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Impressions from a first-time Mac user

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Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#111

Post by danaris »

colinmhayes wrote: post #62
jonnycomputer wrote: post #3

All OS's should come standard with sophisticated windows management. I use BetterSnapTool on my Mac, have done so for close to 10 years now. I honestly don't know what I'd do without it--and I'm not doing too much fancy. But keyboard shortcutting to maximize, minimize, or tile (left right/corners/thirds) elimintes 90% of the fiddly annoying this about dealing with the too many windows I have open. But even this basic…

I'm pretty sure macOS was designed to have every window in fullscreen 100% of the time and the user would three finger swipe to switch windows. Seems like having a shitty experience when trying to do anything besides fullscreen is kind of the point, "do things the way we want you to or suffer."

No, it was actually designed to never have any window in fullscreen. That behavior is a relatively recent addition to the macOS windowing model.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#112

Post by correct_horse »

ysleepy wrote: post #87

My recommendations for Mac Users: * Put the Dock left or right, vertical space is precious (trust me, do it for a week and then decide) * Setup Hot-Corners (Settings -> Mission Control -> Hot Corners) - Upper-Right Corner as Mission Control (Must be upper right so spaces are immediately shown) - Lower-Left Corner as Application Windows - just fling your mouse curser into the corner (use std. gestures on the trackpad)…

> Disable spotlight for everything except what you want to use it for

My friend's mac would "take off" (fan spun up crazy fast) after every boot/login and I disabled full-text search of documents to fix it. There was probably a weird, maybe not-to-spec pdf/docx on the filesystem that spotlight couldn't parse and got stuck. Kinda dumb that it would waste a 100% usage on one CPU core for a couple minutes every boot though.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#114

Post by goosedragons »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #2

Despite the warning, I didn't find it nearly as "ranty" as the author cautioned, and instead seemed like a fairly comprehensive and fair take on his experience. Having gone through the same thing myself several years ago, the UI aspect of it is something that I'd be curious to see how it develops for the author. I think it is not uncommon for Windows folk to find the windowing experience on macs rather painful, at le…

I never got used to it after a year. I wasn't even a "new" Mac user as I'd previously used Jaguar/Panther/Tiger/Leopard as well as Classic and even NeXTStep. But while those were better than XP time has marched on and I don't feel like MacOS improved enough compared to the competition (with regards to window management). If anything should have been Sherlocked it should have been rectangle/magnet etc.

I also feel like Apple cripples mice, it's a very trackpad centered workflow and if you're not using one it suffers. Also they really need to have a separate mouse scroll toggle built in.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#115

Post by olyjohn »

nerdjon wrote: post #101
olyjohn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't get used to the fact that I can't alt-tab to a minimized window. Nor can I figure out how to switch to any particular minimized window. You have literally no way of knowing that a minimized window exists other than right-clicking the dock icon, or going to the "Window" menu after you switched to the application. The dock was fine 20 years ago when they released OSX, but they've literally done nothing to make…

Has Mac changed its default settings? The Dock shows you any minimized windows on the right. If for some reason this is no longer default (I don't remember the last time I setup a new Mac and didn't carry over settings) Right Click the dock >> dock preferences >> Uncheck "Minimize windows into application icon"

Well, that did work. But now I just have a massive pile of minimized window icons... and still no keyboard shortcut to switch to them.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#117

Post by brimble »

lbrito wrote: post #20

>you use what they give you, how they give it to you, using their workflows, barely customizing anything. Apple products are supposed to be revered the world over as the pinnacle of design, used by artists, engineers, professionals, and creators. Why do I feel like there are training wheels on a machine I use for productivity? Gosh, this is exactly how I felt in a similar situation. Really hit the nail on the head. I…

What are people doing with their computers that a Mac is so stifling? I'm late to the Mac game, have been on it for about a decade, and was a 15-year Windows and Linux desktop user before that. Still, I don't even know what it might be.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#118

Post by moonchrome »

I've had a long background of Windows and Linux usage but I've used MacOS a significant time as well - I'm daily driving a 2018 MacBook Pro 15 and use a Windows Desktop for WFH because it's much more powerful an silent. And I'm also developing on .NET core right now which is a Microsoft tech.

With that said I would say MacOS grows on you. On my 34 inch screen using snapping is just not practical - I just move windows around and have plenty of visual space and can quickly move my head to move attention to a different window, find other windows through overlaps - I prefer this to tabbing - and this is when working on my Windows desktop.

Returning to Windows after not regularly using it for last 3 years it's sad to see that the UI has regressed with Windows 11. For example windows had system calendar app that would connect to the system calendar in the bottom right and show event previews for the day and you could click on the day and get day summaries, sort of like Itsycal but built in. They removed this in Windows 11.

I think MacOS is strictly better for most of my use cases :

- The new right click UI is clunky and obviously touch optimized, most of the OS is going this way and it's shit for desktop usability

- Dark mode support is hit-and-miss, much better in MacOS

- PowerToys Run doesn't work reliably at all compared to Mac CMD + Space which works without a hiccup

- chocolatey is garbage compared to homebrew

Where Windows beats MacOS for me :

- Docker performance is much much better

- WSL/linux integration is fairly nice (using OpenSuSe rolling release to get relevant software, Ubuntu LTS they provide is ancient)

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#119

Post by rconti »

IMO, command-tab and command-tilde are vastly superior to the Windows method. It's less relevant these days due to applications running their own tabs inside of the app. I fought this for years but eventually gave up because you really have to use tabs these days. Many applications have wasted space for a tab bar even if you refuse to use tabs. But I liked being able to switch through windows in a given application vs switching applications entirely.

I still feel that tabs-everywhere is making up for a broken window manager. Why should we offload this to each application?

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