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Comment by finalis | Hacker News Reader

I used to think that too before I made the switch to macOS. Yes it was a learning curve initially, but it wasn't unmanageable, and you start to uncover Windows annoyances that you never knew existed because you were used to them and conditioned into thinking they were normal for so long. You'd be surprised how flexible your needs are when you aren't pigeonholing yourself.

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>and you start to uncover Windows annoyances that you never knew existed because you were used to them and conditioned into thinking they were normal for so long

..which promptly get replaced with mac annoyances. Random ones off the top of my head:

* closing a window (using the red x icon) doesn't close the app

* overwriting a folder deletes existing contents, rather than merging them

* weird scroll acceleration that makes clicky scroll wheels unusable

I never understood the rational behind the second one... Sure I get that's how directories probably work underneath the hood but in a GUI I guess I expected a bit more "magic"

>* overwriting a folder deletes existing contents, rather than merging them

Wait. If there truly is not a setting for this then it makes finder unusable as a file explorer and arguably the entire OS. Recursive merge is one of the most fundamental things a personal computer does.

There is in fact a workaround, hold down option while copying the folder. Note that there needs to be at least one subitem in common.

that's the pretty standard behavior on unix. Unless the window manager goes out of its way to override it, mv'ing a folder to a place where one already exists will replace the old folder with the new one.

You can go out of your way to do it manually with rsync and similar tools, of course, but by default you're moving directory pointers around, not merging trees.

How many Unix graphical OS distributions are there even, let alone how many are installed?

Nautilus, the default file manager of GNOME (and by extension Debian and its children such as Ubuntu) handles recursive merge. This isn't an issue on Linux.

It's obviously bad design to have something as high level as a file manager be a glorified 2D wrapper of 2 command line tools.

The window manager manages windows. It has nothing to do with the filesystem or how it's presented to the user.

They meant "window file manager", ie graphical file manager.

> that's the pretty standard behavior on unix.

Not even slightly:

  $ mkdir 1 2
  $ touch 1/foo 1/bar 2/baz 2/quux
  $ mv -T 2 1
  mv: overwrite '1'? y
  mv: cannot move '2' to '1': Directory not empty
  $ mv --force -T 2 1
  mv: cannot move '2' to '1': Directory not empty

I hate being the kind of internet guy who's like "X sucks" about something a lot of people have worked on, but I really, really, really dislike Finder. It fails as a file explorer on several fundamental levels. For example network shares in Finder feel so tenuous and like they could break any instant. Sometimes after you sleep your Mac and wake it up, you have to reboot to be able to reconnect to a network share.

Well, at least Finder used to be good... before OS X.

> * closing a window (using the red x icon) doesn't close the app

Command-Q is your friend.

> * closing a window (using the red x icon) doesn't close the app

There are applications with more than one window.

> * weird scroll acceleration that makes clicky scroll wheels unusable This is called "progress" or UI/UX or whatever name they have today for brain damage . Some years ago the Apple GUI was looking good. Then the replaced the window buttons with coloured circles. Guess which one is which ?

>There are applications with more than one window.

And windows handles it just fine. Clicking X on one window doesn't close the entire app.

I have to use macos for work. I don't think it's very good. Mostly just different (and less untuitive for me - ymmv). I started by being annoyed about the UI, then the cli differences (it's not linux) then I got annoyed by the terrible finder, then I got annoyed by frequent beachballs, then... it goes on.

Some people just don't like it.

> Some people just don't like it.

Indeed. That goes for any software and it'd be really nice if we could grow beyond our childish tribalism and accept that "I don't like the way your favorite software works" is not a personal attack.

Your frequent beachballs might be caused by your work installing an antivirus on the mac, such as carbon black or crowdstrike. Or a bad external hard drive causing i/o freezes.

Honestly, I feel like Apple should just throw away Unix compliance at this point. The average Mac is less POSIX-derived than most unlicensed Linux distros (or BSD derivatives, for that matter), and it only serves to further ostracize people like me, who just want to develop and not wait on my computer. Most Mac owners I know wouldn't care at this point, since they're either completely used to this kind of treatment or quit programming altogether.

I have used other operating systems, including Linux and MacOS. While I am fond of MacOS Application Bundles, I do not like many other things, like single-button mice, limited choice in hardware, and relative lack of gaming.

Apple's mice haven't been single button since ages ago. Right click works out of the box, and all of their own mice also supports right clicking in various ways

Yet they still build the Magic mouse as though it was a single button mouse so it doesn't actually have 2 separate switches, just 1 in the middle. This annoyingly means that clicks don't always click if you're too far from the center.

Apple has never actually built a mouse with 2 distinct switches for left and right click. It's like they are too proud or something and "right" click needs to be faked for some reason.

Sure, but to be fair, most laptops these days does the same.

You know you can connect any USB mice you want, right?

Right now, I'm using a Steelseries one with a Mac. All six buttons and the scroll-wheel work fine.

> You know you can connect any USB mice you want, right?

Yes, I'm aware of that. When I last seriously used MacOS X it was still the PPC era, and while technically you could use a 2 button mouse it wasn't really designed for it. Anyway, compared to other complaints that's a minor gripe of mine.

> and while technically you could use a 2 button mouse it wasn't really designed for it.

I don't quite think this is true. I'm pretty certain that MacOS 9 had a right click menu if you plugged in a two button mouse; I've used MacOS since version 6 and I recall distinctly right click being a novelty in OS 8.

Apple's philosophy always was that context menus could aid other workflows in the program, but couldn't replace them -- the functionality had to be accessible in some other way. Which, I thought, certainly makes sense if 90% of your users have a one button mouse. Could this be what you're thinking of?

> while technically you could use a 2 button mouse it wasn't really designed for it

Nope. Plug in a two button USB mouse and it just worked.

Side-note: I really, really, really wish MacOS had mouse acceleration control in the settings menu. It's the first frustrating roadblock I hit whenever I set up a Mac, and it makes me just want to flash it with something else.

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