My windows button properly handles windows. Window + left arrow snaps left. Windows + down snaps it down. Etc… It’s literally the best default window manager any OS has.
Nothing proper about that. Your right hand is on your mouse, which you use to move the window border. What's your Winkey answer to that? The actions you named don't resize in the way you want to and require moving your hand off the mouse to the cursor keys... and then back.
You're correct! I wrongly assumed that people were using their computers with:
A) Both hands on the keyboard, making it easy to reach both the Win key and the arrow keys at the same time to snap your windows.
or
B) One hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse, making window snapping instant with the mouse.
But I forgot that this is HN, so a significant proportion of readers also use their computers with both hands on the mouse, or no hands and one foot each for the keyboard and for the mouse.
You wrongly assumed that your perception of what's "faster" is correct just because it's setup that way by the OS.
> A) Both hands on the keyboard, making it easy to reach both the Win key and the arrow keys at the same time to snap your windows.
It might be "easy" to reach arrow keys, but it's even easier and faster not having to do that
> B) making window snapping instant with the mouse
Your left window slightly overlaps the right one. You want to resize it by reducing its width by ~5% and its height by ~9% to avoid that
Name your "instant" list of mouse actions to achieve that.
Keyboard shortcuts on Mac are a lot more consistent than windows and Linux actually. On a Mac command + C / V is copy / paste. In Linux sometimes it’s control + c, sometimes it’s control + shift + c.
I guess what I mean to say is that there's no consistent paradigm for keyboard shortcuts. It's a lot more memorization and less real pattern to what keyboard shortcut will do what action.
And the only time I've encountered where it's not Ctrl+C in Linux is in the terminal. That feels like a reasonable exception to be grandfathered in, given it predates desktop environments. I will definitely grant that being able to Cmd+C/V in terminals is pleasant though.
It makes sense to me as well, but mostly because I’m familiar with the UI in-and-of-itself. This is a website for computer programmers mostly, we’re exactly the wrong people to ask if a UI is intuitive.
OTOH among the non-technical people I know they’ve haven’t often complained about this sort of thing, so maybe the real answer is just that this is something where not much explanation is needed in the first place!
My biggest gripe with windows is it will steal your cursor focus from password prompts. And when it surfaces a password prompt, it does not focus it automatically.
I accidentally sent my password in a Teams chat at work because an Auth prompt popped up so I naturally typed my password and hit enter like I would on a Mac.
I love MacOS and it’s my primary OS and I couldn’t agree with you more on every single one of your points.
They have not had any innovation in desktop UI since 2005.
I have an iMac G5 running Tiger and the desktop environment is almost identical in every way. Except now it doesn’t look pretty like it did in the Aqua days.
I remember Tiger. Leopard was such a huge upgrade for it. I mean spaces alone, come on, that was huge. All the trackpad gesture control came after Tiger too with the larger unibody trackpads.
There's the experimental Fairydust Branch which lets you connect a monitor via USB-C. However if you want to use more than one external monitor DisplayLink is currently the only option that works reasonably well. Unless you have a Mac with an HDMI port in which case you can use it.
HDMI out works great on M1 and M2 chips, and DP alt mode output is nearly ready, and works if you compile an experimental kernel. I daily drive an Asahi Linux ALARM M1 Pro macbook, and I have almost zero complaints.
Wild take. I use both and iOS (other than settings menu which is absolute garbage) makes much more sensible design decisions than Google. And even Androids good design decisions are just variations on things they took from iOS. OG android was better. Now they’re just trying to be iOS+
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