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Comment by synergy20 | Hacker News Reader

job mandates a macbook, had no choice besides changing the job, which I will do later.

one thing bugs me the most, as a linux user, is that copy and paste by mouse middle button, now I have to use mouse to select it, then cmd+v to paste it, what a hassle.

of course I changed that scroll down instead of scroll up thing, I don't want to move up the bar to move down the page, that's just odd.

click to close windows does not really close the apps also bothers me.

Apple is such a closed company nowadays, worse than Microsoft from the past in fact, made me hard to love it, thus those nitpicks becomes issues for me.

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> Apple is such a closed company nowadays, worse than Microsoft

This may be true. But Windows is so absolutely horrible with ads and stupid bloat.

Even my work windows instance defaults to showing Kardashian/politics “news” on new tabs. My home windows instance has so much garbage installed.

Maybe Microsoft is more “open” but their design is poor and anti-user. I’ll settle for Apple being closed and user focused every day.

Of course, I’d really love a Linux laptop with the price and usability of Apple hardware, but I’ve been wanting that for 25 years.

I don't understand what the problem is with the windows!=applications paradigm, I GREATLY prefer it.

Some people just want things to work the way they're used to. I'm one of those people, I find it rather annoying to deal with the windowing paradigm used in (most) Linux windows managers and Windows itself. So I'm not surprised when I see it in the other direction.

I do wish it were possible to set up a macOS-flavored version of focus follows mouse, though. It would have to be adapted to the windowing paradigm, but I have some notes on how it could work. I don't expect Apple will ever add it and it would require deep hooks into many parts of the OS to offer it as an extension, so that's that. There's no perfect software, the only question is what you can live with out of the available options.

I wish there were a DE for Linux that replicated the Mac desktop paradigm. None currently do, even GNOME and Pantheon which people like to point to as the “Mac-like” DEs only aesthetically kinda resemble macOS… their windowing models are closer to a weird hybrid of Windows and iPadOS.

It’s an additional abstraction.

On Windows/Linux closing an app requires doing the obvious thing. Press the big X, you’re done. You’re back to the previous app instantly.

On Mac after closing a window what you see on the screen is a lie (besides the ever subtle menu bar and shades of gray); you’re still in the visually-hidden app.

But why would closing a window close the program? If my program has many windows open which big X should close the program? Why shouldn't I be able to run a program without any windows open?

> If my program has many windows open which big X should close the program?

The last one, obviously.

> Why shouldn't I be able to run a program without any windows open?

Because 99% of the time window IS a program. If a program has no windows, it is a process.

Why should a process and a program be different things? Sounds like an additional abstraction to me

There is absolutely 0 reasons why one would want to have a powerpoint/chrome/photoshop instance without a window.

Calendars, emails, chats that need to run headless in the background live naturally on the top menu bar.

And please spare us from "I want it to open fast". This should not be a user concern, the system should be smart enough to cache frequently used apps.

If I have many documents open in one of those programs and I'm pressing the key commands to close a window and open a new window often I don't want open a new window to suddenly stop working because I didn't realize I had closed the last window.

> the system should be smart enough to cache frequently used apps

I mean…isn’t it sort of doing that by allowing a windowless app instance?

> Apple is such a closed company nowadays, worse than Microsoft from the past in fact

I think that's debatable, the 90's were awful and nothing Apple does right now has the kind of platform dominance MS did. At the height of IE6's reign, there were whole areas of commerce and interaction that could only be done on a Windows machine.

But they're clearly moving in that direction. As we saw two days ago w/r/t the DMA evasion nonsense in Europe, Apple is now willing to pull the same kind of tricks MS was: like killing off browser-based apps (!) to force people onto its proprietary stack.

There's a thread down below about how Safari is better than Chrome. And it might be, but it's clear that from Cook's perspectives standard browsers are ejectable the second you can get people hooked on MacOS/iOS apps.

The window vs. app distinction is pretty easy to smooth over, just sub out ⌘Q for ⌘W so you’re quitting instead of closing windows.

The extra layer of grouping can actually be pretty nice at times, since it allows the user to for example close or minimize/restore all windows of an application across all monitors and virtual desktops at once, but it does take a bit of a different mental model.

⌘Q is evil, sitting as it does next to ⌘W. Too many disasters.

I disable it / remap it somewhere in System Settings.

Chrome nailed it

Is there plugins that can do same?

...until you need to close a Finder window and you need to remember to use ⌘W because that can't be quit. Then you need to make sure to ⌘-tab past Finder because it will hang around near the top of recent apps until you've switched to enough other apps to push it to the bottom of the list.

If anyone has a way around this I'd love to hear it, but I think it's basically a side effect of apps being allowed to be open without a window and Finder always needing to run, so seems like an inherent part of the MacOS experience.

In that case, there’s ⌥⌘W which will close all windows (works in other apps too). You can also use a defaults command to add Quit to the Finder’s menu (I do this to be able to easily temporarily hide desktop icons).

Thanks! I'll give those a go next time I'm on my work machine.

> of course I changed that scroll down instead of scroll up thing, I don't want to move up the bar to move down the page, that's just odd.

That's because the scrolling behavior with the mouse is annoyingly tied to the scrolling behavior of the trackpad, where the "natural scrolling" makes sense as a default because it's like you're moving the page up (similar to a phone) with two fingers rather than scrolling.

I hate having to constantly change it in the settings as I'm switching between trackpad and mouse. The settings need to be separated. Just let me have natural scrolling with the trackpad and regular scrolling when I'm using a mouse without needing to open the damn settings app.

There’s a small app called Scroll Reverser which allows you to have a different setting for the trackpad and mouse.

Not sure why we need a separate app for this, but it does work.

No need for an app. You can change the mouse scroll direction right in the settings.

And it doesn’t affect the trackpad? That’s the problem: switching it for one switches it for both.

The maximised window behaviour is the thing that bugs me the most as a primarily Linux user lumbered with a work-Mac. It's so weird to treat that as being on a different virtual desktop. Better than the Lion days when your second monitor could only show "brushed steel" if you had an app maximised, but not by much.

Double-clicking the titlebar should yield a more traditional maximize behavior, except in non-native apps which don’t replicate full native titlebar functionality. For those hovering over the green button with option pressed will show an option for traditional maximize.

As I recall - and my distaste for the work laptop is such that I'll defer checking until Monday - that leaves all the window decorations in place and generally wastes screen real-estate.

I get that this is the way of Mac - I just don't really get why anyone would like that.

Windows and the popular Linux DEs leave chrome of maximized windows in place as well. The only place you won’t find this is in niche window managers.

I use Moom, so maximizing a window without setting it to its own space is ctrl-cmd-z-space. Moom does a lot more than that, it's worth checking out, especially if you plug into external monitors as part of your workflow.

With that setup, I'm quite content with full screen putting the window in its own space. It's an affordance I use fairly frequently, in fact. Just not as often as maximizing the window within the space it already inhabits.

Being a work machine it's pretty locked down (compliance reasons); I don't have the option of installing much non-standard stuff.

I don't want to be unduly unfair - on the one hand, it's faintly annoying that Mac people always say "oh you just need to install ${widget}" ... but I realise that we do the same on Linux: "you just need to apt-get ${widget}" ! We have the illusion that that's part of the OS.

For the most part I think it's irrelevant whether some bit of software is provided by Apple or a third party, I see weird hissy-fits about, say, the fact that keyboard customization on macOS uses Karabiner, and I just don't get it. Yes, none of the three+ package managers used on macOS are built in, why would anyone care about that, what possible difference could that make.

But work restrictions are one of the circumstances where the difference becomes a practical one, and getting your company to relax the restrictions may be infeasible, or more effort than it's worth.

> click to close windows does not really close the apps also bothers me.

It closes App Store and System Settings. I wonder why they operate differently.

For single window apps it makes sense that closing the window also quits the app. For apps that can have multiple windows I suppose it would make sense for the app to quit when the last window is closed, but that seems less obvious that it should, somehow. One reason: The app might open with no windows, waiting for the user to open a file or something.

Sure. This sounds like an app that thinks pretty highly of itself - too valuable to let close.

I miss highlight/middle click to paste but everything else you listed is fairly arbitrary.

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