4 ms·

> alienated a lot of people who only knew how to use Windows-like desktops This is needlessly inflamatory. Many people simply don't like macOS style desktops.

> alienated a lot of people who only knew how to use Windows-like desktops This is needlessly inflamatory. Many people simply don't like macOS style desktops. In particular I like my menus attached to my windows because I don't run apps maximized.

SonOfLilit 3y ago
(You probably know this, but just in case: the rationale for having the menu on the top is specifically for apps that are not maximized, because the mouse movement to get to the top is much faster than that for accurately clicking a hotspot in the middle of the screen)
- mrob 3y ago
  True when you're using a 512x342 resolution screen and a mechanical ball mouse like the original Macintosh, but less certain with modern hardware.
  - acdha 3y ago
    It’s always easier not to make fine grained control motions. Even with a touchpad not having to stop precisely means the motion requires less thought.
  - MR4D 3y ago
    Technically it’s always true. On a Mac the menu bar is always at the top. Because of that, the menu bar is at the logical end of mouse movement (it’s like a virtual wall, which the mouse can’t go beyond). Because of this design, you can “slam” the mouse against that invisible barrier and it will stop where you need it (at least in the Y axis). “Slamming” the mouse is always faster than trying to move it to an arbitrary point on the screen because there is no need to slow down the pointer on the screen. It just stops immediately.
    - mrob 3y ago
      That's only true for the corners. For the edge you're only constraining one axis of motion. And modern screens generally have wider aspect ratio than the original Macintosh, exacerbating the problem of unconstrained X-axis motion.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        One axis of freedom is still better than two, in this case.
        mrob 3y ago
        Fitt's law[0] says difficulty of movement is a function of both accuracy and distance. Macintosh-style menu bars reduce the accuracy required but increase the distance. When distances were always small, this was a clear win. Now that we have large wide-screen monitors, it may not be. The real correct solution is pie menus[1], which reduce both accuracy and distance requirements regardless of screen size. Blender has pie menus and it's one of the reasons its UI is so fast to use once you've learned it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu
    - spookie 3y ago
      Yeah, it does make sense. That's also the reason for the close button or start menu to be at a corner, at least on Windows derivatives. Of course, this clashes with the menubar placement on Mac, if they were placed the same way.
      - MR4D 3y ago
        But Microsoft even messed that up. The original start button was not in the corner - it was near the corner. Literally just a few pixels removed. That tiny mistake made it much harder and you couldn’t “slam and click” the start button (which annoyed me to no end). Also, the order of the window buttons for close, maximize, and minimize are incorrectly ordered, so a mistake causes you to click the opposite of what you actually want.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  On one hand that reason makes sense, but on the other hand I never found that to be a problem when using menus attached to windows. I need to aim for buttons in the middle of the screen all the time, and that's not slower just because the mouse doesn't bounce against a screen edge. I also hardly find myself actually bouncing against the screen edge when using macOS menus. IMHO the bigger problem on Mac is the weird 'application centric' window system behaviour instead of the much more intuitive 'window centric' behaviour of Windows (and most Linux desktops). For instance, "Alt-Tab" flips through applications on macOS, and it's possible for applications to be running even though they have no windows open, and in that case they just present a "naked" menu bar which I find utterly confusing. The whole thing feels like a dead-end UX experiment from the early 90's. I'm mostly using the "3-finger-swipe" on macOS now to directly pick a window instead of tabbing though, but the main reason for that is not that it's better, it's just better than the weird macOS Alt-Tab behaviour. PS: this sounds like I just switched from Windows to Mac, but I made that switch more than a decade ago, and it still feels "wrong" ;)
  - jwells89 3y ago
    The issue with window-centric behavior, I find, is that lacking the logical grouping of application-based, it scales badly. Alt-tab for example becomes increasingly unusable as the number of open windows increases. The fact that the taskbar has grouped windows by applications by default since XP/Vista hints at this scalability problem, with the taskbar quickly getting similarly unusable without the grouping.
    - spookie 3y ago
      This is mitigated via workspaces. Not sure how Win/Mac does it, but that's how I work on Linux desktops.
      - clan 3y ago
        Works reasonably well on Windows: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/multiple-desktops-in-windows-36f52e38-5b4a-557b-2ff9-e1a60c976434 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/multiple-desktop... I can never remember the (easy) shortcuts so this is helpful: https://learn.microsoft.com/da-dk/windows/powertoys/shortcut-guide https://learn.microsoft.com/da-dk/windows/powertoys/shortcut... From PowerToys: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys (Which also have the (in this context) useful FancyZones)
- alpaca128 3y ago
  And yet I'm still slower at this specific thing on Mac OS because I always first have to make sure the right window is focused or I'm in the wrong context menu. Meanwhile on per-window menus that's guaranteed. Also those buttons are the same size as almost all other buttons in the system, it's not difficult to hit them reliably. Edit: also if Apple cares so much about this, why do they make the close/minimize buttons so tiny?
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > Edit: also if Apple cares so much about this, why do they make the close/minimize buttons so tiny? I think daily users graduate to ⌘W and ⌘M (which are all-app standards) fairly quickly, while power users graduate to the window manager they prefer. > …I'm still slower at this specific thing on Mac OS because I always first have to make sure the right window is focused… You might find this useful: https://hazeover.com/ https://hazeover.com/
- steve1977 3y ago
  Although I wonder if still works out so well with 34“ ultrawide monitors (which Apple doesn’t make and therefore doesn’t care about of course).
DinaCoder99 3y ago
On top of that, it failed to copy most of the features of macs that make them worth using.
- jwells89 3y ago
  GNOME 3 and up definitely isn’t “mac-like”, despite having been given that label by many. A few aspects have similar designs to macOS counterparts, but the resemblance is skin-deep at best. It more closely resembles iPadOS than anything.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    > GNOME 3 and up definitely isn’t “mac-like” When many people (like me) use that phrase, we're not referring to the UI/UX. It's instead a comment on GNOME's desire to have a controlled and universal design that is more focused on user ease and accessibility versus the componentized/customizable design of GNOME2, KDE, XFCE, etc.
pmontra 3y ago
I second this opinion. I greatly prefer Windows like desktops. I never liked the Mac UI and I used the very first one back in the 80s. It was OK with that tiny screen but it was out of place as soon as Apple made Macs with external large monitors. My current preference is GNOME shell modded to move the top bar to the bottom, merged with a task bar, a rarely used Start menu, an often used Places menu, no Activities, virtual desktops activated by hotkeys and many other less visible things. That's much better than Windows, so thank you Microsoft, at least for me.
- spookie 3y ago
  The move of the top bar to the bottom makes a lot of sense! I personally use KDE with the taskbar on the left, as it allows for greater vertical screen real estate. Also changed the workspaces keybindings to the same ones as Gnome, which are quite better!
thih9 3y ago
I’ve just now realized, after using macOS exclusively for 10 years, that the menus are not where the windows are but always at the top. Quoting this as an anecdote - showing that to some people this doesn’t matter. In my case I guess it’s because I don’t use these menus that much.
jwells89 3y ago
FWIW, it’s not uncommon for Mac users to also not maximize their windows. In fact I’d say Mac users disproportionally don’t (maximizing everything is more of a Windows thing). Menus being in a bar at the top of the screen just doesn’t bother them. I’m in this camp. The only windows that get maximized are things like IDEs with tons of panes which are unusable otherwise. One perk of the menubar being this way that I’ve come to appreciate is that programs can’t try to remove it or sweep it into a hamburger menu in some misguided quest for minimalism. It’s gonna be there no matter what, which is a welcome bit of consistency. I wish Linux had better support for this option. KDE lets you set up a global menubar but sadly it’s not supported by any programs under Wayland and only works with Qt apps under X11, with the GTK plugin required having been abandoned last I checked. There should really be an XDG standard for programs to expose their menus with, not just for customizability but as as an accessibility affordance.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  > One perk of the menubar being this way that I’ve come to appreciate is that programs can’t try to remove it or sweep it into a hamburger menu in some misguided quest for minimalism Oh trust me they can. There's some really terrible electron-based Mac apps out there. They just have a token menubar with a few options like copy/paste and the rest is the usual hamburger crap.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- barrkel 3y ago
  I've never seen more maximized (full screen) windows than people using MacBooks and swiping between them. Which I do too when using my MacBook.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    To each their own, but that drives me nuts personally. I use spaces constantly but full-screen spaces are probably the bit of Mac UX I find most unappealing.

SonOfLilit 3y ago

(You probably know this, but just in case: the rationale for having the menu on the top is specifically for apps that are not maximized, because the mouse movement to get to the top is much faster than that for accurately clicking a hotspot in the middle of the screen)

mrob 3y ago
True when you're using a 512x342 resolution screen and a mechanical ball mouse like the original Macintosh, but less certain with modern hardware.
- acdha 3y ago
  It’s always easier not to make fine grained control motions. Even with a touchpad not having to stop precisely means the motion requires less thought.
- MR4D 3y ago
  Technically it’s always true. On a Mac the menu bar is always at the top. Because of that, the menu bar is at the logical end of mouse movement (it’s like a virtual wall, which the mouse can’t go beyond). Because of this design, you can “slam” the mouse against that invisible barrier and it will stop where you need it (at least in the Y axis). “Slamming” the mouse is always faster than trying to move it to an arbitrary point on the screen because there is no need to slow down the pointer on the screen. It just stops immediately.
  - mrob 3y ago
    That's only true for the corners. For the edge you're only constraining one axis of motion. And modern screens generally have wider aspect ratio than the original Macintosh, exacerbating the problem of unconstrained X-axis motion.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      One axis of freedom is still better than two, in this case.
      - mrob 3y ago
        Fitt's law[0] says difficulty of movement is a function of both accuracy and distance. Macintosh-style menu bars reduce the accuracy required but increase the distance. When distances were always small, this was a clear win. Now that we have large wide-screen monitors, it may not be. The real correct solution is pie menus[1], which reduce both accuracy and distance requirements regardless of screen size. Blender has pie menus and it's one of the reasons its UI is so fast to use once you've learned it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu
  - spookie 3y ago
    Yeah, it does make sense. That's also the reason for the close button or start menu to be at a corner, at least on Windows derivatives. Of course, this clashes with the menubar placement on Mac, if they were placed the same way.
    - MR4D 3y ago
      But Microsoft even messed that up. The original start button was not in the corner - it was near the corner. Literally just a few pixels removed. That tiny mistake made it much harder and you couldn’t “slam and click” the start button (which annoyed me to no end). Also, the order of the window buttons for close, maximize, and minimize are incorrectly ordered, so a mistake causes you to click the opposite of what you actually want.
flohofwoe 3y ago
On one hand that reason makes sense, but on the other hand I never found that to be a problem when using menus attached to windows. I need to aim for buttons in the middle of the screen all the time, and that's not slower just because the mouse doesn't bounce against a screen edge. I also hardly find myself actually bouncing against the screen edge when using macOS menus. IMHO the bigger problem on Mac is the weird 'application centric' window system behaviour instead of the much more intuitive 'window centric' behaviour of Windows (and most Linux desktops). For instance, "Alt-Tab" flips through applications on macOS, and it's possible for applications to be running even though they have no windows open, and in that case they just present a "naked" menu bar which I find utterly confusing. The whole thing feels like a dead-end UX experiment from the early 90's. I'm mostly using the "3-finger-swipe" on macOS now to directly pick a window instead of tabbing though, but the main reason for that is not that it's better, it's just better than the weird macOS Alt-Tab behaviour. PS: this sounds like I just switched from Windows to Mac, but I made that switch more than a decade ago, and it still feels "wrong" ;)
- jwells89 3y ago
  The issue with window-centric behavior, I find, is that lacking the logical grouping of application-based, it scales badly. Alt-tab for example becomes increasingly unusable as the number of open windows increases. The fact that the taskbar has grouped windows by applications by default since XP/Vista hints at this scalability problem, with the taskbar quickly getting similarly unusable without the grouping.
  - spookie 3y ago
    This is mitigated via workspaces. Not sure how Win/Mac does it, but that's how I work on Linux desktops.
    - clan 3y ago
      Works reasonably well on Windows: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/multiple-desktops-in-windows-36f52e38-5b4a-557b-2ff9-e1a60c976434 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/multiple-desktop... I can never remember the (easy) shortcuts so this is helpful: https://learn.microsoft.com/da-dk/windows/powertoys/shortcut-guide https://learn.microsoft.com/da-dk/windows/powertoys/shortcut... From PowerToys: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys (Which also have the (in this context) useful FancyZones)
alpaca128 3y ago
And yet I'm still slower at this specific thing on Mac OS because I always first have to make sure the right window is focused or I'm in the wrong context menu. Meanwhile on per-window menus that's guaranteed. Also those buttons are the same size as almost all other buttons in the system, it's not difficult to hit them reliably. Edit: also if Apple cares so much about this, why do they make the close/minimize buttons so tiny?
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > Edit: also if Apple cares so much about this, why do they make the close/minimize buttons so tiny? I think daily users graduate to ⌘W and ⌘M (which are all-app standards) fairly quickly, while power users graduate to the window manager they prefer. > …I'm still slower at this specific thing on Mac OS because I always first have to make sure the right window is focused… You might find this useful: https://hazeover.com/ https://hazeover.com/
steve1977 3y ago
Although I wonder if still works out so well with 34“ ultrawide monitors (which Apple doesn’t make and therefore doesn’t care about of course).

DinaCoder99 3y ago

On top of that, it failed to copy most of the features of macs that make them worth using.

jwells89 3y ago
GNOME 3 and up definitely isn’t “mac-like”, despite having been given that label by many. A few aspects have similar designs to macOS counterparts, but the resemblance is skin-deep at best. It more closely resembles iPadOS than anything.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  > GNOME 3 and up definitely isn’t “mac-like” When many people (like me) use that phrase, we're not referring to the UI/UX. It's instead a comment on GNOME's desire to have a controlled and universal design that is more focused on user ease and accessibility versus the componentized/customizable design of GNOME2, KDE, XFCE, etc.

pmontra 3y ago

I second this opinion. I greatly prefer Windows like desktops. I never liked the Mac UI and I used the very first one back in the 80s. It was OK with that tiny screen but it was out of place as soon as Apple made Macs with external large monitors. My current preference is GNOME shell modded to move the top bar to the bottom, merged with a task bar, a rarely used Start menu, an often used Places menu, no Activities, virtual desktops activated by hotkeys and many other less visible things. That's much better than Windows, so thank you Microsoft, at least for me.

spookie 3y ago
The move of the top bar to the bottom makes a lot of sense! I personally use KDE with the taskbar on the left, as it allows for greater vertical screen real estate. Also changed the workspaces keybindings to the same ones as Gnome, which are quite better!

thih9 3y ago

I’ve just now realized, after using macOS exclusively for 10 years, that the menus are not where the windows are but always at the top. Quoting this as an anecdote - showing that to some people this doesn’t matter. In my case I guess it’s because I don’t use these menus that much.

jwells89 3y ago

FWIW, it’s not uncommon for Mac users to also not maximize their windows. In fact I’d say Mac users disproportionally don’t (maximizing everything is more of a Windows thing). Menus being in a bar at the top of the screen just doesn’t bother them. I’m in this camp. The only windows that get maximized are things like IDEs with tons of panes which are unusable otherwise. One perk of the menubar being this way that I’ve come to appreciate is that programs can’t try to remove it or sweep it into a hamburger menu in some misguided quest for minimalism. It’s gonna be there no matter what, which is a welcome bit of consistency. I wish Linux had better support for this option. KDE lets you set up a global menubar but sadly it’s not supported by any programs under Wayland and only works with Qt apps under X11, with the GTK plugin required having been abandoned last I checked. There should really be an XDG standard for programs to expose their menus with, not just for customizability but as as an accessibility affordance.

wkat4242 3y ago
> One perk of the menubar being this way that I’ve come to appreciate is that programs can’t try to remove it or sweep it into a hamburger menu in some misguided quest for minimalism Oh trust me they can. There's some really terrible electron-based Mac apps out there. They just have a token menubar with a few options like copy/paste and the rest is the usual hamburger crap.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
barrkel 3y ago
I've never seen more maximized (full screen) windows than people using MacBooks and swiping between them. Which I do too when using my MacBook.
- jwells89 3y ago
  To each their own, but that drives me nuts personally. I use spaces constantly but full-screen spaces are probably the bit of Mac UX I find most unappealing.