alt Hacker News> mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.
I hear this from a lot of people when they get their first Mac. When they get specific about what their issues are, it tends to be that macOS doesn't do a thing how they are used to doing it, which is more of a learning curve issue, or rigid thinking. Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.
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I can give you a few examples:
Packages are not done well compared to linux. Brew is a poor replacement. It feels like the terminal and everything involved is constantly out of date.
The OS just has a lot of weird things, like the ribbon at the bottom taking up so much space. When I made is smaller and hidden except on mouse over it was incredibly rough.
Window management is decades behind windows or linux. It doesn't like maximizing windows and doesn't make partitioning screen space easy. I had to download a third party app to make it better, which was still worse than windows even in windows 7, and miles worse than linux with i3.
Mac has a lot of rough spots. I have two external monitors and occasionally after updates one monitor would be fuzzy or different resolutions, and it wouldn't go back until the next update.
I switched to Mac as my primary two years ago and I'm still finding myself frustrated at the software a lot.
It's not just that it's opinionated - that's fine. It's that those opinions are often just poor UX.
There's something to it.
On that note, is there any GUI tool that allows me to browse my zip archives without unpacking them, and is also free?
Home/End don't work correctly (external keyboard).
Cmd-Tab switching between applications instead of windows is utterly stupid. (Yes I know there is some magic keystroke that will do it, but who even wants the standard behavior? Like why even do that?)
If there is a window under another window, and you click on something in it, the OS will ignore the click, it will just activate the window.
So now you have to click twice, except what if it's actually active? So now you have to always check if a window is active - which is harder than necessary because of how Macs have the toolbar on top, not near the actual window. (This is especially bad when you have two monitors.)
The toolbar is far from the window, leading to extra mouse movements.
There is no maximize button, instead it's a full screen button.
If you manage to get a window off-screen, there's almost no way to get it back (you have to pick tile windows or something like that to make the mac move it). If you do show all windows, and click on it, nothing obvious happens.
I'm trying to add the screenshot app to the launch bar - I can't, I click on Launchpad and find it, but you can't right click on any of the icons in there to do anything with them.
The finder is an utter disaster - I can not for the life of me figure out how to go up one level in a directory. It's like finder is trying very hard to pretend there's no such thing as directories.
If you have two monitors you can't have an app halfway across both of them, it's always on one of the order.
If I move an app to the bottom right corner the OS will "helpfully" move it back up, even though I moved it down. (This is especially funny when you realize it frequently manages to place windows off screen - why can't it be helpful then?)
When you drag a window sometimes you get this white outline that will resize the window for your screen - I have yet to figure out when this activates and when it doesn't.
When you drag a window from a larger monitor to a small one, it will resize it - sometime. But despite that it manages to place the window offset - so it's the right size, but like 40 pixels to the left.
Every single time I reboot, if I have to unplug my external monitor, and keyboard, login, then plug them back in. Otherwise it refuses to talk to them.
MacOs is extraordinarily opinionated about how everything should work and frequently attempt to predict your workflow.
Linux/Windows (historically) were straightforawrd, each tool did exactly what it said it would do, and it was up to you to learn how to use the tools available.
On linux/windows, if a button was "capture image", it would just capture the image on the screen. On a mac a "capture image" button could do anything from displaying the image on the screen, to saving it in a photos folder, to saving and syncing it to an iCloud account. Whatever the apple PM decided the most common use case was, and god help you if you want to do something different.
If you've been in the mac ecosystem for a while, you've grown used to this and don't notice any longer. You may even occasionally express happiness when a function does something unexpected and helpful!
If you're coming from anywhere else, its unbelievably painful.
Not just this. I'm linux/macos user since early 2000's and still sometimes hate macos because they have very annoying bugs that are never fixed, and annoying corpo decisions.
E.g. it keeps opening Music app whenever I connect bluetooth earbuds. I can't delete Music app, it just keeps popping up with imbecile message about "user is not logged in" or something. I run a script that monitors that Music.app is running and kills-9 it.
Or blinking desktop background issue, that's been there for years, accumulated many support threads, and still not fixed.
Random services like coreaudiod that suddenly start consuming 100% CPU for no apparent reason.
Macbook throttling (thanks God, gone with M cpu's)
I can keep going but my point is macos has legit problems that can't be simply shrugged off with "they just hold it the wrong way".
Like any other mass product tbh, except rare ideal products like Factorio game or sqlite.
> Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.
And this is why many like me prefer Linux. We have our own opinions, and Linux enables us to enforce our opinions.
I've been a Linux guy for 25 years, and used Windows at work for the last 15. I now have to use MacOS at work.
I miss Windows. It wasn't totally better, but I managed to overcome most Windows headaches with workarounds. I haven't found the alternatives yet to MacOS.
From my perspective, both Windows and MacOS suck - but in different ways. I think the problem many Linux folks have with MacOS is that it is the "uncanny valley" of Linux. You get happy that you can use your usual UNIX flows, and then you find out that you can't.
I really want a good tiling window manager. I have yet to find one on MacOS that has the features AwesomeWM have.
It really sucks not being able to rebind keys to use Ctrl instead of Cmd in many apps. For basic tasks (opening/closing browser tabs), I have to use one set of keys in the daytime (at work), and another at night (at home). Why won't MacOS let me change them?