As someone who had to help coworkers with Windows, Mac and Linux problems one of the main problems of macOS is the fact that you have to use the clumsy GUI for so many things and that the Unix-like underpinnings are badly maintained and outdated so many systems have several versions of the same tool installed in various locations (OS-, Homebrew-, MacPorts- or whatever other package manager of the day versions).
Same, only reasons I had to move to KDE were, GNOME crashes when both my monitors are off (so, every night when I go to sleep), and tray icons are terrible (as GNOME intentionally doesn’t support them), the extensions are all very lacking in features compared to the Windows tray (kde somewhat matches almost everything except being able to reorder the icons).
The ArcMenu extension is by far the start menu I’ve liked the most out of all options on linux, and it saddens me that there’s no KDE plasmoid/widget variant
I prefer KDE for desktops, but gnome for laptops. However I’ve been using gnome on my desktop for a while now. With some minor customizations it’s fine.
It’s quite amazing you’ve picked that example. I just didn’t remember some people had to mess with video drivers. Last time I’ve done it was probably a decade ago, on Windows.
@HollandJim@possiblylinux127 I had my mom running Linux. The biggest issues came from her expecting to having to install drivers and stuff when attaching a printer. " How do I make it work?" It just does. Linux issues only appeared because Windows is difficult.
I get your point but truth be told I never expected any family member to update their own stuff. If they want my help I take away their admin rights and do everything myself, remotely when needed. And Linux is much easier to deal with than Windows.
Everyones own milage may vary, I’m not going to argue every comment. Good they can use Linux though - my parents never wanted to know anything but be pure users, so I did the same for them and in out case Mac was easier.
I just don’t see the point of slighting any OS when it’s used as an appliance, which - for the most part with family, is its role.
My mom is not technical in the slightest and she’s been very happily using a laptop with Fedora Silverblue on it for 4+ years. I’ve had to help her with two problems, one of which didn’t even end up being a Linux problem.
Why would grandma want to do that? I have set up computers for tech illiterate people with Linux quite successfully. You just tell them: „if it wants your password, you did something wrong. Never enter your password, unless you know exactly why“ Set and forget.
Watch out if they have fingerprint login. Ubuntu, at least, doesn’t unlock the user’s keyring if they log in by fingerprint, and are quickly presented with a password prompt to unlock the keyring
I think this is mostly because people who know about it have a mental block that it’s only for nerds. Millions have been using Android on their phones for years, though we’ll limit ourselves to desktop GNU/Linux type distributions for this discussion.
Actual usage of Linux has gotten much easier since 2006ish when I first tried it out. With all the popups and ads in Windows nowadays, its rapidly becoming harder to use than Linux, something I did not expect. I don’t see a combined Linux User Group/ Bingo Club/ Bridge Group forming anytime soon, but Linux Mint isn’t any harder to use than Windows, even for normies with an average level of tech skills.
As a regular user of both, I’m able to accomplish custom stuff faster with Linux, but Mac is pretty hands off once you get it set up. That said, it’s a garbage OS out of the box. It’s 2024 and it doesn’t even have windows snapping or back button support. You have to install and configure 3rd party tools to make it behave like something created in the last two decades. I’m pretty sure Apple doesn’t give a shit about their Mac OS anymore, since most of their money comes from iOS and store purchases/subscriptions.
My impression is that many parents are just approved by default, letting the courts determine validity… Good for the patent office, great for the lawyers.
Yeah but my understanding is if they have a patent or the copyright or whatever it is, if they do not go after any single possible infringement, they’re potentially throwing away those rights at a later time. At least that’s how I understand it works in the USA at least?
I use both Mac and Pop!_OS (Gnome) and I like and dislike both. MacOS has a great qulcklook that I miss in Gnome. Sushi almost corrected that oversight but it hasn’t worked right for me in a couple of years now. I also like Mac’s useful icon shortcut in the window title bar.
Gnome’s extension system is a clusterfuck, but at least I can decide how windows function, unlike Mac.
What is the quick look function you’re referring to? Are you talking about command spacebar to quickly find stuff? You can do that in Pop with the super key.
Anything is better than Mac… I hate how every time I try to push the green circle in the top left it now goes into full screen mode (if you don’t hold option every single time). Who the fuck wants full screen mode?
That one feature is honestly enough to use anything else. It didn’t used to be this way… But Apple has been screwing up their products for over a decade now.
It’s a nice aesthetic choice in macos. They got rid of the icons, I always thought the order was clear. It’s like a car clutch closes the engine from the wheels, brake slows the car (minimise) and accelerator maximises.
Yes. Pretty common among men, a trait from their mothers as it lies on the X chromosome. Most women dont have it, as they have a healthy one and it is recessive.
I work with industrial human machine interfaces, used to operate heavy machinery. The prevalence of some form of colorblindness in the male population is around 15-17%, and most heavy machine operators are men.
It’s enough of a safety issue that standards call for at least 2 ways of communicating alarms - most commonly shapes and colors, in many cases text is also used. The use of colors to indicate status (pump running, valve closed, etc) is also limited to colors with a distinct luminance value so that even people with full colorblindness can operate them easily.
In the past, many HMIs were made in which green meant running, red stopped, yellow alarm… let’s just say a lot of people had to be maimed and killed before the standard was issued.
Mac OS from the very start has been about opening (and then stacking windows) on top of other windows. The entire OS has been built around it since 1.0. Once you accept that’s how it works it’s UI/UX makes a lot more sense.
I think he is talking about how the default is full screen instead of maximize window. Full screen meaning the entire screen with no application and system bar visible and maximized window meaning taking the whole space but still showing the application and system bar. Anecdotally I have seen many more mac users doing stuff in a small window than windows or linux users.
I think I get your explanation but I rarely see people in windows using fullscreen (videos and games don’t count ofc), windowed mode is the default so I don’t get the comment
It’s very true on a Mac. Almost every time you click the green button, it jumps to full screen and then you can’t drag another window on top of it.
It’s a pain in the arse because my workflow is to have a reading screen with documents and emails on, and a work screen with whatever I’m actually doing. But if outlook is full screen, you can’t drag any other windows on top of it.
Don’t know why the first guy was saying this is a Windows thing though. I only run onto it on macs.
I specifically said anecdotlly. Your experience and my experience a not representative of anything. Also that is only a small portion of my comment and was meant more a a sidenote.
We were also not talking about windowed mode at all here. It was specifically about what happens when you press the green window control button, which as far as I know puts the app in fullscreen on macos and the equivalent on any other OS known to me is to maximize the window.
ok gnome sucks a lot gnome doesn‘t prodoce errors - it is an error, a very ugly error. i‘m not a fanboy, i use sytems thts works -bsd,macos,debian,alpin but i hate gnome. I destroy every computer with a Gnome interface that I get my hands on in no time. But that’s what I like about Gnome - destroy everything and go away.
Gnome’s Nautilus is a long way away from being Finder. It certainly trying very hard, and there are some things I like about Nautilus more than I like about Finder, but Finder has a lot of polish that is missing from Nautilus.
That said, I look forward to The development of Nautilus and all of the improvements that will bring.
All I read here is “finder is better, but I won’t give you any reasons”. My sister is a die hard Apple fan, and she hates finder. So, yeah, unless you can bring a good argument for your claim, finder is pretty crap.
The list of things you can do is a bit cherry picked too. For example, in a web browser file upload dialog, try previewing the images you want to upload. You can’t do it in Gnome. It’s been an outstanding fix request for 20+ years!
Huh, i have the complete opposite reaction. Having to move to macos for work finder is probably my least favourite bit. It feels like it is deliberately trying to hide the file system and my files from me and just give me the files it thinks i want, id have nautilus or thunar installed in a heartbeat.
KDE is okay out of the box, there are like 5 things I normally change from the defaults. It has tons of powerful apps (unlike GNOME?) Like KDENLive, Kate, etc.
GNOME on the other hand has tons of circle apps, with GIMP and Inkscape being the big players.
Of my messages and contact numbers? Not doing that
But its easy to find, just click the 3 bars next to the connected device and select SMS messages. KDE connect requires the app installed on the device to pair
I mean, I do not want a copie of a closed sourced GUI where everything is behind some obscure hidden configuration… I often had that strange feeling of “why can’t I do that?” For simple basic things.
GNOME and MacOS both give me the same feeling of closed DE where you’re not in control over basic functionalities :/.
I have a Mac and GNOME on my debian desktop, I hate both, but luckily I can change my DE on linux so I would say MacOS sucks way more ^^.
GNOME settings are not obscured? And if you want more customization you can use tweaks, which, it’s true, don’t have centralized settings, but you have the power – on MacOS you’d be paying $5-10 for every tweak.
Just a simple example, on vanilla gnome you can not set nightlights to “always”, how stupid is that? Yeah there are some tweaks made by people you can download from the official gnome website… But than you have to trust their plugin/scripts…
I really don’t like that kind of modification :/
Yeah MacOS is probably the worst OS/GUI that ever existed, and that’s why following a similar path sounds just a bad idea…
I’ve been macOS user for past decade. I’ve switch to Linux a year ago and the first thing I did when I tried Gnome was to switch to KDE. I like how Gnome tries to mimic macOS but it’s still has long way ahead. Gnome was really good on a touch device but I kept hitting the wall with small quirks and eventually I switched to KDE. I know it’s unpopular opinion but I find macOS UI superior to both Gnome and KDE.
First of all I like how all apps, even the 3rd party ones, look alike. When using a new app I don’t have to learn the new UI. Most of the things are in the same place and I can almost intuitively click trough the UI. Also macOS feels smoother - I don’t know how to describe it, it just works out of the box and I don’t need to adjust the settings. The only thing I was updating was the touchpad scroll direction. Everything else had default settings set to my preferences. I liked the animations, placement of various elements and the fact I didn’t have to look how things work. It was as easy as it was designed to be for 5 year olds.
This is more an issue with GTK vs Qt apps. If you mainly use modern GTK apps it’s fairly consistent in my experience. Qt takes a Windows design philosophy with tons of nested context menus.
I love Linux and KDE Plasma, but my biggest complaint is the inconsistent UIs. Specifically the frames. If I have 5 windows all maximized, and I want to minimize a few of them, the frames could all be different thicknesses, or the minimize, maximize, and close buttons could all be different sizes from the other windows, causing you to need to move your mouse around to minimize each window. On Mac or Windows, you can hover the one spot and spam click, because you know every window will have the minimize button in the exact same spot.
Because it is superior. It has been designed meticulously by hundreds of paid designers and developers who are all working towards a single goal. Apple literally wrote the book on user interface, and they apply those design principles to everything they do.
Granted, it may not always be the best choice for all users.
everyone has their preferences, and maybe it could also have something to do with you being so used to the macOS ui that anything else feels weird or wrong in a way?
I went from windows to Linux (gnome and cinnamon) to Mac OS, and I find Mac OS’ UI to just be the best overall. And that’s continuing to use all of them previous system still, just adding another OS on top. In the end I’ve settled on Mac OS for my home use.sure o can’t tweak the UI to my hearts content, but from the start I get a solid user friendly and consistent experience.
That’s true, I might be biased because I was using macOS way longer. On the other hand I’ve been using Windows even longer and I have never liked Windows UI. I guess I have some expectations on how UI should look and work and macOS just hit the sweet spot.
Fwiw i have almost exactly the same feeling going from gnome to macos, sure its polished but it goes out of its way to make anything even slightly complicated incredibly difficult. So yeah im pretty sure its mostly familiarity.
Also, I’m not sure if Gnome tries to mimic OS X or Windows or KDE, for the sake of this argument. Gnome (classic) was invented to replace (original) KDE, which sort-of tried to replace Windows.
Stuff evolves. UIs oscillate between minimalism and overload.
Just because Gnome has a top panel doesn’t mean it tried to copy MacOSX. Gnome tried to copy phone UIs (that have a top panel), not Mac or Windows. And that was the reason why many disliked Gnome, in fact. It seems that it’s optimizing for tablets and phones, while it’s running on desktops.
It’s more than just that; it’s the dock, it’s the application list’s look, it’s the large rounded corners on everything, it’s the icon style… All of it
How can people claim Gnome isn’t trying to copy the Mac UI? If he didn’t say mac at all during the video, I’d think this is some Chinese desktop environment being compared with Gnome.
The entire video reveals how similar they are. Gnome is just Mac’s UI and tools with a linuxy feel. Gnome devs even have the same ideology as Malus “We know best”.
GNOME didnt look like that all the time. I dont know when but they went from bottom panel to top panel to left side panel to this layout.
The top bar is used differently. Workspace indicator, but no global menu (which makes no sense) or app menu. Extensions can make it pretty much the same
The dock is hidden and forces the workflow with workspaces. I dont think thats a crazy feature and dash to dock makes it equal again
The window buttons are different
The top bars are thicker etc.
Some settings are different, the tiling works better but yeah it is too similar.
I solved that problem by using a tiling window manager on every OS. Configure it to use your favorite shortcuts (from i3wm in this case), put super + spacebar as the whatever launcher you like and tadaaaa!
Everything feels more or less the same.
I do that since I became addicted to i3wm years ago. The worst part is just remembering the keywords to type in the launcher according to what OS you’re on.
I am trying to use the LXQt stack with Wayland compositors currently. Havent tried labwc, which sounds like a good candidate for the job, but all the others pull in a ton of dependencies that I actually decided to try it with Kwin now, as I like KDE Plasma and I know Kwin is solid.
I also really like COSMIC but it has a long way to go to become plasma like. Plasma 6 is pretty nice in many things.
I feel like this video exposes the restrictions of both desktop environments compared to already completed solutions like KDE, XFCE, and Compiz which can all be configured to be 1:1 with Mac or 1:1 with Windows.
I can personally say going from windows to stock GNOME on both Ubuntu and Fedora was definitely not a nice experience at all.
And Compiz is just a single (outdated, Xorg based) Compositor, how whould that work?
Strong point haha, I am interested about arguments.
(Yes KDE has a ton more. But it has too much maybe. I like how COSMIC epoch just takes all the best of the others, learning from the stuff they do just now, but with a fresh codebase in Rust)
but yeah GNOME is very restricted in stupid ways, especially as for example an app entry modification setting is not a huge thing.
Gnome and kde are both way ahead in that they offer a proper app library and integration with devices.
Xfce is just a bunch of apps stuck together that happen to be good enough on their own, but aren’t really interconnected.
I mentioned compiz because iirc it was one of the first compositors to outshine all the fancy window effects and behavior of Mac and Windows and still be configurable for both. Things like app switchers, snap windows, workspaces, etc. It just feels more intuitive to use than stock gnome.
I currently use an unholy combination of xfce with compiz, but once xfce upgrades to Wayland, I’ll probably get Wayfire to replace compiz.
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