- Alt+Tab is bugged. You need a third party app to bring consistent behaviour.
- Closing a window with window decorator very often minimizes it instead, no consistency.
- Recording or capturing screenshot is tedious without a third party app
- Homebrew is underwhelming as a package manager. It feels like Linux package managers did around 20 year ago.
- No global shortcut key to trigger arbitrary commands (you need a third party app). Like, starting a terminal.
- Bad support for external keyboard. Dead keys everywhere that have otherwise consistent meaning (delete, home, end, etc). The kinda stuff that could happen on Linux 10 years ago.
- No sensible support for external mouse, such as scrolling behaviour is stuck to what would make sense for the trackpad, and feels bad on a mouse. You need to install a third party app to handle this.
- No copy/cut paste in file manager. You need to drag and drop like a primate.
- Oh, and finder, in general, is bad at almost all the things a file manager should be good at. But, someone somewhere at apple decided that labels trumps hierarchical file structures, to navigate a hierarchical file system.
- Built in advertisements for apple products pop up from time to time.
- "I guess I won't start working right now because MacOS is installing a mandatory update" has already happened.
- Bypassing security check to launch app, as in the "open anyway" is bugged since 2016, but it's still there. And you can click on it without it doing anything. You have to google the command to disable the whole app audit thing and run it in a terminal. (You know, the kind of stuff you had to do on Linux 10 years ago).
- Moving windows around is tedious without a third party app.
- Accessing the root file system through Finder requires googling how and running a command on the terminal (you know, the kind of stuff you had to do on Linux 10 years ago).
This list is just the annoyances noticed this week, and I'm sure I've forgotten quite a few. It feels like crap, and it's not because "apple bad, buu huu". I don't care about your team/my team. I just want things to work and not be annoying. Windows 10 and 11 is crap for many of the same reasons as MacOS. Just a different collection of bad designs. The "it just works" has been Linux for at least the last 5 years.
You're working really hard to make this stuff upp mate.
> Alt+Tab is bugged. You need a third party app to bring consistent behaviour.
It's Cmd+Tab, and huh? What do you mean bugged? Elaborate please.
> Closing a window with window decorator very often minimizes it instead, no consistency.
This is app-specific functionality, you'll find similarly inconsistent behaviour across all OS:es to be honest.
> Recording or capturing screenshot is tedious without a third party app
Cmd+Shift+5, no app, records or screenshots with many convenient ways to select the scope of your screenshot/recording like window, screen, or just a specific area. This is one of the more polished and well thought out features in macOS.
> Homebrew is underwhelming as a package manager. It feels like Linux package managers did around 20 year ago.
It's an open-source project that's outgrown it's initial purpose, it's also not native and while Linux distributions generally build around the package manager as a central point, Homebrew is hacked together and tacked on as an afterthought, not a fair comparison.
> No global shortcut key to trigger arbitrary commands (you need a third party app). Like, starting a terminal.
Spotlight has been a part of macOS for I don't even know how long at this point, but I looked it up for you, it's 18 years.
> Bad support for external keyboard. Dead keys everywhere that have otherwise consistent meaning (delete, home, end, etc). The kinda stuff that could happen on Linux 10 years ago.
Fair, Apple have some special keyboard behaviours that aren't shared with other OS:es, but if you buy a keyboard meant for macOS it's gonna work fine.
> No sensible support for external mouse, such as scrolling behaviour is stuck to what would make sense for the trackpad, and feels bad on a mouse. You need to install a third party app to handle this.
Yeah, I think this is one of Apples eccentric stubbornness things, I honestly can't fathom why the OS doesn't have a native way of setting scroll direction differently for the touchpad and an external mouse.
> No copy/cut paste in file manager. You need to drag and drop like a primate.
Copy is there, but there's no cut, I wanna say that's another Steve Jobs legacy that's probably never going to go away. I hate this too.
> Oh, and finder, in general, is bad at almost all the things a file manager should be good at. But, someone somewhere at apple decided that labels trumps hierarchical file structures, to navigate a hierarchical file system.
I have no idea what you're talking about here. What are you comparing to and what's so much better about it? Honestly I do most of my file managing using the terminal and I suspect you do too, and my parents have no issue navigating Finder, so I don't know why this is such an offensively bad thing to you.
> Built in advertisements for apple products pop up from time to time.
They do? Where? In 18 years of using macOS I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've felt that Apple were peddling something at me.
> Bypassing security check to launch app, as in the "open anyway" is bugged since 2016, but it's still there. And you can click on it without it doing anything. You have to google the command to disable the whole app audit thing and run it in a terminal. (You know, the kind of stuff you had to do on Linux 10 years ago).
With you here. I get what they're trying to do, but the UX here is pretty terrible.
> Moving windows around is tedious without a third party app.
Window management I concede is something Linux distributions generally excel at.
> Accessing the root file system through Finder requires googling how and running a command on the terminal (you know, the kind of stuff you had to do on Linux 10 years ago).
Most Mac users shouldn't be accessing the root file system, this is a feature, not a bug.
> The "it just works" has been Linux for at least the last 5 years.
HAH, now I know you're just trolling. Good one!
In your defense, I'll agree that many of the things that make macOS and other Apple OS:es nice to work with are under-the-hood things most people wouldn't have any idea exist without being told, I know because I'm technical and have learned one or two a year for 18 years. Needless to say there's now hundreds of such things to learn and most users have no way of accessing that knowledge.
I don't like that you say I am trolling. Kinda makes the discussion hostile. Either you are interested in hearing the experience of someone used to other OS, or you are not.
I agree about the screenshot functionality. I didn't know about CMD+shift+5 (and 4). It was built in, and it is fine. I must have incorrectly assumed it didn't exist since apple hadn't bother respecting the "Print Screen" button.
As for cmd+tab, due to the inconsistencies in the close/minimize behavior, this also means that cmd+tab leads to inconsistent behaviour. You literally either replace cmd+tab with something else (e.g. get used to adding option key in there, or remap the keybindings, or use a third party app). The alternative is to start memorizing which apps behave differently. Which is out of the question. As for what other OS'es do, I cannot speak for W10/11 because I don't want to boot into it. But, for gnome, apps that default to hide instead of closing (e.g. slack) actually hide, so they don't show up in Alt-Tab overview. Those that still show up there will also be brought to the front, as one would expect.
Also, launching spotlight and typing something hitting enter is not the same as having a global key-bind to launch a terminal.
Regarding the finder, perhaps a got a bit biased there. It's probably something different rather than bad. Perhaps just the disbelief that I couldn't use it to cut and paste, and thought "fuck this" and used a terminal, or that I couldn't find the root file system.
In any case, another week has passed, and I've made some more observations:
- Animation between desktops is incorrectly implemented and tied to frames, rather than duration. If you use "ProMotion" i.e. 120hz the animation takes twice as long as when on 60hz. Two seconds compared to one second. Either is ridiculously long. And, of course you cannot adjust this, because Apple has decided what the perfect experience is... Bleh.
- When downloads complete, MacOS will show an animation on the docker for the completed download, which... steals the input focus. Another amateurish bug.
When I thought about having to MacOS professionally, I was prepared for some frustration about bad apple design decisions. I was not prepared for the inconsistencies, the bugs, and seemingly petty refusal to facilitate anything non-apple.
Also, I'm just mentioning things that seem like straight up bugs or deficiencies. There are maaaaany tiny frustrations that are more "alright, this seems like a less useful implemention of what I'm used to". For example if I open the overview I very often think one of two things:
- Ah, I would like to close that app.
- Ah, I don't have that open, so I want to open it.
Neither of these work flows are implemented. For the former, you have to either click the app to bring it up to focus, then close it with Cmd-Q (which is ALSO inconsistent btw. Chome won't let you for example). Or you need to find it in the docker, right click and Quit. Oh, and you cannot do this while the overview is open even though the docker is shown. Right clicking doesn't do anything. Just add it to the pile of tiny inconsistencies fucking everywhere.
And for opening an app, you cannot just type as if you had spotlight open. You have to leave the overview and start spotlight. This isn't all that bad, but, definitely annoying compared to what I'm used to.
Oh, and I had a chuckle as well when I plugged in an external mouse and it asked me to press down' the button to the right of the left shift. Come on... USB peripheral identification isn't that hard.
I don't advise just running Mathias' config as is, but read through it and see if anything seems to be something you want in yours, make the changes, and save it somewhere for the next time you're setting up a Mac.
There's some stuff in there about speeding up certain animations (look for "Speed up Mission Control animations"), and about not reordering "spaces" (desktops, full-screen apps, search for "Don’t automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use") based on use which I think may also affect cmd+tab ordering? Not sure, but it's a setting I always change anyway because the default doesn't make sense for power users.
About the trolling thing, sorry, I was genuinely not sure if you were arguing in good faith or just making stuff up, as most of the things you were saying were just plain incorrect or dishonest, from comparing desktop computer performance to low-powered laptops, to incorrect statements about features macOS truly excels at.
The dotfile looks like a great collection of minor tweaks. Thanks.
I don't know what I lied about on the performance though. The MacBook M2 feels slower and sluggish than what I'm used to. It is of course plenty fast enough for what most people need it for. So, I'm not really saying it's not that. But, on discussions on the Mx architecture, the general opinion is blown out of reality. It started when apple straight up lied and sait it was 3 times faster than the existing competition. They just forgot to mention that existing competition was their own previous offering, which was already mid-range when it was introduced 5 years prior.
Take a look at the numbers there and see if that matches your assumptions:
So, to clarify, my objections are not against "M1/M2 are good CPUs". They are actually pretty great, especially for how well it is supported and integrated with the rest of the system, allowing for exceptional power usage. But, it's not nearly as fast as many think it is. And it's tiring if/when that's the baseline argument for why apple hardware is great. And, I think they are wildly overpriced, especially when upgrading the hardware to the bare minimum for a serious work station (64GB ram and 2TB disk).
The alt-tab issue is solved with the `AltTab` which improves it in all ways.
I also remembered what I found lacking in finder. In Nautilus (the file browser I use on Linux), I can browse any ssh server as if a normal directory. Same goth with samba, sftp. And it also helps that it supports multiple different file systems out of the box.
> But, it's not nearly as fast as many think it is.
I'm running on an M2 Max with 64GB RAM here, both Kali and Windows VMs active and working, while my macOS host is running browsers, email clients, Docker containers, etc. All of this without my fans ever spinning, I'm not even convinced they actually installed the fans in mine, I don't think I've ever heard them.
In short, I'm a heavy user and I've never felt I need more performance in my laptop than this provides.
> And it also helps that it supports multiple different file systems out of the box.
What other filesystems do you need your computer to be able to directly mount? macOS supports FAT, exFAT, NFTS, HFS(+), APFS. Anything else you're probably gonna access through SMB, AFP, NFS, CIFS, FTP, SFTP, or FTPS anyway, all of which are natively supported in macOS (OK, you can't mount SFTP, but I don't get why you would want to honestly).
