ?
@@kenos8216 No shit Sherlock.
@@kenos8216 that's how sponsorships work🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
@@kenos8216 Ummmm, duh!! Did you not see the sponsor spot in the video? Anyway, who cares?
I wouldn't say "even Windows" does window management better than macOS. Windows actually does window management pretty well. It's one of its strong points.
Yeah in windows 11 it's pretty good
It *was* good with the classic taskbar. Ever since they did the taskbar grouping thing (and therefore hiding text) and added preview-pop-ups (that you can only disable via registry hack), the workflow greatly suffered for me.
I will never understand why Microsoft (and a lot of the Windows userbase) think its better, if the huge 27" screen only uses a few icons on your left side of the taskbar, while all sub-windows get grouped behind the icon. You have to either use Alt-Tab or do this awkwad thing of moving your cursor to the program icon, wait for this window preview, *then* you can only start looking for the sub-window until you find it. This may not sound like a lot of used time, but oh boy, it adds up soooo much if you use Windows for a while.
Classic Taskbar on the other hand: You look down, read the title of the window you want, you move your cursor down to the very wide button and click it. No waiting, no hidden text, no unwanted mousehover pop-ups. Personally i dont even need to actually read, since the taskbar is always visible the Windows and their text lines are printed into my consciousness, so i can switch to the window i want almost "blind" on classic taskbar. No other desktop design philosophy could ever reach this simple, quick and reliable windows management for me.
This is also one reasons why i really dislike Windows 11 (despite many other reasons).
It's in the name.
@@TheLinuxEXP Windows Vista was ahead of its time.
I had a q6600 and George 8800gt so it worked faster and better than XP.
After having the search and the window snapping I hated using XP machines.
@@LegioXXI Are you talking about only Win11? Because even in Win10 you can ungroup icons in the system settings.
What was even more glaring to me was this Ne.nd.rthal acting like you can't put the taskbar on any edge of the screen. Maybe that changed in Windows 11, but most people are still using 10 or earlier.
I love this. It's like a glimpse into a parallel universe where Linux is the predominant Desktop OS. :D
I'd like to move there!
This is basically how being inside the linux community feels like
In this universe Linux Desktops are only for elites.
I kind of like it.
Haven't you considered that you are on the wrong side? Because the predominant Desktop OS is Windows, not MacOS... and still, I can tell you Linux is better
what in earth are you talking about, dont you know the year of the linux desktop was 20 years and its been nothing but market dominance since
Mac apps are actually not single files, they are directories with a special extension (.app) and internal structure, which is shown by the OS as just the icon of the app. It's actually quite nice to be able install/remove apps just by copying/deleting files. It's a paradigm users already understand. But ... a few apps also require a custom installer, and then you get the typical Windows experience, in which you also need a custom uninstaller to remove it. This confuses many Mac users, because they are not very used to it and struggle to remove these apps.
I can understand the confusion when you can't apt-get remove. If you are coming from linux and prefer to do things in a needlessly complex way, install brew and then you can brew install and uninstall to your hearts content. Us Mac users will continue to install apps by dragging them to the applications folder, and uninstalling by dragging to the trash.
@@LunaticEdit jeez, why so hostile?
@@ephemera-noctourniquet I wasn't aware my comment was hostile? I used linux for 8 years so I got a chuckle about macOS feeling old. Last year I tried to find a linux distro that works with 1 1080p and 1 4k monitor and literally failed to do so - always had issues, either outright, or dragging between monitors. Themes are inconsistent across apps due to some being GTK, some being Qt, etc. Don't get me started on Pulse VS ALSA VS Proton audio. The reason I switched off of linux is because at this point I need my computer for doing work, not to tinker with.
@@R0MUl0 I think XCode is absolute garbage, so no arguments there. To be fair, I consider visual studio on windows to be a slow piece of garbage as well. I use either vim, or jetbrains IDEs -- on both windows at work and mac at home -- have you checked out AppCode? I've had my M1 air since release and I've had absolutely no crashes whatsoever. It's been rock solid and I use it day in and out 7 days a week. I can't really speak for x86 as all of the apps I use have been ported to arm64 at this point. I know everyone has their own experiences -- but the last 3 or so attempts at using a linux desktop has ended in frustration and at this point I don't want to touch it unless it's in a kubernetes cluster or vsphere.
@@LunaticEdit dragging them to the "Trash" doesn't always "Fully" uninstall the program or Apps either.
Yes, window management has been a pain on macOS for a long time and has only gotten marginally better over the years. One small correction though: you don't need to exit Mission Control to move a window from an inactive Desktop to another. You can use a three-finger swipe left or right, or use a keyboard shortcut (by default Control + Left/Right Arrow) to switch Desktops without leaving Mission Control.
It /does/ depend how you work. The only window management that I wish I could do on macOS that I can’t is a keyboard shortcut for “move to next monitor”. However, I agree that fullscreen is almost always useless, and maximize is what I want. But Mission Control means that I don’t need to do things like tiling.
@@natbarmore I disagree on that one. Maximize's role is to give as much space to a window as possible which is effectively what Full Screen does. Additionally, it moves the full screen window to its own desktop which is a better behaviour since, as a window is maximised, I don't want or need other windows in the way. If I'm working with a full screen window (say VSCode, Modelsim, Overleaf or what have you), any other window appearing should go to a separate desktop.
Doing so is even better when tiling. macOS' practice of treating a pair of tiled windows as a single full screen entity is also great.
As for the criticism of not being able to tile with only a single window open, I'm not sure I understand it. In what world would you want to have only a single window tiled?
Personally, I believe that replicating macOS' full screen behaviour would be a good idea for any DE out there while taking inspiration of both it and Windows' behaviour for tiling would be a good idea.
Meh, I’m alright installing other tools for window management. While on Linux, I stick to FOSS, everyone on Mac understands that some slightly more elegant solutions essentially “nickel&dime” you. Sure if you come from Linux you expect to be able to install a window manager for free, but on Mac you’ll probably pay $2 or $3
@@barbietripping There are free and open source window managers on mac, Rectangle is a popular one.
Imo, three-fingers swipe with Apple’s touchpad to switch desktops is one of the most ‘addictive’ feature of MacOS
Another gripe I have is how they seem obsessed to hide anything that is considered as "advanced" - even for simply access to "Save as" when saving something, you need a specific shortcut. And the finder which hides the actual filesystem folder hierarchy, more "special shortcuts" for simple things like deleting a file, etc. Manipulating large numbers of files is a serious PITA in general.
And windows 11 took the same route and everyone hates it for that. 😪
@@romulino yep, it is like dumbing down ppl
Win10 was my last Windows and now I'm on Garuda Linux and never looked back :D
I am fine with some stuff being simple by default, as long as I can customise it so that what I need is quick to access. Macos takes this too far. I get annoyed with nautilus using ctrl+l to edit the file path, but not showing it is stupid
@@romulino Windows 11 you just click the path bar lol it default highlights it so you can copy it lol
@I DUBZH Zorin is nice :D
I think many ppl will leave Microsoft, expecially since Valve is "steaming" up Linux (pun intented xD)
These days, you really have to use a trackpad to take full advantage of all the window management stuff. When you are in mission control, you can also use the three-finger swipe to move between desktops, which imo makes it easy to move windows around between them. I also don't understand why they don't enable App Exposé by default. If you set it to three-finger swipe down, it will show all windows from the current app, including those that are minimized. I would say in general, the most deficient aspect of Mac OS is the Finder. It's missing many things that should have been added in the past 20 years, and it's buggy enough that you can never really trust it if you are trying to do anything with a large number of files.
Anyway, I'm glad Linux exists for you and Mac OS exists for me, because we each seem to like and prefer the conventions of each. Not everything has to be the same because people have different preferences.
+1 this.
I like using macOS and Linux for different purposes. macOS is my main Desktop OS, while Linux is the working horse. Every time i need a pragmatic solution for anything, every time i need an efficient OS without a lot of resource waste, i will pick up a Linux distro that fits those requirements. Would never use Windows or macOS for example on a Raspberry Pi (instead of RetroPi), even if it was possible. Same goes for Admin systems. Linux may has the smallest desktop market share, but on every other usercase, Linux is king.
You don't have to stick to only one operating system for *everything*. Its perfectly viable to combine different systems for different purposes.
Wouldn't know what a trackpad is to be honest. I mostly use a desktop nowadays, and even before when I regularly used a laptop I almost always connected a mouse to it. I'm also a windows guy so I'm a mouse guy. My current mouse is a MMO mouse and has 12 keys on the side that are mapped to various shortcuts. We windows guys like our mice and macros. We don't like having to use the keyboard that much unless we type, and we don't like trackpads because the accuracy and speed of a mouse is lightyears ahead.
I don't even know half the shortcuts mapped to my mouse. I just know what the macro does and have totally forgotten what keys I actually need to press on the keyboard to achieve it lmao.
And also btw I'm a Linux guy now. Windows 11 made me switch last year. But prior to Linux I had been using Windows since I was a kid. I've gotten fairly advanced with Linux, way more than I ever was with windows to be honest. Due to being an advanced user in general though, in less than a year I've managed to become way more advanced than the general Linux user that's been using it for many years. I know where everything is located, I can code my own stuff. The only parts of Linux I haven't messed with yet are kernel type stuff. And honestly I don't even want / need to. It was never my intention really to become this knowledgeable. It only happened because I made multiple messes initially and had to fix them (I'm an extremely arrogant person who will do things his way despite of consequences and risks - which should answer your question as to how I got there). I just want to use my computer to get stuff done and for entertainment.
ENT2 On Desktop Macs, many people use the Apple Trackpad instead of a mouse. Trackpads on Windows do not work as well and I don’t think anyone uses them on Windows desktop machines.
Some of this is painful to watch as a macos user :D
But yeah, window management is much better on Windows and Linux. To be effective you have to learn the keyboard shortcuts and gestures.
"Just use gestures" is the deal breaker for me. I hate gestures with a passion. Though I also dearly miss trackpoints so maybe my take isn't very popular.
@@matthewriley5819 For me its quite opposite. The Apple Trackpad and its gestures were the main selling point of macOS for me. Without it, i would not use it. It just feels so liberating being able to bring up window overviews, to go a site back in the browser etc, without having to waste time shoving the curser to some buttons all the time.
Especially with a large monitor its a great difference. On Windows the wasted microseconds of curser-shoving add up so much if you really spend a lot of time on your computer. I even get pain in my hand after a while, because i move the mouse so often every time when im not on macOS (and therefore also not using a trackpad).
I guess its all preference at the end.
But i can agree on one thing: Gestures being *mandatory* in order to probably manage your windows on macOS is a huge flaw.
Most of this video is cringe.
@@dragonballjiujitsu Cringe how? Your comment implies that you have some useful feedback, but instead you provide no useful feedback at all.
@@terraltheible How about scrolling through the comments and you will find a massive amount of info I've typed.
Alright so a few notes that I'll sprinkle as I watch the video (as an avid macOS user that prefers it over Windows and all flavors of Linux- I've tried pretty much them all)
2:38 The best part about this "global OS menu" is that it's really easy to script and search. Just clicking on "Help" gives you a search bar that lets you search the menus a la Microsoft office. You can also easily script these to automate tasks for apps that have zero scripting functionality with AppleScript.
3:14 This is just one of the pitfalls of Apple's multi-instance ideology. Until OS X came up with this concept it wasn't common to have multiple documents for one app open. They designed the dock around the idea that an application can host multiple windows but the window isn't the app, so closing the window wouldn't close the app. They offer a "kind of" solution in that you can click Hide to hide all windows of the app, however. You could really go either way, and Apple chose the way more consistent with OS principles. Completely valid criticism though.
5:33 Honestly, I prefer this sometimes. Sure, it's fun to customize the crap out of your desktop but sometimes it's really nice where you can go to your coworkers computer and not have to figure out how their desktop environment works. We used to have themes but those went away in favor of the consistency (that app devs love too). I work in a development company and I had to do a presentation on my coworkers computer, which had a tiling window manager that I didn't know how to use. You can imagine how that went.
5:53 Most macOS users use Spotlight to open apps since it's much faster than finding your app's icon, but I presume an application-specific menu would be useful to those who want it.
6:40 Honestly my favorite part of Spotlight is the built-in calculator and the ability to run commands. Super handy.
6:58 Completely agree. For pretty much all Mac power users one of the first things we install is a window tiler. Apple tried to fix this but their implementation is terrible and they deserve all criticism for it.
7:58 It used to actually be a maximize button in OS X Lion, where the full screen button was on the right side. They merged them in Yosemite and now the shortcut for maximize is to double click the top bar, which is definitely easier but is less intuitive.
8:21 This really depends on the app. Maximize events are handled by the developer, so a maximize in Adobe software maximizes the whole screen while Safari only fits the content, something I assume is to aid responsive design (?) not really sure.
10:58 I honestly can't think of a single macOS user that actually thinks the App Store is the intended way to install Mac apps. It's an absolute joke, to the point where most of Apple's official apps have versions that you can just download instead of using the App Store.
11:10 There are a variety of reasons between the sandboxing of apps, invasive update policies, app store guidelines so strict that most open source apps could only have about 75% of their functionality, but perhaps the biggest reason is the fee to get into the App Store. It's $99 a year, which compared to the alternative (downloading a .dmg) is an unnecessary cost that makes updating and releasing harder.
12:46 The only time I've experienced this was with an old version of iPhoto, and that's it. Most Mac apps retain compatibility between versions, the only time this wasn't true was when they dropped support for 32bit apps with Catalina.
13:43 You didn't criticize this but I feel like some people might be helped by this explanation, it's a DMG file since macOS app files are technically just folders that house the resources and the binaries. That's why you can't just download a ".app" file. Some apps use .zip but DMG is still the common practice.
14:10 Even in this case, 90% of apps I've encountered will have a little popup offering to move themselves to the applications folder or outright not running at all until done so. DMG isn't an official app distribution format, it's just a disk image format and that's why it doesn't have it's own "application install" methods. It's literally just a folder and it's up to the developer to tell the user.
15:06 There's a little-known workaround for this, right clicking and clicking "open" will let you avoid going into System Preferences.
Honestly, this video does highlight the main problem with macOS. Apple makes it "intuitive" but the way they do that is by sweeping most desktop management features under the rug. All of the intuitiveness is lost once you try to do power user things and most of it is kind of a "if you know you know" thing. I find Snazzy Lab's Mac Tips series really helpful and I wish Apple would be more obvious with what seems like pretty expected features.
Yep. It’s cooler to hate on other platforms than bother to understand them. Good on you, bro!
You can actually double-click on a blank spot on the top of the window, the one the traffic lights are in, to maximize. You can also set it to minimize (but that is just straight up annoying). I really don't like the behavior of the green traffic light as well, but at least maximizing works.
yeah it works which is nice but isn't apple the company that's praised to be intuitive to non techy users?
Sometimes it maximizes, and sometimes it goes in whatever which way it wants because MacOS thinks it's already maximized.
GNOME works the same way, and it doesn't even have maximize buttons.
@@a544jh Not really : GNOME, like any other OS basically, would maximize the window if you double-click it. macOS would not maximize it, but sometimes maximize, sometimes expand...
@@kevinv2507 another thing is that you can drag the window to the top panel to maximise it, and you can drag from the top panel down unmaximise it
This will sound weird, but... I personally don't like monochrome tray icons. color helps me a lot at finding the application icon I'm looking for. When they're monochrome they sort of blend together to me and it takes me more time to find stuff.
Indeed! Doesn't sound weird at all!
I will never understand why people want so much conformity in their small tray icons. All that does is to make it harder to find the actual icon you want to click on. It's form over function, and that's bad when you're regularly interacting with it. Colours, which don't even need to be bright, make is so, so much quicker and less painful to distinguish between icons.
Same.
I particularly thought someone saying I don't like traffic lights on the left was just a dumb comment. The global menu bar is on the left. Windows and Linux menus for each app are on the left. The left corner is the one consistent place vs. hunting around for how wide a window is.
for windows management I use Rectangle, the window interface in Mac OS is really outdated... with rectangle I even have keyboard shortcut that makes the desktop a joy. I found more easy to organize the windows in Mac OS nine than modern Mac OS
I swear by Rectangle, IMHO a solution superior to any mouse or touchpad-based one: I have all sides and corners of the screen mapped to the numeric keypad, including moving between multiple monitors.
As I will have to migrate to Windows as my daily driver later this year (I'm an Apple user since the Apple IIe!), I'm circling the idea of reproducing its functionality with AutoHotKey.
Yeah like installing extensions on gnome to make it actually functional. Honestly god awful design. I would choose Win 7 or KDE over any other mac os like garbage
@@escifi I've never used Windows 11, but Windows 10 allows you to open apps (and the associated windows) with Super (Windows) + [0-9] if they're pinned to the taskbar.
Windows 7 is better than any UI Apple has ever made, and I've been using Macs since the early 1990s. I haven't owned one since 1998, but I've used them too much. They are, IMO, the worst big company around: terribly anti-consumer and anti-repair.
I see quite a few people here who use Rectangle, which raises the question: why are you okay with having to use third-party tools to get basic UI functionality?
@@theglowcloud2215 The same reason they use Apple: they don't know any better. 95% of them could do the exact same tasks with a Chromebook. 80% of them could chuck their Macs and just use their phones to do their daily computer tasks.
But who could live without their dock icons shaking and jumping around when a notification is waiting?
I honestly didn't expect it to be so bad. Also now I finally understand why every mac user I see use apps as a small square in the middle of the screen instead of just maximazing it.
I have a mac for work and I don't use the green maximize button but for some windows I drag the corners out to make them take up the whole screen. It's a bit silly not having a button to just do that.
@@quickdudley pro tip, double tap the top bar of the window, it stretches the window to fill the screen without entering full screen mode
It's all the more annoying when they share their screen. Especially the terminal.
@@msrsooraj the terminal is actually one of the ones I deliberately don't have full-screen. My terminal windows are all either 80 or 161 columns wide. (161 so that in vim I can have two buffers open side by side 80 columns each and one column of the separator character)
@@tefkah That just seems "logical" and I didn't realize this was an issue on Mac. That being said, I've never used a Mac or iPhone. I do own a 2018 iPad pro and I'd be a liar if I said it wasn't a great device. Maybe I should look into maximizing it's potential and seeing if installing a nix distro would be easily achieved
When I owned a MacBook a few years back, I always got the feeling Apple didn't want me to be productive. However, I erroneously assumed that by now they would have fixed those issues, but your video pretty much made it clear that they haven't.
Oh Apple do want you to be productive. It's only that they want you to be productive in their own very specific and lots of times ass backwards way.
One example, MacOS seems to work better if instead of managing windows you manage workspaces or virtual desktops, swiping to change desktop, using everything maximised etc etc. Which is dumb, but 'works'
@@prgnify because of that alone I would never buy an Apple product myself. I'm forced to use it for work and use my 32 inch 4K monitor and have enough space to do all the work on it, but window management is ass. I rather curse the company everyday than they force me in to their way.
One positive - after work I use my Linux with Gnome and appreciate all the freedom I have. :)
@@prgnify Couldn't have said it better. When I tried apple products while I was still using windows, I quickly came to the conclusion that they were made for noobs. Sure they make some stuff really easy, but there is a glass ceiling, and to break it, you need to exert a lot of effort. And that was from a Windows perspective. It would be even worse from Linux one.
@@prgnify Everything maximized isn't dumb. It's just poorly implemented on Mac OS X. Switching full windows (monocle mode) on dwm is as easy as pressing Mod + J or Mod + K.
OS X wastes too much memory making everything pretty and adding useles animations so switching between apps feels very sluggish.
macOS gestures + Magnet was a very nice workflow for me, but I think that's particularly when you're using a trackpad to leverage the gestures. Without the gestures, window management is a nightmare unless you create a keyboard shortcut to the overview (I ended up setting CMD + q to show the overview, and just quit apps manually).
Overall, I prefer macOS since I'm most familiar with it, but I feel like macOS excludes mouse users so much and its one of my biggest complaints I have about macOS. The fact that I have to install an app to disable mouse acceleration is just stupid.
And yes, you can double click on the empty part of window to maximize it but in my experience, there's like 50/50 chance of actually working and that really frustrates me every single time.
Also I really miss cover flow on finder.
Considering macOS was one of the first operating systems to fully adopt the mouse, it seems strange that now macOS is probably one of the least intuitive operating systems to use with a mouse. Using macOS with a keyboard with tools like Spotlight or Alfred (Spotlight on steroids) then I find myself being really productive. Windows is kind of catching up with Windows 11 and PowerToys on Windows 10, but still not the same.
11:27 Apple doesn't allow free software to be in their store. They don't like GPL license
Damn
homebrew
Wow lmao
@@TheLinuxEXP To be fair, it's more of that the App Store *is not compatible* with GPL license. Specifically, apps downloaded from the App Store has DRM built-in, which is against GPL's "no imposing restriction of any kind are allowed". Apple wouldn't necessarily ban you from distributing GPL-licensed apps to the App Store, but the owner of the original code may complain due to license infringement.
@@SenaStuff Yup, this. There was a lot of drama in the iOS scene for a while about working with GPLed code too. A bunch of free apps that were repackaged GPL software got taken down because the original devs requested the source code, which the repackagers couldn't do because all of the Apple APIs were NDAed. etc etc. Honestly... it's why all of my code is just MIT licensed. I don't care for the GPL or die fervor.
To me the biggest problem is Apple itself. Their hostile take on right to repair and difficulties of not being fully in their eco-system turn me off the most. Like no DE is perfect and you just have to pick your poison, but theirs comes with several extra stuff.
They make high quality equipment. My MBP survived someone tossing it in the trash bin! My Macs are a decade old and are the last repairable Macs on the planet.
Because they didn't want to let go of the product they sold🤣 because if you asked me.. if I bought an Apple product for example iPhone that piece of hardware is already mine, so whatever I do with it for example change the hardware with a cheap one or put it in a oven or used it as a soap or etc then it's all up to me, because I already bought it I paid for it so whatever what I do with that piece of device Apple has nothing to do with it since I already own it, so the only thing that Apple own in that piece of device is the software so they should only prevent the users from tweaking that, that's why Apple preventing the right to repair doesn't make any sense to me🤷♂️
@Jim Allen not just a hardware, they earn more money because of their money making scheme that they always do like, (base on my personal experience) "we don't do repairs if you want we can exchange your broken device with a new one, but by paying almosts the same price if you bought a new one plus you have to gave up your broken device"🤦♂️🤣 paying almost the same price for a buying a new device + your broken device.. see that rip off Apple been doing?
And did you know what the Apple store said to my sister's 1yr old iPad? "We can't repair your device because it can't be opened or no way to open it"🤣 while me thinking "how tf they assembled it if there's no way for it to be opened"🤦♂️ and guess what we looked for a 3rd party repair shop and the dude there just opened it like he's removing a booger on his nose🤣
Apple money making scheme is number in the planet, that's why they removed the earphone jack and the changing brick out of the box because they can sell the accessories needed for it separately, and with a higher price but bad services.
Right to repair is my only complaint about Apple. The sacrifice is well worth it. I left Linux for MacOS about 10 years ago and while I play with Linux, I couldn't possibly think about running a creative businesses off of Linux. Using Apple has saved me so much time and money over the years. I ran an entire business for 6 years off of ONE Macbook Pro 13". The thing paid for itself at an order of magnitude. I wasted NO time screwing around with my OS. Never had the kind of issues I had using linux. Linux is great for hobbyists, but not for getting serious work done. Unless you're a linux a dev. Haha.
They are just tools. When they wear out, I replace them and make sure they are recycled properly. I no longer have any grand illusion that my laptop will be of any real use in over 8-10 years. Currently, I’m on a 5 year replacement cycle. At the end of that period if it still works, great it’s a backup or something for the little ones to bash about on. Beyond that, I’ve got my value out of it and I move on with life. I have enough projects in my life, I don’t need to endlessly tinker with old technology and get a hemorrhoid about what style of screws Apple is using or if it’s simple to replace the battery or whatever… It’s actually pretty simple to solder and desolder components, but it’s not usually worth my time, just like repairing my family’s phones; the cost of most devices is relatively low and any major repair is going to approach the cost of replacement. The key trade off is time.
Was Mac since the late 1980's and still have an original MacIntosh! However, once Apple started leaving my expensive MacBook pro behind, I discovered Linux and Fedora just blows Mac OS away! Your video just confirmed that this was the best move I ever made!... Thanks!
Let's be honest, the absolute only thing Mac and Windows have over Linux is a few apps, or better hardware acceleration in some app. These are all third party and a have nothing to do with the OS. If we're talking about the base OS though, current Fedora for instance shreds Windows and Mac combined in every aspect, except maybe power management with laptops (I've only heard rumors - I don't use a laptop)
Totally agree. My experience to a T. I love the Arch distros especially. I love the whole Linux community and the innovation I find in the Linux family is innovation with purpose, and not disjointed is disconnected from the whole user experience.
@@ent2220 actually battery life is double on fedora 34 and 36 when compared to windows (Asus zenbook ux461 with i5 8250u).
The computer fan is off, performance is smooth constant 60fps and it is ice cold.
@@ent2220 Third-party support is still huge. Nintendo has had issues with not having enough third-party support and they got crushed in a few generations. IDK how well GNU/Linux would be doing without Steam. I imagine a ton more people would at least be dual-booting because Wine is far from perfect.
A Chromebook could shred a Mac just based on how they're typically used.
@@ent2220 And the power management and other such things are because of lacking proper drivers from the manufacturers. So, yeah, Mac and Windows have that on Linux: better drivers and several apps/games that are well tailored for their specific OS. In the general sense, Linux is much better. And the Linux shortcomings seem to get smaller and smaller as people start to embrace it and manufacturers see that there's a market forming for them there.
I really recommend using Rectangle for the window manager, MacOS has awful tiling supposedly because Microsoft patented the whole "drag to tile" thing.
Is that really the reason? Then how come many paid apps bring this functionality to MacOS, and GNOME has it by default?
@@Sancredo sounds like bs, a UI is a mode of operation and therefore not covered by patent law.
Same way as saying Microsoft patented sign language
try mosaic, it's the only viable(and in my opinion better) option to people missing fancy zone. every expensive tho
@@Sancredo yeah. I assume that's because Rectangle is open source and Microsoft gave up on suing Foss projects some years ago. Most other projects by the maintainer are commercial, but he probably doesn't want to risk being sued by Ms.
Apple has a mandatory 3 week review for apps in the app store, and hence most third party developers distribute apps using disk images and not through the app store. Also, I agree on the default window manager too. That is why I install Rectangle which is a better window manager. And to install apps, I install homebrew, which is a command line package manager.
yeah, in this day and age, given the state of desktop Linux, my jaw drops to see how much cobbling has to be done to turn a MacOS computer into a day-to-day, useable, livable experience
@@TheSulross cobbling is the principle of Linux, isn’t it ? Since you have to make it the way you like anyway.
@@shiroishii7312 Depends on the distro. If you want a solid normie build, there are plenty of distros like Linux Mint and Zorin OS that have the common stuff baked in, like competent window management, an office suite, media player, etc. Most of the cobbling is optional.
Having to install a new program because the shipped DE is that terrible is just plain hilarious considering how boring and homogeneous Mac OS X is. And using Homebrew on Mac OS just defeats the purpose of using a Mac.
Re: OP:
1. Apple takes a massive cut of sold apps in the App Store.
2. Nazi-esque enforcement of keeping apps in the IOS/Mac OS X theme so everything can look boring and the same.
3. Apple treats their devices they've sold as still belonging to Apple. They will deny any app that might allow the user to do anything that Apple doesn't want them to do. They can brick it if they think you've been naughty repairing your own home button. We're talking about a company that sends copyright threats and cease-and-desist letters to people posting repair manuals for Apple hardware.
Using the Apple App Store is like using a food delivery app: the only people coming out ahead are the middlemen.
@@shiroishii7312 yeah, that's pretty much true. but it's become a bit less so in some areas than used to be the case. However, even with the recent Ubuntu 22.04 release, which has gotten mostly favorable reviews, there are still a couple of things that require cobbling:
1) Ubuntu refuses to support flatpak out of the box and stubornly clings to their Snaps, so it's necessary to install a package to enable using flatpak apps
2) I actually still use icons on the desktop and it's necessary to install a Gnome extension in order to get decent config UI to manage that, and it's also necessary to install a browser extension in order to be able to download and install Gnome extensions (which is just beyond weird, but there you go - the bizarre landscape of the Linux world)
99 percent of devs use the App Store because an App Store app can also be installed on iPhones and iPads. Id know since I'm a cs student
There are 2 apps that completely smoothen macos experience. Rectangle for window management (for God's sake don't buy Magnet - it's worse and costs money) and Homebrew for package management. With them installed macos is the best system I've ever used (it's like linux but with apps)
loved rectangle, it's my fav tool
once I get homebrew I don't miss linux at all. I get it Docker is still better on linux but it's not like I can't use docker on mac lol.
The moment you need 3rd party to fix what 1st party couldn't it's just bad.
To enhance it is something completely different.
This goes for an OS, games, programs and everything else. Augmenting the already existing UX is good. Repairing (especially Apple environment) is just sad
@@Appoxo In General macos offers much more than other systems so I don't mind repairing two drawbacks with third party apps
yabai is a pretty great window manager too
macOs is meant to be used with a trackpad and keyboard shortcuts. Swipe 4 fingers up for mission control and define other behavior as you want. I also recommend Spectacle (free) which allows to configure window tiling - alt left and alt right to tile the window to each side, and alt up to maximize. You can do alt dow to minimize as well. This combo is super quick, easy to use and frankly should be a default behavior. Also I can remember the last time I opened an app NOT through spotlight.
One more thing. Configure the trackpad for 3 finger dragging - so if you want to drag something you just hold it wit 3 fingers on the trackpad. I can't use a mac without this enabled
I actually really like window management on Mac OS. The fact that I can have multiple fullscreen application and switch between them at ease is super convenient to me. At this point desktop is a place I rarely visit to do some microscopic task.
Though it obviously doesn't change the fact those features are must have for most people.
It's the kind of feature I loved on my 13"Macbook, but really don't care about on my desktop. The integration with the trackpad made it as if that little laptop had multiple monitors to work on. On my desktop I actually have 2 large monitors, and I've never really been able to get into a multi-desktop workflow. I usually have enough space, and I just need to tile things correctly.
@@Niosus Rectangle is great if you don’t mind using shortcuts to control each window individually, and there’s also an auto-tiling window manager called Yabai that works well.
@@rikugo1 The MBP was retired a long time ago. It's a 2011 model. I don't even have a laptop these days, just a desktop and a tablet. But thanks for the tips, maybe someone else will come along and find it useful :)
I have multiple fullscreen applications simultaneously running on my main Linux box, and can switch between them with a single keystroke. That’s because I have KDE configured to give me 6 desktops, each with its own collection of windows. And on top of that KDE supports multiple “activities”, each with its own collection of windows across all desktops.
But those both things you can do in windows and linux distros. Now, try to minimize a app on mac and when you go to your desks, you cant find the app you just minimized. Mac is the only one that does this strange thing
I remember coming back to Linux after using a Mac for 5 years. It was like a breath of fresh air. I was so happy!
I totally agree. I work with iOS and Mac OS for work and come home to enjoy Linux.
@@samthemacman same, I'm not touching macOS unless someone is paying me
Pro tip: brew calls itself the missing package manager for macOS. It works like pacman and is also available on Linux!
And as a macOS user I can relate to your points. It's crazy that Apple rather features and relies on 3rd party tools for eg. window management instead of putting it into macOS itself.
In the other hand I really like Rectangle for window management. With these tools it's a bit of a Linux feeling in terms of customization, some can even mimic i3 behavior!
honestly, after installing rectangle and brew, if you squint hard enough, it looks like linux.
But, it's not out-of-the-box, and that on 2022 is really dumb from Apple
The last proper Apple computer I had was an iMac G3, years later I decided to try and daily drive a hackintosh, everything worked fine, but even then I felt that OS X was stuck in place, especially when it came to the window management.
It's impressive to see that Apple are still as stubborn as ever about the UI and the only way to be productive is to constantly use shortcuts.
They don't want to risk alienating or confusing their customers. Windows 8 was an unfortunate leap in UI design that left people hating it despite it being just a tiny bit ahead of its time.
@@encycl07pedia- if windows 8 was "ahead of its time" I don't like where ui design is going
@@dylon4906 The UI elements like settings being in a pull-out/pull-down shade, floating volume popup, notifications in app icons/tiles are present in mobile OSes like Android and IOS, granted both of those came out before Win8. It was touch-centric, but most PCs were still not using touchscreens and tablets, IIRC, hadn't really taken off as much by 2012.
Win8 was a marked break from the previous Windows UI. People hate change, especially forced change. Windows 8 wasn't as bad as people think. It definitely wasn't the best Windows release ever, but it didn't deserve all the hate it got, at least not much more than Windows 10.
@@encycl07pedia- i realize in tech, you can't be too fast, you can't be too slow. actually, i think that goes for other fields too. I still don't like windows 8, because i felt the splash of colours annoyed me. I got it to work at work (and eventually format the company desktop to windows 7 -- i was an IT admin) but people don't like change. Windows users too. we complain, complain but then get use to it. I hated windows 10 tiles but now, i use it fully. Windows 11..i don't like it but design wise, i think it looks nice. some parts still boggles my mind. Like why keep two UIs? cannot keep one or let us choose during OOBE? I would keep control panel and have a more uniform design and update the windows explorer design. other than that, I feel i can power through it.
@@encycl07pedia- windows 8 was definitely a change in ui, it was the first windows release that started shoving mobile features into a desktop os. i want my desktop os to be an actual desktop os and not a desktop os with mobile features slapped onto it. it also killed the beautiful aero theme in favor of a flat boring theme in line with corporate oversimplification and its been roughly the same ever since. it did not bother to change the rest of the windows 7 features to fit more with its style and thus felt like windows 7 with a weird theme and a start menu hack, and 10 and 11 just kept slapping even more things onto it without removing the old (control panel still exists) leading to win11 being just an odd inconsistent mishmash of features from all the past windows versions since 7. 8 also introduced the msstore, ms accounts, telemetry, onedrive, etc but that has less to do with ui. this is all very subjective but it will always be my opinion that windows 8 is the worst windows because it started everything i hate about modern windows
Along with many useful UI features, I’ve come to believe one of the most useful features on MacOS is the universal menu bar. You always know where and how to configure your App in a consistent way, and is a time saver when learning how to use your software.
Yes, to be hella productive on Mac, you must memorize some shortcuts. Cmd + , to launch Preferences is golden. For most all apps on MacOS, this key combination launches the Apps Preference. Again, not 100% but a large percentage.
And for most all apps installed on Mac, the 'Help' menu item is consistent and useful. I know when I install an App on my Mac, I can click and search for Help about any menu command for that App, which is welcomed.
The consistency is unmatched in Linux and Windows.
Also, like others have mentioned, a simple Cmd+Tab provides a window into everything running on your Mac.
Like with anything, there are Mac alternative ways to accomplish the so called deficiencies Nick mentions that just have to be learned. When I started using Linux almost 20 years ago, I had to learn the Terminal. Even today, anyone that wants to use Linux has to learn the basics of Terminal commands.
Finally what made me switch to Mac was the availability of Apps. Let’s face it, Linux Apps are fine but lack the polish, usability, consistency and ease of use that Mac OS offers.
One thing that surprised me when testing KDE was it's shortcut manager. Basically whenever you have a Qt application (or another one that integrates with it's API), you have one central hotkey manager for both desktop and applications. It orders them by use case, warns you of collisions and even allows you to create custom commands to assign hotkeys to. Sure there is the problem of the non-API outliar but I'd argue within the system KDE does a spectacular job at being both consistent and flexible.
As far as I'm concerned, the menu bar and Spotlight are the only things Mac OS X does right. That's it. I'd rather have the ability to switch windows in a fraction of a second than put up with the resource hog Finder.
@Zaydan Naufal That was Unity? I thought Unity was the hideous UI with the comically-large buttons on the right.
@@encycl07pedia- That was NeXTSTEP aka the thing that turned into MacOS
@Zaydan Naufal It had, by the 16.04 version, the best implementation of a global menu, with the option of having the menu on the title bar if not maximized.
The conclusion is kind of amazing, as free and open source stuff often can be a mess when it comes to looks and ui, and apple has the reputation of being amazing in those regards. Super cool to see linux actually being superior user experience, and I have to agree; I've had to use a MacBook and an iMac in the last couple weeks and and to my huge surprise as someone who hasn't used them much, especially when it comes to managing windows it's a very frustrating os to use. Linux and open source stuff in general has come a long long way!
Linux UI is not superior. It's just Linux fan boys and their channel crying about it for attention. I'm sure many people would choose Mac OS for its looks.
@@ArunG273 I'm not here to cry or bash one os or the other, just pointing out that in my own experience linux ui is less frustrating to use than mac os. I'm pretty new to both linux and mac os and used window for my whole life just to make that clear.
@@ArunG273 The basic desktop environments of Linux are fine. Especially the recent Gnome 42 has really made Ubuntu 22.04 a very user friendly, smooth and fast OS. The UI of the OS really isn't the issue. It's the significant holes in workflows that people expect to be able to do. This is things like missing applications, but also the "ecosystem" features that many in Apple land find hard to give up.
If you've ever tried to game on a Mac, you'll run into the exact same frustration that other people run into when trying to use professional software on Linux. Some stuff straight up doesn't work, for other stuff you need to mess with the terminal to get things to run properly, and if things run it's slow as hell and crashes often.
I'm not saying Linux doesn't have UI issues that it needs to fix. But so do Mac OS and Windows. They all have the basics nailed down, and people just want to get to the application or website they care about. That just needs to work. That's where people encounter problems.
@@ArunG273 An aesthetically pleasing UI isn't necessarily also one that's nice to use. What are looks going to do if one can hardly grab and use the UI they get? Take Windows 8 for instance. It looked nice but users couldn't stand having to use it. What we see at 09:10 looks pretty similar to how Metro apps snapped on the left and right, it's probably that Microsoft did a lower quality copy of what MacOS did, which fared much worse than the MacOS design. Also the assisted window snapping where you drag your traditional window and it snaps to the left/right which MacOS lacks has become one of the basic features people expect nowadays. Mac's snapping and maximizing behave in unexpected and limiting ways without offering a more sane alternative option, which doesn't seem to help with Mac's case for superiority. Who knows? Maybe Mac is more like those tiling WMs that not everyone can live with.
@@ArunG273 Looks aren't everything. I'd rather stick with my two-tone dwm than use freaking OS X's DE. That thing is an absolute joke when it comes to window management. I feel like I'm getting carpal tunnel syndrome just hearing him talking about dragging windows all over the place.
20 year Linux fan and 5 year macOS fan. With the exception of a little personal taste presented as objectivity, this was a refreshingly fair-minded review.
I've been on Linux since 2006 and on Mac since 2008. Linux is getting closer but still has a ways to go.
It's objective if you know nothing about Windows or think Windows 11 is the only Windows out there. 3:05 is either a bold-faced lie (taskbar in Windows since at least XP if not earlier has been dockable on top, bottom, left, or right.) or is only applicable to Windows 11 (I haven't used it).
Lots of other things like him acting like Windows can't do WM well just proves he doesn't know what he's talking about.
@@dragonballjiujitsu i find gnome very nice. I like mac but it is not for me
@@encycl07pedia- It's NORMAL to compare the latest of anything and when comparing older systems people tend to get specific - so basically it's not a bold-faced lie. Windows 11 Taskbar sucketh. You can't move like in previous versions. You have to install 3rd party apps for their menus (Classic dock etc).
@@df3yt That would be a legitimate criticism except he admits at the very beginning he's not using the latest Mac OS X. Windows 11 wasn't out when Big Sur was released.
10:10 you need to do alt+right arrow or left arrow to move between desktops without getting out of mission control, this is a lot more intuitive with a trackpad on macbooks with gestures.
This video has the most proper title. Saying MacOS feels old doesn't sound bad when it has always been the best. It's exactly like saying "Rock (or jazz or blues) music feels old" when it has always been the most advanced and influential and more than half of the people doesn't understand it and never will because they've spent more than half of their lives listening to something else. Windows and several Linux distros have just recently accomplished a similar level of usability and productivity out of the box, but for mac users, UI/UX, intuitiveness system stability and hardware/software compatibility have never really been a big deal, and that remains to this day. Sometimes it's not that you stop getting better, it's just that the others are catching up, which is great news.
The alt resize is a old feature from macos prior to 10.6 or so. Before that there effectively was no maximize window button as Apple thought that most of the users do not actually want to maximize application windows to the full screen area. Instead this button was delegated to a "smart resize" button where the software developer would decide what's the larger most optimal size of the window when pressed. I named the button "resize random" because in reality it was depending on too many factors making it rather unpredictable until pressed.
I will say this.
Mac OS has an entire ecosystem of apps that fill the role of Gnome Extensions. Intellidock gives intelligent autohide. Magnet or Mosaic add in the window management features the default OS have.
Granted, you were reviewing the default experience so that isn't super relevant, my point is that the power users who care about the kinds of things that go into your complaints have alternative solutions. I think it would be cool if you tried this again but tried to modify Mac OS on its own terms and see if you can make a useable experince with it.
Using CMD + H to hide an application instead of minimizing it is the ideal situation on macOS. Although it has its own limitations like for example it hides all the windows for that application and you must have at least one application shown.
It stills bad, you cant find it on your working desks
Let me try to explain the Apple mission control logic:
People don't understand virtual workspaces, so they pile everything into one workspace.
If you want to hide a window, open another window and the previous window is now below it.
If you want to find the previous window, open mission control and it would show all three thousand windows in the current workspace, so you can find it and click it.
If you want to maximize a window, you probably don't want to use another window at the same time, so a new workspace is created and your window is thrown there full screen.
If you want to switch between a full screen window and another window, just switch as if switching workspaces.
If you don't like the default behavior, then…
Go use a third party tool…
I was a Windows user for a good time, then I migrated to Linux for a lot of years, then starting to use macOS on 2011, I think people complains about window management on macOS is pointless because desktop metaphor on macOS and Apple is very different, the "zoom" feature is to do a best fit of the content, not covering the whole screen, if you need that use fullscreen function... if you insist that you want a "maximise" feature like Windows or Linux you have either a way to mimic that or pay for a 3rd party software, don't blame Apple for that...
@@adanmirandaespindola521 it also doesn’t make sense all the time to maximize the window on macs. macOS apps are usually document based. Apps can have multiple documents or windows open at any given time. It’s why when you close the all app windows it may not actually close the app like on Linux or Windows. It’s also why the global file menu exists.
One thing I love about macOS is how the zoom button works and how if you hold it down it’ll create a new workspace you can split or just use that application as a fullscreen app. It’s not like the most important thing but it feels a lot less clunky than other fullscreen implementation.
8:30 You maximize a window by double clicking on any empty part of the top bar of that window. Still bad. But the functionality exists, at least.
Also, I've noticed that the workspaces of fullscreened apps don't stay in consistent order. If I recall correctly, I had two separate fullscreened windows from the same app, and it just placed the most recent one to the left all the time.
That was a silly complaint on his part because using a double click on the title bar to maximize or restore has been working on Linux and Windows as well for at least 20 years.
Sometimes on Linux you get rollup/rolldown but the behaviour has always been configurable.
"While we might lack... all the breadth of applications you might get on MacOS..."
But that is the crux of the issue. Not a small, ignorable "rough edge".
I run Linux on my home system (and at work). I am willing to overlook the disjointed desktop experience (some apps respect the theme, some don't. Some deal with a global menu bar, some don't. Gnome seems hell bent on hiding all functionality behind a completely un-needed hamburger menu simply because that is fashionable, etc.) I can overlook the absolutely horrible and complex power management issues on my laptop. I can ignore the need to dip into the terminal to fix basic things like my mouse not coming back to life after I use a USB switcher. , but the fragmentation between distros - and the corresponding difficulty in getting software to actually do work (vs. simply arranging windows) is a huge issue.
Much of my software relies on me running CentOS 7. I wished I could update to a newer OS or different distro, but I can't. Some software that I WANT to run, however, is only available for Ubuntu. I can and do run flatpak (my preferred package manager for software) but not everything is available as a flatpak, and some of the stuff is packaged by a third party that I have no way of vetting.
I agree that the windowing manager is better under Linux (and I find the overall Linux user experience to have some significant advantages over MacOS), but to gloss over the packaging/fragmentation/lack of software on Linux as a less important, dismissible annoyance vs. the core reason Linux continues to fail to gain market share as a desktop OS seems like maybe placing the focus in the wrong place?
well I don't know about CentOS but have you tried some other distro? I use Arch (btw) and a HUGE repository and rolling release make me basically never miss out on any software I might need. Ubuntu probably also works pretty well for that
@@kerstinhoffmann2343 Ha! Talk about a delayed reply on my end. Apparently I am just learning to use notifications on RUclips. :)
I used to use Arch, but the problem I have is that the commercial 3D content creation software that I rely on (Autodesk products, Houdini, Clarisse) is certified on CentOS 7 and not on Arch. So if I have any issues I am left on my own to solve them if I am not using the certified OS. Even beyond this, just the effort of sourcing the libraries and getting the software running eats into my time getting actual work done.
It is actually super frustrating since I would love to use a more mainstream Linux distro.
@@2000bvz Ah ok. That makes perfect sense
2 years later. have you checked out toolbox/distrobox? They are still not perfect but imo is a lot much better than how it used to be.
Great review my friend and I too shall have to do my own macOS review since switching to Linux review soon. As a long-time Mac user, over 20 years, and recent full-time convert to Linux, you were both fair and balanced. The most surprising thing I have found after 20 years of macOS is how little I miss it. Yes, I am a power user, and yes, I am a geek, but nevertheless, I am proof that you can leave the macOS for Linux. My computing life just feels better holistically from a mental and emotional perspective. Accordingly, at this stage in life it's just a matter of preference and I am glad that I finally made the switch to Linux. To be completely fair and transparent, I too still own a MacBook Pro from 2014 and plan to buy a new one soon to keep up with the macOS for my own blogging and RUclips videos. And I have a Windows 11 partition on my laptop, and I like Windows 11, as well as Windows 10. However, Linux is and has been my daily driver since November 2020, and I am convinced that you appreciate one platform without bad talking others.
Again, great job and God bless,
My biggest gripe with the interface on MacOS is that the key combination to close a tab in Safari is Command+W and the combination to quit a program is Command+Q....YET, it doesn't prompt you if you accidentally hit Command+Q instead of Command+W. It just closes out all of your tabs at once. This is a horrible oversight. Yes, I could just use Waterfox or some other browser (which I do), but it's the principle of the matter.
And automatic tiling would be great! I think there's an app to have that feature added, but I believe you have to buy it?
The automatic tilling app you mentioned is amethyst I believe. It's free (and open source). Works great!
One of the upsides of MacOS is the dedicated userbase who have fixed most of its issues. Rectangle fixes window management, and Homebrew is a linux-style package manager. I like it because it's Unix-like without the awkward jank of Linux. I've never spent more than 10 minutes troubleshooting on Mac, meanwhile getting my old laptop's Nvidia drivers working properly on Linux took forever (and I'm not sure if I even did it right).
Have you tried Homebrew on macOS? It acts like a package manager, similar to apt. You can load all the FOSS apps (both command line and GUI) via this.
Using Homebrew on Mac OS X just proves you should've used Linux or BSD instead.
Always recommended macports over homebrew myself, it's just cleaner, smarter, more thought out where as homebrew makes a lot of security compromises in the name of not using "sudo" and using integrated apple libraries...
@@encycl07pedia- true
I’ve been using mainly macOS for 20 years, so I thought I would disagree with a lot of this. But it’s mostly spot on. The usability of KDE Plasma and GNOME has advanced considerably in recent years, and now they are stealing good ideas from each other every week. Advancing by leaps and bounds in ways they should have been doing since more than a decade ago. But on the flip side there is a robust market of free and paid utilities that can solve pretty much any usability issue with macOS you can name. And then there remains the elephant in the room. MacOS has access to a mountain of commercial software like Adobe CC and MS Office that millions of people are forced to use by their employers or clients. But macOS could definitely learn a few things about UX from the best that Linux currently has to offer.
The real pain with MacOS commercial app is that they are least effort ports of Windows software, especially the Adobe apps.
@@fmlazar I disagree, many commercial software choices are Mac exclusives. And many are more optimized on Mac than on windows (Word being the ultimate example of this). Especially when it comes to photography or book publishing or many other creative tasks.
Adobe is bloated and sucks on any platform at the moment so that’s kind of not the best example of cross platform apps.
@@ghost-user559 Adobe still makes some of the apps most popular with people who professionally do a lot of image editing.
@@a0flj0 Very true. I prefer Adobe, but Affinity just makes more financial sense overall as a one time purchase. There is no reason whatsoever that I can no longer purchase the Creative Suite except corporate greed. The experience I had with Adobe means I will now literally do anything in my power to avoid using them ever again. And the more “updated” it becomes, the more bloated and clunky it is. They are the industry standard because they got their first, not because they are a company people admire or emotionally support any longer.
@@ghost-user559 Talk to professional users. Most prefer Adobe specifically because it is packed with features.
I agree with almost all things you said about window management.
The thing is that it does not show its age, it shows the weird decisions Apple makes. The could easily implement a much better window management system. Why they don't? nobody knows.
The store never got the love it deserves from the devs, I guess mostly because of the yearly fee someone needs to pay to get their app on there.
Most power users are going with brew (similar to aur). Not everything is there but there are plenty. and there s an app i think that provides a guide for it if you don't like the terminal
@CessNight5672 true indeed
@Gabriel Eder never thought that this could be patented
I actually prefer fullscreen over maximize. When an app goes fullscreen in macOS, it creates a new virtual desktop for itself, which means that I can switch back to the previous virtual desktop very easily, using either ctrl+arrow keys or a trackpad gesture. Fullscreen gives me a little bit more screen real estate than maximize, which is very important on a laptop.
GNOME has fullscreen mode as well, but the app goes fullscreen in the existing virtual desktop, covering up the apps behind it. This adds an extra step if I want to access the apps behind it. And don't even get me started on fullscreen mode in Windows...
I also like the way full screen apps work in macOS, but I don't like the way they automatically open in another workspace because this creates inconsistency with workspace keyboard shortcuts. I actually like being able to have more than one full screen app on a workspace as is the case in Gnome. I do like the way you can reorder workspaces on the Mac though.
@@rikugo1 You can turn that off in MacOS under settings I believe. I think it’s under the section with spaces and mission control.
I switched from linux as my daily driver to macOS back in November 2020. I was running linux exclusively at home from 2015 until then. The window management is bad, as you note, though there are extensions that can solve that. The main reason I switched: working from home. I refuse to use the shitty ThinkPad T580 my work issued me - it's loud, somewhat slow at times, and just not very nice hardware in terms of the keyboard and the touchpad is trash as every non-Apple laptop's is. We use almost all web apps (Microsoft, unfortunately) along with Teams. Linux (and I tried every distro available at the time) just didn't work well with Teams or some other apps I had to use for work. Teams *looks* like it works....until you try to share you screen with others and all they see is a black screen! That was due to the Xorg vs Wayland shit that was going on at the time. Hopefully they've solved that but still, moved on for now and many others have as well.
The window management and file explorer (i.e., Finder) in mac suck. And it sucks not having the free/open source community. But aside from those two things, everything in the apple ecosystem is better IMO. You understated the interoperability benefits. I wake up, come down to start work, jiggle my bluetooth mouse or hit a key on my bluetooth keyboard (I run my Mac in clamshell mode 90% of the time and use it as a desktop replacement) and then I immediately hear and feel my Apple Watch notify my it has unlocked my mac. I take a photo on my iPhone and move it to my mac....when on linux I had to email it to myself, or save it to cloud storage, etc...on mac I just airdrop it - takes seconds and is so convenient. I no longer need a document scanner - I just navigate in macOS to the directory I want to scan a document into, click a button to "Scan from iPhone" and boom - my phone wakes up, opens the camera app, and is ready to scan. I scan however many pages I want (which is always perfect due to the camera quality), hit save, and boom - the scan appears as a pdf on my mac. These are just SOME examples of interoparability.
BTW - mac hardware is 1000x better than anything else and it's not even close. I've used top of the line Dell's and no, they aren't close even still to mac laptop hardware (and the Dell's that try are more expensive).
All that said - Apple IS a walled garden. I get that and if I were retired/not working I would go back to linux purely for that reason. I like gnome a lot, Cinnamon is okay, and I just saw that Unity just had a release - that was the best linux DE! When I no longer have to work as part of a team with others who are using Windows then yeah, I'll go back to linux. But I'll definitely miss the apple hardware and a lot of the software is great too.
My biggest gripe with MacOS is when I full-screen videos, for example from RUclips, and it has to play the long animation and move the playing video to a new full screen space. Then, when I command-tab to a different window, it switches back to the previous workspace. But when I command tab back to my browser app, which usually has multiple windows open. It switches not to my most recently active browser window but to my most recently active browser window in my current workspace, which is not want I want.
You can keep the bar on top persistent in full screen apps now. Windows has the patent for windows snapping in commercial products, so unless it’s an open source package that is free they can’t bundle a snapping system into their windows managers, this is not me defending the decision not to have it by default (I use amethyst btw) it’s just an explanation as to why
Sounds very interesting that they can’t do it due to Microsoft’s patent. I do think chromeOS has window snapping regardless?
@@endless_puns the thing this chromeOS is it’s built on an open source project and it can be argued easily that ChromeOS is free and not a commercial product so to speak, Apple refuses to say their OS is free and it has to be run on their products only not just off the shelf components
Windows management is pretty bad without secondary apps. However, the ability to give almost any app a dedicated "virtual desktop" is beyond great. Especially as a teacher I can have X amount of applications, powerpoints(keynote files) documents open and quickly AND fluidly swipe between them. I've yet to encounter a Linux distro that can do this as easily as MacOS. I am open to suggestions. But the ability to click that little green button (or 5 finger swipe up when using BetterTouchTool) is just...*chef kiss*
I have been a macOS user for the last 3 years, and this was hard to watch :D. But I do agree on most points to be fair. Window management is an absolute flaming pile of crap. There are free (Rectangle) and paid solutions (Magnet) to fix that, and they do it really well with keyboard shortcuts without cutting into performance or being too intrusive with the applications themselves (credit where credit's due). Howbeit, it is preposterous that macOS does not have this built-in in 2022. It would be surprising if they added it in macOS 13. The other thing I absolutely detest is the menu bar situation. It is massively annoying to scroll all the way to the top if I have a window snapped to the bottom half of a 34-inch monitor. It clearly goes on to show that window snapping and tiling were never meant to be featured on mac.
You raised a good point about installing apps. There is a lack of coherency between how installers work. Some application distributions actually have installers which copy files all over (the /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin etc.) and also place the application package contents in the /Applications directory. However, others are "portable" so to speak, expecting you to mount the disk image and copy-paste the app contents directly. Others work with the AppStore and it doesn't install it the same way as others. Don't even get me started on package managers. Brew and MacPorts are good at what they do, and I do use them almost weekly, but installation paths are a nightmare.
Also, as powerful as Spotlight search is, free applications like Raycast/ Albert take it to the next level with app-level shortcuts and plugins. Safari might be efficient, but my god is it ancient underneath at this point.
This is controversial but I think we need to remember that people don't buy systems because one OS is better than the other, and it is a silly argument and a comparison for anyone who knows anything about computing. People buy computers to get work done. There are less than 2-3 mainstream manufacturers who ship laptops with a Linux distribution installed. On top of that, most people are used to Windows or Mac from work/ school. Also, adding to the shaky reputation and reliability of budget laptop hardware (I have been stung by that hard thrice), makes a compelling case for people to buy an M1 equipped Macbook Air, which has killer performance for the price. Also add to that resale value, overall hardware experience (trackpad, screen, speakers, device integration and support for third-party accessories). And then comes mainstream app support, which no one will EVER sacrifice just because there is a good alternative. The existence of an OpenSource alternative does not compel anyone at all to switch workflows just because of the virtue of it being free. Most people don't care for it, me included.
More than 99% of computer users are not nerds. Most of us like to get our work done without having to spend 5 months tweaking the system to get it to absolute perfection. Not saying Linux distros are difficult, but remember, most people don't have any experience or don't want anything to do with installing OSs. So, it is a self-feeding cycle.
All said I am excited about Asahi coming to Macbooks natively!
I understand why people don't necessarily feel comfortable installing their own os. It's a bit outside the normal things most people do with their computer, but it is pretty easy nowadays, and there are many advantages to linux that are hard to see from the outside, which is why people who use it love it so much, even if they are in the minority
@porteal Don't get me wrong. I love all 3 OSs for their strengths (I daily drive all 3), and despise them where deserved. But trust me as someone who teaches computing, programming and other things in general to people all the way from 6 to 70+ years, people don't like doing "things" with their computers, many developers included. Unless you "spoon feed" someone linux which is close to what they are used to, and do not have to touch the terminal, people will not use it. The mere existence of something good or better is not an incentive for most people to switch.
@@MrProximace I agree that that is the main barrier keeping people from using linux
I agree with all of the above mentioned points, especially with the installation of apps. Also, I want to point out that starting from macOS Monterey, you get a option in System Preferences to choose if you want to keep the menu bar visible permanently on full screen apps or you like the default configuration where the menu bar is visible on hover.
@@MrProximace I mean, I kind of find it ridiculous that people don't know how to install an OS. I'm not saying they should be manually installing arch or something. but installing an OS should be common knowledge.
The answer to window management on Mac is to download an app to restore the functionality. They should obviously do that by default, but the apps I've used are great, and free so it's no a deal breaker.
For me an app that totally needs to be sherlocked by Apple is "Magnet" it gives you all the hot keys and stuff and drag stuff for window arrangement/tiling stuff. It is one of the few apps I think is essential to MacOS... a lot like a lot of people feel about bartender
Magnet is the bombdiggity.
"It also has one very annoying limitation: you can't minimize an app by clicking on its icon, which is very, very frustrating." Same on Ubuntu 22.04, insane.
Yeah, it's just incredible to not have that
I just want to say in general, MacOS is only limiting if you don't learn the keyboard shortcuts for everything or make your own. And since all apps are forced to use that global menubar, they are also forced to let you change the keyboard shortcuts for any 3rd party apps menubar options via the System Preferences.
Coming from Linux, there's also the terminal which you should already be familiar with, and Apple makes it easy with the Automator app to do all kinds of stuff with shell scripts.
E.g. Apple TV has a nice library overview for all of your video files, but can't handle mkv files, so I wrote a bash script that converts them using ffmpeg, placing them in the "Add to Apple TV" folder, and Automator adds that as a one-click shortcut to any video file in Finder.
any time ive tried it has only worked in half the apps, or i was told not to do that. im sorry that i have 20 years of muscle memory and apple has terrible shortcut keys, i really hate using it
@@BenjaminKoop-i6d I can only recall one time it didn't work, and that is when I was using Microsoft Word on MacOS, and I wanted to set a keybinds for the MacOS "Zoom" functionality (a.k.a. maximize on Windows and Linux), but it wouldn't work because there were 2 "Zoom" items throughout the menu bar for that app: one to actually set the zoom of the page and one to maximize the window. Creating a custom keyboard shortcut for "Zoom" only sets it to the first occurrence of it in the menu bar.
My solution: I stopped using Microsoft Word
@@BenjaminKoop-i6d What I love about MacOS keyboard shortcuts is that they are more ergonomic than having to use my pinky for the Ctrl key for almost every keyboard shortcut. The Apple keyboards have a shorter spacebar to make room for the Command key to sit within easy reach of my thumbs. And with that thumb resting on either command key, I can pivot my left hand to reach any key on the keyboard without having my elbows contort inward like I would if I had to use the Ctrl key on Windows and Linux
@@BenjaminKoop-i6d I've tried rebinding the Alt key to act as Ctrl for Windows and Linux before, but that just messes with my Alt-tab functionality, of of my most used keybinds. The second reason why I don't do that is because for non-Apple keyboards Alt is not as comfortable to press with my thumb as the Command key is because the spacebar is longer on non-Apple keyboards.
i've never once minimized a window on macos. mission control pretty much eliminates that need for me. there's simply no reason unless you are dying to stare at your background, in which case, make a new desktop. anyway, if you want to hide, option + click the icon. have fun.
One thing I would consider a plus for Mac OS, is the ability to run adobe software. I would love adobe software to run on Linux and would use it there if possible, but until that happens I'm forced to use either Windows or Mac OS for part of my work flow.
And no. I don't expect adobe to ever develop their applications for Linux. :-(
That's definitely an advantage
I'd be content with the Affinity Suite to run on Linux. Serif has said they're still trying to iron out a business model for Linux porting that would work. They haven't figured it out yet. Their devs are all certified in the world of Apple and Microsoft. Linux is not up to par in the college education world. For decades, schools got special funding in favor of shilling for Microsoft. Old habits die hard. Especially in state universities.
I dunno if others have already commented this, but if MacOS refuses to launch a downloaded app, you can just right click on it, and choose open. You don't have to go into settings to allow the app every time.
I'd argue that macOS is meant to be used with a trackpad. The window management does kinda suck with a regular mouse, but it feels much better than many other window manager I've used on a laptop with not a ton of screen real estate and a trackpad.
I use the trackpad or magic trackpad 2 and think - with gestures and keyboard shortcuts - and I still think window management is bad on a Mac. It's almost - but not quite - enough to make me switch away from Mac.
I honestly like how macos handles full screen applications, creating a new virtual desktop and moving it to it so you can just scroll through desktops and have applications on each with maybe one for a bunch of floating windows.
I would genuinely like to have that in Linux.
Some unorganized thoughts from a former Mac guy:
* Maximize on Mac has always been app and not OS driven. Makes sense sometimes when windows have size or aspect restrictions. This ends up being a mixed bag. Sometimes apps handle this nicely, and sometimes they don't. I feel like both options kinda suck personally. :-\
* A bunch of the really weird features like mission control, the fullscreen or split screen modes came straight out of iOS. They kinda ruined the Mac for me honestly... Instead of making things better, they chose to make it more like a tablet OS without making the features work well with mouse and keyboard input.
* ".app" packages are great! A lot of Mac users *hate* installers and don't trust them. It's not uncommon for stuff ported from Windows to use them to install crap all around on your drive. Apple does provide a standard installer infrastructure for ".pkg" files, but devs tend to avoid it on purpose unless they really need to install system components. Speaking as a paranoid type, I would always extract them by hand so that they couldn't install crap all around my drive. >_>
* Running apps from a dmg is generally fine... if kinda dumb. Apps are *not* suppose to write anything to their parent folder as non-admin users don't have write access to /Applications. The exceptions are usually stuff ported from Windows since... restricting write access to unprivileged users still seems to be a new idea to Windows devs.
* App Store + all the code signing crap... Ugh. This is the most significant reason I quit the Mac. We used to be able to sell Mac shareware and make a mild living off of it. When the app store came to the Mac, you lived and died by Apple choosing to feature you. It all dried up for us months after the app store launched. It's like winning the lottery now. :(
* I'm amused how passionate Linux folks get about Window management. :) In the last 30 years, I can think of just a single Windows user I knew that was passionate about this. In the Linux world it comes up regularly. Same with sytem theming. Hehe
linux users are likely passionate cause its very easy to get used to it,its not like an app you can just re-learn,its just a basic way of using any PC
When I first tried OS X (as it was called then), I noticed a peculiar bug, I’m not sure if it’s been fixed yet.
Try opening 2 apps, say A and B, such that you have 2 windows open in A, call them A1 and A2, and one window in B. Stack them so A1 is at the bottom, then B overlapping it, then A2 at the top.
Now close A2. Which window comes to the top? You would expect it to be B, but for some reason it would be A1 instead.
Does that still happen?
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Yes. I don't consider that a bug though. Mac has always been application and not window focused. Closing a window in general does not cause an application to lose input focus (menu bar, etc) even if it's the last window. It drives Mac users crazy how closing a window causes you to accidentally switch or quit applications in other OSes. For example, if you want to close a document, then open or create a new one... nope you switched applications instead. (Grrr)
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Still does that thing, that is the only thing not making sense to me of the window management on macOS xD
Re minimizing: cmd+m, faster than clicking :)
The strongest feature of MacOS for me is the preview. There is no program like preview in Linux. No, it doesn't just "preview files".
It is a fully fletched PDF reader, allows you to remove pages, reorder them, insert signatures. It has photo editing features and so much more.
Also, the search bar/spotlight is far more functional than equivalent in Gnome.
The finder also has "tags", which don't exist in linux or windows either.
The only good thing about gnome is it's animations. I struggle to find anything close to Krunner on other OS's or DE's.
Okular is the universal document reader for Linux. View PDF, DJVU, CBx, office formats and just about everything.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Preview is not just a reader though, is always installed, and works with more formats than anything else.
@@cassandrasinclair8722 Okular is just a reader. Think of it as doing one job, and doing it well. If I want to create/modify those file formats, I have plenty of other tools, more versatile than your inflexible, bloated monolith.
You can use Dock Exposé / DockAltTab to provide previews on the macOS dock, as well as enabling clicking dock icons to minimize apps. Rectangle for window snapping.
thanks for the tip on dock expose
Mac OS used to have the green button maximize windows, without holding alt (option). They replaced it with the silly tiling and fullscreen options at one point, and delegated the usual "maximize" feature to an unexplained modifier.
Also, running apps from a .dmg is actually fine in most cases, since preferences are saved in the user's home directory, just like on Linux. It definitely could be made easier, but Apple wants everyone to use the App Store (along with their wallets) instead.
One of the many features that Mac OS has that I wish Linux DEs would copy is the ability to symmetrically resize windows. Holding option/alt on Mac OS will allow windows to be symmetrically resized which has surprisingly often saved a bit of time.
You should consider that most Mac users were iPhone users at first so they learned how to do multitasking and app switching on their phones
So Mac OS with the window management that has Mission Control the apps that go fullscreen and gestures to switch between fullscreen apps it imitates the way multitasking and resource management is done on iOS
So Apples goal with the UX is to be intuitive rather than efficient
It is possible to maximize a window without hiding the dock etc. by dragging it to the top of the screen or double clicking to top bar of the application.
But yes, I do agree the window management on Mac is way behind on it's compertitors
The window management has been improved very well in the current MacOS13 Developer Beta with Stage Manager. Such a great feature!
Stage manager has gotten horrendous reviews on iPads, but I think on Mac it's probably better
@@TheLinuxEXP yeah using it on the Mac and it’s very nice on there
This is where the difference between UI and UX comes into play. The User Interface on macOS is arguably better than any Linux distro if for no other reason because, as Nick said, app developers actually care how their apps look on macOS. This leads to a more consistent look and feel across applications. The global menu, the monochrome status icons, the various widget sizes that stack perfectly, the consistently rounded corners of every application - all these things lead to a better overall UI. However, Nick pointed out all the user experience (UX) issues with macOS that have not been fixed over the years, the worse offender being window management which I agree is absolutely awful out of the box on macOS.
However, some of these UX pieces are made better by the excellent trackpad that comes with the macbooks. And the UX is further enhanced by the integration between macOS and other apple products. Apple's laptops also have a very, very good build quailty and with the release of M1, they also have great performance and unparalleled battery life. Sleep and hibernate on macOS is years ahead of windows or linux. It almost feels like macOS is designed with the Macbook in mind. That said, it is not an excuse to have all of these issues that have gone unfixed or unimproved for years and Apple really should do better.
I had a discussion about M1's performance, recently, with a OSX fan. Ryzen runs rounds around it. The only thing M1 has on its side is power consumption. However, my Asus ROG with Ryzen 9 has a large enough battery to give me several hours of full screen video watching (using Linux). OTOH, I was forced to use OSX a while ago, for a year, on a MacBook pro. The manufacturing of the hardware is exquisite, but even the hardware has usability problems - after hours of using the laptop, my wrists were hurting from the sharp edge of the aluminum case.
@@a0flj0 I would be interested in knowing whether you throttle or lose power unplugged. Traditionally that has been the biggest issue when it comes to other manufacturers. Apple gives you the same performance plugged in or not. Most of the other manufacturers did amazing while plugged in but performance was far worse once on battery.
@@ghost-user559 Never had that. Processor frequency is only decreased when the battery was close to empty, IME. The screen often gets dimmed instantly when you plug out the power source, but you can change that in any modern non-Apple OS via power settings.
@@a0flj0 That’s good to know. I’ll have to look up the manufactures that throttle when unplugged. I watched the comparison about a year ago or more.
I think they were “gaming laptops” so idk if that has anything to do with the differences? Perhaps they use a different gpu for some models when unplugged for certain manufacturers?
I am generally hardware agnostic although I prefer Apple as an ecosystem for work, I would definitely be in the market for a PC to game.
More so when Steam OS and Linux catch up because I despise Windows at this point. But ironically I think Microsoft does very well with consoles so I don’t know if they just have more resources on their gaming than their actual desktop at this point?
Its amazing that a MAC underneath is more linux like than windows :/
BSD something something i think?
Try minimizing a couple of windows. Then do the exposé effect to see all your open windows. Minimized windows aren’t there. Completely idiotic when what I want is an overview of all my windows including the ones I minimized in order to declutter this ungodly mess of a desktop.
I feel the opposite way. Windows shows minimized windows in the task view and alt tab views… that makes zero sense to me.
@@DiogoExMarques but those systems you mentioned are there to switch tasks, and minimized tasks are still tasks.
Double click the titlebar to maximize the window without Fullscreen. Also us Mac users don't tend to tile windows. Most of the time i just use Fullscreen and the 2 split view
Doesn't maximize, it fits the window to the content. And mac users don't tile because they can't ;)
@@TheLinuxEXP even on Linux or windows I never used tiling. I guess it's just because I've been using small displays so tiling isn't really an advantage for me. If you really want tiling go install a different window manager. There's plenty of options that many mac power users use.
I think the issue most of you linux users have is wanting your exact workflow on an OS that doesn't supply that workflow and shouldnt be expected to provide the exact workflow. So you complain it's not that good only because you didn't want to take the time to adapt properly. It's like if I went from macos to windows and called it bad just because it didn't have a menu bar and dock out of the box. I'd get called stupid for expecting that.
Also what do you mean it "doesn't maximize"???? It does exactly what you wanted. Fits the content to the screen. Just because it doesn't fill the whole screen doesn't mean it isn't "maximized". If you wanted it to fit the whole screen just expand it out yourself. It doesn't do it on its own because it doesn't need to. It's like expanding a page to fit the width of a wide-screen monitor when the content is formatted for a vertical monitor. It leaves a bunch of useless space on either side.
Maximizing is literally just fit the content to the height of the screen. macOS does that without wasting space on the sides. Apps like VSCode and Discord do in fact "maximize" like they do on other platforms.
Honestly I never had an issue with that. Having used all 3 OSes as daily drivers for years I never had a problem with macOS window management.
I mean the target audience macOS has is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT from Linux. At least take that into account when reviewing it.
You wouldn't review a game for kids and complain about how bad it is for adults. You would review the game with its target audience in mind.
It is fine to voice complaints that you personally have but still think if that feature you're calling "necessary" would be actually necessary for the target audience when complaining. That's personally why I think Linux is such a mess. It's trying to appeal to everyone all at once with no sacrifices. You can't make everyone happy.
I have to say, I totally agree with most of your review here. I work across Windows 10 and 11, Fedora GNOME and MacOS and by far MacOS is my least favourite!
You can maximise windows by double clicking the window top bar, at least in Monterey. But the window management is awful in MacOS.
The AppStore is mostly "m'eh" once I have the apps I need I'm not going there to notice or care and most apps I install using brew.
Everything else is fine and mostly works but the Window and task management is so terrible I swear at MacOS every day
@@terrydaktyllus1320 LMFAO! A Mac apologist saying Windows users have Stockholm syndrome. That's just hilarious. It's also funny that you blame Windows on you or your wife getting malware (quite possibly a trojan) that plays ads in the file browser. That's not a Windows thing. 100% PEBMAC.
Windows 7, not Windows XP, was the apex of the Windows experience. It's been downhill since then but even Windows 8 had better window management than OS X. Windows 10 is sluggish and crappy on an HDD because the geniuses thought it should be installed on SSDs (real boneheads).
@@terrydaktyllus1320 What were you trying to say, PEBMAC? I'm not a Windows fanboy, either. I've been running only Debian or Linux Mint for years.
A cool thing they have which I tried to replicate in linux is sessions. The fact you can shut off a mac, turn it on again, and all the windows magically open in the same spot you closed them, without losing any progress (especially if you have a 2nd monitor plugged in!) is over the top. Wishing for linux to have that option soon enough, but I doubt it's in the roadmap...
Hibernation has been an option for a LONG time in Windows and Linux. I know it's, not quite the answer you were looking for, but it does technically do exactly what you want to. Just make sure you have a good SSD with a decent TBW rating. I always use hibernation though, it allows me to use my computers as if they are always just put in sleep mode, to save a teeny bit of power and to avoid any loss in power outages.
I use macOS and Linux (PopOS) side by side and I always feel like in macOS, things just feel a bit more polished
I modded macOS heavily, and ended up with the yabai tiling window manager, skhd and such, and hid both the top bar and dock. Then I use spotlight for launching apps and alacritty and neovim for software development. Great experience not gonna lie.
Floating windows is the way Mac OS has worked since System 6. Once you’ve used this for about 30 years you really don’t want it messed up. I prefer to work in floating windows and never use them full screen. I can always see what’s open and running on the same workspace. I love window management in Windows, but I use my windows the same way in windows. It’s really a workflow style that you develop of a user. There are quirks of Mac OS that really have travelled with the OS and it’s users since the time of MacOS on its 68k machines. But to each their own. But MacOS usually plays well with third party tools.
the window management is ultra basic and simplistic, but every time i have to use a mac, my problem is always the FINDER !
feels like going back in the 90's ever ttime i wanna manage some files :O
Reviewers seem to want things to be constantly changing (so they have something to write about?), however regular users might prefer consistency rather than a constant flow of new features and ways of working. Most people don't use all the various interface functions anyway, they're too busy doing what they need to do!
There's a lot of applications that, on being started, check whether they are ran from the original dmg and offer to copy themselves to the Applications folder. But there are cases where you just want to try or one-shot use an application before copying it into the applications folder, so it's nice that that's possible as well. Also, the out-of-the-box window management sucks, but there's a great window manager called Magnet which is usually the first thing I install on a new macOS installation.
It's crazy that Windows11 is basically a skin over Windows XP and yet MacOS is a more classic experience. I don't view that as a bad thing though, I'm all for that. Mac iterates on what works instead of making silly things like Microsoft does.
I got reminded by this of a channel named OSFirstTimer, where a guy get's his mum to try out operating systems to test their usability to a new user. With Windows, she had a hard time on windows 8 but loved windows 7. She loved all the linux distros she tried (unless they were super weird ones like ratpoison). But what stuck with me is what she said about OS X. She was surprised when testing a 2016 version of the system that it was similar in functionality to the 2002 one she tried, and yet felt more modern.
Windows 11 is not "basically a skin over Windows XP".Your whole comment is full of misinformation and nonsense. Clearly just repeating someones trashcan video.
you didn't touch on 'homebrew', which is pretty much the best way to get FOSS software on your mac, with all the latest updates. I don't think anyone uses the app store for anything on a mac computer.
The macOS store is only good for proper paid apps like Affinity Photo (a Photoshop alternative) and the like. Besides those, it’s a complete joke, with all the missing FOSS and with all the scam apps with very limited to no functionality hidden behind a paywall. Typically stuff that is available for free on both Linux and Windows.
I think this nicely shows 2 trends:
First the macOS desktop was the leading most modern and influencial UI for a desktop OS and is loosing ground and probably will soon or already has lost that lead on UI depending on your personal preferences. This i think has a lot to do with the changes in apples top management.
The second is harder to see from the video but still makes a lot of sense in my humble mind and it is a shift of the focus from the desktop to smartphone or more general speaking Touch UI. In that for me apples still has the lead with the smoothest and most user friendly UI up to now.
PS: Luckily you didn't compared apples with oranges( unity).
More seriosly i am really happy how many choices you have based on your preferences for desktop UIs on Linux like Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, Budgie, Pantheon, Enlightment, Deepin, LXDE and someone is always pissed not mentioned his prefered one still. New ones are on the way like the one from Pop OS which bring in new ideas and the best of all some of them like Gnome and KDE even work together on the parts were it makes the most sense without loosing there conceptual different approaches to user interfaces.
10:17: 3 finger swipe to the next desktop then drag from there.
Don't have a touchpad, and Apple sells desktops without touchpads as well ;)
@@TheLinuxEXP fair point. in mission control settings, you can turn on keyboard shortcuts for switching between desktops using ^ (left or right arrow) if its not on by default (it should be).
dang... you beat me to it. I literally partially scripted this exact video from my PoV for producing once I'm not busy developing stuff again.
PS: Obviously I'm still gonna do it.
Also ayy lmao you also commented on the lack of Minimise on Click on Dock... that's literally one of the things I comment about in my script thus far... jokingly pointing out maybe THAT'S why Ubuntu does not either.
You can still make the video.
Make it
As with most operating systems, customizing fixes all the issues. Magnet + keyboard shortcuts makes window management better, and if you really want you can find a mac "tiling" manager
I had one of the first Intel MBPs back in 2007 and am daily driving a Mid 2014 MBP. I feel like the window management was actually a little better when MacOS went by big cats.
True. I can’t remember which version changed the green button to fullscreen but no one on the planet liked it and I never figured out how to fix it. That was the same time when they introduced slow animations for things like opening Safari 🤢
Not sure if this would be useful for anyone. But if you want better window management on MacOS, I recommend Rectangle, and Amethyst depending on what you like (I use both depending on the thing I am doing). Amethyst brings the feel of a tiling window manager, which while not analogous, do feel like i3/sway. Rectangle brings the snapping feature to mac, while also having lots of window configuration options to map keyboard short cuts to. Window management should be built in yes, but there are free solutions that do give you some choice depending how you prefer to work over on linux.
General remark: Learn and use hotkeys. Not a single Linux (professional) user I know, actually uses the small icons in the top left/right of windows and tabs.
The huge advantage of macOS is here that almost alle apps implement the preferred hot keys: tab-t for news tabs, tab-n for windows, cmd-w to close tabs, cmd-q to close an app. Use CMD-h to hide windows, no need to minimise it to the dock.
6:00 Same here: Who starts an app via an "app manager" (?) in 2022? CMD-space opens spotlight: Type in the first 2-4 letters of the app name and click enter. App opened. Takes maybe 1 sec.
9:00 Use just an app like "rectangle" to achieve the behaviour you want to have.
11:00 Tip here: Install home brew and (basically) all OpenSource and Linux apps are available to you w/o any further work necessary. You can also define a LaunchDaemons for upgrading and updating brews. This includes VLC, GIMP, LibreOffice etc., etc. etc.
So to sum up the video: You don't like the windows management. Fair enough, just use an app like rectangle. What you miss, but briefly mention at the end to the video, is the "handover" features and full integration of the system; and all productive measures of macOS: Send/share files between your devices via Airdrop, sync/share tabs in 1 sec, share documents via handoff in 1 sec, system integrated key chain access via FaceTime on the iPhone; unlock the MacBook via my Apple Watch w/o doing anything, seamlessly share Notes/TodoLists/etc. between Devices etc. etc. etc.
While I agree with most of your points, I would like to give a defense for Mission Control's window management issues: When using MacOS on a laptop with a trackpad, there are a lot of gestures which make Mission Control significantly nicer to work with. You can open Mission Control simply by swiping up with three fingers, and switch between desktops by swiping sideways with three fingers. Doing this does not close Mission Control, making it a lot faster to move a window to a different desktop. Furthermore, this three finger sideways swipe also works normally, making it blazingly fast to switch between desktops.
These shortcuts supposedly also work if the user has a "magic mouse" (although I can't confirm this), which should act a lot like a trackpad in a lot of ways. If the user however has neither a trackpad, nor a magic mouse, I can completely see how this UI would suck, because it is designed with a heavy focus on gestures.
There are however also some negatives which you did not mention, which I experience(d) quite regularly: By default, the height of the dock changes depending on the amount of icons shown (at least in the version I'm using, when the dock gets relatively full). This means that opening / closing / minimising applications to dock will create a giant mis-match in window height, since by "maximising" the windows will only open as far as the dock. This is especially a problem on smaller screens, such as on the Macbook Air, where the bar fills up quite quickly. While it is possible to disable this auto-resizing, this is only possible using the terminal, and this can't be done through the settings menu.
It is also not possible to cut -> paste files like you would normally do with ctr / cmd + x. Instead you have to first copy the file with cmd + c, and then paste it with cmd + option + v to move it. This is just an annoying shortcut to do due to the layout of the keys: It is quite common to press the cmd with your thumb (which is already close due to normally being on the spacebar). If you then want to use the left option, you have to switch to a different finger for the cmd key since the left option is so close to the cmd key, or if you plan to use the right option key, you have to move your right hand away from your mouse / trackpad, where it is often located. This is just way more inconvenient than being able to use cmd + x for copying (which is actually used in every program on MacOS, except the file manager), and isn't clearly explained anywhere. This causes users to just resort to drag + drop, or copy + paste and then manually delete, because they don't know about this "short-cut".
5:33 For general use (which will be mostly 95% of the MacOS users) there's no need to create those kind of personalizations or event to concern about it. They just created one that simple works and work very very well (finder). "oh but I want to be able choose between 999 versions of buggy file explorers" err... on MacOs you won't. Customization, freedom not always means good quality or experience.
Something Linux sorely needs, especially in the age of big screens, is the "maximize to big enough" behavior. Not every app has to use the whole screen, and most windows users in contrast always work with everything maximized, they don't actually use "windows". A "big enough" size lets you easily multi-task without being cramped.
5:18 future of gnome right there
I have to admit I find some of your complaints a little weird. It would _never_ have occurred to me to try to minimize an application by selecting it in the dock. If it's a larger click target you want, you could bypass that entirely by just using a keyboard shortcut.
I'm not sure when you would want to maximize a window without fullscreening it… like you want it to be the only thing on screen but you also don't? …but as others have mentioned double-clicking the window's top bar maximizes. Weird unintuitive control, yes, but the feature is there.
The experience definitely _has_ changed since OS-X 1.0. Multiple desktops weren't a thing back then, and the way they function was reworked a couple of times. Mission control was completely changed. Fullscreening a normal window wasn't even a thing you could do. (The green button used to maximize.) The apps menu didn't exist. There were no widgets and no built-in notifications system at all. I'm not even sure if dock folders or the app store existed.
The tiling does suck, though I admit I've never really used tiling. (Probably because MacOS trained me not to. :P)
I think I know why it works that way: It seems to be directly copying how it works on iPadOS, probably as part of their effort to make their whole ecosystem work together. Is that an excuse for it being bad? No. :P
Wholeheartedly disagree. The criticisms brought up are criticisms of someone who hardly uses the system. It is quite weird because this usually is an argument of the linux advocates.
App grid is not to your liking? Well, most people launch anything with spotlight and typing the two first letters of the app's name within the fraction of a second anyway. Window management? I don't think I have clicked any of the window scaling buttons in years because of the super practical window overview (the marketing term is mission control, i think) except for a tiny fraction of cases, in which it doesn't really matter. Therefore, I haven't felt the need to minimize anything in years (and if so by accidentally pressing the shortcut). And unlike most reviewers, I distinctly dislike the "layout options" that are now common in windows, some linux desktops, and mac os when the cursor hovers the maximize button. Honestly: Who uses this on a regular basis after the first few minutes when it is interesting because it is new? The only real criticism I share is the missing tiling option when a window is dragged to the screen's edge. A much more realistic way to set up a work environment is to have apps in fullscreen or side-by-side view in a bunch of desktops through which it is very easy to navigate via keyboard shortcuts or mission control.
Regarding the apps, I actually don't see the problem. If it is not in the app store, just get it from the developers webpage. This criticism seems weird from someone who used to use elementary os with a basically empty store as his daily driver. The dmg-files do seem a bit antiquated, though. Particularly, having to unmount the single use dmg is a bit annoying.
When it comes to major advantages that are supposedly lacking, there is the whole MS-Office-Photoshop-proprietary-software-debate even though most linux users dismiss this. If you need that stuff for work, this is a very significant argument. At the same time, I can install a bunch of linuxy stuff via brew, which is particularly useful for scientific stuff. I find it quite practical that I can use the same machine to develop AND test HPC code while having access to some proprietary mainstream apps.
So, while I usually find the reviews on this channel relatively balanced it feels like you were looking for the proverbial hair in he soup with a magnifying glass just because the linux crowd really hates Apple for whatever reason.
This, right here.
Nick, if you hold the Option key you’ll get a different set of options in the context menu that pops up from the green button, that will just move the window to the left or right side, and won’t try to force tiling. “Make Fullscreen” will also change to “Zoom”, the lame macOS version of maximize that was inherited from Classic Mac OS. And you don’t actually need to long-press the green button. The context menu will appear if you just hover over the green button for a second. When in doubt in macOS, ALWAYS try the Option key. Many menus have items that change when the Option key is held down.
I agree most of the part with the review Nick! The reason why Apple's choice of not tiling the window apps is stated long time from Steve Jobs where he prefered having all the window apps to be floating instead of being stacked, because that would help Unix systems approach to the era of GUI apps.
I will cover this topic in my next video (this profile channel)
your channel seems interesting and i'd like to watch it but your audio quality hurts me.
@@gsgrzegorz98 thanks! There is a problem with my device, I'll try to fix it! However, a little support and generous comment like yours are always appreciated! ✌️🙂
God, this discussion of window management has just nailed my frustrations with MacOS. You basically have to install third-party software to allow for quick snapping and maximizing using keyboard shortcuts. It's awful.
I feel like they also took a back step with workspace management too. I use two displays, and it used to be that if you switched desktop, it would only switch the one on the screen you were active in. Now it switches both screens at once.
So if I have apps open in desktop 1 and 2, moving to desktop 3 also moves my second screen to desktop 4. I've basically stopped using different desktops for that reason, so frustrating to make it worse with no option to change back.
One behaviour I do appreciate in macOS is the Hide option. It’s nice to hide an app without minimising its windows and showing it by clicking its icon.
Another thing to mention is that uninstalling apps often doesn’t result in relevant data and preferences being taken away with them. For example, an application may have a huge amount of data and extra plug-ins in the /Library or ~/Library folder. Apple never really made a way to get rid of those unless you use a third party utility or rebuild a user account.
On that, I really like the NEXTSTEP-derived Library folders as it makes rebuilding a lot easier for accounts, and it’s a neatly conserved structure for the user, all users, and the system.
Also, AppleScript/Automator/Shortcuts are amazingly useful applications if you have need for them. I wish that application scripting was easier in other OSes.
While it is true that it is not possible to minimize an application by clicking on its icon in the application bar, it is possible to hide it by option-clicking on it. Also, you can hide the active window with option+click on your desktop (Finder).
I've been a Mac user for decades and this guy is complaining about things that have never been an issue for me... what a troll!
"I got used to bad design so I can't accept criticism" is what I read
One thing to consider is that, like Gnome, there are third party tools for customizing some things and addressing some of the deficiencies of Mac OS. I use Better Snap Tool to provide window tiling. It has drag to top/side/corner to maximize, half-screen, or quarter-screen tiles, respectively (along with some other capabilities). For installing and managing apps, I use Homebrew package manager and avoid the dreaded App Store.
I will say, however, that there are two things that Apple gets right. First, updating native Mac apps that are installed from the Store or the Web is the best experience I’ve ever had. When opening an app with updates available, it opens a dialog asking if you want to update, you click “yes,” and it downloads the update, closes the app, installs the update, and reopens the app where you left off. It’s fast and smooth as butter. The other thing I like about Mac OS is that the Preferences menu is always in the same place for all apps.
There are things I like about Mac, but there’s a lot not to love.
Hi. I am a mac user since 2004 and watched your video with interest. It appears Linux users like to spend much time customizing the desktop or playing with the app windows. A lot of your critics were focused on how macOS reacts or does not react to your expected clicks. Well, this is because macOS is not Linux. Watching your video, I realize I focus on getting my work done with macOs rather than playing around with the desktop settings. Using the GUI is no "nightmare" for me but routine. I also do not want to customize my desktop down to the last icon, but to boot up my mac and get started on my work. So it is a different viewpoint I have but it doesn't mean that I call Linux a bad or complicated system. Both worlds do have fans and it's just a choice we make on which OS works best for us. Therefore I am happy Linux is the answer to your needs, macOs is mine.
Its a common argument that mac OS "just works", but it does only that. If you focus only on your work, youre missing forest for the trees. If you try to optimize your workflow, you may find that being able to tile windows with a simple gesture rather than couple of clicks will make you more productive. You don't need to spend hours optimizing your setup. Other OS's come with more sensible defaults, like not hiding taskbar/top bar whenever you maximize a window - yes it takes longer if you have to wait for the app bar to reveal itself rather than being where you expect it to be.
@@MichalDabski I can tile all windows with a single click, there's an app for that. macOS offers me exactly what I need to be as productive as possible, and that includes apps and the smooth interaction of macOS, iOS, iPadOS and the iCloud. I have respect for how Linux has developed, but for me the operating system is not an alternative - and I'm not looking for one.
uhuuu fisher price my first operating system.. all of his criticism is valid and saying window management is a nightmare isn't an attack personally on you. Mac makes even simple power user operatioms difficult, so now, for most of it it doesn't get out of the way, it's perpetually in the way. Try KDE Plasma sometime, you dont need to "tweak every option". KDE works very hard to give sane defaults out of the box. its usable for basic users and power users immediately.