I have a 100% remote job, but I had them set me up with a desk in a coworking space. I just felt that being alone all day was just a lonely way to live my life. It was great at the start to have so few interruptions, but y'know we're not building the pyramids. Everything we make in tech becomes legacy pretty quickly and eventually forgotten about and lost. I think a lot of life is what happens in the interruptions. That's where you find out about the guy that goes ice fishing and get invited along, or about someone who plays in a band and introduces you to a weird new music scene or something like that. I think everyone should get to work however they feel they need to within reason (I like the coworking space vibe myself), but I just hope people aren't giving up more than they realised.
Every technical thing you know is informed by your practice in an area. There's a lot of roles where you don't even have to think about which algorithm is implemented behind your favorite sort method. If you work in a role like that for 10 years, bubble sort becomes "which one was that again"?
Engineering is about solving valuable problems. Solving some of those problems requires obsessive control over (and selection of) specific sorting algorithms, many do not.
Edit: it's also worth bearing in mind that many of the people who discovered these algorithms are famous in part for having thought them up. If data structures and algorithms were so obvious, nobody would know who many of these people were.
Assuming knowledge and understanding of an algorithm but no prior practice with implementing it, one’s way of implementing it does tell about their proficiency in programming.
GPs bubble sort was obviously just an example, effectiveness of the algorithm or wether there’s ever need for implementing it by hand is irrelevant.
Google does seem to have an issue with maintaining promising apps. Maybe those would actually would do a bit better if the teams those engineers were on actually had to make money. It wouldn't be so much of an issue if they weren't smothering similar apps before deciding they didn't like the ideas so much after all.
I got a mac for the first time this year. Honestly, it feels like taking a shower after getting home from the beach on a sunny day when you've been wearing sunscreen. Everything just works with no extra garbage, no constant intrusive updates, no hassle. The only issue I had was the lack of alt-tab, and that was solved by an app called alt-tab.
I got my first mac through work this year and I hate the UI. It's very nice that it doesn't come with as much bloat (but it does still come it, e.g., Apple news, music, etc). I absolutely hate the window management. Inconsistent behavior on double click of the title bar (Chrome maximizes and Slack doesn't) is annoying. Lack of snapping and tiling (a la super-arrow) drives me nuts. That command-tab will switch me to a different workspace completely defeats the purpose of having a workspace at all. And I also hate the nonstandard keyboard layout and shortcuts.
Yes, you can install a dozen little extra utilities to customize your way out of most of these things... but I'm not going to. I use systems usually quite-close to stock because of how often I'm using not-my-system or how often the system is reimaged or whatever. Also it's a corporate machine and I can't be bothered to see if each and every bodge-app is permitted by security policy.
The hardware is very nice, however. I would totally buy a MBP personally if I could run Windows or Fedora on it, and swap the keyboard for something sensible.
> I got my first mac through work this year and I hate the UI.
I am baffled by whoever thought having icons leap in the toolbar as a default behaviour was an OK thing to do. Drives me crazy when I use a Mac other than mine. I have lots of little issues with the UX. Play button opening Apple Music -- ahh! Running unsigned apps is easy but I always get caught out by the right click thing.
> you can install a dozen little extra utilities to customize your way out of most of these things
Usually paid for too. Using mouse on Mac feels absolutely awful to me without Smooze.
I wish there was a better laptop on the market, but despite the compromises my MBP is the best laptop I've ever owned it's not even close. Just like my iPhone, I think it's a brilliant device despite Apple being, well, Apple.
I gave up trying to use a mouse on OSX years ago (the acceleration curve causes physical pain for me) and leaned into what Apple did right: trackpads. I got an apple trackpad for my desk setup, and otherwise use the built in trackpad on the macbook.
Doesn't help for those who need a mouse device (cad/design/photo-editing, etc), but for what I use it for (software dev/ops work), it's great. Trackpads in a windows ecosystem feel absolutely horrendous to me, so I just use mice there lol.
God bless the trackpad on Macbooks. Some Windows laptops come close but none match it.
Thumbs up for Smooze if you're looking to try and have a somewhat usable mouse experience. It's 20 bucks because of course it is, why wouldn't a tool to allow a need that basic cost money? It does have a trial. Maybe another commenter can recommend something free but when I was looking a couple years ago it was the only thing that did it right.
YMMV, but I've found that using very high resolution (~3000 DPI) "gaming" mice works very well under MacOS. This works well with my tendency to not move my hand very much when mousing, but still expect the pointer to go to the other side of the screen. Plus, some of those mice have on-board memory which allows customizing their buttons without having some crappy app running in the background (Logitech G vs normal Logitech).
Using a regular mouse does feel like trying to push a string through sand.
i am not a mac guy, saw a friend use m1. why does everything have to be trial/paid?
i use linux and everyone is expected to be a freeloader and yet people constantly keep on churning our good/bad software for free because its the whole idea of "you scratch my back, i will scratch yours" and "i am doing this for fun. how about you have a problem so you fix this yourself and help everyone" type camaraderie which is opposite in osx where the idea is "you are rich enough, why wont you pay"
The major obvious factor is because the devs can earn money doing that unlike with Linux, but there are also things like: because it's usually not free to make those apps (mac's developer subscription, without which it makes harder for the users to install apps)
> And I also hate the nonstandard keyboard layout and shortcuts.
I think you may grow to like them, especially if you routinely type in languages other than your layout.
For example, I use a physical QWERTY layout, but often type in French (the latter is an abomination for programming and similar). I can very easily use dead keys to create the accents. I type as quickly in French on a Mac QWERTY as I used to on a regular AZERTY (it still requires dead keys for some characters).
If you use terminals, now your copy/paste shortcuts stay the same across apps. Trying to copy something without paying attention won't quit your running program / return you to the end of the history.
At first, I also found it a bit weird, but it has grown on me so much that now that I don't use a mac anymore, I try to bring it with me. One of the reasons why I hate using Windows at work, is that I can't get it to have a fully mac-like keyboard. I'm pretty close, but it insists on having the right alt as AltGr, which is a PITA, especially since it can't be moved. On Linux, the Mac layout works perfectly, at least on X11.
Why do you do that swap? I dislike tucking my thumb to copy and paste, but could imagine someone with different hand geometry having different preferences.
There’s a setting to enable/disable switching to a space with an app’s window when switching to an app. That should help with one of your issues.
Kb shortcuts are standard - for a Mac ;). Heck in most apps you can even use standard readline shortcuts like ctrl-e for end of line, ctrl-a for start of line , ctrl-n and -p for next and previous etc. Same as in emacs or in a terminal window.
> Inconsistent behavior on double click of the title bar (Chrome maximizes and Slack doesn't) is annoying.
This is actually on third party app devs, not apple. Note that double-clicking the titlebar works the same in stock apps, as well as in most mac-only native apps.
Cross-platform apps like Slack often hide the native titlebar and draw their own which doesn’t implement all the native behaviors or even try to mimic them. Papercuts like this are part of why Mac users are more likely to be discontent with cross-platform apps.
For many Electron apps a decent work around is to install them as PWAs, which can be done with both Safari (File > Add to Dock…) or your preferred Chrome-cousin. Those draw proper titlebars.
The UI is the single biggest reason why I will never own a Mac. I cannot stand having a single menu bar for the entire system, and I'm not about to use an OS which forces it on me. I do at least appreciate that Apple tries to make good products for their customers (even if they are overpriced), but I hate their GUI design and there's no real way around that.
I find macOS annoying no matter what I do. AltTab is nice, but the window management still sucks in my opinion. The security bandages used to work around traditional desktop security models makes it feel incredibly annoying to use; I'll try to set a keyboard shortcut (not a global one mind you) in iTerm2 and suddenly I need to enable iTerm2 to have accessibility access?
Disabling SIP is needed for a myriad of things that aren't really that advanced, like for example, it is needed for some reason by some of the macOS "tiling WM" toys, and it's needed to even use any kexts. No joke: Discord will direct you to disable SIP if you want to .. capture audio during screenshares. It's also needed for macFUSE.
macOS also has no equivalent to WSL2. "But it's POSIX!" I can hear you say. Very fair point, but there are a lot of uses for lightweight Linux VMs, like, well, testing Linux things. Docker Desktop tries but it's slow. I really wanted to like Podman Desktop but it's similarly slow, and I had trouble with networking in a difficult-to-debug way. I strongly recommend Orb Stack here: it basically brings the WSL2 experience to macOS, except maybe even a bit better, vastly prefer it to Docker Desktop. That said, it's a monthly cost, which is definitely not ideal. There's also Colima but I have to say I don't love it either; no IPv6 support isn't a killer but it was annoying to find out the hard way.
I could probably make do with macOS if forced, but I wouldn't enjoy it. That said, I can't really take having to deal with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, so I am stuck very deep into Linux. To be fair, this is nothing new for me: Linux has been my primary desktop OS since high school. But I wouldn't say it's a good desktop OS. I mostly use it because I don't really feel like I have any other options and I already paid the cost to get deep into it anyway.
(I don't hate everything about Apple obviously, but to be honest, my desire to use Apple Silicon devices was mostly tied to high hopes for Asahi Linux)
Closing a window has never closed a Mac application. Like, since the first Macs. Applications can have multiple windows so it makes sense from a UX perspective to not terminate an application when a window closes, even if it is the last window.
This behavior can easily be overridden by application developers but they choose not to go against expected behavior.
Power users press Command + Q to quit an application.
I've literally never struggled with what you're describing.
It makes zero sense from a UX perspective to not terminate (most) processes when the last window closes. Exceptions do exist, but for example if I close all my word processor windows then the process does no good continuing to run. I think you make a fair point that Mac users are used to this behavior and so it should probably remain consistent. But if you were to redesign the OS from the ground up, it's horrible behavior that should in no way be the default.
You might close all windows, but still have a background task running. That's nicely represented by the app remaining on, which can ask about interrupting the background task if you try to close it. It removes the need for most systray usage.
That’s because on Mac OS, there isn’t a 1:1 mapping of windows to processes. Instead, multiple windows of any given app are hosted by a single process which stays open when all windows have been closed to facilitate opening documents or new windows without pointlessly disposing of the existing process only to start another.
It’s been like that for the Mac’s entire existence. For someone who’s used Macs all their life, the Windows way is weird.
> Discord will direct you to disable SIP if you want to .. capture audio during screenshares
This is untrue, there's a difference between disabling SIP and changing your security policy to "reduced."
Disabling SIP lets you modify files on the system volume along with a few other things, like a way to run executables that require private entitlements that aren't signed by Apple. The reduced security policy lets you run older Mac OS versions (there's no online signature check during installs) as well as kernel extensions from authorized developers.
Discord relies on the latter, as it uses the ACE extension for audio capture, the same one that powers Rogue Amoeba's excellent apps. There are APIs to do this natively now, introduced in Ventura I believe, but Discord hasn't yet switched over to them.
Yeah, I have an app that relies on the Rogue Amoeba kext. Probably Zoom or something.
I admit I glossed over the details of SIP partly because I forgot, but the point is that to get audio capture working on Discord ~~right now~~ (Apparently according to neighboring comment this is fixed, but the point does still stand anyways since this literally was the situation for users since Apple Silicon arrived afaik), you have to go into recovery and run some esoteric commands to lower the security level of the machine, and it's 100% Apple's fault because they didn't offer APIs for things that people were using kexts for before shutting off third-party kexts.
(And this whole thing feels a bit rushed, as can be seen by the issues that have occurred with the newer usermode network filtering APIs... It's always especially bad when you fuck up in a way that messes with privacy software for only your own services, even if it's truly accidental.)
> I'll try to set a keyboard shortcut (not a global one mind you) in iTerm2 and suddenly I need to enable iTerm2 to have accessibility access?
Maybe this could be more clear in iTerm's UI, but the reason it needs accessibility access is in scenarios where it's stomping on Mac OS' system shortcut keys. I would expect Windows or Linux would need special privileges to do the same.
> and suddenly I need to enable iTerm2 to have accessibility access?
This is a strange thing to complain about, you have to do it literally once and it takes less than 5 seconds and 5 clicks. And I would rather have a nice settings panel showing what apps have access to what, rather than the mess that is Windows privacy settings.
Why is it strange to complain about randomly needing to grant applications access to apparently-unrelated permissions? This sounds exactly the same kind of weird handwaving Linux fanboys routinely get scolded for. And "It's better than Windows" doesn't make it good, but the fact is that you don't have to do this for any kind of keybinding in Windows, so it's neither here nor there.
It's strange because you have distorted the facts. iTerm doesn't "suddenly" ask for accessibility permissions. You, by your own description, have attempted to make global changes to the macOS GUI. That's a legitimate and expected situation for an accessibility permission dialog to show up.
Why does changing a keybind inside of iTerm 2 need global accessibility permissions? By my own words, it's not a global shortcut, because well, it wasn't.
> I'll try to set a keyboard shortcut (not a global one mind you)
(I will admit that the phrase "keyboard shortcut" instead of something like "key binding" likely lead to this confusion, but by the time this occurred to me, the edit window was already closed.)
This hit me just recently when trying to map Command+P to Control+P. I don't know if Command+P is somehow special, but if you want to try it for yourself, feel free.
Secondly, though, accessibility permission is a really large hammer. Typically that's a high level of privileges as it usually means being able to read and interact with just about everything on-screen. Granted, this is the reality of many desktop OSes today anyways, but that's the other thing. If I have to switch all of these permissions on for many apps anyways, is this really a good design? No, of course not.
I tried to keep my rant relatively contained, because the truth is I hate macOS a lot worse. A software I used to like a lot, SnagIt, has become progressively less usable as macOS has updated over time, presumably because apps that handle screenshots and video capture have had to get increasingly tricky to function. Just about every time SnagIt starts, it gives me a laundry list of permissions I need to grant it. I mean literally it has to be like 7 things. Most of them seem to stick, but apparently after the software updates some of them need to be done again.
This security model sucks in other ways too. Like for example, you have to give your terminal emulator full disk access. If you don't, really stupid things will happen. I accidentally ran brew update in a VS Code terminal. It worked! And promptly wiped out all of the granted permissions on all of the casks it updated, because VS Code (of course) doesn't have full disk access, and as part of the security model you can't just update an app without full disk access. I really wish that wasn't the default behavior, because it was genuinely just a mistake to use the VS Code terminal for that. But even worse, I really want to grant this permission to Brew and not literally everything I run in that terminal emulator, so this is pretty damn unideal.
I haven't even gotten into Gatekeeper, OCSP stapling, and all of the trouble I have gone through trying to sign apps for macOS and have it not need to phone home to check the signature. (I was also hit by that funny bug where programs were taking forever to execute because the exec syscall was hanging waiting for Apple's servers. Reminds me that I am on a "privacy friendly" OS.)
But seriously, I'm really only scratching the surface here. Don't get me wrong, I hate other OSes too. I have an ongoing rant right next to this one about how much I hate Windows 11, and I don't think I really need to express how bad desktop Linux is from a usability standpoint.
I take this refreshing shower at night, when I close my Mac work computer and go use my Windows personal computer. Everything is easy to accomplish, my personal use software just works and I don't have to struggle with extra clicks and movements for everything. It's incredible how different people are - and that's a good thing.
People are free to have their own opinions. But some things aren't matters of options, but hard cold facts.
Windows, especially after Windows 10, has been actively hostile and repeatedly ignores the clear will of its users.
At boot time, it regularly takes the computer hostage in an attempt to coerce me to mass-enable its many spywares. After disabling then one by one, I can login to my desktop only to find that it has changed my default browser again. So I have to change that back, which is kind of futile because various parts of the OS now ignores the default browser settings anyway. After that, I have to dismiss the relentless ads and remove the crapware that keeps getting installed at every turn and corner.
This is a very, very far cry from "everything is easy to accomplish, my personal use software just works and I don't have to struggle with extra clicks and movements for everything." Both things can't be true at the same time. I have to click, click, click, go through all sorts of hoops, and finally give up and throw my computer out the window in frustration to try to achieve what I want in Windows. And what for? Out of pure corporate greed.
> People are free to have their own opinions. But some things aren't matters of options, but hard cold facts.
I feel same way about Mac users. Can't understand how people accept that turd of OS that comes with poor defaults (Window Management/Finder/keyboard), weaker customization and tonnes of bloat (Music/Notes/Messages/Mail/...) and then they pay a premium for it.
That's literally your opinion about features. And a possibly outdated one too, because current model keyboards are fine.
Also the fact that you chose window management as a major problem on Macs tells me that you have a strong dislike for things that's unfamiliar to you. There are some annoyances with Macs, especially if you're a dev, but window management isn't one of them. Macs have the best touchpad gestures and virtual desktop management UX. GNOME comes close these days, but Macs still feel a bit smoother.
As for your problem with "bloat," most of those are just stock utility apps. Any major desktop OS have had those since ages. You do have a point with Apple Music, but Notes, Messages, and Mail? Are you serious?
I haven't experienced the "facts" you describe - which makes me think they are opinions, or personal perceptions on pretty standard product practices, rather than facts.
Whenever there is a major update, they put a big button for me to enable Bing and a smaller button for me to not do that, and I just need to click on the smaller button. They sometimes enable brand new features I don't want by default, but they do that to make features discoverable; in years of Windows use, all I needed to do is disable the things I didn't want.
I'm not a Windows fanboy. It's just an operating system, not a way of life. While it does have some things I don't like, I'm quite productive using it and I'm a satisfied user.
If it wasn't trivial to disable/reject these things, Bing would have a 50%+ desktop market share and that's not what we see. People aren't going in mass from Windows to Linux/Mac, what is happening instead is that desktop OSs are becoming less and less useful as people who used to be desktop users do everything they need on mobile platforms.
An opinion? Are you suggesting that all the abuse I've been subjected to by my Windows machine was just all in my head? Well, that's weird because instances of those abuse are well documented. The sheer number of those cases, the length Microsoft goes to, the level of contempt they show towards their users is unheard of in any other operating system in existence. I double checked, and I'm pretty sure my "perception" is in agreement with verifiable facts.
> Whenever there is a major update, they put a big button for me to enable Bing and a smaller button for me to not do that, and I just need to click on the smaller button.
This is not true. They're making it progressively harder to opt out of unwanted features. It's even impossible in some cases. Anyways, I clearly remember Windows booting into an unskippable full screen nag. The option to mass-accept various violations of my privacy was shown as a big blue button. The other option was concealed in a wall of text as a link, barely recognizable. After clicking on the link, I was greeted with a bunch of options that I had to toggle off, one by one. This isn't normal or acceptable. It's evil and manipulative, and the fact that they chose to do this at boot, when people need their computers the most, is beyond infuriating.
Here's just a little taste of the Windows experience:
Having moved to mac 4 years ago I can't think of going back to windows. Only downside I find is you need to buy Apple hardware at premium to experience MacOS
It used to be that you could create a Hackintosh with cheap hardware. Had a really fast "mac" this way a few years back. Unfortunately since apple is moving away from Intel this may not be viable anymore.
I hackintoshed with an old laptop years ago, and more recently with a custom built tower.
When it’s good it’s really, really good. That old laptop had a better LCD panel than you could get in any Macbook of that era, and that tower ran circles around any real contemporary Mac.
The problem is that no matter how hard you try, there’s always little glitches that are downright impossible to eliminate unless you have the chops to tinker with DSDTs and kernel extension development.
Windows is apparently moving to a "we'll be an app on any platform you move to" model, and I kinda think it's the best of both worlds.
I wish macos moved to the same model and it could be just an app on a linux or windows machine. Apple is already shifting their weight to service revenue for growth, this could be a realistic direction to take.
I was also pretty pleased with my move to MacOS but one thing I really miss is the file navigation from Windows. Like when I want to drag a file somewhere a few difectories deep. I wish I could hold it over a folder and then have it open that next folder, and so on. Is there a way to enable this?
Also the in application file picker makes it difficult to go up and down directories.
> I was also pretty pleased with my move to MacOS but one thing I really miss is the file navigation from Windows. Like when I want to drag a file somewhere a few difectories deep. I wish I could hold it over a folder and then have it open that next folder and so on. Is there a way to enable this?
Macs have had a feature like that since the 90s called spring loaded folders. Pick up the file you want to move, then hold it over the base level destination folder for a moment until it “blinks” and it’ll open the folder in a new window. Rinse and repeat as you’re drilling down to the folder you want, then drop.
Back/forward buttons in Finder windows can also be hovered over with a dragged file to trigger those.
I discovered the fingers on my right hand barely brush the bottomed edge of it when I make certain multi-key keystrokes. Right where the play “button” was by default. Took me forever to figure out why Music was opening “randomly”.
I ended up setting the touchbar to static, not per-program customizable, and replacing most of it with a “spacer” element. Fixed the problem.
Luckily they’ve realized they were a bad idea and my newer ones don’t have a touchbar.
This has never happened to me. I exclusively listen to music on my phone, and work every day on my Mac. I have never had the Music app open itself up, not once. Nor I have I experienced anything that is even related to music, such as asking me to subscribe to a service.
I leave Music running all the time. I have all the store and subscription features turned off. I just have the program loaded with all of my MP3s, something I've been doing since it was called SoundJam MP [1]. I have all my playlists in there and it works fine with the play/pause/prev/next buttons on the keyboard. I think they bug me about subscribing to Apple Music once every major OS update. I promptly say no and turn off any of the extra features they added.
The Windows approach of one button for cycling through windows is a bit less mental overhead than needing multiple keyboard shortcuts to first cycle through applications then windows in that application.
In windows you just mash the key until the thing you want comes up.
I'd say it's basically standard everywhere outside the US. I lived in Canada and Europe, and eneryone is on it. All my fellow immigrants in the US are all on WhatsApp groups.
With WhatsApp, your phone number allowed you to see everyone in your contacts that you could message on there, so you could see everyone straight away. Without that, you'd have to bring your friends along and have them sign up as well, then give you their username so you can connect.
What's your source for this? European countries are quite different from each other, and I'm wondering if your experience was only in restaurants while travelling (which is a very different experience to what most people eat every day at home).
