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Impressions from a first-time Mac user

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Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#421

Post by Damogran6 »

foobarian wrote: post #234
traceroute66 wrote: post #17

The author makes a big deal of lack of snapping. Frankly I've never seen the utility of it on OSs that do have it, infact I've always felt it more of a hinderance than a help (gets in the way, tries to snap when you don't want it to). The author makes a big deal that you have to do Command+Tab to switch applications, and then Command+` to cycle between windows in that application. Well, frankly I think thats the bett…

> Let's say (as you do) you have a dozen browser windows open (maybe in more than one browser) ... do you REALLY want to sit there hitting Command+Tab dozens of times ? No. Its quicker to switch to the desired app and then cycle within the app. That way you don't cycle through the browser when you don't need to. I'll see your use case and raise you a: Let's say you now have two dozens of browser windows open on two d…

Three fingers up on the trackpad shows everything...

OSX takes about a week, after 10 minutes with someone that's used it a lot.

All of the OS's are at parity now, the rest is just getting used to the frosting.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#422

Post by systematical »

I've had to use Mac at my last two jobs, before that was Linux for 8 years. I use Linux at home. I just do enough to get by and get my job done in Mac. I know its a bad mentality and I should work to improve my Mac experience, but I just don't enjoy working in that O.S.

Even if I spent the time honing in the UI and terminal. Home Brew is just terrible compared to Apt. That's really the game for me. Maybe my next gig will let me use Linux, but Mac seems to be becoming the only show in town for nix-based development teams and its just sad.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#423

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

kevincox wrote: post #290
Aardwolf wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a mac user (but a linux user who chooses desktops with the windowing paradigms of like windows 2000 or so plus multiple desktops) so have no idea how it's like in practice, but: These days it's very common for more than half your work to take place in a browser, with many browser windows, each having many tabs Every window of the browser almost is like its own application for the user, yet they're all from th…

I agree. While I admit that I have only lightly used macOS but for my last job I find it hard to get used to this multidimensional switching. I think it might have made sense where you had a few documents and a few emails and a few folders. But now I have 3 browser windows and 3 terminals and my brain can't get used to the fact that a video call window is in the same group as my reference docs but my text editor is i…

The browser really breaks the paradigm. I think the ideal would actually be a browser that had a window per site and an “application” per category of site.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#424

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #361
Aardwolf wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a mac user (but a linux user who chooses desktops with the windowing paradigms of like windows 2000 or so plus multiple desktops) so have no idea how it's like in practice, but: These days it's very common for more than half your work to take place in a browser, with many browser windows, each having many tabs Every window of the browser almost is like its own application for the user, yet they're all from th…

It doesn't work out well. This is an area of macos that grinds my gears daily. It gets even messier if you maximize an app, or use multiple desktops. Often I need to quickly switch between a particular terminal window to a particular browser window. But it's always a gamble. I don't know what I'm gonna get when I press cmd+tab. It may show the correct window, or it may show all terminal windows, or it may even do abs…

So, I have the opposite problem when I go back to using Linux/Windows: I mentally file all my windows into application buckets and it makes the alt-tab switcher for not-macOS seem to pick a random window.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#425

Post by SkyMarshal »

>Apple M1 Pro (8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores)

Fwiw I'm not sure anyone really thinks of the M1 in terms of performance vs efficiency cores, but rather in terms CPU and GPU cores (and maybe Neural cores if they're doing AI). For example, "8 CPU Cores and 16 GPU Cores", or "10 CPU Cores and 24 GPU Cores", or the like. But not even Apple's own store really makes an upfront differential between performance and efficiency cores.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#426

Post by lolinder »

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?

There's already a sibling comment that suggests this, but to elaborate, this is how I would typically organize something like that:

    /home/my_user/
      Customer/
        Project/
          Subtask/
            Foo.txt
            Bar.txt
Is there a reason why you can't just use nested folders?

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#427

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

goosedragons wrote: post #114
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 lik…

So, I always invert the mouse scroll wheel on Linux now, because the Mac scroll direction just feels right to me. Which is sort of the problem here: macOS’s UI works really well if the paradigm makes sense to you and long-time Mac users often have the same problems “backwards” when they use Linux or windows.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#428

Post by throwanem »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #361
Aardwolf wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a mac user (but a linux user who chooses desktops with the windowing paradigms of like windows 2000 or so plus multiple desktops) so have no idea how it's like in practice, but: These days it's very common for more than half your work to take place in a browser, with many browser windows, each having many tabs Every window of the browser almost is like its own application for the user, yet they're all from th…

It doesn't work out well. This is an area of macos that grinds my gears daily. It gets even messier if you maximize an app, or use multiple desktops. Often I need to quickly switch between a particular terminal window to a particular browser window. But it's always a gamble. I don't know what I'm gonna get when I press cmd+tab. It may show the correct window, or it may show all terminal windows, or it may even do abs…

This is the problem at root, yeah.

Application switching makes sense in a world where the application is the locus of interest and you tend to spend a long time in each app, only rarely switching to another. We haven't lived in that world for a very long time.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#429

Post by poink »

This is fair. Most of the bad mentioned can be worked around trivially, and even turned into a strength with third party apps (a lot of the window management stuff, especially, has more/better third party options than Windows), but Macs are total garbage as corpo machines. Pegging yourself to anything less than the latest version of anything (as businesses managing a fleet of machines are wont to do) is Russian roulette. It’ll work for a while then break with zero warning. You’ll put in a paid issue with Apple support and they’ll just throw their hands up and tell you they can’t help you unless you’re on the latest version.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#430

Post by MereInterest »

s__s wrote: post #184
olyjohn wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On Mac you generally just don’t minimize windows unless you explicitly want that behaviour (sort of hidden and available manually through the dock). It’s just a different workflow.

The few times I've used a Mac, trying to use this workflow just leads to a lot of visual clutter. Everything sits on top of everything else, and every window is sitting somewhere on the screen, a constant reminder that nags at the back of your mind.
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