6 ms·

I personally much, much prefer the UX on Linux. I may be suffering from some kind of Stockholm syndrome as a long time Linux user, but I have to use macOS for w

by sspiff 3y ago

I personally much, much prefer the UX on Linux. I may be suffering from some kind of Stockholm syndrome as a long time Linux user, but I have to use macOS for work and it absolutely doesn't work for me. I find the UX quirky and akward to use. I hate how the window management works. I hate how annoying it is to get two windows to show side by side. I hate how there end up so many icons in the menu bar which are entirely unhelpful. I hate how space inefficient the dock is, but when you auto hide it, you can no longer see the notification counts at a glance. I would honest to God rate macOS UX a 2/5 for design and a 5/5 for QA.

rurp 3y ago
I feel very similarly. Macs are polished and well built, but the amount of anti-features or weird UX decisions that I can't do anything about are maddening. I eventually switched to linux for my personal dev machine and after some initial bumpiness came to love it.
bombcar 3y ago
If you have the time to “play” with it Linux is amazing. But you have to defend yourself against upgrades. It was years ago that a routine upgrade from some Linux distribution to the next version completely changed my GUI in ways that I just didn’t want to deal with - I bought a Mac. If I were ever to go back I’d run Gentoo or some other rolling release distro; at least then I get changes a little bit at a time. There are addons and tricks to do window management in Mac OS - but the big one I do is throw that dock on the right hand side of the screen and leave it. Wide screens have space there, might as well use it. Mac OS still has a bit of that “upgrade changes everything” going on but it seems more gradual and less painful - and in my experience pretty polished.
- sspiff 3y ago
  I've not had breaking changes in Linux for a long, long time. I generally use either a completely unmodified, default config Gnome, or Sway with my own config. I've used a couple of different desktop environments or window managers over the past few decades, but these days I either stick with the default (which is so often Gnome) or use Sway, where I can just copy in my config file and everything works exactly as I'm used to.
- gorjusborg 3y ago
  > If you have the time to “play” with it Linux is amazing. But you have to defend yourself against upgrades. That has not been my experience. If you are using something like Arch (rolling release distro) maybe, but Ubuntu and Debian stable have been pretty much that. I also find it a little funny that a complaint about Linux is in the thread of a post showing how Apple will change things that break their users without apology.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I’ve found that even if I have time to allot to playing with Linux, I can never get things tuned the way I want. If you want bog standard Win9X paradigm desktop (most DEs), iPadOS with a mild desktop bent (GNOME), or yet another minimal tiling WM those are easy to do, but reproducing other environments (mainly macOS) keeping all the bits that matter in tact isn’t currently possible. It’s quite frustrating for me. If it weren’t for the fact that such a thing would progress glacially if worked on only in my spare time I’d write my own DE and maintain enough forks that my GitHub profile would look like a fork factory.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Making a simple tweak like setting caps lock to an extra ctrl is a whole side quest on Linux and you may never really get it working everywhere.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Part of the fun with that is there's about fifty different places you could do it, and the only one that will really affect everything is in the kernel (IIRC), anything else will affect the program, window manager, terminal, etc but not necessarily anything else. And some programs bypass everything and read scancodes anyway. Whereas in Mac OS X it's a simple configurable option (a bit hidden, System Settings, Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Modifier Keys).
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        And if you do it in the kernel, then any other users on the machine are stuck with your choice. The MacOS setting is per-user, but affects very nearly everything, except the recovery environment and I guess the login screen, for good reasons.
        jwells89 3y ago
        It makes me wonder, how exactly would one go about implementing Linux remapping that works on everything on a per-user basis? Is there a way to hook into the USB HID implementation and change what it reports to X, Wayland, etc and flip it on/off based on user preferences?
- pluijzer 3y ago
  It is funny because this is actually one of the main things I like about Linux. My current setup is basically the same as the one I had 20 years ago. Things function and look the same. The only difference is that it the background lots of improvements started accumulating not to mention my much better PC. With Linux it feels I can keep doing the things how I want them to do. True, there are some distributions and window managers that throw the baby out with the bathwater for every update, looking at Ubuntu and Gnome, but sticking to something more conservative and you are set for live. Also, every time this happens, somebody will always fork of the old code, like with Mate and Trinity. With a Mac or Windows you are sort of stuck with wills and whims of some company. If Windows could still look and function like 2000, but just be better, I might still use it to this day.
  - hbn 3y ago
    > With a Mac or Windows you are sort of stuck with wills and whims of some company. It's true, but I'd also say macOS as it is today looks pretty damn similar to screenshots of the first OSX version shown off 20+ years ago. Other than updated icons (which are still mostly based off the original icons) and an overall flatter aesthetic compared to the flashy, novel 3D of those days, it mostly functions the same. They only updated the Preferences app to System Settings in the last version with a design overhaul, and it was a pretty big deal because they don't do that much.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  People will (and have) showed up to deny this, but what you describe is common enough that it can't be untrue. At this very moment, I'm still going through the "play" phase. If you pick a distro and then never change anything about it, then maybe it will work out for you out of the box. But as soon as you try to "make it yours", suddenly you'll find yourself with a second day job with no pay, you'll wonder where all your free time went, and your muscle tone will be gone. Inevitably, you'll have some weird issue like a particular program acting slow and causing the mouse to lag, or maybe your Wayland compositor has the wrong cursor position, and nobody on the internet knows why, except for some guy with a script as long as the declaration of independence that you can run in your terminal to fix all your problems (um, no). Eventually you give up and run the built-in compositor within another compositor, and somehow that fixes the original issue. But now your keyboard/mouse configuration no longer works! Holy shit, it's almost Christmas? Screw this, let's install Debian stable. Wait, what? The installer can't find the installation media? You ARE the installation media! Fuuuuuuuuu... I love Linux as a tool, but the desktop experience will never get its act together. Whether it works for you or not seems to be based on luck. I don't even want a complicated desktop experience; I just want something basic like Openbox and a web browser, but these days you can barely even do that without a bunch of tinkering (unless you want to stick entirely to X11).
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    It seems like the problem that makes it common is that Linux self-selects for people who want to tinker (that's why they're installing a non-default OS). The difference is that it also accommodates people who reach a point where they just want the computer to work and get out of their way. So you end up hearing both voices. > If you pick a distro and then never change anything about it, then maybe it will work out for you out of the box. Yes, exactly. Use a stable distro, don't touch things, and they won't change. It will continue to run exactly the same for years and years. This is in contrast to OSX and Windows. Windows is completely unrecognizable to me since stopped using it 7-8 years ago (the last version I used being Windows 7). My Linux desktop works exactly the same (with Firefox as an outlier that randomly removes/hides functionality). Apple is notorious for not caring about backwards compatibility, and just expecting everyone to accommodate whatever changes they want to make. > unless you want to stick entirely to X11 Right, don't change things, and it will keep working. Wayland sounds like its benefits are all nerd stuff that I don't care about (a "better" architecture or whatever). Meanwhile, X works just fine. At some point, if people stop complaining about Wayland, and if it has some benefit to me, maybe I'll try it. Currently it seems that neither of those criteria are met. When I do try it, if it doesn't work, I'll just roll it back.
- horsawlarway 3y ago
  This sorta feels like a parody comment, especially as I currently sit at my work macbook with an entirely redesigned and laid out settings UI (which now actually reminds me of the control panel view from windows XP - with it's new list of categories with lots of confusing, duplicate, and overlapping choices).
philistine 3y ago
Do you always have your applications in full screen? In my limited experience, that's the number one cause of grief with macOS' UX.
- sspiff 3y ago
  No, I do not, at least not on macOS. Because the experience is so horrible, perhaps. I generally have one big window or two windows side-by-side on Linux though.
  - timeon 3y ago
    Have you tried yabai? MacOS still interferes with it sometimes, but overall it is not that bad.
geitir 3y ago
Highly recommend https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
- baq 3y ago
  and https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos
Phemist 3y ago
For the window management, a big shoutout to `magnet` (for snapping windows) and `AltTab` (for sane alt tabbing).. for making the management much less frustrating (although not completely fixed). The "windows should be grouped in terms of the applications" does not make sense to me AT ALL. Most work is done on a project basis, which crosses application boundaries quite readily. E.g., one project might involve having an open Android Studio project, a PDF with documentation, a browser window and a note pad. "Cmd-tabbing", though, brings up the next window of the same application that I am currently on. Viewing a PDF with preview, this will bring up some random image most of the time? (Luckily this is fixed by AltTab) No solutions for the dock from me though. Personally I hate how the dock can randomly move between two monitors if you just happen to drag a file through the area where the dock COULD go on your second screen. Additionally, things I hate and have not been able to fix: how if you close a window of a specific application in MacOS, it moves another window of that same application forward (similar to the Cmd+Tab behaviour) and if you click on an application in the Dock, it brings forward ALL windows of that application (whereas I would expect only the most recently used one).
- ris58h 3y ago
  > magnet There is Rectangle which is free and open source. Also there is Touch-Tab (disclaimer: I'm the developer) to switch apps with 3-finger swipe left/right. https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/ https://github.com/ris58h/Touch-Tab/ https://github.com/ris58h/Touch-Tab/
roopepal 3y ago
> I hate how the window management works. I hate how annoying it is to get two windows to show side by side. Plenty of window management apps and tools available. Rectangle, for example. > I hate how there end up so many icons in the menu bar which are entirely unhelpful. The only ones I cannot seem to be able to remove trivially are the clock and the Control Center. Solved in mere seconds by typing "menu bar" into the System Settings search. You could literally even just hold cmd and drag almost any icon out of the bar. Not to mention any of the more involved menu bar customization apps and tools. Why does it seem like such "macOS bad Linux good" comments always compare the default macOS experience to a personalized Linux environment? Why does an out-of-the-box Mac have to fulfill the same requirements we spent hours configuring for on a Linux machine? Where does the capability or mindset to install a tool disappear when we move from Linux to macOS?
- yencabulator 3y ago
  > Why does it seem like such "macOS bad Linux good" comments always compare the default macOS experience to a personalized Linux environment? Because the "Linux bad macOS good" comments say things like the parent: > Linux may be fine if you like tinkering Are you now saying macOS requires tinkering too?
- sspiff 3y ago
  > Why does it seem like such "macOS bad Linux good" comments always compare the default macOS experience to a personalized Linux environment? I'm not, I'm comparing to an unmodified, standard config Gnome or Plasma. I also use Sway, and I'm pretty sure I've spent less time customizing/configuring it than my Mac.
- dagw 3y ago
  Why does an out-of-the-box Mac have to fulfill the same requirements we spent hours configuring for on a Linux machine? I think part of the problem is due to Mac and Apple have traditionally sold itself as intuitive and easy-to-use out of the box. People buy a Mac because they've been told that they don't have to spend hours configuring it. Hell Apple built a whole ad campaign around how the Mac is so much easier and more intuitive to use than Windows computers. However truth is that if you're coming from Linux or Windows, a lot of MacOS is incredibly unintuitive and weird out of the box.

by sspiff 3y ago

rurp 3y ago

I feel very similarly. Macs are polished and well built, but the amount of anti-features or weird UX decisions that I can't do anything about are maddening. I eventually switched to linux for my personal dev machine and after some initial bumpiness came to love it.

bombcar 3y ago

If you have the time to “play” with it Linux is amazing. But you have to defend yourself against upgrades. It was years ago that a routine upgrade from some Linux distribution to the next version completely changed my GUI in ways that I just didn’t want to deal with - I bought a Mac. If I were ever to go back I’d run Gentoo or some other rolling release distro; at least then I get changes a little bit at a time. There are addons and tricks to do window management in Mac OS - but the big one I do is throw that dock on the right hand side of the screen and leave it. Wide screens have space there, might as well use it. Mac OS still has a bit of that “upgrade changes everything” going on but it seems more gradual and less painful - and in my experience pretty polished.

sspiff 3y ago
I've not had breaking changes in Linux for a long, long time. I generally use either a completely unmodified, default config Gnome, or Sway with my own config. I've used a couple of different desktop environments or window managers over the past few decades, but these days I either stick with the default (which is so often Gnome) or use Sway, where I can just copy in my config file and everything works exactly as I'm used to.
gorjusborg 3y ago
> If you have the time to “play” with it Linux is amazing. But you have to defend yourself against upgrades. That has not been my experience. If you are using something like Arch (rolling release distro) maybe, but Ubuntu and Debian stable have been pretty much that. I also find it a little funny that a complaint about Linux is in the thread of a post showing how Apple will change things that break their users without apology.
jwells89 3y ago
I’ve found that even if I have time to allot to playing with Linux, I can never get things tuned the way I want. If you want bog standard Win9X paradigm desktop (most DEs), iPadOS with a mild desktop bent (GNOME), or yet another minimal tiling WM those are easy to do, but reproducing other environments (mainly macOS) keeping all the bits that matter in tact isn’t currently possible. It’s quite frustrating for me. If it weren’t for the fact that such a thing would progress glacially if worked on only in my spare time I’d write my own DE and maintain enough forks that my GitHub profile would look like a fork factory.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Making a simple tweak like setting caps lock to an extra ctrl is a whole side quest on Linux and you may never really get it working everywhere.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Part of the fun with that is there's about fifty different places you could do it, and the only one that will really affect everything is in the kernel (IIRC), anything else will affect the program, window manager, terminal, etc but not necessarily anything else. And some programs bypass everything and read scancodes anyway. Whereas in Mac OS X it's a simple configurable option (a bit hidden, System Settings, Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Modifier Keys).
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      And if you do it in the kernel, then any other users on the machine are stuck with your choice. The MacOS setting is per-user, but affects very nearly everything, except the recovery environment and I guess the login screen, for good reasons.
      - jwells89 3y ago
        It makes me wonder, how exactly would one go about implementing Linux remapping that works on everything on a per-user basis? Is there a way to hook into the USB HID implementation and change what it reports to X, Wayland, etc and flip it on/off based on user preferences?
pluijzer 3y ago
It is funny because this is actually one of the main things I like about Linux. My current setup is basically the same as the one I had 20 years ago. Things function and look the same. The only difference is that it the background lots of improvements started accumulating not to mention my much better PC. With Linux it feels I can keep doing the things how I want them to do. True, there are some distributions and window managers that throw the baby out with the bathwater for every update, looking at Ubuntu and Gnome, but sticking to something more conservative and you are set for live. Also, every time this happens, somebody will always fork of the old code, like with Mate and Trinity. With a Mac or Windows you are sort of stuck with wills and whims of some company. If Windows could still look and function like 2000, but just be better, I might still use it to this day.
- hbn 3y ago
  > With a Mac or Windows you are sort of stuck with wills and whims of some company. It's true, but I'd also say macOS as it is today looks pretty damn similar to screenshots of the first OSX version shown off 20+ years ago. Other than updated icons (which are still mostly based off the original icons) and an overall flatter aesthetic compared to the flashy, novel 3D of those days, it mostly functions the same. They only updated the Preferences app to System Settings in the last version with a design overhaul, and it was a pretty big deal because they don't do that much.
ravenstine 3y ago
People will (and have) showed up to deny this, but what you describe is common enough that it can't be untrue. At this very moment, I'm still going through the "play" phase. If you pick a distro and then never change anything about it, then maybe it will work out for you out of the box. But as soon as you try to "make it yours", suddenly you'll find yourself with a second day job with no pay, you'll wonder where all your free time went, and your muscle tone will be gone. Inevitably, you'll have some weird issue like a particular program acting slow and causing the mouse to lag, or maybe your Wayland compositor has the wrong cursor position, and nobody on the internet knows why, except for some guy with a script as long as the declaration of independence that you can run in your terminal to fix all your problems (um, no). Eventually you give up and run the built-in compositor within another compositor, and somehow that fixes the original issue. But now your keyboard/mouse configuration no longer works! Holy shit, it's almost Christmas? Screw this, let's install Debian stable. Wait, what? The installer can't find the installation media? You ARE the installation media! Fuuuuuuuuu... I love Linux as a tool, but the desktop experience will never get its act together. Whether it works for you or not seems to be based on luck. I don't even want a complicated desktop experience; I just want something basic like Openbox and a web browser, but these days you can barely even do that without a bunch of tinkering (unless you want to stick entirely to X11).
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  It seems like the problem that makes it common is that Linux self-selects for people who want to tinker (that's why they're installing a non-default OS). The difference is that it also accommodates people who reach a point where they just want the computer to work and get out of their way. So you end up hearing both voices. > If you pick a distro and then never change anything about it, then maybe it will work out for you out of the box. Yes, exactly. Use a stable distro, don't touch things, and they won't change. It will continue to run exactly the same for years and years. This is in contrast to OSX and Windows. Windows is completely unrecognizable to me since stopped using it 7-8 years ago (the last version I used being Windows 7). My Linux desktop works exactly the same (with Firefox as an outlier that randomly removes/hides functionality). Apple is notorious for not caring about backwards compatibility, and just expecting everyone to accommodate whatever changes they want to make. > unless you want to stick entirely to X11 Right, don't change things, and it will keep working. Wayland sounds like its benefits are all nerd stuff that I don't care about (a "better" architecture or whatever). Meanwhile, X works just fine. At some point, if people stop complaining about Wayland, and if it has some benefit to me, maybe I'll try it. Currently it seems that neither of those criteria are met. When I do try it, if it doesn't work, I'll just roll it back.
horsawlarway 3y ago
This sorta feels like a parody comment, especially as I currently sit at my work macbook with an entirely redesigned and laid out settings UI (which now actually reminds me of the control panel view from windows XP - with it's new list of categories with lots of confusing, duplicate, and overlapping choices).

philistine 3y ago

Do you always have your applications in full screen? In my limited experience, that's the number one cause of grief with macOS' UX.

sspiff 3y ago
No, I do not, at least not on macOS. Because the experience is so horrible, perhaps. I generally have one big window or two windows side-by-side on Linux though.
- timeon 3y ago
  Have you tried yabai? MacOS still interferes with it sometimes, but overall it is not that bad.

geitir 3y ago

Highly recommend https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

baq 3y ago
and https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos

Phemist 3y ago

For the window management, a big shoutout to `magnet` (for snapping windows) and `AltTab` (for sane alt tabbing).. for making the management much less frustrating (although not completely fixed). The "windows should be grouped in terms of the applications" does not make sense to me AT ALL. Most work is done on a project basis, which crosses application boundaries quite readily. E.g., one project might involve having an open Android Studio project, a PDF with documentation, a browser window and a note pad. "Cmd-tabbing", though, brings up the next window of the same application that I am currently on. Viewing a PDF with preview, this will bring up some random image most of the time? (Luckily this is fixed by AltTab) No solutions for the dock from me though. Personally I hate how the dock can randomly move between two monitors if you just happen to drag a file through the area where the dock COULD go on your second screen. Additionally, things I hate and have not been able to fix: how if you close a window of a specific application in MacOS, it moves another window of that same application forward (similar to the Cmd+Tab behaviour) and if you click on an application in the Dock, it brings forward ALL windows of that application (whereas I would expect only the most recently used one).

ris58h 3y ago
> magnet There is Rectangle which is free and open source. Also there is Touch-Tab (disclaimer: I'm the developer) to switch apps with 3-finger swipe left/right. https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/ https://github.com/ris58h/Touch-Tab/ https://github.com/ris58h/Touch-Tab/

roopepal 3y ago

> I hate how the window management works. I hate how annoying it is to get two windows to show side by side. Plenty of window management apps and tools available. Rectangle, for example. > I hate how there end up so many icons in the menu bar which are entirely unhelpful. The only ones I cannot seem to be able to remove trivially are the clock and the Control Center. Solved in mere seconds by typing "menu bar" into the System Settings search. You could literally even just hold cmd and drag almost any icon out of the bar. Not to mention any of the more involved menu bar customization apps and tools. Why does it seem like such "macOS bad Linux good" comments always compare the default macOS experience to a personalized Linux environment? Why does an out-of-the-box Mac have to fulfill the same requirements we spent hours configuring for on a Linux machine? Where does the capability or mindset to install a tool disappear when we move from Linux to macOS?

yencabulator 3y ago
> Why does it seem like such "macOS bad Linux good" comments always compare the default macOS experience to a personalized Linux environment? Because the "Linux bad macOS good" comments say things like the parent: > Linux may be fine if you like tinkering Are you now saying macOS requires tinkering too?
sspiff 3y ago
> Why does it seem like such "macOS bad Linux good" comments always compare the default macOS experience to a personalized Linux environment? I'm not, I'm comparing to an unmodified, standard config Gnome or Plasma. I also use Sway, and I'm pretty sure I've spent less time customizing/configuring it than my Mac.
dagw 3y ago
Why does an out-of-the-box Mac have to fulfill the same requirements we spent hours configuring for on a Linux machine? I think part of the problem is due to Mac and Apple have traditionally sold itself as intuitive and easy-to-use out of the box. People buy a Mac because they've been told that they don't have to spend hours configuring it. Hell Apple built a whole ad campaign around how the Mac is so much easier and more intuitive to use than Windows computers. However truth is that if you're coming from Linux or Windows, a lot of MacOS is incredibly unintuitive and weird out of the box.