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The erosion of the Mac experience

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Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#322

I feel like I may be the only developer that prefers Windows to MacOs. I really, really just do not get the "Mac Experience". It feels so clunky and counter intuitive. - Why does the alt tab equivalent cycle through applications first, and I need another shortcut to cycle through the windows of that application? When I have an IDE with 5x instances, hosting different projects, it's a pain switching back to the projec…

I'm with you, I'm a dev who prefers Windows over Mac. I'm convinced that most Mac users don't use multiple monitors and they're completely fine with the really poor window management. It boggles my mind; I am objectively less productive with a single monitor than I am with multiple.

> I am objectively less productive with a single monitor than I am with multiple.

I've tried multi-monitor setups before with both Windows and OS X, and I just don't like them. I moved to a 43" 4K TV, and I like it much better, especially with a window manager like Rectangle. If I need extra screen real estate, OS X has pretty good support for virtual desktops, but I haven't felt the need yet.

One of these days, I might feel cramped by my setup, but I suspect that I'd rather go up to 50" than get multiple monitors. Especially if I could go 8K by then.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#323

I feel like I may be the only developer that prefers Windows to MacOs. I really, really just do not get the "Mac Experience". It feels so clunky and counter intuitive. - Why does the alt tab equivalent cycle through applications first, and I need another shortcut to cycle through the windows of that application? When I have an IDE with 5x instances, hosting different projects, it's a pain switching back to the projec…

> I just cannot understand why…

Because it’s natively UNIX-based and this well-supported by the tooling.

Sure, Windows has WSL and it’s great and it’s gaining developers but IMHO it isn’t quite there yet.

And it’s really important to acknowledge that there are a metric crapload of real world devs on Windows. I wouldn’t be surprised if the vast majority of programmers were on Windows.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#325
Fundamentally, I believe that Apple's biggest fans fall into two different camps. In one camp, you have people who effectively want macOS on an iPad with a touch-centric UI which is made obvious by their assertion that a unified everything across all devices is the correct path forward. The other camp wants a traditional desktop operating system on their Macintosh computers.

Personally, the only reason I enjoy Macintosh machines at all is the UNIX platform with a distraction free environment. The has been dying and I have therefore gone back to using Slackware with TDE. I don't want 50,000 notifications. I don't want my computer to be a dumb terminal to network services. I want my UNIX environment to be a first class feature and not an afterthought. The Apple Silicon chips are the sexiest thing to happen in technology since the introduction of the first ThreadRipper, but they aren't worth the trade off for me personally. Being forced back into the Apple world with, what is in my opinion, a distracting environment just makes me less productive.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#327
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OPs solution is the only valid solution they have open to them though.

The personal solution is to not buy monitors from manufacturers that fail to put EDID chips in their HDMI signal path. The set of manufacturers that do this is well-documented.

I give up. I couldn’t find that list. Where do I look?

It would be useful to know what brands to avoid.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#328

I feel like I may be the only developer that prefers Windows to MacOs. I really, really just do not get the "Mac Experience". It feels so clunky and counter intuitive. - Why does the alt tab equivalent cycle through applications first, and I need another shortcut to cycle through the windows of that application? When I have an IDE with 5x instances, hosting different projects, it's a pain switching back to the projec…

because it's easy to manage packages using brew, Windows has the... winget which is all but abandoned. For the longest time there was no such thing as WSL so Mac had a serious advantage for us who migrated between Linux and Mac. And as you've mentioned I've had so many quality control issues with Windows computers including Dell and Asus that eventually I just said fuck it I'd rather spend 3 to 4 grand on a machine t…

there is chocolatey as well which i find works great

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When I'm using it I have to Google how to do simple stuff like copy and paste." Really? everytime? :-)

Actually I got this mixed up with taking a screenshot, which kinda proves my point because I had to Google to find this out. Also no one can say CMD+shift+5 is intuitive to take a screenshot, prtsrn is much easier.

[flagged]

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#330
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, Mac is the one platform I avoid virtual desktops because the experience is so clunky with no keyboard commands to move items between spaces or jump to spaces, and the weirdness with fullscreen windows being their own space but then returning to a previous space when fullscreen is exited.

> no keyboard commands to move items between spaces Not natively but Rectangle.app is a FOSS app that has them. > jump to spaces Control+(left arrow|right arrow) does it for me. It doesn't hop across destops but it gets me where I want quickly without moving my hand off the keyboard. > fullscreen windows being their own space but then returning to a previous space when fullscreen is exited I'm not sure what you'd con…

>Control+(left arrow|right arrow) does it for me. It doesn't hop across destops but it gets me where I want quickly without moving my hand off the keyboard.

You can create desktop-specific shortcuts in Keyboard → Shortcuts → Mission Control → Switch to Desktop N

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