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Comment by truetraveller | Hacker News Reader

Mac UX is far worse compared to Windows, in my opinion. I feel very claustrophobic using it. How do you live without a simple maximize button? "Maximimze to contents" is ambiguous, and in practice, does not work at all for most apps. I find myself having to "manually" maximize windows. And now, I don't want a third party app.

To add to this, even after I "maximimze" windows, I have an ugly menu bar at the top, in addition to the windows own titlebar. Allow apps to have a menu in their own window, but don't force an ugly global menu. For the clock/systray, integrate it like windows in the bottom app bar.

I could keep listing frustrations. Many of these are objective.

Note: I'm not talking about app installation, or malware, or "polish". Mac is superior, will agree.

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> How do you live without a simple maximize button?

Classic Mac OS apps did not put the entire application UI in a single full screen window. Instead, it was typical for an application to contain multiple windows that could all be visible at once.

> To add to this, the "top" menu bar is lame.

This is related. In Windows, the entire UI of the app is contained in a single window, which you would typically maximize to fill the screen. In classic Mac OS, apps have multiple windows open at the same time, but the menu bar pertains to the application and not to the window.

I understand all of that. And that is precisely my point. Isolate everything concerning an app to its own window, and allow that to be maximized. If an app has multiple windows, contain them within the main app window. Don't pollute the "global" window space with app-specific windows.

> If an app has multiple windows, contain them within the main app window.

This advice is actually rarely followed by apps regardless of whether they are on Windows or Mac. Consider Microsoft Word; if you open two Word documents, does Microsoft Word open two windows or does it open one main app window and then contain both documents in a single window? Are you aware of this Microsoft concept called MDI?

It sounds like you were used to iOS where each app has but one window and you'd prefer that to be the case on desktop operating systems like Mac or Windows. There's nothing with preferring that, but it's against decades of desktop computing tradition.

The tradeoff to that being the lack of UI consistency between applications.

That makes it really hard to use two (or more) applications side-by-side effectively. I am grateful for individual windows I can move exactly to where I need them without worrying about the application as a whole. I think it boils down to how people think — application-centered thinking makes it easy to have multiple windows from different applications playing nicely with each other, workspace-centered thinking hates what appears to be the messiness of applications having windows here and there.

If they’re anything like this, almost none of your frustrations are going to be objective - they are going to be things that grate on you because of the design and interaction models you are used to.

There’s nothing wrong with that! You’re allowed to prefer particular approaches. It’s like when I use Windows or Ubuntu, and get frustrated at how particular interactions work. It’s not because the Mac is objectively better, but because I’m used to it.

(Except for the keyboard shortcuts. Distinct control/option/command keys is objectively better and I will die on this hill.)

>Distinct control/option/command Way too much cognitive load. Just have a single "ctrl". Coupled with shift, that's more than enough for most hotkeys.

The way I remember it, command was used for commands, option was mostly for typing accented characters, and ctrl was only used within terminal windows (which means most Mac users would have never touched it).

ctrl+click was used to show the context menu with a single button mouse. At least some probably used it!

https://www.wired.com/2000/10/eek-a-two-button-mac-mouse/

"In recent years, the company has added "contextual menus" to the Macintosh operating system. But to activate them, users must hold down the control key while pressing down the mouse button, which more or less defeats the purpose."

Oct 31, 2000

> How do you live without a simple maximize button?

Why would I want a webpage which stops showing additional content after ~1200 pixels wide to take up the entire of my 2560px wide monitor?

Because it removes the clutter of your desktop + other windows. I think many would agree. Sure, there are times you need to see windows side-by-side, and there is affordance for that. But mostly, a person is doing one task at a time.

As my displays have gotten larger, I've found I want my windows to take up less and less of them. I may occasionally full-screen something, but it always feels incredibly difficult to deal with. As primarily a Windows user, I've more than once wished I had a "fit to content" button like Mac's.

Just another instance of different users having different patterns.

I'm this person. I have a hard time focusing on one, never mind more than one - in a similar vein, notifications are also disabled / minimized.

I feel like the expected pattern to deal with clutter in MacOS is by hiding rather than just covering. This is often forgotten about but you can alt+click on an app to hide all other apps but the one you clicked. This is even in possible in Mac OS 9. In modern macOS you can invert the behaviour by turning on single-app mode through the terminal. It's then alt+click to show multiple apps and just click to hide all but the app.

> Why would I want a webpage which stops showing additional content after ~1200 pixels wide to take up the entire of my 2560px wide monitor?

Personally, 80% of my web usage these days is hacker news and wikipedia. Neither of which do this.

The rest is probably majority dev docs (crystal atm), and I'm not aware of any dev docs that do this either.

The point here being that not all websites exhibit this behavior.

To avoid everything else distracting you.

I only started using MacOS a few months ago. For the first ~2 weeks, I hated it. I actually remember thinking that it felt like a poorly implemented clone of MacOS ironically. But the truth is, whilst you can jump between Windows and most Linux distros (even Fedora) without much trouble, MacOS is an entirely different beast.

For example, I learnt that, completely different than Windows, on MacOS you're not really supposed to minimise windows, at least not as you would on Windows. Instead, you open the command centre or whatever its called and switch between them. Workspaces also arent an optional extra, they're pretty crucial to using the OS if you have multiple windows open. Its for these reasons I can see why people praise the trackpad so much, its actually preferable to use over a mouse because its so deeply embedded in the flow of the OS.

I'm not saying MacOS is objectively better in its workflow, for that I'm still not sure what I'll end up using as my main computer, just that its different and should be treated as such.

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