[sidkshatriya]

I've used macOS for years and still don't understand their windows minimize/restore logic. I'm always hunting for my minimized window. Yes, the fault probably lies with me.

OTOH the Windows UI is far better well designed and intuitive. But yeah... I'd rather fumble around in macOS: Windows is always trying to upsell a service that I don't need. If I say no it will helpfully keep reminding me (my answer is never going to change). I have 32GB ram and a recent processor being fed tons of wattage -- it feels so bog slow.

Windows needs to fix itself fast.

[weaksauce]

reading all these comments about windows having better shortcuts and window management features makes me feel like i'm taking crazy pills. windows for me was hands down the worst experience in ux. the shortcuts in macos are so well thought out and consistent.

now i'm using kde in linux land and it's the best and most customizable experience. I can't imagine going back to windows ever and would be missing a lot from linux if i went back to macos(though it would be fine).

getting macos keybinding in linux land is a game changer to me: https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy and this just makes me feel at home.

[fodkodrasz]

I give you a well thought out macos shortcut for example. Ok, it is for a niche feature people rarely use... Screenshots, put straight to the clipboard.

On windows you have 2 options, bot pretty unintuitive:

1. You can either press PrintScreen button... (OK boomer, who uses a full size keyboard? My RGB clicky-keys 57% keyboard doesn't even have backspace, return, escape or delete, I don't even know when I saw a keyboard with Printscreen. My Neofetch-fork does save the screen, and otherwise no need for screenshots...)

2. Or you may press Win+Shift+S. Ok it is hard to memorize, how does S even relate to Screenshot?

Meanwhile on the intuitive MacOs to do this you only have to press Command+Option+Shift+4. So intuitive and easy!!! Also way easier to press, just try it! Only 4 keys to press at the same time, in a very convenient layout, way better than that illogical windows shortcut.

Sarcasm aside: It is clear why Microsoft is well known for the fact that in the 1990s they put a lot of effort to usability research, and why Apple is famous about Steve Jobs being the BDFL, and things had to fit his personal taste.

[weaksauce]

there's good reason the equivalent shift-command-s isn't bound to screenshot by default... it's the command to save a file and there's no good way to do partial screenshot and full screen screenshot with just command-shift-s + option if you want the option to put it into memory instead of a file. they chose command-shift-3 for full screen screenshot. command shift 4 for partial screenshot and add option to do either of those into memory which is a very common paradigm in macos shortcuts. the option key does something slightly different to the original shortcut in system shortcuts. in any event windows didn't get the non-printscreen version of a screenshot tool until very late in the game and osx had it in for a long time.

that issue isn't even an issue if you really want screenshots to be something else. you can change basically any shortcut in one place in macos. same with kde.

[cityofdelusion]

I don’t see much difference to be honest. I didn’t pick up Mac OS until later in life, so windows shortcuts are embedded in my brain. That said, I find Mac shortcuts just as simple to memorize. I’ve used cmd shift 4 thousands of times now and I don’t even think about it, I just press it.

[lobf]

>Meanwhile on the intuitive MacOs to do this you only have to press Command+Option+Shift+4

It's command-shift-4, no option key involved.

[fodkodrasz]

Now got hold of a mac, and checked it:

Command+Shift+4 is area snipping, as you said, but pops up the viewer window

Command+Control+Shift+4 is snipping, but to clipboard. I mixed up the shortcuts, yet my fingers are getting used to it anyways, still I find it terrible default UX compared to other desktops.

[fodkodrasz]

afaik that way it pops up the viewer, and does not put it to the clipboard.

[falcojr]

It probably depends pretty heavily on your workflow. MacOS is designed around doing things visually with a trackpad. If you don't want to work that way, you're just out of luck, because that's the "right way" and if you disagree you're wrong. An example using my preferred workflow: I like to map the applications I use to <meta> (or option on mac) + number keys on the keyboard. So <meta>+1 is my editor. <meta>+2 is my terminal. <meta>+3 is my browser. Etc. If I have multiple windows open, just hit that combo again to cycle in a least-recently-used cycle. I don't have to raise all of the windows from the dock with my mouse and then go find the one I want. I don't have to open some mission control thing and go hunting for a window. I don't have to swipe to another space to remember where I put the window. I don't have to command+tab to a certain number of times to get to the window. I know exactly how to get the application I want with 1-3 key presses. Then once I've raised the window I want, I often want to tile it to one side or the other or fullscreen it with another keyboard shortcut.

Getting this to work on MacOS is a huge PITA. I tried app shortcuts in settings and they'd just randomly not work sometimes for some apps. Apps can override global shortcuts? What??? I tried the "shortcuts" app and it also similarly wouldn't work for some apps and would often forget my key bindings on an update. Tiling via the keyboard would randomly not work either. Multiple apps couldn't fix it. I finally found hammerspoon and scripted an option that consistently works. Rectangle finally solved my tiling issues. But why do I need 3rd party apps that involve writing my own scripts to get basic OS behavior? This is stock Windows behavior.

Beyond that it's just a bunch of papercuts. My dock randomly appears on the wrong screen. My windows sometimes don't get focus when I click on them. The coreutils are old and suck compared to the linux equivalents. Things built cross-platform are often the worst on Mac. Even though they're both sitting behind virtualization, WSL just feels much more integrated than running containers on mac. My usb mic randomly stops working...I've literally had more mic problems on Mac than I did on Linux. Sometimes I need to force kill my browser, and it'll sit for several minutes as a zombie descendant of pid 1 before getting cleaned up, preventing me from opening a new instance of the thing that should be killed. When I had initially mapped tiling to <option>+something, and it didn't work, I'd get a fun unicode character in my text instead, so I had to install an ascii-only keyboard layout to stop myself from looking like a moron who couldn't type. I'm guessing if you're a mac native, the shortcuts make more sense, but after 20 years of windows/linux shortcuts burned into my brain, moving to a mac for work has made me have to pointlessly relearn everything, and it still feels very unnatural.

The hardware is great, but the OS makes me hate this machine with a passion.

[kmeisthax]

macOS does not and never has had a good strategy for handling minimizing windows. Keep in mind that prior to Mac OS X, you couldn't minimize windows at all, you could only roll them up. When OS X added the dock, they made minimized windows go there. Except, the Dock is an icon grid, so there's no way to see window titles, and the windows themselves are so small that it is difficult to identify them at a glance. Making things worse, the Dock is also a place you put app icons, so now you have an icon to show all your non-minimized app icons, right next to all your minimized window icons.

Meanwhile, Windows had minimize since version 2[0], except for whatever reason windows minimized to desktop icons, and there was no desktop folder. They'd known they'd invented a worse version of Mac OS, and in Windows 95 they made sure that there was not only a real desktop, but also a list of all open windows. This design was so successful that the only major tweak that stuck was merging the taskbar and Quick Launch[1] into something that superficially resembles the OSX dock, but is just plain better[2] because clicking an app icon actually shows you all the open windows.

[0] I don't have a Windows 1 install to check with.

[1] Strictly speaking you could put anything in Quick Launch, but only apps go in the Win7 taskbar

[2] Oldschool NeXT users will point out that in NeXTSTEP, minimized windows had an actual title on them, and the app icon instead of a screenshot of the window at tiny scale.

[p_ing]

Early macOS also had rollup windows. I greatly prefer that to minimized windows in macOS, which are impossible to quickly access outside of the mouse or unminimizing all windows with a key combination which I can't remember.

[mschuster91]

You want to look into HyperSwitch and SizeUp. These two solve pretty much all headaches relating to window management on macOS.

[3form]

Overall it does sound like KDE is possibly the experience that you desire - did you try it before?