> alienated a lot of people who only knew how to use Windows-like desktops
This is needlessly inflamatory. Many people simply don't like macOS style desktops.
In particular I like my menus attached to my windows because I don't run apps maximized.
This is needlessly inflamatory. Many people simply don't like macOS style desktops.
In particular I like my menus attached to my windows because I don't run apps maximized.
I’m in this camp. The only windows that get maximized are things like IDEs with tons of panes which are unusable otherwise.
One perk of the menubar being this way that I’ve come to appreciate is that programs can’t try to remove it or sweep it into a hamburger menu in some misguided quest for minimalism. It’s gonna be there no matter what, which is a welcome bit of consistency.
I wish Linux had better support for this option. KDE lets you set up a global menubar but sadly it’s not supported by any programs under Wayland and only works with Qt apps under X11, with the GTK plugin required having been abandoned last I checked. There should really be an XDG standard for programs to expose their menus with, not just for customizability but as as an accessibility affordance.
Sure, but those same applications just leave a bare and non-functional menu bar at the top, which is almost more offensive.
Windows enforces the same kinda constraints on MenuBars:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/...
The only difference is the Windows' version disappears if you choose not to use it. And the same with KDE and GTK.
Oh trust me they can. There's some really terrible electron-based Mac apps out there. They just have a token menubar with a few options like copy/paste and the rest is the usual hamburger crap.
My current preference is GNOME shell modded to move the top bar to the bottom, merged with a task bar, a rarely used Start menu, an often used Places menu, no Activities, virtual desktops activated by hotkeys and many other less visible things. That's much better than Windows, so thank you Microsoft, at least for me.
I personally use KDE with the taskbar on the left, as it allows for greater vertical screen real estate. Also changed the workspaces keybindings to the same ones as Gnome, which are quite better!
On a Mac the menu bar is always at the top. Because of that, the menu bar is at the logical end of mouse movement (it’s like a virtual wall, which the mouse can’t go beyond).
Because of this design, you can “slam” the mouse against that invisible barrier and it will stop where you need it (at least in the Y axis).
“Slamming” the mouse is always faster than trying to move it to an arbitrary point on the screen because there is no need to slow down the pointer on the screen. It just stops immediately.
The real correct solution is pie menus[1], which reduce both accuracy and distance requirements regardless of screen size. Blender has pie menus and it's one of the reasons its UI is so fast to use once you've learned it.
Also, the order of the window buttons for close, maximize, and minimize are incorrectly ordered, so a mistake causes you to click the opposite of what you actually want.
IMHO the bigger problem on Mac is the weird 'application centric' window system behaviour instead of the much more intuitive 'window centric' behaviour of Windows (and most Linux desktops).
For instance, "Alt-Tab" flips through applications on macOS, and it's possible for applications to be running even though they have no windows open, and in that case they just present a "naked" menu bar which I find utterly confusing. The whole thing feels like a dead-end UX experiment from the early 90's.
I'm mostly using the "3-finger-swipe" on macOS now to directly pick a window instead of tabbing though, but the main reason for that is not that it's better, it's just better than the weird macOS Alt-Tab behaviour.
PS: this sounds like I just switched from Windows to Mac, but I made that switch more than a decade ago, and it still feels "wrong" ;)
The fact that the taskbar has grouped windows by applications by default since XP/Vista hints at this scalability problem, with the taskbar quickly getting similarly unusable without the grouping.
I can never remember the (easy) shortcuts so this is helpful: https://learn.microsoft.com/da-dk/windows/powertoys/shortcut...
From PowerToys: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys
(Which also have the (in this context) useful FancyZones)
Back in a days when Virtual Desktops were not that handy (technically those available since win2000 if I recall correctly), I've used Blackbox for Windows and my own homemade program to quick search though all PuTTYs (written in VB6 + Winapi). Now I don't need it anymore :)
This can work really well even on MS Windows. It is unfortunately not default nor obvious to the regular user. But what comes in the box sprinkled with a PowerToy is rather good.
That is the paradigm I strongly prefer.
I have always liked the tight integration on Mac (such as printing - no driver fuss) and the UI looks really sleek. But the UX of the window/app handling does not sit well with me. Not for the lack of trying.
My first GUI was GEM Desktop which might have damaged me for life.
Edit: also if Apple cares so much about this, why do they make the close/minimize buttons so tiny?
I think daily users graduate to ⌘W and ⌘M (which are all-app standards) fairly quickly, while power users graduate to the window manager they prefer.
> …I'm still slower at this specific thing on Mac OS because I always first have to make sure the right window is focused…
You might find this useful: https://hazeover.com/
Quoting this as an anecdote - showing that to some people this doesn’t matter. In my case I guess it’s because I don’t use these menus that much.
When many people (like me) use that phrase, we're not referring to the UI/UX. It's instead a comment on GNOME's desire to have a controlled and universal design that is more focused on user ease and accessibility versus the componentized/customizable design of GNOME2, KDE, XFCE, etc.