I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:
- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?
- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?
- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?
- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?
- Why don't I have any system tray icons?
- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?
Having had issues with KDE I decided to give GNOME a try recently. The decision made to remove these buttons absolutely perplexed me beyond belief.
(I think that this situation is worth pointing out because there is potential for talking past one another as a result of the default choices made by different Linux distributions).
On Gnome, super let's you search for application launchers or click on windows immediately; works great for both.
Also re: not to mention with extensions they’re single threaded JavaScript applications essentially so when one crashes it literally crashes the entire DE. Just unacceptable.
Peperridge Farm remembers.
Don't know if it's still the case on the latest version, but for like a decade, opening it on Ubuntu would greet you with an icon named "Software Upda..." and another one named "Software & Up...". Every time I saw it, I'd have to stop and scratch my head for a minute, wondering how such a thing could remain unchanged for so long.
The worst: ImageMagick icon shows four lines of wrapped name/comment in brackets, the last line of which is unreadable as it disappears under the icon below in the grid, so very much not ideal! I'd rather the icon title appeared wider and in a solid colour over the nearby icons when moused over. I'm using a largish font on a small screen (1366x768). Most are OK.
(I have to admit to rarely using the 'Show Apps' or 'nine dots' function, I usually just mash the windows/mod4/super key and type a couple of letters of the name then hit enter)
There's not much choice on Mac unless you install Linux on it.
Want to start Firefox? type "fir<tab>" in your terminal and hit enter.
Want to see your files? Type "ls" and hit enter. Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities and you can leave those mouse-pushers in the dust.
Or I could use a desktop on expend my limited mental energy on things more relevant to me. It’s far easier for me to remember things in a visual or spatial manner.
But really mac is less about having every square inch of your monitor filled with a dozen different applications sized perfectly to fit the exact information you want on these screens. You can of course do this if you like but thats not really the philosophy.
The philosophy is that this is a real life desktop. Just like papers on your desk. Do you resize papers various ways and print them to maybe 3 inches across and lay them out on your desk such that you can see every paper at once, no space from one page to the next? No. You have piles. You thumb through piles and pull out stuff you need and lay them loosely next to eachother. Nothing is fixed in any constraints. Stuff can overlap or have space in between.
This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
i just came back to GNOME from KDE after messing something with my system (disk space was eaten fully i don't know why) but all your points are mostly invalid... you can literally start GNOME out of the overview with a simple extension install, then you can launch your apps via whatever you f** want! dmenu? custom shortcuts? mouse gestures? a python script that will listen to your voice? based on weather? come ON, you talk like the bash doesn't exist
your max. and min. buttons are just a toggle in Tweaks app - i have a dedicated button on my mouse which toggles the speed sensibility (inside GNOME not on hardware), really useful for doing digital collage work on GIMP
now the extension critic i found it valid! but who knows how far someone can get with AI... personally i had a custom text box at my top-bar after 2-3 prompts which informed where i'm with my keyboard layer (running QMK, doing HID communication)
Apple is a big pile of shit with biased design much harder to modify but also: locked down to the point your now eating ads. in your expensive premium aluminum box
But that's not the worst of it. It took me some time to realize this, but when I wanted to see why my battery was draining so fast one day (I suspect Youtube has a long standing bug that causes it to go turbo drain mode for some reason, the app is incredibly poorly programmed and leaks memory over time, if you didn't know).
But lo and behold, I couldn't see the per-app battery usage breakdown! Why is that? Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.
The only thing in the Apple world I’ve become hopelessly dependent on is iMessage. It’s going to be painful to leave all those group chats. Everything else I use has a great Linux replacement.
2026 is finally going to be the Year Of The Linux Desktop for this former Apple user.
Say what you will about Apple (I loathe so much about my work macbook), but this seem untrue unless you have a pretty loose definition for "a few". My inherited 7 year old iPad is still getting updates, and this year's Mac OS is the first to not support Intel hardware, the most recent hardware being 6 years old.
The last 20 years we've only seen Apple enjoying the good times. What they did when the money was gushing in from every angle is not really an indicator of what they'll do in the hard times. We're getting into the hard times now, IAP revenue is plummeting because of competition for payments and a whole bag of things are impacting consumer purchase behavior.
This has resulted in positive outcomes like services have largely gone global this last quarter but it's also resulted in negatives like more ads and service price increases in many countries.
My 2020 XR still gets updates and runs every app I need- uber, school stuff, office stuff.
There’s one non-tech sister in law who won’t install signal (but is somehow ok with Snapchat) so she’s just not included on the group chats.
With that said, something Apple does very well is the ecosystem integration between devices across form factors. I miss that, but not enough to switch my phone back.
I am starting to believe that Apple got rid of any UX talent they had, replaced them with interns and spent the saved $ on marketing.
The rotation thingy alone infuriates me on iPhones. The Android implementation is perfect.
Android keyboards are in a different class from iOS. And I use a source available privacy respecting one.
VPNs work much better on Android.
Settings is laid out better.
Haptics are used much more which I appreciate.
lack of back button is a crime.
can't customize home screen launcher.
clock alarms often doesn't work
I like Vanadium (Chromium) a lot more than Safari. Everything is so well thought out. For example, on iOS, the open in new tab brings you to that tab so if you want to open a bunch, you have to go back to the tab you're branching off of. On Chromium, it works like on desktop.
default apps arent as well implemented as android. Can't change a lot of them which seems anti-competitive. I'm talking about picking which apps open and stuff like messaging app, not the default apps that come with the OS's quality. Apple might get a win there. Apple notes is awesome.
The Android password manager integration is much better at autofilling and detection.
Edit: and rotation
What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.
On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...
I’m super excited for containers. Yes they exist without Apple recreating them, but built in container runtime for the OS is developer forward thinking
I got tired of having to haul a separate HDMI display out for Asahi use.
Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.
"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.
[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.
And btw my Air has 16 GB of RAM.
Just that "Apple customers use old MacOS devices" is in fact of a piece with "Let's monetize our users" (by stuffing ads into the Settings app in this case). They can't rely on you for upgrade revenue and need to squeeze you in other ways.
No free lunch, basically, unless your software vendor really cooks for free.
Basically everyone is getting shafted.
iPhone is nice, but it has its quirks and stupidities. Android is nice, but has some other stuff I don't like.
I wish there would be a third option that would take the best of those two worlds.
I’m almost in the market for a new phone and I wish there were more options than Android/iPhone. I’m looking at maybe going for a GrapheneOS phone of some sort though
I thought I was the only one.
Maybe it's because I started on Windows and Gnome "feels" closer? Hard to quantify. Like they're US and Britain, while macOS is China.
You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder, signified only by an arrow, with no explanation of what it’s doing or why. Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it. So sometimes I would end up with an app running without having been installed. Therefor some of my apps wouldn’t show up in Launchpad, etc. Now that I understand the process, it’s pretty cool. And it’s simple, in a sense. But it fails any definition of intuitive.
The scroll direction of a mousewheel cannot be controlled independently from a trackpad. So one or the other is bound to feel wrong to most people.
There are simple things Apple could change to fix most of these, but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.
I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.
Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.
I accidentally sent my password in a Teams chat at work because an Auth prompt popped up so I naturally typed my password and hit enter like I would on a Mac.
Hilarious. But bad UX.
For me, I always felt like the dragging an app into a folder is pretty intuitive. I feel like it follows the unix "everything is a file" philosophy; installing is just putting the app file somewhere on your computer.
But everything else I pretty much agree with you.
The funny thing is, it could almost work on something like iOS, where (if I understand correctly) focusing away from an app suspends it typically. So that could be the red button. I’m not sure what yellow should be. Maybe put the app into a sort of non-interactive mode where it stays on the screen but doesn’t do any processing, just queues up notifications.
Yellow = yield (minimize)
Green = go (grow)
Makes sense to me.
OTOH among the non-technical people I know they’ve haven’t often complained about this sort of thing, so maybe the real answer is just that this is something where not much explanation is needed in the first place!
They have not had any innovation in desktop UI since 2005.
I have an iMac G5 running Tiger and the desktop environment is almost identical in every way. Except now it doesn’t look pretty like it did in the Aqua days.
It’s supposed to grow to the size it needs to fit the content. That button was never a “maximise” but a “zoom” (you can confirm this by checking the “Window” menu in an app).
> Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window.
It depends. The general rule is that for apps which can only ever have one window (e.g. System Settings), closing the window quits the app. For apps with multiple windows, closing the window only closes the window.
> And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.
We (the users) are the ones who call them traffic lights, though. As far as I’m aware, Apple hasn’t suggested that as an analogy.
> though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great
The old behaviour is still there, if you ⌥+click.
> The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder
The insight there is that (most) apps aren’t really “installed”. You can grab that file (actually it’s a folder, a package bundle) and put it and run it from anywhere.
> Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, that UI is part of the DMG. If an app is distributed as a zip, for example, you won’t see it.
> but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
But it’s not. You yourself listed an example where it changed (zoom/maximise). Installing apps with PKG files used to be more common. The scroll direction thing isn’t that old, it was only some time after iPhones that trackpads changed the default motion.
The simplest example of that to me is Cmd+T to open a new tab, Ctrl+Tab/PgUp/Dn to cycle through tabs, whereas it's Ctrl for all of them on KDE or Windows. There simply is not a way to deterministically switch to a specific other program/window, where in Windows/KDE you can do Win+1 to move to the first program on the taskbar (and so on with other numbers). And the behavior of Home/End is very inconsistent between programs, with seemingly no consistent way to move the cursor to the beginning of the current line.
And the only time I've encountered where it's not Ctrl+C in Linux is in the terminal. That feels like a reasonable exception to be grandfathered in, given it predates desktop environments. I will definitely grant that being able to Cmd+C/V in terminals is pleasant though.
That is a very strange keyboard shortcut when the home and end keys exist though.
Edit: It seems that Ctrl+A actually moves back to just after the most recent newline. That is not the same thing as moving back to the start of the line.
What's the difference between "just after the most recent newline" and the start of the line?
It being different is a fair point, and when designing a system you always make tradeoffs; what I feel is that Apple tradeoffs and design goals are slowly turning more toward additional monetization after you buy the product than focusing on the product per se.
> You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
My first guess would be Linux. Although maybe they used Gnome as a one-off, liked it, and then switched to Windows for some reason.