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Comment by ktpsns | Hacker News Reader

As a decade long windows and linux desktop user, the mac OS X dock was one thing I was really envy. There are tons of bad copies of it for various linux desktops (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, you name it), they all don't get it. The software quality of the dock and window manager was something where OS X was, for a long time, years apart other GUIs. My feeling is the default setting made the dock less exciting in the last years.

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Why? It's restricted to one display, but will insist on moving from one to another if you make some moves with your cursor.

You can't decouple multiple windows of the same app.

IIRC it insists on disappearing if you are in fullscreen on another display.

It also wastes more space than other taskbars to be usefull and look decent.

(disclaimer: I dislike MacOS globally)

Sorry, but the Mac DE sucks compared to modern ones like KDE. Why does my left-aligned dock change width every time I open a new program? Now every window I maximize has a slightly different width depending on how many programs were opened when I maximized it. Why can't I disable this feature? Why can't I get the dock to fill the height of the screen?

Why are programs still "open" when they have no open windows? Why am I able to cmd-tab to applications with no open windows and have nothing happen?

This is a MacOS thing - an app is not just windows, it is also a menu. The windows can all be closed and the menu is still there. Apps that don't behave like that feel like they are not proper Mac apps. As a seasoned Mac user, cmd+Q is your friend.

>The windows can all be closed and the menu is still there.

I'm a few macOS versions behind what's current, so it's possible things have changed, but historically in OS X/macOS your description applied to apps that could have multiple windows. Any app that could only have one window—for example, System Preferences—would quit when the one window was closed.

Any App with a menu generally works as I described. And that hails back to the System 7 days, and also NextStep was the same from what I remember (though I mostly used OpenStep.)

System Preferences (especially the iOS-ified version) breaks a lot of rules. The "classic" version is really similar to the System Prefs in Next/OpenStep. The classic version was a single document interface, and it used a back arrow to go back a level. The new one has more persistence IIRC with the list down one side.

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