You can turn down the animation times for most of this with "defaults write" commands. Set them to 0 or as small as you want. Here's a good list to get started:
https://gist.github.com/j8/8ef9b6e39449cbe2069a
> I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.
System Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion: Enabled System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency: Enabled
These terminal commands don't fix the problem- there are still lengthy animations, e.g. when swapping desktops or opening folders. These are tasks I sometimes do multiple times per second on Linux.
> This is always the default answer to this question online, and I’m sick of it! It doesn’t even solve the problem, but rather replaces it with an equally useless fade-in animation.
https://arhan.sh/blog/native-instant-space-switching-on-maco...
But this eroded over time. Nowadays both Mac and iOS are bloated pieces of crap that reek of design by committee. A lot of people blame Alan Dye (and they are probably right to do so) but there are other factors too. With Steve and Jony gone, they need someone who cares to step in and assert control once more
That's kinda rose tinted history. System 7 (1990s Mac OS) for example crashed and locked up a whole lot, in my experience. The UI was fantastic and had great consistency, and the developer docs were of a quality that would blow minds today. But the software was not as solid as all that.
Windows was the same or maybe worse at the time. BSOD was common and a nightly reboot was a good idea until NT/Win2000. Solaris and BSD would have months of uptime on similar hardware, so it was a software problem. PC OSes were just not there yet. Windows 2000, OSX, and Linux gradually fixed that.
That's all basic uptime. The UI design drift of MacOS is another story.
Now that said iPhone is a thousand times faster, just invoking the keyboard can cause a serious delay with stutters.
In any case, it’s odd that hardware is multiples better yet it doesn’t always nail something as basic as typing
But I often have input lags where I will press several keys, and then a period of time (which can be multiple seconds) will pass before my taps are registered.
The 14 Pro Max launched less than four years ago, and should not be slower than an Android which launched a decade prior.
No-one has forced you to upgrade. I’m writing this on iOS 18.
FWIW, SwiftUI got a huge performance boost for iOS/macOS 26+, and Instruments 26 has been nice for finding performance bottlenecks. You may find the SwiftUI performance auditor in a free/FOSS project of mine (https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/commands/ui-design/au...) helpful as well.
Why it took 4 years to get to near-UIKit levels of performance I couldnt say, but I've had a great experience working with it on an app that's 97% SwiftUI.
Input devices and monitors can make a difference as well.
It's not the default, but IIRC Windows could be configured to have zero animations, and I found it to be quite responsive as such.
I'm not talking about the speed of opening programs, but more of the speed of every-second interactions: Unfolding a folder (or other interactions within a program with keyboard or mouse), alt-tabbing across windows, moving between desktops, etc. At least on Windows, I saw far fewer IO-blocking animations than I have on MacOS.
You're right about the "something starts to happen": Apple hides delays behind sigmoidal animations throughout much of their OS. For those who aren't aware of the trick, the delay between the start of the animation and the tail where it starts appears to just be an animation that started on the interaction.
I plug a Mac into a 120hz monitor with a high refresh rate mouse and it is gloriously snappy, snappier than any Windows PC I’ve ever used.
But did you try Homebrew and its extensions? It works pretty well for managing both terminal and GUI apps, and has some useful extensions like Brewfile, MAS, etc. Its not perfect, but for single-user Macs with an up-to-date OS version, it works quite well.
How often are you switching systems that you can't remember the package manager?
You could just alias your package manager to something more memorable if it's really a problem, but I feel like this argument only really applies to servers where you may be logging into a variety of different distributions every day.
In terms of package management SOFTWARE, however, nix (and guix, lix, etc.) are state of the art and work fairly similar in both linux and macos. A deeper integration with the OS would have been nice.
I use both linux (with a decent tiling window manager; the tiling management being the least important part of it) and macos. And certain things are just not possible to do with macos. On linux I can have 300+ open terminal windows AND CAN find the one I need when I need to. On macos 20 (counting in Termianl tabs, which are implemented as windows, underneath) is about the high mark that it gets annoying to work on. On macos, you can't effectively work on multiple projects that use the same software (editor + terminal, for example). You can work with different Applications, though, and that is managed pretty well (better than most linux window managers that I have seen).
Every year or so I try adding a couple of Spaces, and always regret it a couple of hours later, switching back to a single Space (+ a few fullscreen apps).
I love the three finger gesture to move between them though, it's like moving pieces of paper around. You can also work around the bug I mentioned by swiping faster, but yeah I wish they'd just fix it so we can move on.
I wouldn't expect that of Android because it's Java and Kotlin parts run in a VM and there's a garbage collector pausing the execution at times.