You’re getting ratio’d but you’re right. Core parts of the user experience are steaming piles of dogshit while people praise MacOS for its many gimmicks.
Finder is an absolute pile of shit and gets first time users addicted to bad habits. It takes digging through hidden settings to even make it match the out of the box functionality that Windows Explorer offers and it still can’t match the full potential of Explorer for file management. The integrated search is unpredictable and fuzzy so they went and made Spotlight its own thing.
Window management is a nightmare if you’re actually trying to do multiple things at once without switching windows. Mac OS has not implemented window snapping for years and they still managed to make it suck when they did. Not once have they considered stealing great ideas from the tiling window managers, Apple simply decided to reinvent the wheel and make it square.
Got multiple applications running at the same time while minimized? Lol, get fucked. The only way to know what’s actually running at a glance is the shitty little dot below the dock icon and restoring a specific window takes either way too many clicks or requires you to know the magic keyboard shortcut for untangling your windows (another gimmick they added later in order to actually make the OS usable bearable).
Got any sort of issue during startup? Here, take this black screen with a single icon. Not even a slight hint as to what the actual problem might be and if you should worry about it. MacOS might seem like a stable OS but that is mainly because it is very well integrated with the limited set of hardware it can actually run on. If any real issues do come up, the troubleshooting experience is basically just a giant “get fucked” sign pointing to the nearest Apple store.
Sometimes simplicity is a good thing, but usually designing something to be accessible means severely limiting the amount of depth you can go into as an experienced user. Every aspect of the OS and the tools that come with it share this overall problem that there’s just not much depth to what you can do with it. Can’t have a steep learning curve if there’s just nothing to learn.
And I feel like none of these are unreasonable. I like using the right tools for the right jobs, which is why I run Windows for heavy productivity and engineering work. Desktop Linux has come a long way but it just doesn’t (yet) have the required toolset to support engineering workflows. While programming of any kind and getting more complex data wrangling done is best done using Linux. My server needs are also best covered by Linux as most distributions can be run without all the bloat that Windows comes with. And I am sure as shit not paying for Windows Server.
I just can’t find a valid reason for using MacOS. It seems to combine the worst of both worlds into an OS that’s like a trial experience of actually using a computer to get things done.
What out of the box functionality are you missing? As for search, from context I’m going to assume you are not being sarcastic. Windows search has to be the single worst search I’ve ever fucking encountered. Say I made a picture of a bird. I called it bird.jpg, and saved it in my pictures folder. Now, I type ‘bird’ into explorer search, and it gives me a fucking DLL FILE called matrixRRT.dll. I waited literal minutes for this? Literally the advice on all over the internet for making windows search better is to use something else instead.
*Agreed, window snapping is better in Windows.
*It’s been a hot minute since I used anything other than Expose to choose which window I want (Which is great, btw) but don’t you just click and hold on the dock icon?
*Agreed, more troubleshooting on startup would be handy. But to be fair, I’ve had way more startup issues with my windows box than my Mac. In fact, the last Mac startup issue I think I had would have been about six years ago. Whereas I’ve probably had six in the last year alone on the Windows machine. Sample size of one, of course. shrug
I’m not blind to the fact that Windows has a terrible search experience, but I won’t say it’s the worst. Out of the box it is fucking useless, but if you actually take the time to index specific paths and make use of the metadata options in Explorer you can actually get some decent results in reasonable time.
Apple had the right idea with Spotlight, it’s just sad that both parties can’t properly integrate the functionality into their file managers.
My search needs are mostly covered by Voidtools’ Everything, which is able to scan through the whole NTFS partition in a matter of milliseconds for realtime results. The caveat being that you have to know the name of the file you’re looking for. Otherwise I just use Powertoys Run for search and application launching needs, which is what Spotlight could have been if it was made by passionate nerds.
I do realise this makes my argument lose it’s bite somewhat, but it comes down to user experience. MacOS has a terrible out of the box experience that can’t be fixed, use something else instead. Windows has a terrible out of the box experience that can be fixed to some degree if you take some time to learn how it works, but you can still opt to not bother with any of it and use something else instead.
Linux was always going to be the clear winner here.
Now for the dock icon strategy: try doing that repeatedly with multiple instances/windows from the same application and compare the experience to the “never combine, show labels” taskbar in Windows. I guarantee there is going to be a clear winner in terms of usability. As always, under Linux is not an issue because you can just do whatever the fuck you want.
The troubleshooting bullshit a pattern seen in all of Apple’s products. They have a habit of hiding all important information in case of an issue, and I have had this complaint about all the iDevices I’ve had the displeasure of touching over the years. iPhone update failed? Tough shit, have a red message saying “something went wrong, try again”. Fan controllers randomly stuck on 100% speed on an iMac without the ability to get any information about the sensors. None of the system tools provide any information beyond the bare minimum. I’ve come to a point where I just refuse to help any family member having trouble with an Apple device because it turns into a multi-hour wild goose chase.
I’d argue having an overall stable experience with the occasional vague issues that can’t be troubleshooted is worse than having slightly more frequent issues that actually lead to a solution. Apple’s products by design teach the user nothing about technology because there’s no entry-point to the knowledge itself. Meanwhile Windows, while flawed, does provide the user with an incentive to learn about proper maintenance and troubleshooting which leads to more competent users overall.
Last but not least, the command line: I love my experience using package managers on both Linux and lately also on Windows with winget. It has quickly become the main way I install and manage most utilities. MacOS has options but none of them are integrated neatly and have to be installed separately.
Even on Windows I use command line utilities where I can and GUI functionality where it makes sense. While the realm of possibilities is not as broad as the GNU/Linux world provides, I at least feel I have a great deal of control over what I do. MacOS is an impostor that has murdered a UNIX distribution and is wearing its skin. The terminal experience feels like it’s a remnant from the early days that they never bothered to put any more love into but they can’t get rid of it either. Just like some of those Windows 3.0 components you can still find in the modern versions of the OS.
I’m 100% done with Apple and their products because they make everything I’m trying to do slightly more difficult and annoying than the alternative. And those are just limited to my issues with the way they do software. I also have very valid issues with the way they design hardware and with the way they conduct business (ethics, monopolies, their overall effect on tech markets in general).
From a product design POV there’s something to be said about having control over every aspect of the system. I can see why people enjoy using apple stuff. It’s not for me though.
Gotta disagree, the gestures are actually amazing. Only pain point is gaming, but I don’t really do that, and the dev experience is pretty good compared to windows too. Installing programs is as easy as it should be on windows. Fuck msi installers
I’ve administered BSD servers professionally and I have to say that it was one of the nicest, most consistent, operating systems I’ve worked with. I’ve worked with Linux since the mid-90s and done more than my fair share of Windows Server/AD admin. and I would gladly manage a room full of BSD hosts again.
Not sure why the Linux community is convinced macOS is better than Windows. macOS has the same big issues Windows has (Spyware, ads, and the inability to delete the built in browser) while having worse issues like not supporting openGL/Vulkan, not allowing the user to install old apps, the inability to install hardware, and the small issue of only a select few Linux distros that work with it. Windows isn’t good, but it’s still better than macOS in most regards.
I bought a Mac laptop once and lasted about 3 months before running back to Linux. Mac OS may be great for some people, but it’s definitely not for everyone. It was also hell to pull my photos out of their damn software.
(Spyware, ads, and the inability to delete the built in browser)
Ads for Apple services, yes. I don’t approve of that. But this is otherwise bullshit. I can delete any app I want. And I have to opt-in for Apple to get my crashlogs. And there aren’t ads for third-party bullshit.
And Linux is even better. Both OSes are great by comparison. And good on their own. We will never have perfect software.
I know a lot of people like macOS, and I’m sure they get a lot done with it. For me however, it’s easily my least favorite popular OS. That’s even considering the terminal running zsh by default, which is miles ahead of Windows.
A quirk that recently bit us at work is that Safari has a maximum allowed version based off your OS version. Now if it was just me as a user, I’d download a 3rd party browser. However, as a developer, I have to build solutions that work for every “reasonable” browser. This means I can’t use features that every modern browser has, including Safari, because Safari from 4 years ago didn’t have it.
This used to be the case with IE. you’re always going to have to support at least one legacy browser.that’s one of the few real benefits of everyone moving to chromium based browsers.
Yeah, thankfully I never had to develop with IE in mind. Though I have heard a lot of people dislike it for that reason.
You’re totally right about that being a benefit to everyone moving to chromium. Thankfully Firefox has kept pretty up to date with new features/standards too.
at my last workplace we used a service called browserstack which cost something like 10$ a month, it allows you to run almost any combination of os/browser versions. you can even set it up to access a local server if you’re running one on your device machine for example. took out all the headache of running the specific ie version that the client was reporting bugs on it worked great but you can definitely find similar services to suit your use case
Thanks for the callout! We actually use browerstack too, but only for exceptions like that one. It’s not part of our typical process. Really cool software
Homebrew only supports one user (AFAIK). We had shared iMacs at work, and some stuff was installed using homebrew with the permissions modified so everyone could access what was installed. One night I got bored at work and upgraded some things… Which changed the permissions back to only the user that installed the cask (or whatever) and broke the terminal and other things for everyone else. My coworker was pissed the next time he saw me.
Any sane Linux package manager (I’m not counting Snap and FlatPak) installs stuff system-wide and all users can access the installed packages.
Linux is inherently a multi-user OS but Apple apparently stripped that feature from OS X.
Of course things are going to break if you take something that’s meant to be installed per-user and open up one user’s installation to everyone else on the system. Not Brew’s fault your company’s IT used it outside spec.
It’s more user friendly in a thousand minor ways, such as installing programs, which makes it much more user friendly overall. At least MacOS has a consistent UI that doesn’t massively change every single update
Ok, it’s true that you have to spend 15 mins after setting up to “install developer tools”, and remove some safety rails. However, the mac doesn’t prevent you from doing that, and doesn’t really even try to make it hard (if you’ve ever touched a terminal before). Once it’s set up, you’re good to go…
Depends on what you are doing. My company was using clang for c++ compilation and it was a drag to make all this clicks for each .so every is update. And there is no way to automate the process. And those occasional compatibility breaks didn’t help either.
what do you mean? clang is a command line tool, can’t you write some cmake and a bash script to automate the build process? That’s what I always do when I writing any C++ that needs to be compiled/updated fairly regularly.
It has nothing to do with clang being command line. It consists of many binaries, all of them untrusted. Any time new dynamic lib is loaded Mac stops the process and complains. Then you need to do manual stuff, as you can’t automatically trust a binary, for obvious reasons. This happened almost two years ago, maybe clang got apple certificates or some shit to combat the issue. But my point was that every OS update on Mac brings annoying issues for developers.
I have to admit, I’ve never touched the kind of issue where I need to load a bunch of binaries I can’t automatically trust as part of a build process, so I won’t speak on that.
On the part about OS updates being a PITA, yes: I’ll admit that I offset updating the macOS major version for as long as possible. As long as my major version is maintained/get’s security updates, and the newer versions are backwards compatible enough that I can compile stuff for them without any hassle, I’ll stay on macOS 13. Judging by historical data, that means I have about two more years before I might need to spend an hour or two fixing up stuff that bugs out with the eventual major update.
I really like it, and I miss it on Linux. On Linux, I have to trust that each and every sh/bash script, package install script, or some stuff you download from internet are actually safe and don’t access your private stuff. On mac I get the prompt when some software needs to access a specific folder.
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