[lynndotpy]

The thing where Linux (and Android, and Windows at least circa 2023) blows Apple out of the water is in UI latency. The built-in animations on Apple's software are sometimes hundreds of times slower than on their competitors, in ways which can't be accounted for.

Improving interface response times is the single best thing Apple can do to improve their UX. I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.

As far as I know, MacOS is the _only_ desktop OS with this problem. The only way to fix this problem on MacOS is to do everything inside a virtual machine running anything but MacOS.

[runjake]

> The built-in animations on Apple's software are sometimes hundreds of times slower than on their competitors, in ways which can't be accounted for.

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

[lynndotpy]

As others have noted, the "Reduce Motion" doesn't fix anything (neither does Reduce Transparency).

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.

[ajross]

Hilariously, this is what the Gnome 2 people would have called an "Unbreak Me" option, something they tried culturally to eliminate more than a decade and a half ago. With... not total success, I guess, but the resulting environment tends to have a very high level of "work and not suck by default" quality -- something that steadily evolving commercial software tends to struggle with maintaining.

[jcgrillo]

The only thing I need to do to unbreak gnome is twiddle the ctrl:nocaps thing in xkb-options. Everything else is optional.

[storoj]

> Enable the “Reduce motion” setting in System Settings.

> 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...

[gitpusher]

You're missing the point here. The "old" Apple would never have tolerated a janky feature that inverts responsibility onto the user and behaves poorly out-of-the-box. Back then it was either lightning fast, jank-free, and intuitive -- or else it doesn't ship.

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

[robotresearcher]

> Back then it was either lightning fast, jank-free, and intuitive -- or else it doesn't ship.

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.

[Lalabadie]

What saddens me is that a decade and a half ago, Apple led that charge with a reliable and unblockable UI thread on the iPhone.

Now that said iPhone is a thousand times faster, just invoking the keyboard can cause a serious delay with stutters.

[nomilk]

I have an ‘old’ model (iPhone 14 pro max) and text frequently misses characters due to the lag/input delay. It’s most pronounced when using safari for some reason.

In any case, it’s odd that hardware is multiples better yet it doesn’t always nail something as basic as typing

[lynndotpy]

In my experience, iOS only misses keys during the time the keyboard is loading (which can be over a second- crazy!)

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.

[senderista]

I never had any lag on my 4yo iPhone SE until the forced upgrade to iOS 26. Now I finally understand what all those Android users complain about.

[phony-account]

> forced upgrade to iOS 26

No-one has forced you to upgrade. I’m writing this on iOS 18.

[DeathArrow]

I don't have lags in Android.

[brailsafe]

I think a big part of this in recent years is SwiftUI just not being fully-cooked and Apple trying to shove it into a bunch of areas without enough attention to performance. Not sure how it is on iOS, but for example, the Settings app feels chuuuunky if you navigate through the panes with up and down arrow keys. I wasn't able to make a selectable list view that worked consistently and didn't feel like a regression compared to an equivalent AppKit view

[CharlesW]

> I think a big part of this in recent years is SwiftUI just not being fully-cooked and Apple trying to shove it into a bunch of areas without enough attention to performance.

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.

[brailsafe]

Hmm, I guess I couldn't have known about that since I don't have iOS and haven't upgraded to macOS 26 yet, but performance auditing did seem a bit opaque last I tried.

Any specific improvements you've seen on the mac side?

[joemi]

It's odd to see this comment, since I've always had the opposite experience (at least when comparing Windows and MacOS -- I haven't used desktop linux much in the past 20 years). On MacOS, when I click something, something happens, or at the very least starts to happen (and I get some visual indication). While in Windows I often click on something and get no indication that something happened or started happening, so I click again, and then suddenly perform the action twice. This most often happens when opening programs, but it happens in other places too sometimes.

[someguyiguess]

I’ve found Mac OS to be snappier than any of the dozen or so Linux DEs I’ve tried. I use Fedora with XFCE and it’s ok in responsiveness, I’ve got PopOS on another machine. It’s good. But I’ve got MacOS on my other two machines and they just feel so much snappier. And the Macs are 6-7 years old. The other machines are newer (2/3yo).

[michaelmrose]

In any case have you tested on the same machine for the most apt comparison? Agr may not be the best predictor of performance when io and memory may be more productive of snappiness than the latest CPU.

Input devices and monitors can make a difference as well.

[lynndotpy]

For Windows, my last experience on a personal install was Windows 10 and that was yeeeaaars ago, so... Grain of salt :)

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.

[lallysingh]

Windows isn't a useful base of comparison anymore. They really stopped trying years ago.

[christophilus]

Package management, too. I recently got a MacBook for work, but it’s sitting on my desk and I’m continuing to use my Lenovo. Managing software updates is much better on Linux. As is managing windows (via Niri in my case). macOS really feels like a downgrade.

[setopt]

I don’t disagree, I just moved back to Linux from macOS myself (Tahoe was the last drop for me).

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.

[someguyiguess]

For managing windows I agree Mac OS sucks. But the third party window managers I use for MacOS are better than any other first or third party window managers I’ve ever used. Windows has far better window management than any Linux distro’s default WM. (But it’s terrible in every other way)

[dlahoda]

did you tried nix on macos? helps with software updates

[honr]

Nix is not the same as nixos, and in this case the distinction matters. It has to step carefully around Apple's updates. This further highlights the fact Apple lacks the same quality package management as some linux distros. Nixpkgs (on macos), Ports, and Homebrew packages are toys compared to the EFFORT that goes into maintaining Debian and Redhat packages.

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.

[bombcar]

Package managers are wonderful until you step near our outside of the packaged software - then you better hope you're on a big distro otherwise you may be in uncharted territory.

[someguyiguess]

Except on Linux you have to remember which of the several different package managers each specific system uses. Do I use apt, apt-get, pacman, yum, dnf, flatpacks, build from source? Homebrew on MacOS is miles ahead in terms of DE in my experience. But yeah I guess by default the “App Store” is meh.

[sayamqazi]

There is no such thing as DX with any digital tool. Its just pain and suffering all the way down. Sooner you realize it and make peace with it the better.

[DaSHacka]

> Except on Linux you have to remember which of the several different package managers each specific system uses. Do I use apt, apt-get, pacman, yum, dnf, flatpacks, build from source?

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.

[vachina]

I find using non-Apple pointing device to have drastically improved the latency.

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.

[DeathArrow]

>The thing where Linux (and Android, and Windows at least circa 2023) blows Apple out of the water is in UI latency.

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.

[kinematikk]

This is the biggest thing that irks me after coming from windows. Everything feels so sluggish. I wonder why the internet ist full of people complaining about that. I guess they just dont work fast enough to be bothered by that?

[dbmikus]

Yes, I hate how slow it is to swipe between desktop workspaces, for example.

[shric]

Doesn't excuse it but in case you or other readers are unaware, there are some ways to mitigate it: https://arhan.sh/blog/native-instant-space-switching-on-maco...

[honr]

Why would you use that feature? MacOS doesn't REALLY have multiple desktops (Spaces). That is merely a pre-release feature (for 10 years or so, I think). As evidenced by the many critical user journey bugs it has that don't get addressed.

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).

[bschwindHN]

I've used spaces since 2013, they work well enough. The animation bug is annoying though. On displays higher than 60Hz, the animation is slower because they made it frame-based instead of time-based, or something silly like that.

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.

[honr]

Of course it can be used. But it is very buggy (as in missing or not well-though-out behaviors), which is unlike the typical polish Apple human interaction folks deliver. For example switching between Spaces and then between apps and windows and creating a new app window don't work as expected in some combination of steps and for some apps. There are several other "corner" cases that show the features were not laid out in a full design to exhaustively decide the desired behavior in each case. Which is very much like when someone bolts on a feature to a system without fully nail down its interaction with all other adjacent and relevant features.

[bschwindHN]

I'm just responding to your "Why would you use that feature?" question. I use it because I like it, and it works well for me. I'm not disagreeing that they have some bugs and design issues to work out. It seems pretty obvious MacOS doesn't get as much attention as iOS when it comes to these things.

[dbmikus]

Spaces help me visually organize related apps. I have all my chat apps in one, all my dev stuff in another.

I used to run Linux with i3 tiling window manager, but switched to Mac because the battery is so much better. Although the new Framework laptop looks like it has pretty great battery life.