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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

> And as for some saying that MacOS is becoming more iOS like: Yes, it's been happening since Mac OS X Lion with the fullscreen Launchpad. Nothing has changed.

I'd say a lot has changed, because everything is a matter of degrees. As soon as I realized Launchpad was a piece of crap, I put an Applications folder stack in my dock a la the Leopard default, and forgot that Launchpad exists.

Can't really ignore it anymore...

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My solution is to just use Spotlight Search to launch everything. My hands are on the keyboard much more than a mouse or touchpad, and it's a good habit for when I switch between the laptop (where the touchpad is more convenient) and a desktop setup where they're more physically separated. Hunting for things on a screen with a cursor is tedious and annoying to me, when I can always just type it. But maybe that's a habit from growing up with MSDOS and (later) Linux and FreeBSD starting in college.

Spotlight search is one of the only patterns I really took away from using a mac for work.

I even mapped Super (win key) + Space to the application finder in XFCE. It's just muscle memory at this point, just like the vim keybindings.

And, really, any excuse to use the mouse less is a win.

You can also just right-click the Launchpad icon on the Dock.

I've been using a MacBook for ~5 years full-time for all sorts of development (including frontend JavaScript, backend APIs, big data involving hadoop, etc.) and I've never used launchpad. I don't see why it can't be ignored? I don't even have it in my menu bar.

Sorry, I wasn't clear.

Launchpad can absolutely still be ignored†, but the overall iOS-ization of macOS cannot be. It is ever-present, in every part of the system.

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† If it even still exists in macos 11.

It looked like Launchpad was not in the Big Sur install. It wasn’t in the docks for the demos. I suspect that it as been deprecated if not fully retired.

I’m also seeing UI elements from MacOS coming to iPads in the sidebar components they are adding.

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