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Make macOS consistently bad unironically

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Re: Make macOS consistently bad unironically

#331

Post by hennell »

freetime2 wrote: post #94
amarant wrote: post #16

I must say that all this fuzz about the corners actually reflects rather well on macos. If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS! It's not gonna make me leave my darling Linux, ofc, but i think this whole debacle can only be interpreted as praise. On second thought, it might also be considered a mediation on people's tendency to bike-shed.

Yeah "notorious inconsistency issues in windows corners" almost feels like an oxymoron to me. Perhaps it is notorious among graphic designers, but I'm sure the vast majority of MacOS users will never notice or care.

My colleague update his Mac a while back and I commented on the wild difference in corners between finder and word from across the room. I had to walk round and physically point at them for him to know what I was on about, and then he says "oh yeah, guess they are a bit different"

To my designers eye it was the first thing I saw, to him it was nothing.

I still think it's bad and a sign of a change in apple focus/style, but it's clearly not an issue at all for a lot of people.

Said colleague did get cross when he struggled to resize a window though. Turns out inconsistent corners means inconsistent handles. And that is a real problem.

Re: Make macOS consistently bad unironically

#332

Post by fredgrott »

Somehow this little hidden setting via CLI

defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES

Makes thing bearable....note log out to see it change.

You still need to then turn transparency off via settings see

this

https://tidbits.com/2025/10/09/how-to-turn-liquid-glass-into...

Re: Make macOS consistently bad unironically

#334

Post by arendtio »

amarant wrote: post #16

I must say that all this fuzz about the corners actually reflects rather well on macos. If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS! It's not gonna make me leave my darling Linux, ofc, but i think this whole debacle can only be interpreted as praise. On second thought, it might also be considered a mediation on people's tendency to bike-shed.

I think it is more like the newest incarnation of sub-optimal user experience decisions. 20 years ago, their system was great for the time. However, nowadays it feels like a system that has been developed over time by different people with different concepts in mind.

Currently, MacOS has the worst window management compared to Windows and (all) the Linux desktop environments. I mean, where else do you have such problems with resizing windows or just switching between windows, not to mention the inconsistent feature sets when you want to work with virtual desktops...

Re: Make macOS consistently bad unironically

#335

Post by KronisLV »

root_axis wrote: post #262
zackmorris wrote: post #89

Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade. Also I can't paste filenames in the save file dialog in some apps. And the URL field in Safari is just weird. My computer was running so slowly that I had to minimize transparency in system preferences somewhere. I think I also turned off opening every app in its own space. And I hid the icons on the Desktop in Finder settings somehow, which…

> Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades I've been hearing this complaint for decades and I'll never understand it. The suggestion seems completely at odds with my own experience. Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on. I remember a time when I could visually see the screen repaint after minimizing a window, or waiting…

> Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.

This very much depends on what hardware you have and what you're doing on it (how much spare capacity you have).

Back in university I had a Techbite Zin 2, it had a Celeron N3350 and 4 GB of LPDDR4. It was affordable for me as a student (while I also had a PC in the dorm) and the keyboard was great and it worked out nicely for note taking and some web browsing when visiting parents in the countryside.

At the same time, the OS made a world of difference and it was anything but fast. Windows was pretty much unusable and it was the kind of hardware where you started to think whether you really need XFCE or whether LXDE would be enough.

I think both of the statements can be true: that Wirth's law is true and computers run way, way slower than they should due to bad software... and that normally you don't really feel it due to us throwing a lot of hardware at the problem to make us able to ignore it.

It's largely the same as you get with modern video game graphics and engines like UE5, where only now we are seeing horrible performance across the board that mainstream hardware often can't make up for and so devs reach for upscaling and framegen as something they demand you use (e.g. Borderlands 4), instead of just something to use for mobile gaming.

It's also like running ESLint and Prettier on your project and having a full build and formatting iteration take like 2 minutes without cache (though faster with cache), HOWEVER then you install Oxlint and Oxfmt and are surprised to find out that it takes SECONDS for the whole codebase. Maybe the "rewrite it in Rust" folks had a point. Bad code in Rust and similar languages will still run badly, but a fast runtime will make good code fly.

I could also probably compare the old Skype against modern Teams, or probably any split between the pre-Electron and modern day world.

Note: runtime in the loose sense, e.g. compiled native executables, vs the kind that also have GC, vs something like JVM and .NET, vs other interpreters like Python and Ruby and so on. Idk what you'd call it more precisely, execution model?

Re: Make macOS consistently bad unironically

#337

Post by realo »

root_axis wrote: post #262
zackmorris wrote: post #89

Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade. Also I can't paste filenames in the save file dialog in some apps. And the URL field in Safari is just weird. My computer was running so slowly that I had to minimize transparency in system preferences somewhere. I think I also turned off opening every app in its own space. And I hid the icons on the Desktop in Finder settings somehow, which…

> Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades I've been hearing this complaint for decades and I'll never understand it. The suggestion seems completely at odds with my own experience. Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on. I remember a time when I could visually see the screen repaint after minimizing a window, or waiting…

Ok. Today we have multi-Ghz processors, with multiple cores at that.

Photons travel about 1 foot per nanosecond ... so the CPU can executes MANY instructions between the time photons leave your screen, and the time they reach your eyes.

Now, on Windows start Word (on a Mac start Writer) ... come on ... I'll wait.

Still with me? Don't blame the SSD and reload it again from the cache.

Weep.

Re: Make macOS consistently bad unironically

#338

Post by hackrmn »

For all his infamy, Jobs held Apple together in large part through his uncompromising perfectionism and attention to the kind of details that have since been demoted to "we'll fix it in the next version" or the equivalent of "# temporary". Every company is a bit of an ant-farm, but this one either has no single queen to lay down the law, or the queen is "trying things out" :P

Jobs used to laugh at Microsoft for all manner of inconsistencies in behaviour and user experience with Windows, but now Apple is contending with the same problem, in part due to exposure as macOS has never been so popular and prevalent, and now there are ever growing amount of eyes calling them out for those inconsistencies that have been appearing more and more frequently without Jobs' leadership style.

Re: Make macOS consistently bad unironically

#339

Post by cluckindan »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #139
cluckindan wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Install i3wm, it will change your life.

Something I realized after spending a few months in sway (i3) and then niri is that I only care about a few windows (code editor, terminal, browser, apps I use moment to moment). All the rest I'd prefer to just summon as-needed and then dismiss without navigating away from the windows I care about. sway/niri want me to tile every window into some top-level spot. Took me a while to admit it, but the usual Windows/macO…

Maybe awesome-wm would be better for you then.

Re: Make macOS consistently bad unironically

#340

Post by paustint »

freetime2 wrote: post #101
_jab wrote: post #9

Between the rounded corners that don't reach the edges of the viewport, and the behavior when opening a new app for the first time, it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle. Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always…

I use Rectangle [1] for window management. I only use three shortcuts: full screen, left half of the screen, and right half of the screen. My editors and Chrome are always running in one of these modes. But for other apps where interactions tend to be brief like Finder, Messages, Notes, Music, etc - yeah I don't usually expand them to full screen. [1] https://rectangleapp.com/

Exact same for me - but I also use the shortcut to move windows between monitors.

I use cmd+tab and cmd+~ a ton also as I have multiple browser profiles and windows open and usually a few instances of ide with different projects.

And always close tabs with cmd+w and apps with cmd+q to avoid running apps with no visible windows.

I feel super productive with this workflow, never need to fiddle with manual resize.

When someone is screen sharing and they have a bunch of random sized windows it drives me crazy.

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