[HN Gopher] Make macOS consistently bad (unironically)
___________________________________________________________________
Make macOS consistently bad (unironically)
Author : speckx
Score : 222 points
Date : 2026-03-27 19:15 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lr0.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lr0.org)
| post-it wrote:
| I can't say I've had any issues with the corners, or noticed any
| difference after upgrading to macOS 26. But this is neat.
| rafram wrote:
| This isn't a part of macOS 26 that bothers me, honestly. I don't
| spend a lot of time stacking windows and measuring their corners.
| dilap wrote:
| i use a an auto-layout tool, so having windows stacked on top
| of each other is super-common for me, and the fact that they
| all peak thru each other (like the screenshot in the blog)
| looking absolutely terrible drives me crazy
| JellyPlan wrote:
| I don't either, the only thing that annoys me is it's much
| harder to resize windows, so the usability is worse
| mabedan wrote:
| To me it's a little like the situation with charging the Mighty
| Mouse. It's become a meme to post a picture of it on its side
| being charged, but if you own one it doesn't really matter, as
| you charge it once a month for 15 minutes while you're at
| lunch.
|
| There are things which definitely do bother me like the Liquid
| Glass, but the window corners really don't bother me. And I'm
| into design and constantly inspect parts of ui with Digital
| Color Meter app.
| kibwen wrote:
| In other words, MacOS is fine as long as you're undiscerning
| and not at all detail-oriented. Imagine telling Steve Jobs that
| this was the prevailing attitude needed to make using a Mac
| bearable.
| pram wrote:
| I'm not a fan of the look in Tahoe (especially Apple Music wtf
| happened there) but most of it I can totally ignore, and don't
| even notice anymore. Except for the tabs. I have Sequoia and
| Tahoe machines, and the tabs in Tahoe are so unbelievably bad in
| comparison. Like this ugly pill shape. I rarely hear this get
| brought up but they're astonishingly ugly, worse than the
| previous design in every way.
| hbn wrote:
| You're not alone, I was calling out how ugly Safari is in Tahoe
| a few weeks ago!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282085#47310011
|
| Probably my least favorite redesign in the whole update. Why is
| everything an oval? It's just bizarre.
| skrrtww wrote:
| I'm not sure if these selectors are hit in SwiftUI or not.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| One of my claude code projects was going to be "theghostofsteve",
| a social media platform where people post things they love and
| hate about appleOS things. Likes/Dislikes would be "genius/it's
| shit". And in all likelihood, the platform would surface that
| most users think "it's shit."
|
| The platform would aggregate by major/minor version, and you
| could see in totality whether the current version of macOS/iOS
| would make Steve proud of miserable.
|
| Ultimately I decided against it, for defamation/cease-and-desist
| reasons, and not wanting to find out. But it needs to exist.
| ykl wrote:
| Wouldn't "insanely great"/"it's shit" be more Steve than
| "genius"/"it's shit"?
| dcrazy wrote:
| FYI, the article incorrectly claims that SIP just controls write
| access to /. It does way more than that.
| lapcat wrote:
| I don't see where it says that. Can you provide a direct quote?
| dcrazy wrote:
| Footnote 2.
| lapcat wrote:
| The footnote 2 link doesn't actually work for me, for
| whatever reason.
|
| What does it say?
| rzzzt wrote:
| "Arguable, since you just loose security over /root,
| which is not a big deal if someone already gained access
| to your machine, at least for me."
|
| It doesn't render for me either, but is in the HTML at
| path...
|
| .../html/body/div/div/main/div[3]/div[6]/div/div[2]/div/p
|
| Edit: SIP has a series of control bits for a diverse set
| of protections. You can see what these control (and which
| bits "csrutil disable" toggles) in this include file:
| https://github.com/apple-oss-
| distributions/xnu/blob/f6217f89...
| _jab wrote:
| Between the rounded corners that don't reach the edges of the
| viewport, and the behavior when opening a new app for the first
| time, it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption
| most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but
| rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle.
|
| Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty
| applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt
| like a bizarre assumption to me.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Probably not the norm, but I use a large 4K monitor and no
| scaling.
|
| I haven't maximized a window in years. They look ridiculous
| like that. Especially web pages with their max width set so the
| content is 1/4 the screen and 3/4 whitespace.
| amelius wrote:
| Without scaling, those rounded corners look not so rounded.
| jiehong wrote:
| interesting! But, the default scaling makes them look
| bigger.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Computers were better with square corners anyway.
| alex_c wrote:
| I use a 40" 4K screen.
|
| If I ever accidentally full screen a window, and it's not in
| night mode, I am instantly blinded by a wall of mostly white
| empty background!
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Do you have the brightness on your monitor set really high
| or something?
|
| I frequently use macOS on a _projector_ , it doesn't quite
| fill my wall floor to ceiling but it comes close. I don't
| use full screen often, but I do it occasionally as a
| focusing strategy, and it's fine.
| amarant wrote:
| Projectors are way easier on the eyes than monitors
| though.
|
| You're shining a bright light on a wall, which you are
| looking at.
|
| With a monitor you are shining a bright light at your
| face, while staring directly at the lightbulb!
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Doesn't bouncing off the wall just effectively make the
| "backlight" dimmer? The light reflected off the wall is
| hitting your face versus the light from the screen
| hitting your face. It's still light regardless.
|
| If you're using a monitor in the dark the way you use a
| projector, you should turn the backlight down. If you're
| using it in a well lit room, the brighter backlight
| should have less of an effect.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I have three 27" screens (iMac in the center and two
| thunderbolt displays on each side) and I use most of my
| "daily driver" applications fullscreen (single monitor). So,
| things like Xcode, VSCode, web browsers, mail, Quicken,
| Spreadsheets and Word Processing, and so on. This gives me
| usually at most 3 things to do at once. Occasionally, for
| smaller apps, like calculator, messages and so on, I won't
| fullscreen them. But for my main workflows, it's fullscreen
| all the way.
|
| My actual biggest pet peeve with this setup is the vast
| number of web sites that deliberately choose to limit their
| content to a tiny column centered horizontally in my browser,
| with 10cm of wasted whitespace on each side.
| amarant wrote:
| I too have a huge monitor. How anyone can use one without a
| tiling window manager is beyond me
| doubled112 wrote:
| A tiling window manager adds a bunch of keyboard shortcuts
| I can't get used to. Not worth the mental load of having
| things change places on their own either.
|
| It's probably a me problem, but I'm going to open stuff and
| then leave it scattered around all day. It's fine.
|
| I don't use more than a couple of virtual desktops either.
| Just one for current tasks and one for background apps.
| eightys3v3n wrote:
| I've seen half a dozen Mac users and none of them maximized the
| window very often. They usually had a mishmash of like 12
| windows open and randomly all over the screen. Then they used
| the Alt-Tab to get between them. Basically wherever it opened
| is where it stayed.
| htx80nerd wrote:
| absurdity. mac users are not serious people.
| dstroot wrote:
| > "mac users are not serious people."
|
| I can't tell if this is a serious comment or humor.
| genewitch wrote:
| there's iconography of a partially eaten fruit on the
| cases, and some of them glow.
| eszed wrote:
| This is me. I tend to order projects onto their own
| desktops[0], each with several app windows open. With an
| external monitor there's plenty of space, and... Yeah: with
| command-tab thoroughly committed to muscle memory it usually
| doesn't matter much if they end up on top of each other. If
| it does, I'll put them next to each other. Stickies usually
| go out of my eye-line to the left side of the screen, so I'll
| keep that otherwise clear.
|
| I sometimes maximize something - other than video calls:
| those are always full-size - on the laptop screen, but
| otherwise not at all.
|
| I can see how a full-screen IDE makes sense, but I don't use
| one, so I always want a couple of terminal sessions running
| alongside my editor.
|
| There are vanishingly few contexts in which I find full-
| screen helpful. Not criticizing anyone else, or recommending
| my way of working, but it's what works for me.
|
| [0] I _would_ like better support for desktop management:
| naming and shortcutting, particularly. Years ago I tried some
| (I think it was Alfred, or a predecessor) add-on that
| promised that, but it was super flaky. Does anything exist
| that works well?
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| This is me almost exactly. Windows pile up being whatever
| size feels appropriate, organized only by virtual desktop.
| If screen #2 is a laptop screen or the program in question
| is an IDE with a billion panes I might resize it to fill
| the screen, but otherwise it's rare. I practically never
| use full-on fullscreen.
|
| It's so ingrained I tend to get frustrated on other
| desktops, which are nearly all built around the Windows
| mentality of keeping displays filled to the brim with tiled
| or maximized windows.
|
| Even on the handful of times with maximize/tile on macOS,
| it's with a gap of a few pixels of desktop peeking through
| so it doesn't feel as "boxed in" and claustrophobic.
| akdev1l wrote:
| Yes MacOS breaks down the user until they give up on window
| management
| wmil wrote:
| Window management is one thing that MacOS has long been
| weirdly bad at.
|
| I think there's a conflict between the users who use it on
| studio displays and users who use it on 13 inch laptops. The
| Mac team at apple won't pick a side or come up with two
| solutions.
|
| That's not completely true, they've been pushing swipe
| between fullscreen apps for a while.
|
| But that doesn't make any sense on an iMac.
|
| So the recommendation from pro users is to use Alfred to
| manage windows.
| dbatten wrote:
| > it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption
| most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but
| rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle
|
| IMO, this has been their assumption for years, and it actually
| turned me off when I tried getting used to Mac circa 2006-2007.
| Coming from Windows at the time, I just couldn't get over a
| weird anxiety that my application window wasn't maximized,
| because it didn't look like it completely snapped into the
| screen corners.
|
| Now, using 34-inch ultrawide monitors almost exclusively, I
| never maximize anything... it'd be unusable.
| nine_k wrote:
| I constantly stretch windows to maximum height.
|
| I maximize windows of graphics and video editors.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| As a 38" ultrawide owner myself, I use vscode or intellij
| maximized most of the day, depending on the codebase I'm
|
| Browsers only ever get maximized to the left/right half
| screen for me too
|
| Which is something macos should really improve on though, the
| ux is pretty bad compared to Windows and Linux there
| jmspring wrote:
| I split a vs code window and a browser or a browser and
| terminal window on my 13" mb air. Usually need additional
| context on the same screen.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| While I don't maximize anything on a monitor that wide, I do
| appreciate Window's snap to half/quarter functionality for
| monitors that wide, and I wish Mac had the same ability
| natively.
| girvo wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it does? I haven't installed anything and
| it has the ability to do half and some other layouts
| through the window menu and snapping IIRC
| pc86 wrote:
| I can't speak to the quarters but you absolutely can snap
| windows to the left and right halves in MacOS.
| drivers99 wrote:
| > I wish Mac had the same ability natively
|
| Hover over the green button in the top left of the window.
| I recently found out about that menu for moving a window
| between screens, which is also an option it has. (I also
| just found them in the Window menu if you prefer that. I
| dont; the options take an extra level of hovering to get
| to.)
| setopt wrote:
| You can also long-click the button instead of hovering.
| Also, see the menu bar entries related to window
| management, which replicates these same functions but can
| be bound to keys in the system settings.
| mjcohen wrote:
| Damn. Never knew that. TIL
| wingmanjd wrote:
| I just installed Kubuntu last week so I could get the
| additional shift-drag targets to split my 34" ultrawide into
| 3 sections, or bump to the edges for the half filled.
| cluckindan wrote:
| Install i3wm, it will change your life.
| setopt wrote:
| I'm currently using Krohnkite [1] to get dynamic tiling
| in KDE, and Klassy [2] to get i3wm-like pixel borders
| instead of full window decorations.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite [2]:
| https://github.com/paulmcauley/klassy
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Something I realized after spending a few months in sway
| (i3) and then niri is that I only care about a few
| windows (code editor, terminal, browser, apps I use
| moment to moment).
|
| All the rest I'd prefer to just summon as-needed and then
| dismiss without navigating away from the windows I care
| about.
|
| sway/niri want me to tile every window into some top-
| level spot.
|
| Took me a while to admit it, but the usual
| Windows/macOS/DE "stacking" method is what I want + a few
| hotkeys to arrange the few windows I care about.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Yeah, anything that has an MDI metaphor going on should be ran
| fullscreen. Otherwise, what's the point? If the idea is to use
| the OS desktop space as the application window organizational
| space, then don't let people make apps that have different
| document panes.
|
| This goes towards something that I've felt for a little while:
| at some point in time around the early 2000s, operating system
| vendors abdicated their responsibility to innovate on
| interaction metaphors.
|
| What I mean is, things like tabbed interfaces got popularized
| by Web browsers, not operating systems. Google Chrome and
| Firefox had to go out of their way to render tabs; there was no
| support built into the OS.
|
| The OS interfaces we have now are not appreciably different
| from what we had in the early 2000s. It seems absurd that there
| has been almost no progress in the last 25 years. What change
| there has been feels like it could have been accomplished in
| user-space, plus it doesn't get applied consistently across
| applications, thus making it feel like not a core part of the
| OS.
|
| MacOS in particular was supposed to an emphasis on the desktop
| environment being the space of window _and_ document level
| manipulation, as exemplified by the fact that applications did
| not have their own menubars. All application menu bars were
| integrated together at the top of the screen. Why should it be
| any different with any other UI organizational feature? Should
| not apps merely be a single window pane, accomplishing a single
| thing, and you combine multiple apps together to get something
| akin to an IDE out of them?
|
| Well, I don't know if they _should_ be. But they can 't.
| Because OS vendors never provided a good means to do it. Even
| after signalling they wanted it.
| fwip wrote:
| I seem to remember Windows XP using tabs in a lot of its
| settings pages - and possibly earlier versions as well.
| moron4hire wrote:
| It did, but those were static tabs. It was pretty easy to
| create tabs as a form of sub-organization. But the
| treatment of tabs as documents was new-ish to
| Chrome/Firefox. Other applications treated multiple,
| concurrent document views as whole, resizable, sub windows
| inside of an "MDI" panel.
|
| Look at how older versions of Word, Excel, and Visual
| Studio worked. The tool trays stay consistant as you move
| between document windows. The entire application is
| minimizable and quittable together as one.
|
| Photoshop still uses this metaphor. In the ealry and
| mid-2000s, Photoshop on Windows had a window for the
| application separate from the documents, but on Apple OS9
| and OSX, the only representation of the application itself
| was in the menu bar. Document windows and tooltray windows
| both floated in the same desktop space as every other
| window.
|
| I haven't checked on the GNU Image Manipulation Program,
| but I seem to remember it retained the same "no application
| window, tooltrays and doc windows exist in the DE" metaphor
| for much longer than Photoshop.
|
| There is also a difference in the way that Chrome renders
| tabs in the window title area. That's a part of the UI
| chrome that one would expect to be in the perview of the UI
| toolkit, but Google took it on themselves.
| anthk wrote:
| Virtual desktops in Unix predate Visual Studio. I'm
| pretty sure there was a concept of tabbed interfaces
| somewhere in the Amiga or BeOS or any other OS.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)
|
| Don Hopkins himself can enlighten us about it (NeWS)
| better than me literally anyone in this thread, jut wait.
| moron4hire wrote:
| What does that have to do with my criticism of the two
| most popular operating system that they failed to
| innovate or adapt in areas that showed obvious need?
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I'm not sure if I understood correctly but i3 has tabbed
| windows and no window titles
| anthk wrote:
| Opera had tabs. Tabbed under Unix had tabs. Dillo had tabs.
| TCL/TK had damn tabs in 1997.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Thank you for the additional examples of how the major OS
| vendors failed to respond to clear need within the market.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I actually feel the opposite? The current green button action
| not only makes the window fill the entire screen, it also hides
| the menu bar AND creates a new virtual desktop and hides all of
| my other apps. And it seems to me that's what the majority of
| people want.
|
| Meanwhile, I want to use my graphical, mutli-window preemptive
| multitasking operating system to, you know, use multiple
| applications at the same time.
| RussianCow wrote:
| I honestly can't say I've _ever_ seen a non-techie expand a
| window to full screen using the green button on macOS. I 'm
| not sure why, because in theory, I agree with you.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| In my experience supporting Mac users, it's about 50/50. I
| think a lot of them have been conditioned to not maximize
| windows because it hides everything else, and they don't
| understand how to get back to their other windows.
| akdev1l wrote:
| It does weird things in multi monitor because dragging a
| window on top of the newly "maximized" window somehow does
| not work
| jiehong wrote:
| One issue with windows maximised with the green button is if
| you have more than 1 window of the same app: you might alt-
| tab to the app, but cmd-` is not switching to the other
| window of the same (while id does if not maximised.
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| Yeah this is the assumption, even pre-OSX. I won't claim to
| know the majority of mac users, especially not since the large
| uptick in the 2010's... but it seems, in my experience, very
| much the norm to not maximize windows and I wouldn't be
| surprised if people who do maximize are mostly Windows converts
| (not that there's anything wrong with that).
| cdaringe wrote:
| It's painful for me to watch senior engineers drag windows
| around and resize, hunt and peck for what they're looking for.
| I suppose that's what an emacs user may think of me when I move
| code around, but I suppose such things aren't critical for
| overall productivity
| Reason077 wrote:
| It depends very much on the size of the screen. On a small 13"
| laptop screen? Sure, you're going to be running apps full-
| screen a lot of the time. On a big desktop monitor? No, except
| for games and playing movies, I'll almost never expand an app
| to fill the entire screen.
| al_borland wrote:
| Last time I had to work on just my laptop screen (16"), I
| actually found Stage Manager pretty useful. On a larger
| screen, or for more casual use, I do not.
| mulmen wrote:
| In the office I have dual 24" monitors. At home I have a single
| 38" ultrawide. In desktop mode I almost never have one app
| taking up my full screen. In portable mode yeah, all full
| screen. The only exception is IDEs which get their own spaces
| and are basically self-contained tiling window managers anyway.
| pdpi wrote:
| I do this on macOS much more than I do on Windows, yes. MacOS
| flows a lot better if you're willing to adopt its window
| management style.
|
| As you said, browser and IDE are the big exceptions, plus
| things like Lightroom or my 3d printer's slicer.
|
| Even VS Code usually lives as a smaller window when I'm using
| more a text editor rather than as an IDE.
| akdev1l wrote:
| The window management style of Mac OS is complete chaos imo
|
| I have been using it for years and I just gave up entirely on
| managing anything and if I zoom out to see all my windows it
| looks like the freaking Milky Way from windows I forgot
| crest wrote:
| Yes. I think the assumptions are made by people with two
| displays of at least 32" and >=4K resolution.
| al_borland wrote:
| I think it's more of a carryover from the original Mac's in
| the 80s.
|
| Trying to maximize a window, even 23 years ago when I first
| moved to OS X, was a completely manual process. It was
| designed around windows, not walls. And screens were much
| smaller and lower res back then.
| Latty wrote:
| People do this, yeah. Even on Windows I've been over someone's
| shoulder walking them through something and it drives me nuts
| they work in a tiny window in a random part of the screen.
| al_borland wrote:
| macOS only recently got an option to make windows fill the
| screen. For most of history what most people would assume is a
| maximize button (the green one) was actually a zoom button. It
| sized the window to what the OS thought was appropriate for the
| content (to the best of my knowledge and experience with it).
|
| Apple then made things go full screen, but in a special full
| screen mode, so macOS worked more like the iPad.
|
| By the time they added a way to maximize windows in the way
| Windows does, the idea of maximizing an app has largely worked
| its way out of my workflow. It was always too much trouble, and
| I find very few apps where it provides much benefit. Web
| browsers, for example, often end up with a lot of useless
| whitespace on the sides of the page, so they work better as a
| smaller window on a widescreen display. In an IDE, it really
| depends on what's being worked on and if text wrapping is
| something I want. Ideally lines wouldn't get so long that this
| is a problem.
|
| With the way macOS manages windows, I often find it easiest to
| have my windows mostly overlapped with various corners poking
| out, so I can move between app windows in one click. The
| alternative is bringing every window of an app to the front
| (with the Dock or cmd+tab), or using Mission Control for
| everything, neither of which feels efficient.
|
| I could install some 3rd party window management utility, I
| suppose, but in the long run, it felt easier to just figure out
| a workflow that works on the stock OS, so I can use any system
| without going through a setup process to customize everything.
| It's the same reason I never seriously got into alternative
| keyboard layouts.
| hbn wrote:
| You can double click the grab handle area of a window (which
| is less obvious than ever in Tahoe) and it'll fill the window
| to the display.
|
| Except Safari, which just fills out the window's height
| vertically. Kinda weird to make an exception like that but I
| don't hate it, because I generally use Safari for reading,
| and shrinking the browser's width forces lines of text to not
| get too long if the website's styling isn't setting that
| manually.
| empressplay wrote:
| You can double click on any part of the top title bar (that
| doesn't have buttons in it) for example in Calendar you can
| double click beside the magnifying glass in the top right
| and it will maximize the window.
| al_borland wrote:
| This is running "zoom". When I try it in Finder, it
| doesn't make the window full screen, it actually made it
| smaller.
|
| When I use the Window menu, Zoom replicates what double-
| clicking the top title bar does, while Fill maximizes the
| window. This holds true with the behavior you describe in
| Safari as well.
|
| It just seems like a lot of apps treat Zoom and Fill the
| same now (I tried Calendar, Notes, TextEdit, and
| NetNewsWire), which adds to the confusion.
| achandlerwhite wrote:
| by only recently do you mean 15 years ago with Lion?
| al_borland wrote:
| Lion got Full screen, but Fill screen came later. Best I
| can tell, that was in Yosemite, 11 years ago. That still
| feels relatively recent, as it is in their current
| California landmarks era and no the big cats era.
| flomo wrote:
| Right, Macs always have had the premise of "spacial window
| management" (or that's what Siracusa called it), so that's
| probably how you are 'supposed to' do it.
|
| Full Screen Mode was their answer to maximize, going back
| many years now (10.7).
| FroshKiller wrote:
| I use a MacBook and a Mac mini personally, and I do not
| generally maximize any application that isn't implicitly a
| full-screen experience (e.g. a video player or a computer
| game).
| peacebeard wrote:
| Yes, all the time. I understand that if you have a setup where
| you do everything in your IDE you could reasonably leave it
| full screen all the time and I get why that works for some
| people. I'm not one of those folks and I use separate IDE,
| terminal, browsers, and other windows and use window management
| to allow myself to see multiple of them at the same time and
| switch between them by clicking on what I want.
|
| Also just want to be 100% clear: Tahoe is bad and I hate the
| changes and I don't think the OS should prefer one way of
| working over the other. I just hope it's helpful to explain my
| perspective.
| freetime2 wrote:
| I use Rectangle [1] for window management. I only use three
| shortcuts: full screen, left half of the screen, and right half
| of the screen. My editors and Chrome are always running in one
| of these modes.
|
| But for other apps where interactions tend to be brief like
| Finder, Messages, Notes, Music, etc - yeah I don't usually
| expand them to full screen.
|
| [1] https://rectangleapp.com/
| 9dev wrote:
| Hey, workflow buddy! I do the exact same. I feel seriously
| handicapped without these shortcuts.
| sarmasamosarma wrote:
| I never work in full screen. It's bizarre to me that people do.
| I don't need full screen for anything, even Pycharm.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I've always disliked MacOS because it is so janky about
| maximizing windows.
|
| I have a 39" ultrawide and I keep every window maximized. I
| have OCD about this. I can't stand things all layered on top of
| each other. I like to focus on one screen at a time.
|
| Chromium browsers have been rolling out split tabs and I use
| that on a couple of tasks where I'm constantly cutting/pasting
| between sites, but that's about it.
| janwirth wrote:
| I just use yabai...
| wryoak wrote:
| It's very rare that I maximize an application. I'm always
| stacking. However, I don't think it's an optimizing assumption:
| I am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange
| my windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got
| too close to an edge of the screen
|
| In general my browser is dead center or slightly to the right
| so I can access my other windows (terminal, throw away text
| editor, etc) easily where command tab is insufficient (when I
| have multiple terminal windows, eg)
| 1e1a wrote:
| Turn off System Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> Windows ->
| "Drag windows to menu bar to fill screen"
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Maximizing everything whether the document fills the screen or
| not is very Windows user behavior. macOS is not meant to be
| used that way.
| brooke2k wrote:
| for the longest time I never did this, but then I got a
| gigantic 4K screen, and I realized that it was almost giving me
| vertigo having apps like my IDE fullscreened, because I
| literally have to move my head in order to look everywhere.
|
| so in response I changed my windowing strategy to having a set
| of windows floating around at exactly the size I want them, and
| then the advantage of the enormous screen is just how many
| windows I can have open at once
|
| that being said, I use KDE not MacOS, and 90% of Mac users I'd
| guess are on laptops, so using this strategy sounds completely
| insane to me. On laptops I still default to fullscreening or
| "half-screening" most apps.
| daemonologist wrote:
| Yes! After many years of using only linux or windows machines,
| I was assigned an iMac at an internship and noticed the
| friction with fullscreening things. I decided not to fight it
| and spent the next year happily working in little windows and
| making frequent use of the "mission control" gesture.
|
| However, after the internship I went right back to
| fullscreen/window tiling in linux, so I can't say I really
| preferred it. Even now as a Gnome user with a big monitor and
| magic trackpad on my desk - which gives me ~equal access to
| either approach - I fullscreen everything.
| bombcar wrote:
| I don't know what it is, but fullscreen on Mac (even dock-
| showing "fullish screen") feels _wrong_ in a way that
| fullscreen on Windows /Linux feels "right".
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I think it's partially because on Macs, the desktop has
| always been a more pivotal component of the OS thanks to
| ubiquitous drag and drop support and mounted volumes
| showing on the desktop, among other things. At least for
| me, it's not unusual to grab images, text snippets, and
| other things from apps and drop them on my desktop, making
| it more of a workbench than it is on other platforms.
|
| Another component is how ability to overlap windows is
| emphasized, allowing the currently relevant portion of them
| to be visible without taking center stage or stealing any
| space from your main window(s).
|
| Both are part of a larger difference in mentality and
| workflow style.
| kogir wrote:
| MacOS assumes you won't full screen every app because all of
| them ship with large enough, high enough resolution monitors
| that full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space.
| Unlike on cheap laptops with 1080p screens.
|
| I suppose you could splurge for a Mac desktop and then get the
| cheapest, smallest screen possible, but I hope it's rare.
| kellpossible2 wrote:
| writing this reply on a 13 inch macbook air...
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I run 27" 4k and a 34" ultra wide monitors on my desktops,
| and my main laptop is a P16S with a 16" 3840x2400 OLED
| typically docked to one of those screens when not on the go,
| and I almost never use windows that are not snapped to
| fullscreen or at the very least to halves or quarters. "Large
| enough" scarcely applies to a MacBook Air or Neo with a 13"
| display, and I bet a TON of those get docked to cheap 21, 24,
| and 27" 1080p screens.
|
| I'd like to be able to snap things to the middle third,
| especially on the ultrawides.
|
| Only little calculator widgets, property panels, and modal
| dialogs that get immediately closed after use don't get
| maximized or at least docked to fill some region. I hate the
| cluttered, layered feeling of having a bunch of non-full-
| screen windows overlapping, I want to have a dozen apps open
| and making optimal use of the available display area.
| karlgkk wrote:
| > Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't
| expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them
| half-sized somewhere in the middle
|
| The assumption is that the window should be the size of the
| content of the document inside.
|
| It turns out that this approach works well for many
| applications, especially what the mac was designed for in the
| 80s and 90s. And it's horrid for modern "pro" applications.
| donatj wrote:
| Bring back the floating toolbars of the early 2000's and it'd
| be fine.
| joemi wrote:
| When I'm using my macbook's screen, I usually expand a browser
| window to fill the whole screen -- it's a 13" screen so not
| using the whole thing makes things feel small. But most of the
| time my computer is plugged into an larger external monitor
| (20-something inches, maybe 27?), and there I don't expand any
| windows to fill the whole screen. I like having separate not-
| full-screen windows which partially (or mostly) overlap.
|
| Somewhat relatedly, we use Windows at work, and it drives me
| crazy when I hop on a computer after someone's been using it
| and they have every single thing maximized, even Windows
| Explorer, on 27" monitors. A maximized browser, I get... I
| don't do it myself but I understand how it can be useful, but
| maximizing Windows Explorer is just insane to me, and yet a lot
| of my coworkers do it.
| massung wrote:
| Just wanted to note that this is how I work. I rarely have any
| window full screen/maximized and hate it when a website or
| application is built assuming a giant monitor with a maximized
| window.
|
| I've never found a setup with multiple desktops or similar with
| a way to quickly switch between apps I'm using more than
| "editor slightly more left, browser slightly more right, ..."
| and just clicking on a border I know brings that app to the
| front. I'm sure many think I'm crazy. That's ok. :)
|
| That said, I generally hate the new OSX UI. Every UI element
| that is non usable just became larger and wastes space I should
| be able to utilize. Likewise, it made some operations insanely
| frustrating (here's looking at you, corner drag resize!).
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| I exclusive use complete fullscreen mode for apps i'm actively
| using and on large screens connect the workspaces, on small
| screen swipe back and forth. So I you never actually use that.
| justonceokay wrote:
| I'm not trying to defend because I don't like it either. But
| the Mac workflow has always been much more alt-tab focused than
| windows. With alt-tab and alt-shift-tab (reverse order) I feel
| like I can fly through my apps at the speed of thought.
|
| Lots of native applications also pop up multiple windows with
| the expectation that they kind of just float around. But at
| least in Mac you can scroll on an app that isn't in focus...
| zahlman wrote:
| > Does anyone actually do this?
|
| Yes (but not for a browser). My terminal windows are 80x24,
| pretty much always. I do this today on Linux, I've done it
| through multiple versions of Windows, and I did it in my
| childhood on a 9" B&W "luggable" Mac screen.
|
| I just like it, okay?
| piekvorst wrote:
| I never have any window in the fullscreen/maximized mode. Some
| are pretty large, such as IDE, and they sometimes touch one or
| more edges of the screen/dock/panel, but never occupy the
| entire space. That was true even on my 14in MacBook with 125%
| DPI.
|
| That said, I am a huge fan of manual window management.
| stavros wrote:
| I hever have any window in fullscreen, but I always have all
| windows maximized (obviously except the ones that can't be
| maximized, because of course settings couldn't possibly be
| made maximizable, what, that's crazy talk).
| michael_storm wrote:
| Some users switch apps by dragging windows around the screen,
| like a messy stack. A friend of mine didn't even know about
| Cmd+Tab to cycle through open apps. Users are weird.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I hate maximized windows. I like it when my windows are not
| maximized but I usually do have significant overlap between
| windows. Then I switch between windows based on the sliver of
| window that's visible even when other windows are in focus.
| It's the spatial way of thinking; just like how Finder purists
| think each _folder_ on your disk should remember its own window
| size and location so you use your spatial memory to locate
| Finder windows. I find that this is significantly faster for my
| brain to process compared to the Windows style where almost all
| windows are maximized and people use Alt-Tab to switch between
| windows.
|
| I would in fact say that the culture of _not_ maximizing
| windows was a small reason why I switched to Mac OS X in the
| early 2000s.
| lucasay wrote:
| The pill tabs are what get me too. I can ignore most visual
| changes after a while, but those somehow manage to feel both more
| distracting and less informative at the same time.
| amarant wrote:
| I must say that all this fuzz about the corners actually reflects
| rather well on macos.
|
| If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows,
| you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
|
| It's not gonna make me leave my darling Linux, ofc, but i think
| this whole debacle can only be interpreted as praise.
|
| On second thought, it might also be considered a mediation on
| people's tendency to bike-shed.
| intrasight wrote:
| I disagree as it shows a fundamental flaw in terms of
| separation of concerns that's probably manifest throughout the
| operating system.
|
| Or to stay it another way, if we see shit like this then we
| know the whole thing is a hack.
| amarant wrote:
| Hmm, that's a good point actually! Hadn't considered that!
| brailsafe wrote:
| Eh, it might be or it might not, why is that a valid
| indication that everything else is wack? There certainly are
| other things that are bad, maybe many, evidently, but I don't
| think the corner problem is a fair indicator of that exactly.
| Numerous things can be discretely bad and poorly directed
| without there being some ebola virus of bad throughout
| justonceokay wrote:
| That's funny to call Mac OS a hack compared to windows. Now
| windows is trying to be backward compatible with DOS and
| that's... something. But when we read blog posts explaining
| why things are how they are in windows i always get the
| heebie jeebies.
| intrasight wrote:
| > compared to Windows
|
| I never said that
| justonceokay wrote:
| Well sure we can compare it to niche OS like Linux or
| vaporware. But without comparison then we probably aren't
| taking into account the real life complexity of a desktop
| OS.
|
| As a related anecdote, my friend said my car was ugly. I
| asked him what cars he thought looked good. He said "I
| don't like cars". As a result I realized his opinion was
| worthless
| bigyabai wrote:
| You can compare it to prior versions of macOS, if you
| insist on assessing it from a relativistic standpoint.
| Apple didn't have this issue 10 years ago.
| NwtnsMthd wrote:
| It's not the biggest flaw, there are plenty others, but it does
| seem to be universally disliked.
|
| For example, there is not much you could do to Finder to make
| it worse.
| mikey_p wrote:
| On the other hand the fact that it sometimes makes it hard to
| resize windows means that it breaks something that Apple
| operating systems have been capable of doing without issue for
| nearly 45 years.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its
| windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
|
| There are loads of other flaws with the OS. It just so happens
| that people care a lot about the design of Apple's products, so
| people talk about these details.
| amelius wrote:
| The biggest flaw is that the system is opinionated, so you
| cannot change anything you dislike.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's not only that it's opinionated, it's that it's
| idiosyncratically opinionated. It would be different if it
| had a boring, middle-of-the-road opinion.
| kibwen wrote:
| It's not that it's idiosyncratically opinionated, it's that
| its idiosyncratic opinion is insane, user-hostile, and
| flies in the face of decades of experience crafting user
| interfaces.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| It's not even close to the biggest flaw, it's just the most
| obvious one.
| bloomca wrote:
| It is just the most obvious, macOS is a death by thousands cuts
| ablob wrote:
| > If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its
| windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
|
| This argument would also make Windows 11 a pretty decent OS by
| extension via "If the biggest flaw of a OS is the position of
| the start menu you've got yourself a pretty decent OS".
|
| In general I could use any minor nuisance as a proof of decency
| - or inject some to form this argument on purpose as a
| manufacturer.
|
| People don't like if their environment changes in minor
| unsolicited ways. There's always gonna be fuzz about these
| things and that means that the fuzz itself can't be used to
| make any strong argument whatsoever.
| akdev1l wrote:
| I think people are more complaining about windows crashing on
| updates or Microsoft putting ads everywhere or forcing one
| drive
|
| That's way more than just the "position of the start menu"
| gcapu wrote:
| I think you miss the point. How would you feel if you had a
| Ferrari with a noticeable scratch? Yes, it is great to have
| such a nice car, but it'd be a pity. So much much effort was
| put into the whole thing and this little detail is what lingers
| on your mind.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This is not the biggest flaw, this is just the most recent
| flaw.
|
| MacOS has been shit for as long as I've used it (8 years) and
| probably for much longer than that. There are many lists
| available of MacOS problems (https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/com
| ments/12rw1sn/a_long_list_... for example), it's just that
| there's not much point making a new article about the Finder
| that's been shit, and unchanged, for a decade.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing. I actually agree with most of
| the complaints people have made about the corners, but it seems
| so small compared with literally every interaction I have with
| Windows.
|
| As someone who works on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Windows stands
| alone in my opinion as the "stepping on legos with no socks on"
| of operating systems.
| freetime2 wrote:
| Yeah "notorious inconsistency issues in windows corners" almost
| feels like an oxymoron to me. Perhaps it is notorious among
| graphic designers, but I'm sure the vast majority of MacOS
| users will never notice or care.
| nostromo wrote:
| Clearing notifications on macOS Tahoe is ridiculously tedious.
| The "Liquid Glass" button is slow to respond, the notifications
| hang for a bit before being cleared, and then sometimes you have
| to jiggle the cursor to clear the next one. It's absurdly
| frustrating.
|
| And the updates to Music (formerly iTunes) are so bad the entire
| team should be dressed down, Steve Jobs style.
| batmanthehorse wrote:
| The notification buttons have always felt a little squishy and
| unresponsive since they were added. They're terrible.
| jasonhemann wrote:
| I love that there are people who are observant enough to notice
| these kinds of things, a vanguard for those of us who are
| blithely unaware and protected due to their vigilance.
| tencentshill wrote:
| Apple used to know this. You don't notice these things, but
| your subconscious does. You start to trust it less when things
| get inconsistent and don't "just work".
| amelius wrote:
| Never trust people who play mind tricks like this.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| I use this https://github.com/FelixKratz/JankyBorders to try and
| have a consistent feel to it, but I wish I could make it less
| rounded
| streetfighter64 wrote:
| > disabling MacOS system integrity [protection], which results in
| making them possibly vulnerable
|
| Not really, if you have malware that has root access on your
| system I think you're already pretty screwed, especially
| considering that you don't even need root to read all your saved
| passwords and personal files https://xkcd.com/1200/
| dmix wrote:
| I've been using Tahoe since the beta and the borders haven't
| bothered me once.
|
| I get the UI consistency thing but it's okay to transition to new
| UI things gradually than making radical changes all at once. If
| this is still an issue 2yrs from now it will be more of a concern
| about their commitment.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| With only a little sense of self aware irony, one thing I hate
| about so much dialog these days is how vehement opinions are. I
| don't particularly like the rounded corners, and think it's a
| regression. It's also... fine. It's not the difference between
| usable and entirely unusable. And I see this kind of attitude all
| over the place now. A slight change, some slightly non-ideal
| behavior and all of a sudden a product is THE WORST THING EVER.
| We will be ok with inconsistently rounded windows. I think people
| need to be a bit more tolerant of design decisions that are
| opinionated, and likely worse but also not breaking.
|
| Ads in a start menu can die in a fire though.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I feel the opposite. macOS has had excellent UI in the past,
| and the rationale was usually that Apple took designer feedback
| seriously. Designers told Apple that advertisements in the
| notification menu was a no-no, they warned about layering text
| on low-contrast glass effects. They stopped OSX' UI from
| becoming visually bloated and low-density like the eventual Big
| Sur+ design language. We only get _these_ kinds of issues when
| the chain of communication is cut: https://noheger.at/blog/wp-
| content/uploads/2026/01/scrambled...
| https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-...
|
| If you want ads in Spotlight or Launchpad, telling people to
| tolerate "opinionated, and likely worse but also not breaking"
| features is exactly how you get it. It's how Windows got there.
| haunter wrote:
| I usually use Linux and Windows (pretty much split 50/50) and tbh
| this is why I never could switch to Mac full time even though
| I've have had and still have several Macs at home. The full
| screen beahavior is weird. Is the dock should overlay every
| single window all the time? If not then why is the dock not
| hidden by default? If yes then full screen is actually "maximum
| size app window without overlaying the dock"? What's even the
| point of the dock actually? The other one is the open window =/=
| running app behavior. Wait 2 hours later this app is still
| running in the background even though I've closed all windows?
| gonzalohm wrote:
| What about the minimize and maximize buttons being swapped
| without any way to customize it. That one drives me crazy.
| htx80nerd wrote:
| Half the people in IT have no business being here.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since
| the upgrade. Also I can't paste filenames in the save file dialog
| in some apps. And the URL field in Safari is just weird.
|
| My computer was running so slowly that I had to minimize
| transparency in system preferences somewhere. I think I also
| turned off opening every app in its own space. And I hid the
| icons on the Desktop in Finder settings somehow, which helped a
| lot. There are countless other little tweaks that are worth
| investigating.
|
| I also highly recommend App Tamer (no affiliation). It lets you
| jail background apps at 10% cpu or whatever. It won't help with
| WindowServer or kernel_task (which also often runs at 100+% cpu),
| but it's something.
|
| I can't help but feel that there's nobody at the wheel at Apple
| anymore. When I have to wait multiple seconds to open a window,
| to switch between apps, to go to my Applications folder, then
| something is terribly wrong. Computers have been running
| thousands of times slower than they should be for decades, but
| now it's reaching the point where daily work is becoming
| difficult.
|
| I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full
| operating systems using other OSs as working examples. Then we
| can finally boot up with better alternatives that force
| Apple/Microsoft/Google to try again. I could see Finder or File
| Explorer alternatives replacing the native ones.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu
| since the upgrade_
|
| That's because some app is spamming window updates.
|
| It's been an ongoing problem for many releases. AFAICT,
| WindowServer 100% CPU is a symptom, not a cause.
| sunnyps wrote:
| But apps shouldn't be able to hammer WindowServer in the
| first place. If your app is misbehaving, your app should
| hang, not the OS window compositor!
|
| FWIU there's really no backpressure mechanism for apps
| delegating compositing (via CoreAnimation / CALayers) to
| WindowServer which is the real problem IMO.
| mentalgear wrote:
| QubesOS seems a great migration target: it runs Apps/OS in
| secure sandboxes - and even with that overhead doesn't seem
| worse than the terrible MacOS 26 performance.
| aetimmes wrote:
| I think we're already seeing the operating systems that AI can
| build, and I don't think they've been an improvement.
| diego_moita wrote:
| Windows gets a lot of (deserved) bad rap for bloatware but MacOS
| is just a little less bad. "Features" that we can't uninstall
| (e.g.: Siri, Apple Music), arbitrary changes in the UI, ...
|
| True, the "blessing" of forced online accounts, telemetry and
| advertisement didn't arrive to MacOS, yet. But, I wonder how long
| it will take us to get there.
| gib444 wrote:
| In window management, anything other than i3 is an unequivocal
| downgrade.
|
| Rounded corners are just...bizarre. Just because the laptop
| casing is physically rounded !? (Yet the menubar squares it off
| off at the top, and the bezel squares it off on the bottom...)
| varispeed wrote:
| I've been running Sonoma and it's going to stay that way for
| foreseeable future.
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