What I miss most in macOS is the raw graphics performance of Windows, even for day-to-day computing. Probably a combo of available graphics cards, drivers, and how the OS treats graphics performance. Finder is def getting a bit creaky, but I've never hit limitations using it.
My experience is that macOS is similar to how Windows used to be. You have to wipe it out and reinstall it every year or two to get your performance back.
Familiarity is a huge part of it. Windows is getting better very slowly but consistently. Really the only major pain points where I say MacOS is objectively better are:
- Window flickering on resizing, both have it but MacOS has a lot less of it.
- Being able to customize any shortcut menu item in any app
- Finder, Document proxy icons and open/save dialogs are just leagues ahead of Explorer.
I lived through these times, and I thought OS X was a huge improvement over MacOS, I'd never want to go back! Software in general has gotten more bloated and slow since the '90s, but I don't blame it on the OS.
I didn't have too many major complaints about working on MacOS, but I've always preferred windows. I used Windows 3.1 before MacOS. It's probably since I used Windows first, but I've always preferred the Windows approach of window management. Whenever using a Mac, I would always end up with a jumble of windows and I'd frequently click the wrong one when and it would pop to the front and hide what I was looking for. Then the wrong application's tab strip would be visible. Arrrgggh! It was a common point of frustration for me when using Photoshop and Illustrator since there are a number of similar Windows.
In Windows 11, I like that there is reasonable support for dark UI and multiple desktops. I haven't used OS X that much in the past 10 years, so I can't comment on the improvements that have been made since then.
I have used Mac laptops as my daily driver for the last ten years after being a ride-or-die Linux guy for the 15 years before that.
I’m still more comfortable on Linux systems, though. Some things I dearly miss, in no particular order:
1) complete control over window management, an embarrassment of riches in terms of amazing and wacky window managers
2) {s,p, (and much later) d}trace; there are probably similar tools on Mac but I don’t need them badly enough to find and learn them —- but I know just enough about them in Linux-land to investigate frustrating things
... I thought there would be more when I started typing, but that might be it.
Huh. After years of mar I tried to go back to windows. I did it for 2 years but I'm so much happier on Mac again.
I did kind of like the windows thg of dragging a window to the top to maximise, but that stuff is easy to replace with an app or two. General OS slowness and instability and clunky design not so much.
I am still on macOS but I totally agree with your post. macOS and iOS are seriously locked down and it can be very frustrating.
Like you I used Magnet but wanting to get something more tiling window manager-like I switched to Amethyst[1] which while not as powerful is pretty good for what it is.
Sadly macOS has frustratingly laggy window resizing for a lot of things. Finder and Safari are usually fine but pretty much everything else feels laggy to resize and generally macOS just has absolutely terrible window manager so a tiling window manager is a god send.
I mostly use macOS because I have been doing iOS and macOS development and so what else you gonna use but I have to admit I want to move away from the platform. It is all 'very exciting' right now with all the Apple Silicon hype and yeah it genuinely is impressive but for me I kinda want to get back to something more open even if it doesn't have a lovely highly efficient and performant custom SoC driving it.
I am like 90% there in convincing myself to build a nice AMD desktop next year and moving away from macOS as my main OS. Luckily I am not dependent on any Apple services so switching shouldn't be that bad.
For what it's worth, there are quite a few tools that can help make macos a usable experience. Magnet helps a ton for window management, for example. But stock macos is pretty booty.
As someone who uses both, I have to say I am not sure what's so special about the 'macOS experience'. I mean the desktop is not even a decent window manager imo, I have to get something like PathFinder for a decent file manager etc, yes there are some nice apps for macOS but it's not like the OS experience itself is some unbeatable benchmark.
There's also a 10% that works better on Windows than on Macs and you're not currently aware of it. I've switched between Macs and Windows and Linux as my daily driver several times and there's always an annoyance when you switch and everything doesn't work the way you want t. But it goes away quickly, within days. And then the next time you switch you're again annoyed that things don't work the way the new way you're used to. Actually, I've been mostly using Macs for the last 4 years and I still think window management and the Finder are inferior to Windows'.
I use both platforms regularly. Using dual screens, I have noticed many more bugs in MacOS graphics stack than Windows. From out-right freezes, to black screens, inverted colors, wrong colors, fuzzy fonts, screen glitches and more.
The best things about MacOS is its Unix underpinnings and general consistency. The flip-side also happens to be the two worst things about Windows.
i use mac and linux and I really like the mac finder less. But it is a personal choice. I miss the macos8 windowshades...
I feel sometimes linux almost has too many choices. There are a few main stream ones and a bunch of others that have bunch of fans/developers so the end product feels very rough. When the other choices (Windows/mac) are good enough but consistent.
I'm not one to defend the "mac experience" but some of the stuff you mention I actually really like, namely like the separate key-combo for switching between app windows and the two modes of full screen (although I never use full-full screen anymore).
Finder is definitely not great. It's improved over the years which is kind of sad as it's not a whole lot better. You still can't cmd+x a file to move it to another location. I'm not sure when it happened (probably a while ago) but you can actually rename files in open dialogs now! I didn't notice when it happened because I gave up trying many years ago.
Anyway, I like macos as it gives me a linux-esque command-line experience out of the box without having dive into managing a Linux installs (although that's probably not as big a deal as I think it is), because the hardware is nice, and otherwise because it's just what I'm used to ¯\_(?)_/¯
For non-developer reasons, Logic, even though not the best, is so insanely cheap for what you get, and as a light gamer, Minecraft runs decently well on my Mac Mini.
Looking through my dock, I would miss the following:
Spark, Safari, Terminal (no, Hyper is no proper terminal compared to the native one), Paw, Sketch, Postico, Transmit, Bear, Pages, Numbers, Keynote and Textual.
I think I would even miss small things like the Finder listing options, it's just that macOS was may many years ahead and Microsoft is playing catch up just now but has too much to catch up too, so I will wait at least several more years to even consider Windows viable.
Even if macOS stagnates for the following years, it's still the better OS for me. I am on a Hackintosh btw, so the hardware advantages are non existent.
Indeed. I'm making the switch from Linux (which I've been using almost exclusively since 2004) to MacOS, and so far I find a lot of nuisance, and almost nothing that works better. Different, yes. More pro apps available, yes. But inherently better (or just basically in the OS)? Haven't found where yet.
As for PSH: use fish and don't look back. :)
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