[HN Gopher] WhiteSur: macOS-like theme for GTK desktops
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WhiteSur: macOS-like theme for GTK desktops
Author : nateb2022
Score : 165 points
Date : 2025-02-23 17:43 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| alberth wrote:
| Probably don't want to use the trademarked Apple logo and Finder
| icon in this theme (as seen in the top screenshot).
|
| And I don't see exactly what's different in the "Default" ->
| "Majave" Nautlis style ...
|
| But otherwise, the theme looks quiet nice.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Default the sidebar is full height
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| The difference is whether the sidebar ends below the tile bar,
| or goes through the title bar.
| wk_end wrote:
| It's so subtle it almost seems like parody.
| runjake wrote:
| Or the copyrighted Launchpad, Activity Monitor, App Store,
| Music, and Safari icons in the screenshot.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Pretty easy to avoid copyright by making your own icons then
| you are left with trademark.
|
| I'm honestly at that point not sure if there is an issue you
| aren't offering a confusingly similar product. Mac isn't
| offering an icon pack they merely have one. At least they
| don't appear to have ever gone after Macish icon themes
| legally.
| Retr0id wrote:
| It's been a long time since I last installed a theme of any kind.
| In my past experiences, there was always aesthetic jank at the
| "boundaries" of themed vs unthemed elements. The "Fix for
| libadwaita (not perfect)" subheading doesn't inspire confidence -
| not a knock on this specific theme, just one of the hazards of
| theming in general.
| hollerith wrote:
| Also, plugins (and themes) have a short expected lifetime on
| Gnome because it is tedious for a maintainer to adapt the
| plugin to the high rate of churn in Gnome.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| IIRC GNOME also doesn't have much of an official plugin API,
| which makes the situation that much worse. Plugins just have
| to tinker with GNOME internals and hope for the best.
| al_borland wrote:
| My issue tends to be that themes that try to emulate a
| different OS can only do it in style, not in function. So while
| a screenshot might look similar, it won't function in the same
| way as the OS it's trying to be, which leads to compromises all
| over the place... and the aforementioned jank.
|
| Gnome, for example, doesn't have a minimize concept. There is
| an extension to add it, but it's janky and feels weird. No
| amount of theming is going to change this, when the underlying
| system wasn't designed around it.
| exe34 wrote:
| I could live with the jank and functionality if it would stay
| consistent over time - but you know it's going to be broken
| at the next GNOME update, and the next version won't just
| suck more, but the theme will also not quite work anymore and
| it's like multiple papercuts every time. Nowadays I have
| xmonad, xterm and emacs and a few gnome apps but I would
| replace them in a heartbeat if they annoyed me enough.
| andrepd wrote:
| Breaking UI and functionality for no reason whatsoever,
| with no option to change it back, often with mandatory
| updates, is one of my #1 pet peeves with modern software.
| jorvi wrote:
| Gnome does have a minimize concept? It's just hidden (haha)
| by default. gsettings set
| org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout
| ":minimize,maximize,close"
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| For GNOME, the bigger problem in my opinion is no option for
| a global menubar. Though there are similarities between macOS
| toolbars and GNOME headerbars, the former isn't bearing
| nearly as much of a load as the latter is because Mac
| toolbars don't need to cover every function an app provides.
| Less-used/niche functions just don't get a button and instead
| live tucked away neatly in one of any number of menus at the
| top of the screen.
|
| On the other hand in GNOME apps, if a function isn't used
| often enough to earn a spot in the app's headerbar or
| hamburger menu it just gets tossed, because otherwise the
| hamburger menu becomes long and unusable. This results in
| less functional apps that are not as well equipped to keep up
| with growth in the user's skill.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| This is true for most Gnome themes, but I used Chicago95 (on
| XFCE) for 3 years and could count the "jank" on one hand:
| https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
| rbanffy wrote:
| I know there is no accounting for taste, but... If I wanted
| the 90's back, I'd go with OpenLook or IRIX's theme.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| I remember the massive PITA that was running KDE with Gnome
| apps (or vice versa). The eyesore was unbelievable, and the
| official fixes required installing extra bridge themes, that
| tried to unify the look of everything, which of course wasn't
| perfect. This is better now, but even in 2025 GParted looks
| wrong under KDE, and this is sad.
| pjerem wrote:
| > even in 2025 GParted looks wrong under KDE, and this is
| sad.
|
| I did care a lot about this 10-15 years ago. Unfortunately,
| somehow I don't even notice this anymore. In 2025, and thanks
| to web apps, everything looks wrong on my desktop.
|
| It doesn't help that I'm a developer and that basically not
| any single modern IDE / text editor cares about looking
| native.
|
| Even Firefox and Thunderbird aren't looking integrated
| anymore.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Qt has been having good compatibility for Gtk for a long,
| long time. The other way around not so much.
| ahoka wrote:
| "Fix" means hack here. GNOME and libadwaita does not officially
| support changing the theme like this.
| runjake wrote:
| The middle "stoplight" button is 1-2 pixels higher than the
| others for me. Is this one purpose? It looks this way in the
| screenshot, as well, unless my eyes are playing tricks on me.
| wruza wrote:
| The green one? I checked the first screenshot in paint.net,
| they all equal. Maybe gamma/balance issues?
| runjake wrote:
| Thanks. That's probably it.
| wtallis wrote:
| Are you wearing glasses with high-index lenses that cause
| significant chromatic aberration?
| acheong08 wrote:
| Surprising to see this up here. I used it for a few years and I
| do still believe Apple generally has better design than most
| gnome/kde themes. Gnome is unfortunately quite buggy and I've
| switched off since
| bloomingkales wrote:
| I use this on windows to not feel dirty:
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1787090/MyDockFinder/
| SahAssar wrote:
| > not feel dirty
|
| What is the dirty part referring to? MacOS, Windows or Linux?
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Windows UI is just unattractive to me. You can be a trillion
| dollar company and have no recourse on fixing your design
| quality.
| margana wrote:
| That's just personal preference. It works the other way
| around too.
| diath wrote:
| It's not a matter of personal preference, Windows UI is
| objectively atrocious. Like what is this even? Why does
| Windows need 20 different ways to handle context menus?
| https://i.imgur.com/uLLiMxS.png
| p_ing wrote:
| Someone is complaining that a contextual menu is
| contextual?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Money and taste are not necessarily correlated. I too find
| it horrible.
| xyst wrote:
| Wow it even has achievements :)
| replete wrote:
| Use this on Fedora, mostly works great apart from a few apps for
| whatever reason do their own thing.
| Mad_ad wrote:
| are they Flatpaks?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > works great apart from a few apps for whatever reason do
| their own thing.
|
| Frankly, that's also my experience using real macOS.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Doing your own thing in macOS is a cardinal sin. I know it
| might be unavoidable depending on the tooling you are using,
| but, still... Don't.
| replete wrote:
| Not really, you can tweak a lot with the right CLI
| commands, and the desktop experience is not constantly
| being messed with or your settings reverted, as is the case
| with Windows and its forced updates.
| grvbck wrote:
| Unless you are Kai Krause and very determined to make some
| users love your GUI while the rest scream in agony.
| replete wrote:
| I am referring to how some window buttons not rendering macOS
| style in some linux applications.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| I noticed Mac OS dock clones never use the same scaling method as
| Apple's. That's because they patented it!
| comex wrote:
| Huh, I never knew that.
|
| But it looks like those patents have expired:
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US7434177B1/en
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US8640045B2/en
|
| (in any case, this particular theme uses exact copies of some
| Apple icons [albeit apparently redrawn], suggesting the author
| probably wasn't worrying much about IP rights.)
| Aurornis wrote:
| This theme isn't shy about copying various icons and bits from
| macOS, so I doubt that's it.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| 7. The computer system of claim 6, wherein said others of said
| plurality of tiles each has a left edge and a right edge
| located at distances d1 and d2 from said cursor, and is moved
| to a position such that said left edge has a distance d1 from
| said cursor and said right edge has a distance d2' from said
| cursor wherein:
|
| d 1 '=Sxsine(p/2xd 1 /W)
|
| d 2 '=Sxsine(p/2xd 2 /W). 8. The computer system of claim 7,
| wherein said at least one of said plurality of tiles is scaled
| by a factor of:
|
| 1+(d2'-d1')/(d2-d1).
|
| This is... not an invention.
| bsimpson wrote:
| It shows the stoplight-style close widgets on the right in the
| first screenshot and the left on the later ones. Is that
| configurable?
|
| It looks like the apps in the example are designed to use the
| space all the way up to y=0, so I didn't expect to be able to
| move them to the left, but it looks uncanny on the right.
|
| There's a difference between convention and brand infringement.
| I'd be down to try a theme that moved the widgets to a familiar
| place, but showing the Apple menu on a non-Apple system is a
| bridge too far.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| It's configurable: https://www.baeldung.com/linux/gnome-window-
| buttons
| michaelmrose wrote:
| There are certain terms that indicate membership in a
| particular set like management, sales, HR that include for a
| greater understanding of the particular field and a kind of
| othering of the rest of the human species because one's field
| is at odds with the rest of the population. EG only sales
| entertains the fantasy that it is serving the population by
| connecting needs and products. The rest of us recognize the cat
| stalking in the tall grass.
|
| "Brand Infringement" is one of those terms. Apple ought to be
| worried that Samsung is copying look and feel of their iphone
| because they are directly attempting to entice their customers
| away from their most profitable market.
|
| A theme for 0.5% of 1% of existing users of another OS to make
| their environment look like Mac carries none of the risk.
| Finding out if our judicial system actually considers it so it
| would probably require 2 parties and hundreds of thousands to a
| few mil to decide.
|
| A threatening letter might well shut something down to no
| benefit to anyone and at a cost of good will.
|
| So perhaps disengage boring business mode and enjoy nice
| things. After all do you really feel morally bad about theming
| your own desktop as if you should be respecting someone's
| "brand identity"
| cf100clunk wrote:
| LinuxScoop has been working on macOS-like themes for KDE, Gnome,
| and XFCE over the years and versions:
|
| https://invidious.baczek.me/channel/UCNnUnr4gwyNmzx_Bbzvt29g...
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Cute but Gnome already has a fairly macOS-like interface, really
| well polished, with great HIG, but with its own flair.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I really appreciate Gnome's minimalism. It tries to do as
| little as possible and stays out of the way most of the time.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| I like it too, but I'm in the minority. Everyone always
| whines about it, but honestly I don't interact with the DE
| much. I run like 5 programs and switch between them. I just
| need a good launcher, task switcher and for it to look pretty
| doing it. That's it.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| The metrics are wrong, and they can be looked up from Apple's
| Design Resources.
| Kalanos wrote:
| For normies, does this work on Ubuntu?
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| I was at a Ubuntu conference in Korea a few years ago and there
| was this kid with a Macbook running Linux but it was themed
| perfectly to MacOS.
|
| It was all very amusing until he tried to present and the HDMI
| didn't work.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > It was all very amusing until he tried to present and the
| HDMI didn't work.
|
| Let me guess... Nvidia?
| ramon156 wrote:
| I cannot stress enough how much the nvidia situation pisses
| me off. I've had to convince colleagues that their bad
| experience is with nvidia drivers, not linux.
|
| If your only solution is to buy a completely different
| version of a laptop to fix jankyness, most people would just
| say fuck it and opt for a macbook instead. It's a shame
| people dismiss linux because of that experience, but I cannot
| blame them.
| prymitive wrote:
| I think that the default Gnome theme is fantastic, unique and
| very elegant. It has nothing to be ashamed of even when compared
| to macOS look and feel.
| pjerem wrote:
| I'm not the last to criticize (relatively, I respect the things
| I've got for free) Gnome but yes, aesthetically, I prefer
| Adwaita to macOS.
| amlib wrote:
| Considering it used to look like this1 it's no wonder why
| people (including me) were desperate to theme it. It took until
| the last two or so years for me to not care to do that because
| the default look and feel of gnome is now pretty good.
|
| Still, I wished they offered some more adjustments rather than
| just a paltry selection of accent colors (you can't even select
| a specific color...)
|
| [1] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2011/05/gnome...
| rcarmo wrote:
| I have been using this for years, and love it. The only real
| niggle I have is that some of the document icons are actually old
| Windows icons and not Mac ones.
| karparov wrote:
| I've never understood the appeal of such themes. If you really
| love to have an Apple logo in the top left corner, why not buy
| the original? What's the point?
| encom wrote:
| To spare oneself the misery of using Apple hardware, I assume.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > To spare oneself the misery of using Apple hardware, I
| assume.
|
| Come on, the pain (insofar that you experience pain) comes
| from the OS, not the hardware.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I think macOS is a perfectly fine Unix operating system. I
| use it with MacPorts and it does everything I need the
| exact way I expect it to be.
| p_ing wrote:
| It's only UNIX 03 when you look at it funny. And not UNIX
| as shipped.
|
| Why MacPorts and not brew?
| amlib wrote:
| I've tried using a mac for work a year or so ago and the
| keyboard alone drove me crazy, constantly making mistakes
| and activating the wrong shortcuts. I wished they had IBM-
| ified their keyboard back when they went with Intel...
| hei-lima wrote:
| I use it, and it's really very good and beautiful. However, I set
| everything to dark colors.
|
| But there's something that really bothers me, and none of the
| fixes work: I can't get the cursor to work in GTK applications!
| It always switches to the default. It's not the theme's fault, as
| this happens with all the others...
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I'll be honest my experiences with themes for Linux have been
| quite poor. Even with good ones it works for some apps but not
| others and you end up spending all your time fixing edge cases or
| just dealing with some windows not looking right.
|
| My solution has been to just use the default Ubuntu theme that
| ships with Gnome. I find that theme just seems to work the best
| across most of my apps with a few small exceptions, compare this
| to other themes I've tried where only like half of the windows
| look right.
|
| I'm sure there are better themes out there and I could achieve
| perfect consistency if I dug deep enough and tweaked enough
| things. But at least in my case I already spend many hours on my
| computer coding and something like desktop theming is super low
| on my list, it's one of those things I just need to work because
| I don't have time to be focusing on that crap.
|
| The same goes for my desktop environment. I am well aware that
| Gnome is not the best and if I put it enough effort I could have
| a dream setup with XFCE or one of the many tiling window
| managers. But for me it just goes back to not having time, the
| thing I love about Gnome is that even though it may be more of a
| resource hog, it just f*king works.
| andrepd wrote:
| I've used Mint-X/Y (the default theme for Linux Mint on
| Cinnamon) for over a decade now, and my experience has always
| been great.
| Fnoord wrote:
| If you want Ubuntu theme but with different accent color, there
| is Yaru [1].
|
| [1] https://github.com/ubuntu/yaru
| kristopolous wrote:
| personally I don't get it. If I wanted a macbook, I'd get a
| macbook. These things are cute and fun, ok, but do people
| actually want to use it?
| joshuamt15 wrote:
| I just like how the cursor looks. I'd never buy a mac but I
| can admit the icons and design look nice.
| pndy wrote:
| Maybe Posy cursor would be a good substitute for you:
| https://michieldb.nl/other/cursors/
| kristopolous wrote:
| there's cursor themes on linux and although you have to
| apply them in the usual wonky linux way, it's totally
| possible and it is independent of the window manager.
|
| Of course some applications do their own cursor management
| so if you do it poorly your cursor hops around themes as
| you drag it over various windows based on the toolkit they
| use but then again, that's what we all signed up for.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Desktop environments are inherently very personal things and
| so what one person might find great, someone else might
| consider unusable. Themes are a good way to add room for user
| preference without forcing the user to change desktop
| environments entirely.
|
| For example, before libadwaita screwed it all up I used to
| like to apply a custom theme to GNOME to cut down on the
| egregious padding everywhere, making the UI a much better fit
| for non-touch desktop OS use on a small laptop screen. There
| were several themes that accomplished that very well.
| asveikau wrote:
| I think it made substantially more sense in the 1990s.
|
| For one, Gtk+ used to be advertised as a multi platform
| toolkit, with a port of GDK to Win32. Making Gtk+ widgets
| look like Win32 made sense for that.
|
| Secondly, there were two groups of people using Linux and X11
| in that era: one group who were exiles from commercial Unix,
| and another, faster growing group coming from Windows. For
| the former group, it was reasonable to want widgets to look
| more like Motif or Athena. The latter group wanted a more
| modern look, which could depart from old school Unix
| workstations.
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| In fact, the only change from your characterisation is that
| the toolkit has been renamed from Gtk+ to GTK. Here is an
| example of a current claim: "GTK is a library for creating
| graphical user interfaces. It works on many UNIX-like
| platforms, Windows, and macOS."
| https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/overview.html
|
| I think what has changed is user expecations; in the the
| 1990s, there was an expectation that programs should look
| like the native toolkit; whereas by now, it's even
| questionable whether there is a native toolkit on Windows
| (due to the range of choice, each of which a noticeably
| different in look and feel) and program-specific appearance
| is the norm on mobile and web applications. Nowadays, you
| could probably write a slightly customised Adwaita app for
| Windows and you'd get by more satisfactorily than if you
| wrote a plain GTK app and tried to theme it to modern
| Win32.
| adityamwagh wrote:
| Have you tried the Pop_OS theme? I think it looks good.
| dtkav wrote:
| Pop!_OS also has a built-in tiling window feature called
| "Automatic Window Tiling." It's integrated into the default
| desktop environment rather than being a separate tiling
| window manager like dwm. Nice to have something like dwm but
| without any fiddling.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Yeah, the default Ubuntu theme is great.
|
| And if you ever happen to feel adventurous, various Gnome
| extensions such as Burn My Windows can give you more than
| enough eye candy while still keeping the stock theme.
|
| https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4679/burn-my-windows/
| mitchell209 wrote:
| Even if a theme is perfect, it eventually stops getting updated
| with new versions of whatever you're using so you have to give
| it up eventually.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I've not actually built any themes so take these thoughts with
| a grain of salt, but my impression is that with GTK at least,
| most of the problems come down to CSS conflicts and libadwaita
| doing its own thing separate from GTK proper. It seems like a
| lot of GTK apps hardcode colors, fonts, etc instead of
| parameterizing too, which means they aren't going to respond to
| theme changes correctly. All together these combine to produce
| a pretty spotty theming experience.
|
| Things seem a bit better on the Qt side of things, but it
| suffers resolution scaling issues. Most KDE/Qt themes I've
| tried can't draw correctly at non-integer scales.
|
| Personally I think that CSS is actually pretty badly suited for
| the use case of desktop UI toolkit theming. It's fine for one-
| off apps but quickly becomes a mess when it needs to be part of
| a larger more flexible system.
| pooriamokhtari wrote:
| > it just f*king works.
|
| I think this is the first time I've heard anyone say this about
| the Linux desktop experience! Kudos to the GNOME/UBUNTU people
| I guess.
| nullifidian wrote:
| This reminded me of the anti-theming sentiment in the gnome
| developer community https://stopthemingmy.app/
| mountainriver wrote:
| This is peak nonsense
| rbanffy wrote:
| In the mid 2000's, I loved trying different themes. These
| days I just take whatever is the default for Gnome, which is
| remarkably sane, usually more comfortable than a Mac, and
| consistent.
|
| Some themes solve real problems, especially for the visually
| impaired, but that's not the norm. It's a fun work of art,
| but the utility is always limited. More often than I like to
| admit, I was left with a broken desktop after attempting to
| uninstall a theme that didn't work well enough (or at all),
| and that couldn't be fixed by installing another on top of
| it.
|
| There are more pressing issues in Gnome than to provide a
| stable theme API.
| skerit wrote:
| Gnome also made it _a lot_ harder to override the default
| Adwaita theme in libadwaita applications. Not impossible,
| just very annoying.
|
| This happened together with a GTK UI redesign, turning it
| into yet another flat UI.
| saghm wrote:
| I'd happily never customize a theme again if there were any
| other easy way to actually pick the background and foreground
| colors on all of my apps. I like having white text on a black
| background, not a "dark" gray background and white text (and
| certainly not some off-white background with some dark but not
| fully black text, which I find even worse than just a typical
| black text on white background theme). I'm well aware of the
| fact that it probably does nothing in terms of actually
| affecting the battery life of my devices, and that dark gray is
| considered "better" from design perspective, but I don't care,
| because I happen to like the way the color scheme I describe
| looks, and I don't see why it should matter whether it does to
| anyone else if it's just going to be on a device that I'm the
| only one who ever uses. For whatever reason, this is next to
| impossible to do without rolling my own GTK theme (not even
| just using one that someone else had made, because I literally
| couldn't find one that just changed the background to black
| without having a bunch of other opinionated decisions on icons
| and padding and stuff), so that's what I do. I'm grateful that
| this is even possible though, because apps that aren't GTK (or
| Qt, which is also possible to theme) often don't provide any
| ability to theme whatsoever. With the exception of coding
| editors, I'm not sure I've ever found an Electron app that
| actually lets me pick a fully black background color, so
| despite not being particularly dogmatic in my opposition to
| them, I always try to run stuff like Slack and Discord in the
| browser so I can theme them with custom CSS. (I'm vaguely aware
| that this might be possible to do with the electron apps as
| well by running in some sort of developer mode, but I can't be
| bothered to spend a bunch of time trying to replicate what I
| already have working in the browser for their sites).
|
| Expressing their argument as "don't use custom themes" just
| makes it less convincing when there aren't really any other
| easy ways to get the flexibility from them that doesn't cause
| any of the issues they cite. It would be like finding out that
| a friend or relative uses the same password for every site, and
| then trying to get to them to install a package manager by
| uninstalling Windows and switching to Linux at the same time.
| Mixing together subjective personal preferences with objective
| technical advice just dilutes the latter to the point where
| it's impossible to find it compelling.
| tuna74 wrote:
| Isn't custom accent colors implemented in the latest
| Gtk/libadwaita?
| nancyp wrote:
| But why fake it? Mac osx has the worst ux for window management.
| cafeinux wrote:
| Great, it should integrate perfectly with GNOME then!
| amlib wrote:
| I used to be KDE nut until version 4 came around. I stuck for
| a while but once gnome 3 got a few years of development on
| it's back I started liking it more over the direction KDE
| took. Nowadays I just use GNOME and think their design and
| HIG works really well across multiple different devices. Be
| it a desktop with a big screen and tons of real estate for
| lots of windows showing up concurrently, running on a cramped
| notebook screen with mostly just a single FS widnow or two
| side by side or as a "couch" experience on my HTPC, with a
| great interface for a "ten foot UI" usage.
|
| I've also heard some good feedback on how well it works on a
| phone/tablet context but haven't had the chance of trying
| that my-self. Perhaps the GNOME project is on the right track
| for converging all those computing experiences in one in a
| way that makes sense, specially compared to the train wreck
| that microsoft's attempt unifying stuff in windows 8/mobile
| was.
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| If only gnome shell could be used on Mac OS, I would jump at
| heartbeat. I really can't understand what apple developers had
| in mind when bringing window in focus which is present in the
| current screen it switches to a different workplace. Is it a
| bug or is it intentional is hard to tell with macOS.
| lxe wrote:
| I've been a fan of the Author's other theme: Orchis
|
| https://github.com/vinceliuice/Orchis-theme
| ritcgab wrote:
| This is good work.
|
| But my desktop has looked identical for the last five years, and
| I wish it would stay the same for the next ten years.
| derefr wrote:
| The part of macOS I miss when using a Linux desktop isn't how
| macOS _looks_ , it's how you _interact_ with it.
|
| * I miss the keyboard shortcuts. Not only what they are, but also
| the strict conformity macOS apps have to using the same set of
| keyboard shortcuts for everything. (Did you know that Cmd+[ and
| Cmd+] work as "Back" and "Forward" in the Finder; in both Safari
| _and_ Chrome _and_ Firefox; and even in the iTunes Music Store
| views in Music.app? Did you know that Cmd+Shift+[ and Cmd+Shift+]
| work to move between tabs in literally every app that has tabs --
| including things you wouldn 't normally think of as "tabs", e.g.
| the sheets of a spreadsheet in Numbers?)
|
| * I miss the Menu Bar. Specifically, I miss app menus _in_ the
| Menu Bar. I know there are some themes with UI hacks that can
| trick Linux applications into disgorging their toplevel menu bars
| into some global faux Menu Bar -- but that assumes that apps even
| _have_ toplevel menu bars. Many Linux apps don 't; they have top-
| level right-click menus, or top-level hierarchical modal
| navigation sidebars. And because of this, Linux apps also mostly
| just "have" keyboard shortcuts -- toplevel window keyboard
| listeners. Whereas in macOS apps, _all_ keyboard shortcuts are
| really keyboard accelerators for app-menu entries. Which means
| that everything you can do with the keyboard, you can also find
| in app 's menu; the app's menu is an _exhaustive_ access-point
| for all of the app 's behaviors. And everything you can do in the
| menu, can be _bound_ to a custom accelerator, or wired up with
| shell automation /scripting, or exposed to an accessibility
| device, or full-text-searched using the now-universal search box
| that appears under the Help app-menu. (Also, for those with not-
| so-tall screens, having the app's top-level menus pulled out into
| the Menu Bar means that if you 1. make an app full-screen and 2.
| set the shell to hide the Menu Bar when an app is full-screen,
| then you can reclaim the vertical screen real-estate of the app's
| top-level menu, with them just appearing -- along with the rest
| of the Menu Bar -- only when you hover the top of the screen.
| There'd be no sensible way to reclaim this same chunk of screen
| real-estate in fullscreened apps with internal top-level menu
| bars.)
|
| * I miss the carefully-thought-out filesystem organized around
| bundle directories. Apps are bundles; plugins are bundles;
| libraries/frameworks are bundles. There are no installers, no
| package managers; bundles just sit where they sit, and then their
| Info.plist metadata can be auto-discovered by the OS (through
| Spotlight indexing, gated by Gatekeeper allow-listing), and
| registered with weak-reference semantics. (That is: drop an app
| that opens filetype X onto your computer -- suddenly that
| filetype knows it can open in that app. First time you actually
| try it, Gatekeeper notices you haven't actually said you trust
| the app yet, and warns you. Remove the app, and the filetype
| associations automatically get purged -- they were technically
| just a cache/index of the app-bundle's Info.plist, after all, so
| if the canonical association entries go away, the cache entries
| go away too.) This also means that macOS "libraries" and
| "plugins" don't have to spew themselves across half the
| filesystem; they both just bundle everything up and present
| themselves as a single file -- one that _has_ no default
| interaction verb, and so "tucks its protected members away",
| without actually being _inconvenient_ to dig into, the way a
| shared object with embedded resources would be.
|
| * A specific point of the above: I miss disk images. Not so much
| the ones apps come in -- Apple themselves invented a better
| alternative to those with integrity-verified .xip files (with
| support, through Safari, for auto-self-extraction, and for auto-
| Gatekeeper-vouching when the archive is Apple-signed. Sadly these
| never spread to third-party support, and Apple themselves stopped
| using them in favor of just distributing things like Xcode
| through the Mac App Store.) Rather, I miss the deep UI
| integration with sparsebundle disk images. When I use macOS, I
| use sparsebundles for everything -- they're technically disk
| images, but in practice, they just act like archive files,
| growing in size along with your usage rather than having a
| preallocated size. Unlike your average Linux loopback image,
| they're actually directories (bundles!) consisting of a bunch of
| 4MB "band" files. The "sparse" part is "sparse" like sparse-file
| support, but it works in a completely filesystem-oblivious way:
| the sparsebundle block-device layer notices whenever a given band
| would be updated to contain entirely zeroes -- and just deletes
| the underlying band file instead. Mounting a sparsebundle _that
| lives on a remote SMB share_ is the most low-latency, IO-
| efficient way I 've ever seen of interacting with many small
| files (such as a remote git worktree.) It's no wonder macOS
| internally uses sparsebundle-mounts-over-SMB for Time Machine
| backups. (And they can be encrypted easily, too -- not just with
| a custom passphrase, but also with a key held in a macOS Keychain
| -- which doesn't have to be your default one!)
| jcgl wrote:
| I'm not at all a Mac person, but this whole comment was a
| really interesting read.
|
| Regarding the shortcut-listeners-not-accelerators things in
| Linux, is it really not equivalent when an app uses a fully
| featured toolkit like Qt that (presumably) has support for
| specifying the semantics of various controls?
|
| Aside: I still miss the Unity desktop environment that Ubuntu
| used to have. It had its flaws for sure (e.g. poor performance
| and relying on a patched version of Mutter), but its
| implementation of a global menu was just superb. The ergonomics
| of having it at the top of the screen were great, and having
| each entry be searchable was a breath of fresh air. I've been
| happy enough with KDE Plasma for a while now, but would jump at
| the chance to have that global menu with search again.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| As much as I appreciate desktop Linux (particularly with
| Windows getting worse by the minute) it really kills me that
| these points can't be fully replicated under it. All the DEs
| are geared for Windows-like or tablet-OS-like experience first
| and foremost, with a few niche oddballs mimicking unices of
| old. WMs are predominantly hyperminimalist tiling things.
| There's nothing that reproduces a Mac desktop experience beyond
| the most superficial level.
| InMice wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder what the desktop linux experience would be
| like if all the total effort put in was focused on the
| unification of userspace instead of endless fragmentation.
|
| That said, I still respect this effort :)
| winrid wrote:
| Still no icon preview in file picker though right? :)
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