[jchw]

I find macOS annoying no matter what I do. AltTab is nice, but the window management still sucks in my opinion. The security bandages used to work around traditional desktop security models makes it feel incredibly annoying to use; I'll try to set a keyboard shortcut (not a global one mind you) in iTerm2 and suddenly I need to enable iTerm2 to have accessibility access?

Disabling SIP is needed for a myriad of things that aren't really that advanced, like for example, it is needed for some reason by some of the macOS "tiling WM" toys, and it's needed to even use any kexts. No joke: Discord will direct you to disable SIP if you want to .. capture audio during screenshares. It's also needed for macFUSE.

macOS also has no equivalent to WSL2. "But it's POSIX!" I can hear you say. Very fair point, but there are a lot of uses for lightweight Linux VMs, like, well, testing Linux things. Docker Desktop tries but it's slow. I really wanted to like Podman Desktop but it's similarly slow, and I had trouble with networking in a difficult-to-debug way. I strongly recommend Orb Stack here: it basically brings the WSL2 experience to macOS, except maybe even a bit better, vastly prefer it to Docker Desktop. That said, it's a monthly cost, which is definitely not ideal. There's also Colima but I have to say I don't love it either; no IPv6 support isn't a killer but it was annoying to find out the hard way.

I could probably make do with macOS if forced, but I wouldn't enjoy it. That said, I can't really take having to deal with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, so I am stuck very deep into Linux. To be fair, this is nothing new for me: Linux has been my primary desktop OS since high school. But I wouldn't say it's a good desktop OS. I mostly use it because I don't really feel like I have any other options and I already paid the cost to get deep into it anyway.

(I don't hate everything about Apple obviously, but to be honest, my desire to use Apple Silicon devices was mostly tied to high hopes for Asahi Linux)

[donny2018]

Also, pressing (x) close button doesn’t close the app. It continues hanging somewhere inside of this $1500 machine’s 8GB of RAM.

That alone makes me forget all of the Windows’s quirks and appreciate all the basic things my Windows machine offers.

[williamcotton]

Closing a window has never closed a Mac application. Like, since the first Macs. Applications can have multiple windows so it makes sense from a UX perspective to not terminate an application when a window closes, even if it is the last window.

This behavior can easily be overridden by application developers but they choose not to go against expected behavior.

Power users press Command + Q to quit an application.

I've literally never struggled with what you're describing.

[bigstrat2003]

It makes zero sense from a UX perspective to not terminate (most) processes when the last window closes. Exceptions do exist, but for example if I close all my word processor windows then the process does no good continuing to run. I think you make a fair point that Mac users are used to this behavior and so it should probably remain consistent. But if you were to redesign the OS from the ground up, it's horrible behavior that should in no way be the default.

[dontlaugh]

It's not horrible at all.

You might close all windows, but still have a background task running. That's nicely represented by the app remaining on, which can ask about interrupting the background task if you try to close it. It removes the need for most systray usage.

[jwells89]

That’s because on Mac OS, there isn’t a 1:1 mapping of windows to processes. Instead, multiple windows of any given app are hosted by a single process which stays open when all windows have been closed to facilitate opening documents or new windows without pointlessly disposing of the existing process only to start another.

It’s been like that for the Mac’s entire existence. For someone who’s used Macs all their life, the Windows way is weird.

[miki123211]

> Discord will direct you to disable SIP if you want to .. capture audio during screenshares

This is untrue, there's a difference between disabling SIP and changing your security policy to "reduced."

Disabling SIP lets you modify files on the system volume along with a few other things, like a way to run executables that require private entitlements that aren't signed by Apple. The reduced security policy lets you run older Mac OS versions (there's no online signature check during installs) as well as kernel extensions from authorized developers.

Discord relies on the latter, as it uses the ACE extension for audio capture, the same one that powers Rogue Amoeba's excellent apps. There are APIs to do this natively now, introduced in Ventura I believe, but Discord hasn't yet switched over to them.

[jchw]

Yeah, I have an app that relies on the Rogue Amoeba kext. Probably Zoom or something.

I admit I glossed over the details of SIP partly because I forgot, but the point is that to get audio capture working on Discord ~~right now~~ (Apparently according to neighboring comment this is fixed, but the point does still stand anyways since this literally was the situation for users since Apple Silicon arrived afaik), you have to go into recovery and run some esoteric commands to lower the security level of the machine, and it's 100% Apple's fault because they didn't offer APIs for things that people were using kexts for before shutting off third-party kexts.

(And this whole thing feels a bit rushed, as can be seen by the issues that have occurred with the newer usermode network filtering APIs... It's always especially bad when you fuck up in a way that messes with privacy software for only your own services, even if it's truly accidental.)

[winterqt]

> There are APIs to do this natively now, introduced in Ventura I believe, but Discord hasn't yet switched over to them.

As of a few days ago, they have: https://twitter.com/advaithj1/status/1723926917286371818

[pfranz]

> I'll try to set a keyboard shortcut (not a global one mind you) in iTerm2 and suddenly I need to enable iTerm2 to have accessibility access?

Maybe this could be more clear in iTerm's UI, but the reason it needs accessibility access is in scenarios where it's stomping on Mac OS' system shortcut keys. I would expect Windows or Linux would need special privileges to do the same.

[MisterSandman]

> and suddenly I need to enable iTerm2 to have accessibility access?

This is a strange thing to complain about, you have to do it literally once and it takes less than 5 seconds and 5 clicks. And I would rather have a nice settings panel showing what apps have access to what, rather than the mess that is Windows privacy settings.

[jchw]

Why is it strange to complain about randomly needing to grant applications access to apparently-unrelated permissions? This sounds exactly the same kind of weird handwaving Linux fanboys routinely get scolded for. And "It's better than Windows" doesn't make it good, but the fact is that you don't have to do this for any kind of keybinding in Windows, so it's neither here nor there.

[soraminazuki]

It's strange because you have distorted the facts. iTerm doesn't "suddenly" ask for accessibility permissions. You, by your own description, have attempted to make global changes to the macOS GUI. That's a legitimate and expected situation for an accessibility permission dialog to show up.

[jchw]

Why does changing a keybind inside of iTerm 2 need global accessibility permissions? By my own words, it's not a global shortcut, because well, it wasn't.

> I'll try to set a keyboard shortcut (not a global one mind you)

(I will admit that the phrase "keyboard shortcut" instead of something like "key binding" likely lead to this confusion, but by the time this occurred to me, the edit window was already closed.)

This hit me just recently when trying to map Command+P to Control+P. I don't know if Command+P is somehow special, but if you want to try it for yourself, feel free.

Secondly, though, accessibility permission is a really large hammer. Typically that's a high level of privileges as it usually means being able to read and interact with just about everything on-screen. Granted, this is the reality of many desktop OSes today anyways, but that's the other thing. If I have to switch all of these permissions on for many apps anyways, is this really a good design? No, of course not.

I tried to keep my rant relatively contained, because the truth is I hate macOS a lot worse. A software I used to like a lot, SnagIt, has become progressively less usable as macOS has updated over time, presumably because apps that handle screenshots and video capture have had to get increasingly tricky to function. Just about every time SnagIt starts, it gives me a laundry list of permissions I need to grant it. I mean literally it has to be like 7 things. Most of them seem to stick, but apparently after the software updates some of them need to be done again.

This security model sucks in other ways too. Like for example, you have to give your terminal emulator full disk access. If you don't, really stupid things will happen. I accidentally ran brew update in a VS Code terminal. It worked! And promptly wiped out all of the granted permissions on all of the casks it updated, because VS Code (of course) doesn't have full disk access, and as part of the security model you can't just update an app without full disk access. I really wish that wasn't the default behavior, because it was genuinely just a mistake to use the VS Code terminal for that. But even worse, I really want to grant this permission to Brew and not literally everything I run in that terminal emulator, so this is pretty damn unideal.

I haven't even gotten into Gatekeeper, OCSP stapling, and all of the trouble I have gone through trying to sign apps for macOS and have it not need to phone home to check the signature. (I was also hit by that funny bug where programs were taking forever to execute because the exec syscall was hanging waiting for Apple's servers. Reminds me that I am on a "privacy friendly" OS.)

But seriously, I'm really only scratching the surface here. Don't get me wrong, I hate other OSes too. I have an ongoing rant right next to this one about how much I hate Windows 11, and I don't think I really need to express how bad desktop Linux is from a usability standpoint.