He makes a good point that work computers especially benefit from sane defaults so anything the OS doesn’t do well out of the box (even if fixable 3rd party) is no-go for many users.
Impressions from a first-time Mac user
351–360 of 756 posts
Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yep, it's cmd-backspace, which is unfortunately cumbersome, but it works and it's easy enough to remember. That said, how the menu items appear always baffles me. Want to search for a file by name? Hit Ctrl-Shift-Command-F. How did I discover this? Open the menu and start banging different modifier keys till "Find" turns into "Find by Name..." I'm sure this behavior is as old as Macs, but it's an odd quirk, one that…
Or just hit cmd-space for spotlight search?
Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user
#353Lots of "I don't like how it tastes/feels, therefore it must be bad" packaged in a rant, as usual. Essentially only useful information if you are a clone of the author, in all other cases your milage will vary... drastically. There isn't much of a point in attacking or defending taste in such a way, but neither is trying to objectively score something because it's not the objective score that matters, it's how it fee…
What a useless comment. The post is from someone new to Macs. You have completely failed to grasp the context and got immediately defensive.
Is it? The author self-described the written article as a rant, and here on HN the title presents it as a neutral "impressions from a first-time user". I think you may want to do some introspection before accusing people of failing to grasp contexts.
Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user
#354Lots of "I don't like how it tastes/feels, therefore it must be bad" packaged in a rant, as usual. Essentially only useful information if you are a clone of the author, in all other cases your milage will vary... drastically. There isn't much of a point in attacking or defending taste in such a way, but neither is trying to objectively score something because it's not the objective score that matters, it's how it fee…
Exactly. Some people like chocolate ice cream and some like vanilla. I never understand the need some people seem to have for these posts. It’s not going to get me to change. I like my Mac for my own reasons, and that’s all that matters.
Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno, I really like being able to set out my most-used apps and cycle between them with Win+n - much quicker than alt tab / cmd tab. But then that’s not obvious unless you’ve read any of the documentation - so that’s another question, how many people actually read up about their OS features ?
I've always felt like Apple [desktop] tries to make choices based on what's intuitive for the user, presumably through user testing, whereas Windows historically made choices that developers prefer. My impression is Windows has tried to become more user friendly over time, but it has baggage that results in trying to satisfy two influential groups. Maybe this describes a lot of software, but for better or for worse I…
> …whereas Windows historically made choices that developers prefer.
And more recently, what marketing wants. Windows is insanely pushy about Edge and Teams, with the latter even being tied to a key shortcut that I keep accidentally hitting.
Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user
#356Someone needs to tell him about option-click on the maximize button. Most of these "rants" really just amount to: "this different OS doesn't work exactly the same way as the OS I am used to." That's why 3rd party utilities exist to give you the functionality you wish to have. That formula cuts both ways.
“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 of everyone's gender based on the adjective you hear.
> On the other hand, English has a weird grammatical system where you need to listen to the pronoun to know someone or something's gender. I want to know if someone is a man, a woman, or a chair based on the adjective, not just the pronoun.
Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user
#357There'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 of cursor navigation that is so unnecessary as I am looking at all this unused real estate in the dialog box.
For those of you long time Mac users: why are you not out with torches and pitchforks???!!!
Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user
#358Funny. Coming from macOS to Linux Mint, I find I can make many of the same or similar arguments but against Linux.
The UI is inconsistent, esp. wrt the menu bar. Keyboard shortcuts are inconsistent across different apps. macOS remembers window positions, GNOME doesn't. macOS can use different backgrounds for different monitors, GNOME can't. The GNOME Panel is a poor substitute for the macOS Dock (which itself is severely limited) i.e. doesn't offer any visual cue that an app is launching. I could go on.
OSes are a tool. Use what works best for you.
Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user
#359The 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…
Yeah this annoys me too. I just had get used to the fact that if I context switch away to a different desktop, I should switch back with ctrl-left, not with cmd-tab.
Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user
#360We're doing cross-plat work and I have a macBook that I sometimes need to use to compile and debug stuff.
Even after a couple of years, I dread having to work on the mac. Could be me being used to Windows since the DOS / Win3.1 days, but I feel right at home on Windows - know most nooks and crannies; macOS feels like a kid's toy by comparison (an ATM or kiosk terminal) - it literally feels like being asked to do work with my right hand tied behind my back. I actually enjoy working on Linux desktops more than on macOS.
For the past year I have a home setup with a Windows laptop and a macBook side-by-side hooked up to 2 external monitors and Barrier software KVM; the idea was to use Windows for work and mac for personal. But I never venture outside the browser on the mac - a chromebook would work just as well.
I actually wanted to install an USB network adapter because the machine felt so laggy and I blamed wifi; a thing that on Windows for the past 20 years has literally been plug&play needed futzing around with driver packages, an hour of searching for workarounds and at least 2 reboots.
I honestly don't know why so many developers prefer working on mac.