It can’t do the literal entire thing an operating system is supposed to do: manage applications and their resulting windows, in a sensible way.
I want to know what application is running.
Sure it’s in the dock!
I want to find a specific application window.
Go fuck yourself right to hell.
Wait, the taskbar doesn’t show the running windows, like it does on every other OS? It’s at least discrete right?
It discretely takes up 1.5cm of the bottom of the screen at all times. It’s so discrete it doesn’t even need to use the corners.
Uh, alright, well that’s all the system space you need right?
Yeah of course just that bottom inch or so … And a top of screen system level menu bar to display what windows does in the bottom corners.
/sigh/ ok, fine, I just want to be able to full screen a window and still see what else is open.
Burn in hell and die.
I want to be able to easily switch left and right between open windows.
Go full screen or I will shoot you.
I want to move an open window into the other monitor.
You can’t because you’re full screen dumbass.
I want to let a window present a popup like they normally do.
You can’t because youre full screen dumbass. Why would you be full screen?
I want an application like Slack to be able to popup and remove notifications when is appropriate.
Choose to have every single notification persists on screen until you manually remove it, or miss all your notifications.
Can’t we trouble you for something in between, where we trust an application and let it manage them in a way that makes sense based on their context?
You can trouble me for something in between these cheeks, shit stain.
Like honestly, I fucking hate what an advertising and AI filled mess Windows is, but it can actually manage your windows and virtual desktops in a way that makes a modicum of sense.
It feels like a single Apple product manager decided that the way that they use their computer (a single application at a time, no windows to manage) is the only way anyone does, so who cares if we implement a nonsensical full screen paradigm, it makes one tiny niche edge case slightly simpler.
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I have to use Mac for work and hate the window management. So much of it feels counterintuitive, especially anything with two instances running and switching.
macOS=bad
Mac OS X snow leopard= peakUpvote for an unpolular opinion.
But it’s pretty clear that most of your PEBCAK
Eh, I seemed to do fine when I had to use it a few years at work. It was good in most parts compared to Windows.
However. That fucking keyboard layout is from hell.
I’d argue window management is a small part of the overall MacOS experience, and yes I agree that it sucks. However, with BetterTouchTool configured sensibly and raycast set up, I really like it.
A few things I really like about macos:
- you can download an app and just drag it into your apps folder. No installation required. You can also just use something like brew with
--caskParam then you don’t need to even download the app first - You can modify most settings programmatically
- CMD + , always opens settings in all apps
- The os (or hardware??) Is very energy efficient, I don’t have to worry about running out of battery
- I like the menu bar is always at the top of the screen, and when using the Search function under “help”, it shows me where to find the correct menu item so I don’t have to search again next time I need to find it
- you can download an app and just drag it into your apps folder. No installation required. You can also just use something like brew with
I‘m a long time Mac user and have hated the full screen function since they introduced it. The + button used to zoom/maximize the window according to the size of its content, and it still remained resizable. You can alt + click the + to get the old behavior. There’s also a setting, where you get the old behavior by double clicking the window title bar.
The whole window management has become messy. It was pretty simple and powerful, but then they added more and more features every year, making it harder to use and less useful.
The full screen mode is just bad.
It was great up through MacOS 9.
peaked at 7.5 tho
I have to use one for work. I hate it and its been 3 years now. I’d rather use it than windows though.
I don’t even know how to limit my Mac to get most of those complaints. What did you do to it? In particular the only reason the taskbar doesn’t show all my running windows is because there are so many. There’s got to be the first 30 or so though.
Nor do I know how to avoid some of them on my Windows box.
The MacOS dock literally just shows running applications, not windows.
If you right-click the application in the dock, it’ll show you a list of windows open in that program.
Along with all the quick links, in a big text list that’s impossible to quickly scan, and isn’t filtered by monitor.
It’s slower then mission control which is already slower then Windows’ always-present, hoverable-with-preview taskbar.
Yeah, I agree with you on this one. I installed Ctrl+Tab or whatever and it’s somewhat better, but windows management is horrible if you use a keyboard and mouse.
Not to mention keyboard shortcuts range from really useful to just god awful.
You can change all keyboard shortcuts in macOS.
Not only does it have terrible UX designed by the marketing department of Fischer Price, it treats you like a toddler as well.
This is the thing that the Gnome devs are desperately trying to replicate.
Agreed. I am not a big fan of Gnome either.
Concerning your window management troubles, have you tried Exposé/Mission Control at all? “Ctrl + Arrow Key Up/Down” will show all open windows, and all open windows from the currently used application respectively. On trackpads this is bound to a four finger swipe up/down.
To cycle between the active application’s windows use “cmd + >” (add shift to cycle backwards), or alternatively you could right click an application’s dock icon to view a list of all its open windows.
If you combine these with “cmd + tab” to cycle between active applications you can bring any window you are looking for to the front quick and efficiently, using only the keyboard or trackpad.
Yes, I use this all the time out of necessity but it’s still hogwash.
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Mission Control is ok for selecting windows on a a single desktop as long as you have less then 6 open, it starts falling apart after that, and for some reason, no matter what, it makes the icons for full screen apps so small it’s impossible to tell which particular mostly white web page is which.
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Ctrl + Arrow Key - switches between only true Full Screen applications, forcing you to use Full Screen, instead of just maximizing. Want to know which windows are coming up next in the list? Too bad, use mission control.
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CMD + tab - switches between your last used applications, it does not switch between windows.
On Windows:
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you have a taskbar at the bottom where all running windows are neatly tucked away under each application, each with a preview.
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With Alt + Tab you go through a list of last used windows, not applications. With a three finger swipe left or right, you can switch between them with a single gesture. You can configure this list to be all windows, or just the ones on that monitor. Their previews are always a predictable and visible size.
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you have virtual desktops where you can put your entire window arrangement across multiple monitors away, and start a completely fresh workspace for a different task.
I don’t use full screen windows much because I do agree that they become kinda annoying to find if you have more than 1-2 open at a time, mainly because I do most navigation with Exposé and they don’t nicely integrate there.
You pointed out that “cmd+tab” doesn’t cycle between windows, but that’s why I recommended “cmd + >” in my first comment, since that’s exactly what that does.
“Ctrl + Arrow Down” will only show your currently focused application’s windows, it’s different from “Ctrl + Arrow Up” which shows every application’s windows. So if you just use “cmd+tab” to focus on whichever application you’re currently looking for, and then hit “cmd + >” a few times (or “ctrl + arrow down”) you should find your window pretty quickly. Just a different process than cycling through every window on Windows, but I wouldn’t call it worse.
Unless you have like 20 windows open for a single application, I guess I could see how things could get convoluted in that case.
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It is. Period.
For real. There’s a huge fucking reason most computers in the world run windows and not macos (about 70% and 15% respectively). It’s literally not an unpopular opinion, it’s practically a hard fact.
There’s a huge fucking reason most computers in the world run windows and not macos
The fact that the cheapest Windows devices are like 100 euros and the cheapest MacOS devices like 1000 euros?
Eh, I don’t know. Kinda feels like it’s more of a reflection on your ability to learn.
Does macOS need some windowing improvements? Undoubtedly. But my 12 year old kid and my senior citizen mom can use it just fine, I’m sure you can too.
macOS has the unique ability to be good for newbies and power users (thanks to its unix underpinnings,) but falls short for people who have just enough computer knowledge to be dangerous (such as yourself.)
The UX is only serviceable to power users if you own the computer. If it’s corporate you’re stuck with the defaults, which are years behind Linux and windows.
Not to mention Cmd is in a terrible spot compared to Ctrl on windows. Needing to use your thumb for Cmd + C vs using you’re pinky to do Ctrl + C is also terrible in my opinion.
Unix underpinnings make it comfortable for developer work, but that does not necessarily make it good for power users.
MacOs is pretty locked down and basic which makes it a reasonable choice for someone that just needs a computer, but if you’re the kinda person who wants to tinker with and change a bunch of stuff to make your computer work for you (i.e. a power user) you’re gonna meet resistance.
macOS has tons of power user features built in. Automator, Service Menu, Shortcuts, Folder Actions, intelligent folders, and much more! Adding commands to the contextmenu, that then work across apps is super cool and easy to do for example.
In any app, I can select text and then use the service menu or context menu to run my own text transformation scripts (title case, replace, etc.). Only using built-in tools!
Also you can add or change keyboard shortcuts for every app, even if it doesn’t have them for some menu items. Do you want to not accidentally quit Firefox with cmd + q ? Change it to cmd + alt + q in System Settings.
macos doesnt care about unix, it is literally the most incompatible unix like os that there is
It’s BSD, it’s not Linux.
It is very much Unix and POSIX
It’s certified Unix by The Open Group: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
It’s literally the most Unix-like (modern) OS there is.
macOS has the unique ability to be good for newbies and power users (thanks to its unix underpinnings,) but falls short for people who have just enough computer knowledge to be dangerous (such as yourself.
Bruh, I’m a professional software developer.
I’m not complaining because I can’t figure out how to use it, I’m complaining because I use it as fast as anyone can and it irritates me that it slows me down compared to using Windows or most Linux distros.
Holy fuck, press F3 and delete your rant…
- Exit button minimizes application.
- Minimize button right next to exit button also minimizes application.
- Clear all button for notifications doesn’t actually clear all notifications.
- Keyboard shortcuts for window snapping don’t snap windows.
- Necessary to install supplementary tools to accommodate basic functionality that other OSes have out of the box.
- X code
- No software support for DP MST so fuck you if want to run your own computer off a single wire dock.
At least the virtual desktops work pretty good.
A Mac application can keep running without having an open window. That’s also why the menu bar is not attached to the window.
Minimize button, minimizes the window into the dock.
You can also hide an application, or hide all others, which is a very useful feature.
Exit button minimizes application.
X closes the window, it doesn’t minimize it. The application stays open until you explicitly quit it.
Staying open but hidden is what we call “minimize.” “Explicitly quitting” is what should happen when you click the exit button.
You’ve coupled the idea of window and application in your mind because that’s how Windows has worked for years. Mac has never worked like that. An application is separate from its windows and has ownership over them. An application can happily continue running with no open windows and still be useful (you control it with the menu bar at the top of the screen).
One of the most annoying things for me on Windows is when I close a Word file and want to open another one, if the one I closed is the last window then the entire program needs to restart which is very slow. On a Mac this never happens.
Having not touched a Mac in about twenty years, is there a visual indicator that the application is still running when there are no open windows? Steam, for example, displays an icon in the systray on Windows, or the equivalent on Linux DEs, to show that it’s still running even though you closed the main window. Does MacOS have an equivalent system that all its apps hook into? If it does, then that’s fine. But if it doesn’t, then that’s a serious problem.
Yes, there’s a dot under its icon in the dock. If the application is in the foreground then you’ll see its name in the top left, the first menu in the menu bar to the right of the Apple menu.
It’s also the case that regular applications (as opposed to background processes) cannot be running without having an icon in the dock. Icons can be left in the dock for quick access to launch those applications. If an app is not left in the dock then running it will add it to the dock along with a dot underneath it, along with a bouncing animation to draw your attention to it being added to the dock. Quitting an application that’s not normally pinned to the dock will cause it to disappear from the dock.
Ignoring your speculation on the source of my expectations, the expectation that when an application is not doing something I asked it to (i.e. making draw calls to my window manager, processing data, polling for updates or notifications, etc) it doesn’t run at all is not unreasonable.
To continue to run when I’ve instructed it that I’m done and that I have no further work for it is a violation of my intent in interacting with the machine I own. On Windows that violation is up the app developer and most that implement such systems have a settings option to disable staying alive. On MacOs Apple has made the decision of what I want, and, at least in my case, it’s the wrong one. On Linux I have extremely acute control over whatever the heck my computer is doing and it works how I like it. Linux is a good OS.
But that’s the thing, you haven’t instructed it that you want it to quit, you’ve only instructed it to close a window. That’s what that button does, and its function shouldn’t change based on whether it’s the last window in the application. Plenty of uses for running programs headless and not having them take up resources by keeping a window drawn (though certainly less of an issue now than it used to be).
Dunno, I like more granular control instead of changing functions based on context when it comes to basic UI. If I want to quit a program, I quit it. If I want to close a window, I hit the UI element that does that, and only that.
But this split goes back to the late 80s: Microsoft was late to the multi-window paradigm, and their first implementation pretty much was wrapped in one program, one window. If a program needed multiple windows or panes, they were all drawn in a parent window. Closing that parent window closed the program. They caught up I think with Windows 3.1 (and not fully until Win 95, though my memory is fuzzy, it’s been 31 years!), but kept the program-window coupling because their users were used to that, and it’s stuck. Linux desktop environments were built more towards the Windows paradigm so as not to confuse the largest source of new users, so now that stuck, too.
It’s quite easy to explicitly tell an application to stop running: Quit (command-q). The Mac has worked this way since 1984. If you have unsaved documents you will be prompted to save them (though most modern apps have used the OS’s built in support for autosave for years now) and then all windows will be closed before the app quits.
Closing the last open window of an application is not an instruction to close the application, it’s an instruction of the form “I am done working with this document now.” No more, no less.
This dates to a time when computers could reasonably be expected to work on single documents that consume all available memory such that the user must close the current document before opening a new one. Furthermore, in those days the application itself may reside on a different floppy disk from the document itself. Forcing the application to close upon closing the last document would then force the user to swap floppies in order to restart the application and then swap floppies again to open another document.
I digress. The floppy swapping issue is clearly no longer relevant but the metaphor remains: the Mac was conceived as a virtual desktop where users would work on their documents using applications (tools). If I’m cutting a piece of paper with a pair of scissors and then I put away the piece of paper, I don’t expect the scissors to put themselves away at the same time. I took out the scissors deliberately and I will put them away when I decide I’m finished with them.
One of the most annoying things for me on Windows is when I close a Word file and want to open another one, if the one I closed is the last window then the entire program needs to restart which is very slow. On a Mac this never happens.
A) on windows that does not have to happen, that is a choice by the office developers. If they want they can instead close a window but still have a service running in the system tray that can bring them back up instantly. Famously stuff like Steam and Discord work like this ootb.
B) the alternative, is that on MacOS you either:
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close the last window, and accidentally leave an application running that chewing up memory for no reason
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think you’re on the last window and go to explicitly close the application using Command Q, only to find out you still had another window open behind it or on another monitor that you needed, because MacOS provides no logical way of finding windows.
close the last window, and accidentally leave an application running that chewing up memory for no reason
Mac OS has memory compression and paging built in. If you leave an application running with no open windows, it’ll be idle in that state (it can also be idle with open windows, if you’re not interacting with them or running calculations in them) and when memory is low the operating system will first compress the memory of idle applications and later page them out (copied to storage and removed from memory) to disk (a fast SSD on a modern machine). An application that is paged out is so fast to page in and resume working that I’ve never even been able to tell when it happens. It basically feels like the computer has infinite memory available.
In practice that means you can leave every single one of your applications open and you won’t have any memory issues unless they’re all actively working and allocating memory to get work done. I leave almost all my commonly used applications open for months at a time with no issues. If there were any applications leaking memory or wasting battery then the system would warn me under the battery menu (listed as an app using significant energy).
- think you’re on the last window and go to explicitly close the application using Command Q, only to find out you still had another window open behind it or on another monitor that you needed, because MacOS provides no logical way of finding windows.
The Mac has tons of ways to find windows. For one, every application has a Window menu in the menu bar that lists all open windows, lets you switch to the ones you want (they may be on separate spaces) as well as more advanced stuff such moving and arranging and resizing all windows for an application:
Other ways to find windows include command-tab which cycles applications (but will bring up a window from that application if there are any open) and the trackpad gestures 3 finger swipe up to show all open windows in the current space (and be able to switch spaces or rearrange windows into different spaces) as well 3 finger swipe down which does the same thing but only for the windows opened by the current application.
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Minimize hides that specific window. The window still exists, it’s still taking up memory, anything it’s doing is still running.
Close closes the window, kills any tasks that window is running, but leaves the basic program still running so if you click on it again it’s already ready to go, you don’t have to fully reopen the program.
You have to decouple the concept of program from window.
In macOS there’s the general concept that every window should represent a document. You can have several documents open, such as PDF files, web pages, Word documents, etc. For a running application, you can have zero or more documents open at the same time, meaning you can close all documents and still have the application open.
🤷♂️
If I close all documents I don’t want the app running. It takes up visual space in the dock making it more cluttered and it takes up more RAM or swap space that I’d rather have allocated to things I’m doing than to things I’ve told the computer I’m not doing.
Understandable, but it’s just not how macOS works; it’s an intentional paradigm. I guess the use case is “dealing with documents”, opening, editing, closing, in repetition.
But closing the application and all its open documents in one go also has a common UX pattern: Command+Q. So if that’s what you really want, do that instead of closing windows/documents.
It’s just a very simple matter of making happen what you want to happen instead of not doing that. 🤷♂️
With all this said, I don’t think macOS is a good operating system. It’s very well thought out and very cohesive and very nice looking, great for beginners. But it’s just not practical for me. The window management is clumsy and lacks a lot of features, I don’t like how applications are installed (or uninstalled; sometimes packages can’t be easily uninstalled), and I don’t like how the hardware will just not support the latest operating system after a while.
With Linux, I can just keep going and upgrade the system in perpetuity and it’ll just keep going.
I also find tiling managers are good, but after about 15 years with i3 I’ve committed myself to Niri. It’s so good. A whole new paradigm that fits my mental model very well.
If I close all documents I don’t want the app running.
That makes absolutely no sense at all.
Why not? Sounds reasonable to some extent.
Staying open but hidden is what we call “minimize.”
That isn’t what happens. Minimizing means you can restore the current window as is. Closing a window and then clicking the application icon means a new window will be generated using whatever default settings you have.
