> - Finder is very mediocre comparing to even File explorer in Windows
It really is awful. Why the hell is there no key to delete a file? Where's the "cut" option for moving a file? Why is there no option for showing ALL folders (ie, /bin, /etc) without having to memorize some esoteric key combination?
For fuck's sake, even my home directory is hidden by default.
> - Scrollbar and other UI issues
Disappearing scrollbars make sense on mobile where screen real estate is at a premium and people don't typically interact with them. It does not make sense on any screen that you'd use a mouse to navigate.
For years, you couldn't even disable mouse acceleration without either an esoteric command line or using 3rd party software. Even now, you can't disable scroll wheel acceleration. I hate that I can't just make a consistent "one click = ~2 lines of text" behavior.
I could go on and on about the just outright dumb decisions regarding UX in MacOS. So many things just don't make sense, and I feel like they were done for the sole purpose of being different from everyone else, rather than because of a sense of being better.
You know IMHO Apple doesn't have any 'Pro' machines. A 'Pro' machine isn't about hardware (although it helps), it comes mainly from the software.
MacOS doesn't have enough 'openness' to it. There's no debug information, lack of tools etc. To this day I can still daily drive a XP or 98/2000 machine( if they supported the modern web) because all the essentials are still intact. You can look around system files, you customize them edit them. I could modify game files to change their behaviour. I could modify windows registry in tons of ways to customize my experience, experiment lot of things.
As a 'Pro' user my first expectation is options, options in everything I do , which MacOS lacks severely.
All the random hardware that we see launching from time to time have drivers for windows but not for Mac. Even linux has tons of terminal tools and customisation.
MacOS is like a glorified phone OS. It's weirdly locked down at certain places that drive you crazy. Tons of things do not have context menus(windows is filled with it).
Window management sucks, there's no device manager! Not even cli tools! (Or maybe I'm not aware?)
Why can't I simpy cut and paste?
There's no API/way to control system elements via scripting, windows and linux are filled to the brim with these!
Even though the UI is good looking I just cannot switch to an Apple device (both Mac and iPhone) for these reasons. I bought an iPad pro and I'm regretting. There's no termux equivalent in iPadOS/iOS , there are some terminal tools but they can't use the full processing power, they can't multi thread. They can't run in background, it's just ridiculous. The iPad Pro is just a glorious iPhone. Hardware doesn't make a device 'Pro' software does. Video editing isn't a 'Pro' workflow in the sense that it can be done in any machine that has sufficient oomph. An iPad Pro from 5 years ago will be slower than an iPad Air of today, does that make the air a 'Pro' device? No!
I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.
> there's no device manager! Not even cli tools!
`ioreg -l` or `system_profiler`. Why does this matter?
> There's no API/way to control system elements via scripting
> I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.
The tiling window manager thing is epidemic on Hacker News, and I think the explanation is two fold: Hacker News obviously leans towards programmers, programmers in general don't like the mouse, tiling window managers, as a general rule, are about avoiding needing to manage windows with the mouse.
The problem with that viewpoint, to me, is that, programming is literally the only complex modern computing task I can think of that isn't mouse-centric. E.g., if you're doing CAD, spreadsheet work, media editing, 3D, audio editing, all of those tasks are mouse-centric and the tiling thing just feels silly to me in that context (like I'm going to put Cinema 4D in a tile?). So it solves a problem I don't have (managing, what, my IDE and terminal windows? this isn't even something I think about) and makes seems like it would make things I think are hard today, even harder (arranging the Cinema 4D Redshift material graph, render preview, object manager, and geometry view where I can see the important parts of each all at the same time, which I do by arranging overlapping windows carefully).
> I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.
For me, not so much the window management, but task management. I very strongly believe that the task bar (I guess the Dock bar in MacOS) should have a separate item for each open window of an app. If I have 3 Firefox windows open, that should be 3 entries in the task/dock bar so I can switch between them in a single click. I can do this in Windows, can't do it in MacOS.
One of the problems I have with MacOS is that it's not obvious how to start a second instance of an app. Sure, some apps will have a "New Window" option. But what about apps that don't, like Burp Suite? If I bring up the launcher, then click Burp Suite when one is already loaded, it just shows me the existing one.
You can't start a second instance of an app. Or rather you can (run the app binary from the Terminal) but apps are not required to expect you to do this, and it would probably lead to data corruption from them writing to shared files.
A weakness of this is you can duplicate apps and launch the duplicate, even though they have the same bundle ID, so they might still fight over things.
No your problem is you brought over your expectations from non-macOS systems and the. expected the Mac to be similar. That isn’t how it works. Do you complain that Windows doesn’t have a bash or that Linux doesn’t support ACLs easily?
Even as kids we were fiddling with batch/bash scripts, how many kids do you see using apple script or whatever? It's the ease of accessibility.
Powershell now is lot more powerful than what Apple can dream to offer. MacOS is an opinionated OS for people who want to do simple tasks. MacOS apart from good looks offers nothing else.
> Do you complain that Windows doesn’t have a bash or that Linux doesn’t support ACLs easily?
Don't both of those exist now?
The reason the Mac is more "app-centric" is Conway's law; developers own apps so it's thought if you tried breaking apart an app it would fail, since previous "document-centric" efforts like OpenDoc failed.
All of that is exactly the opposite of what a Pro machine should be. Pros want hardware that works without fiddling to get their real job done. They know that configuring the OS or adjusting the GUI or discussing File Explorer differences is just a waste of time that has nothing to do with their job.
Cmd+delete? I don't really want it to be a single key as it's too easy to accidentally trigger (say I try to delete some text in a filename but accidentally bump my mouse and lose focus on the name)
It really is awful. Why the hell is there no key to delete a file? Where's the "cut" option for moving a file? Why is there no option for showing ALL folders (ie, /bin, /etc) without having to memorize some esoteric key combination?
For fuck's sake, even my home directory is hidden by default.
> - Scrollbar and other UI issues
Disappearing scrollbars make sense on mobile where screen real estate is at a premium and people don't typically interact with them. It does not make sense on any screen that you'd use a mouse to navigate.
For years, you couldn't even disable mouse acceleration without either an esoteric command line or using 3rd party software. Even now, you can't disable scroll wheel acceleration. I hate that I can't just make a consistent "one click = ~2 lines of text" behavior.
I could go on and on about the just outright dumb decisions regarding UX in MacOS. So many things just don't make sense, and I feel like they were done for the sole purpose of being different from everyone else, rather than because of a sense of being better.