Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Impressions from a first-time Mac user

loganmarchione.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 756 posts

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#381

Post by Groxx »

CSMastermind wrote: post #257

There's a lot of people in comments defending macOS saying that the difference in switching between operating systems will lead to a bad experience no matter what and people just need to power through and learn the new system. I'll say that I've used Windows and macOS both personally and professionally for two decades now (longer for Windows). I'd consider myself a power user in both OSes, I know the keyboard shortcu…

Purely on monitors, I've had the opposite experience - Windows has been dramatically buggier and worse-behaving. Particularly if they're different DPIs - Mac DPI support is just so far ahead of Windows that it's absurd.

I've had slightly better luck getting monitors to work at all on Windows... by a single monitor. I mean more around system behavior when I plug in a monitor. OSX acts... normal? Stuff moves where I last moved it in that setup, or stays wherever it is. Everything stays about the same physical size. Display-rearranging is easy and perfectly reliable. On Windows, literally anything is possible, often including windows completely disappearing or going completely out of the bounds of any screen.

That said, I have no idea why monitor support is so buggy anywhere. It seems nuts. Is it actually that hard? I get that there are some scenarios where there are no perfect choices (e.g. what do you do with desktop icons / window positions when changing sizes? they've gotta go somewhere)... but the amount of times Windows has shoved windows completely off-screen and made them inaccessible is totally inexcusable. It even does that when going from a small screen to a large one, or just adding a second monitor. What kind of code leads to that??

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#382

Post by chipotle_coyote »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #357
CSMastermind wrote: post #257

There's a lot of people in comments defending macOS saying that the difference in switching between operating systems will lead to a bad experience no matter what and people just need to power through and learn the new system. I'll say that I've used Windows and macOS both personally and professionally for two decades now (longer for Windows). I'd consider myself a power user in both OSes, I know the keyboard shortcu…

I have mostly enjoyed my transition from Windows to Mac. I agree the the default of not being able to Cut and Paste in Finder was annoying but there is one thing that absolutely makes me furious: The file save dialog box has this unbelievable limit of 38 viewable characters! I regularly have to deal with 50+ character naming conventions where the first 38 characters are the same among many files. It is a huge hassle…

I mean, I can't speak for any other long-time Mac users, but...

> I regularly have to deal with 50+ character naming conventions where the first 38 characters are the same among many files.

...that's arguably a kind of unusual situation.

I don't think you're necessarily wrong, to be fair! It's just that in over two decades of owning Macs and at least a decade before that of using them off-and-on, I've never been in a situation where I thought, "man, the text field for entering a file name is just way too short."

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#383

Post by Groxx »

aspenmayer wrote: post #325
yakubin wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience is that Windows has far better UX for pretty most end users. UPDATE: After seeing a reply to this comment, I googled some screenshots. It seems that Macs normally do display a hint for the shortcut to delete files. I'm not sure why mine doesn't. Windows is also more learnable. On Mac at least today you're just supposed to know stuff. The most basic operation: deleting files. Seems like an operation yo…

Finder tells you the keyboard shortcut to Delete a file in the menu. Most every menu item on macOS that has a keyboard shortcut exposes it in this way through the menu, which is one nice feature that macOS has that Windows doesn’t have, but could have.

It is a bit odd that it doesn't appear in the right-click context menu, but yes - I love the menubar consistency in OSX. That plus the search field in the "help" menu is amazing, every OS would benefit from mimicking it.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#384

Post by verelo »

lwkl wrote: post #177
verelo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that came from a windows world for the first 10ish years of my career, i found this pretty frustrating too. I honestly still do. Sometimes it feels like I just cannot get to the window I want.

There is a separate shortcut to switch between windows of the currently selected application cmd + ` or ctrl + down arrow to show the windows. So you alt + tab to select the application and switch to the right window. I personally think it's more reliable than Windows especially if I have a lot of Windows open (I used Windows for the last 10 years). On Windows I regularly switched to the wrong windows because of my f…

So i actually use these shortcuts all the time! I think im more struggling with some edge case of my multi screen setup, im not sure. I just find myself having to do the full expand of all windows and then find the one i want to get things working again.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#385

Post by notshuttingdown »

Something OP didn't mention, but miffs me about macOS is the way it handles full screen apps.

macOS takes the entire app full screen in a separate desktop and doesn't allow other windows to overlap.

Cmd + Tab during full screen triggers a 1 sec animation as it switches workspaces... so if someone texts you on your iPhone during a video, you can't just peek at the Messages app with the video in the background :'(

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#386

Post by JoelMcCracken »

chillacy wrote: post #356
JoelMcCracken wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“France is really dumb because I can’t understand what they are saying. Look, even England does it the way I know!”

"Impressions from a first-time english speaker" > A little background on me: I’ve been speaking French and Spanish my entire professional life ... > The Bad > I’m accustomed to gendered pronouns in both French and Spanish, so it was nice to see that in English. However, the lack of gendered nouns is awful. French and Spanish both have what I would call “sane” gendered nouns (shown in this dictionary), where you know…

Very fine, you took my stupid comment and made it something good.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#387

Post by macintux »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #380
_s wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your workflow is dependant on many files, and with that naming convention because of it - there’s a good chance the workflow could be cleaned / simplified greatly. Wether it’s worth the effort or not, I don’t know - but lots of tools / freedoms / restrictions make certain processes possible and it’s always worth revisiting.

The naming conventions that require >38 characters come from a vast number of business entities that I have worked with through the years: Customer_Project_Subtask_Blaa How does anyone in the real working world not have this issue?

...folders?

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#388

Post by sneak »

bliteben wrote: post #375
mch82 wrote: post #365

This review is misses for me due to these two quotes: > I’m using this Macbook almost exclusively with the lid closed, with a USB-C adapter to connect my keyboard/mouse/monitor. > However, that keyboard doesn’t have the Option (⌥) or Command (⌘) keys like on my Macbook. The reviewer isn’t using the built in webcam, Touch ID, trackpad, or the Mac keyboard layout! Why even have a Mac with that setup? Opening the lid so…

I don't see why you can't like a mouse if you like MACs. Also if you like a mouse that you have to turn upside down and can't use while charging you are just a glutton for punishment. USB-C mice are not really a thing, so you have to use a Bluetooth mouse instead of using a mouse you may have had for the last 10 years and replaced the omron switches in several times. All this for what arrogance?

Mac is not an acronym, it's short for Macintosh.

MAC stands for Mandatory Access Control or Media Access Control (as in ethernet hwaddr).

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#389

Post by [deleted] »

CSMastermind wrote: post #257

There's a lot of people in comments defending macOS saying that the difference in switching between operating systems will lead to a bad experience no matter what and people just need to power through and learn the new system. I'll say that I've used Windows and macOS both personally and professionally for two decades now (longer for Windows). I'd consider myself a power user in both OSes, I know the keyboard shortcu…

[deleted]

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#390

Post by knighthack »

majormajor wrote: post #350
CSMastermind wrote: post #257

There's a lot of people in comments defending macOS saying that the difference in switching between operating systems will lead to a bad experience no matter what and people just need to power through and learn the new system. I'll say that I've used Windows and macOS both personally and professionally for two decades now (longer for Windows). I'd consider myself a power user in both OSes, I know the keyboard shortcu…

In fairness, I don't think most end users are plugging in four monitors, cut and pasting folders, or playing 25 year old games. And all those things are very user-specific and better for some than others in different places. I have a Dell from 2017 that won't run an external monitor with the lid closed out of the box, it'll go to sleep. I tried playing Total Annihilation (another 25 year old one) off GOG on it and it…

> I don't think most end users are plugging in four monitors, cut and pasting folders, or playing 25 year old games.

Most users are not cut and pasting folders? What?

When I first used a Mac, that was one of the first major difficulties I encountered. Cut and paste was quite unnatural - you had to Copy the source item, and then press COMMAND+OPTION+V to move/paste an item rather than to copy it. It was quite unintuitive.

Post reply on HN