Long time Mac user (1992); I think the Mac UI peaked at Mavericks (some would argue Snow Leopard due to the dumb Save workflow in Lion). As soon as Yosemite started trying too hard to be minimal it started a descent into prioritizing style over UX. I haven't touched Big Sur yet and probably won't until I'm forced to with a new Mac.
Looking at screenshots of Elementary, it's so much more obvious how things work and what widgets do than on modern Mac OS. I've been running it in various VMs for a few years but didn't seriously consider switching to it full time until Big Sur was announced. I have too many paid-for Mac apps like Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Photo Mechanic, and others that prevent me from moving to Linux full time.
Another long-time Mac user, who is also increasingly frustrated with how dumbed down & bloated OSX is becoming [I'm sticking on Mavericks for the foreseeable future and only 'upgraded' from El Capitán because more and more of my apps were breaking after applying updates].
With all OSX Finder's faults and all the annoyances of the OS, I still think it's miles ahead of any Linux distro I've tried to get on with.
Two words "Quicklook" --OK. that's one word made of two. I find it incredible that no Linux desktop environment has something like this. Pressing spacebar to preview the content of a file without needing to open it first is something I do literally every single day and often multiple times. Why, in 2021, does every single Linux desktop require me to open a file first to see what's inside it?
That's my biggest bugbear with Linux desktops. Other annoyances are more vague. Mostly to do with the inconsistencies in the interface. Coming from something like OSX which, for all its faults, presents a completely consistent user interface, every Linux desktop I've tried [even the polished ones like Ubuntu & Mint] always have those annoying glitches & inconsistencies which just scream 'Designed by Committee' [which I suppose they are, to an extent].
As regards apps; a big part of what I do is graphic design and that pretty much rules Linux out for anything work-related. Whatever you think of Adobe, Photoshop and Illustrator just blow The Gimp [dire!] and Inkscape [tolerable but clunky] out of the water.
I did have high hopes that new kids on the block Affinity might bring their Photo and Designer [which actually do give Photoshop and Illustrator a run for their money] to Linux. But it seems they've decided to follow Adobe's lead and make thei offerings OSX & Windows only.
About the only quality graphic design app I've seen available for Linux is Krita. But it's more of a digital painting app than an image manipulation one. And, of course, no vector graphics.
> Mostly to do with the inconsistencies in the interface. Coming from something like OSX which, for all its faults, presents a completely consistent user interface,
I used Mac OS X from 2009 to 2012.
It was sold as consistent and keyboard friendly back then.
However: Describing a desktop interface where selecting a single word using the keyboard needs a different keystroke in different apps, that is - rich.
Maybe this is fixed now but back then even official applications had different ways to select a word using the keyboard: in one it was cmd+shift+arrowkey in the next it was ctrl-shift-arrowkey or even fn-shift-arrowkey.
Especially infuriating because one of the most used ones in other applications meant "navigate back" in Safari.
Meanwhile in Windows and Linux ctrl+arrowkey always moves one word and ctrl+shift+arrowkey almost always (hi Excel!) selects a full word.
Maybe it is fixed now. But I'll never let a Mac user lecture me about consistency again.
I’ve had Mac since Snow Leopard, and recently Fedora on my desktop. In macOS command+arrow jumps to the begging or end of the line and option+arrow jumps words. If you hold down shift in addition, the words get selected. It has “always” been like this consistently!
Consistency has really gone downhill in macOS, but thankfully if there are menu items for those actions you can override the binding in the settings app.
If we're doing the 'showstoppers on the Linux migration', I must yet again ask why no other file manager on any other operating system can do as Finder has been able to do since the 90s and display the total recursive size of a directory in bytes!
The combination of this feature (including sort-by this directory size when listing dir contents) and quicklook makes the Mac the only place I ever want to actually manage files, instead of dumping them in Downloads and declaring bankruptcy. Two basic features that would have me on Linux in a heartbeat. I'm begging you!
(Ironically, Windows Search is so useless compared to Spotlight that the give-up-and-dump-and-search approach works best on Mac too...)
(Though the whole thing, while useful in practice, feels like essentially a workaround for unnecessarily heavy and app-centric UIs. Having both an “Open” command and an “Open, but faster and does less” command feels like humans succumbing to the needs of computers, not computers providing an additional convenience for humans. But that is a much more complicated problem that I don’t think has ever been solved in a GUI context.)
> Though the whole thing, while useful in practice, feels like essentially a workaround for unnecessarily heavy and app-centric UIs.
Right, I'm sometimes puzzled by how people approach their personal "deal-breakers" that prevent Mac->Lin (or Win->Lin) switch. Many of the issues are presented as though they are bugs or clear-cut missing features, but are in fact subjective preference statements.
In this case the "spacebar to preview" feature might be a must-have for some, but to others it might not be important, and maybe even to some be perceived as an anti-feature. I personally see this particular feature as redundant (given there is already thumbnailing and a means to open files) and unintuitive, and thus just more clutter. But I also don't care too much, since I could always disable it if it came pre-enabled.
The worst cases of this is when some insist that not only is their particular preference the The One Way, but that stubborn Linux DE developers are somehow at fault for not implementing The One Way, and that's why Linux will never be popular. There are plenty of things that might keep "normies" from switching, but random obscure DE features are not them. People tolerate FAR worse UX disasters than any major Linux DE.
I always feel like I'm in a different plane from the rest of the universe when discussing these things.
When I read how Linux DEs are "obviously" garbage, I just generally throw up a thought bubble with few question marks above my head in confusion and go on with my day. I find Mac OS a frustrating experience personally, but assume it's mostly a result of not being used to it.
> I find Mac OS a frustrating experience personally, but assume it's mostly a result of not being used to it.
I used it at my previous job, 2014-18 -- got the choice between a Mac and IIRC a ThinkPad when I started, and never having used a Mac before I wanted to finally try it -- and got a MacBook Pro, can't recall the vintage. Broke the screen a couple years later, got a 2016. But, anyway: Took a while to get used to the OS, and certainly didn't feel all that "super-intuitive" as the hype has had it for all these years.
So, observation #1: If I could get used to it (and I got quite comfortable after a while), I can't see why people can't go the other way just as easily.
Can't recall the OS version at the beginning (one of the last of the big cats, or some US body of water?), but later it upgraded via various Californian (or Oregon, Washington?) rivers or lakes to Maverick and finally, I think (for the last few months), to El Capitan. Can't recall if it set in right away, but after a couple of years at the latest I noticed the same thing as many here have mentioned, namely
Observation #2: With every new version, the OS gets a little more limited and locked down.
> I always feel like I'm in a different plane from the rest of the universe when discussing these things.
Exactly! It really feels like there's this massive disconnect in these conversations that I can't explain.
Whenever I have to use macOS, I'm a complete mess, and to me like it's missing basic features and doesn't support my workflow without lots of 3rd party add-ons, etc. That said, I probably am using it wrong, so I don't go around saying that macOS desktop is obviously garbage. I know that other people prefer this style, so that's A-OK.
It reminds me an article from the author of Paul Buchheit (gmail's creator), when he was beta testing it internally with Google employees.
Many of them were asking for email preview popups directly from the inbox. Instead of implementing it, he realized the need wasn't for a popup but for a wait to see your email quickly. The real issue was that it was slow when you clicked on an email, so he made it fast instead.
> Right, I'm sometimes puzzled by how people approach their personal "deal-breakers" that prevent Mac->Lin (or Win->Lin) switch. Many of the issues are presented as though they are bugs or clear-cut missing features, but are in fact subjective preference statements.
Since preference is pretty important, does it really matter? If they have a workflow they like and no significant pressure to change, why would they? You speak as though it is everyone's most pressing goal to transition to Linux Desktop for some reason.
> The worst cases of this is when some insist that not only is their particular preference the The One Way, but that stubborn Linux DE developers are somehow at fault for not implementing The One Way, and that's why Linux will never be popular.
There's a lot of reasons Linux will never be popular, developers ignoring the workflows and use cases of potential users is just one of them. The condescending attitude of many of its supposed proponents is another. Why would I want to switch to a Desktop that's as clunky and haphazard as Windows 10, just in different ways that I have to relearn?
>Having both an “Open” command and an “Open, but faster and does less” command
>I personally see this particular feature as redundant (given there is already thumbnailing and a means to open files)
I'm guessing neither of you have actually used QuickLook and/or don't use apps like Photoshop or Illustrator which, even on a fast SSD equipped laptop can take around 30 seconds to open. QuickLook is much more than just a preview.
When I'm browsing a folder of my image files and can't remember which of dozens of files is the one I actually want, QuickLook lets me pop open a screen sized modal preview window, which is as good as having that file open in the app. If it's not the file I'm looking for, I hit the up or down arrows and the next or previous file's content is displayed in the already open preview popup. If some of those other image files were created by Illustrator, I've just saved myself an additional ~30 seconds, by not having to open that app too. And, once I find the image I want, I can open it in its associated app directly from a button in the top of the preview pane.
But, even if you're not a graphic designer, QuickLook has its uses for other types of document too. It can preview the content of source code files [with syntax highlighting] preview the rendered output of things like HTML, PDF, Markdown, AsciiDoc etc. You can even scroll through the pages of a multipage document.
This is another timesaver I use all the time. Being able to check the date or bottom line on a received PDF invoice, without opening it... being able to check whether I mentioned something in a letter I sent, without firing up a text editor or word processor... being able to see a rendered representation of what an HTML file contains... etc. etc.
No, that’s not what I meant. I do in fact use the previewer I linked to, and would be worse off without it.
I just think that it the apps that make it necessary shouldn’t do so: if Photoshop (or GIMP, or LibreOffice, or whatever) takes 30 seconds to open a file, the solution shouldn’t be to layer on yet another option and make me think whether I want to suffer that delay or reduced functionality, it should be to eliminate the delay.
Yet (as I’ve also said) I don’t think anybody came up with a plausible way to do so (even a purely technical one, disregarding economic incentives for app developers).
Evince is also pretty snappy. Not as omnivorous, but let’s be honest, most of my hard drive is PDFs.
Quickly flipping between files with horizontal arrows (or something of a similar complexity) is actually the more interesting function here, I think, and maybe it does warrant a mode. Some picture viewers try to make the switch implicit (flip between files when picture fits on screen, pan horizontally when not), but my builtin mode tracker gets out of sync frequently, and I would absolutely hate to have the same error-prone controls in a PDF viewer, where I sometimes stare at a single file for hours and sometimes flip through a dozen in a minute. No idea how this should be done.
First off, thanks for the great reply! My point isn't that it's not useful as much as that it's very preference-based. The good news is though that apparently both Linux (GNOME + KDE) and macOS support this feature, despite my not using it much on any platform, so it's what we're discussing is not even a difference between mac/lin at this point, but just an abstract consideration.
> Being able to check the date or bottom line on a received PDF invoice, without opening it.
I tried double-clicking on a 43-page PDF, and it took less than a second to open on my under-powered Acer (about ~$200, mfg 4 years ago), running stock Ubuntu 20.04. This seems really fast, as it was basically instantaneous from releasing the mouse. Obviously opening up a PSD would be slower, but then again I can always just zoom in on the thumbnail in that case (Ctrl+Scroll zooms in on icons in Linux).
This is making me think perhaps the real difference is that the default programs that open are too slow, eg if Photoshop is the default associated application for all images, or Adobe Acrobat for all PDFs, then I totally would see the need to have a previewer as well, since last time I used those they were realllllly slow.
I dunno, that said, it's all really not important. Then again, what is HN but for getting grumpy about unimportant things? :p
A preview pane isn't exactly the same thing. OSX also has this in column view. But Quicklook will popup a modal window, which can be resized as big as you want, so you can get a clear view of the file content as good as actually opening it in its app, without the added overhead of actually having to launch [and quit] that app.
[and, if the file in question is a Photoshop or Illustrator document, you'll really appreciate how much time QuickLook saves you, by not having to wait for those behemoths to creak slowly into action]
There are also certain plugins which can enhance this functionality by providing extra info, such as pixel dimensions on image files, allowing browsing inside archives, syntax highlighting of source code files etc.
Maybe peoples' descriptions on here aren't doing Quicklook justice, for those who aren't familiar with it. Once you've used it for a while, you can't imagine why it's not a standard feature on any modern desktop OS.
It's not hidden in a disused lavatory behind a sign bearing the words "beware the leopard". Click menu button view panels "Information" Also F11
If remembers the state globally so if you leave it open it will always be there when you open a file manager window if you toggle it off it will be hidden next time too.
It's not open by default perhaps because not everyone regards it as maximally useful. Say I open a file manager and have it sized to 1/4 of a 24" 1080p screen. On the left hand side of the screen is a panel which lists common and places and other items. This leaves a space for 15 icons on the screen at 48px size big enough to comfortably read and note some details in a preview.
Opening the information pane reduces that to 10 icons greatly reducing the space available for the main purpose of the application.
What if I open it to the full size of the screen? I can now view 56 icons at 80px where now they actually are a pretty decent size to see whats in them in their own icon.
I think most of the time having the info panel shown would decrease the utility of the window.
> It's not open by default perhaps because not everyone regards it as maximally useful.
Indeed, I don't have any use for information or preview panes, I disable them all when encountering. IMHO they are a distraction from the content itself and make the view arrangement clumsy.
Maybe QuickLook outlived itself. It was a technology tailored to the HDD era of hardware, when complex apps required dozens of seconds to start. In a world were even LibreOffice cold-starts in under three seconds on middle of the road hardware QuickLook is just a familiar workflow instead of a necessity?
Initially I missed QuickLook a lot after switching away from macOS, but now I haven't thought about it in years.
I can't imagine not having access to QuickLook. It's not really about how quickly apps open so much as the UI—in a large folder of images or documents, I can use QuickLook to see what's inside each one, whereas without it I'd have to open a window for every document.
Yes, for me the killer aspect of Quicklook is being able to flip through dozens of documents in barely more time than it takes for my arrow keys to actuate. It’s wonderful for skimming through dozens of files quickly. Icons that accurately represent content on more than just images are great too.
Aside from that, QuickLook remains one of the few examples of a generic extensible document reader in modern operating systems. The way it gains the ability to read new types of files just by virtue of the owning app’s bundle being present on the system (no installation necessary, and it goes away when you delete the app) makes so much sense, and it’s a shame that there’s no equivalent on Windows and Linux.
> QuickLook remains one of the few examples of a generic extensible document reader in modern operating systems.
...were there other ones in classic operating systems? QuickTime <= 10.2 did let you install third-party components (I wrote one recently), but what else was there?
There was OpenDoc on classic Mac OS, and I think maybe COM on the Microsoft side of the fence? Not as well versed on Windows stuff though so that may be a misread on my part.
I think the quicklook is available in gnome. I'm not sure how it compares to the osx one because I don't use anything apple, but selecting a file and pressing space in nautilus behaves as I expect quicklook to work. A preview of the file is shown. It doesn't work for all file types but the common ones (images, documents, videos, text files etc.) are shown.
>About the only quality graphic design app I've seen available for Linux is Krita. But it's more of a digital painting app than an image manipulation one. And, of course, no vector graphics.
Well there's the web based Figma, somebody even created an unofficial desktop app for Linux. Figma has plugins, tons of them for many graphic design tasks. It blows the Affinity stuff out of the water imo.
The big caveat with Figma is that you don’t full own your data with it. It technically lets you export, but the file format is undocumented and subject to change at any time.
Additionally, it’s very much geared specifically toward UI design and prototyping, whereas something like Affinity Designer or Sketch also work well for generic screen-targeted vector work.
I've been using PenPot[1] in lieu of Figma all this year, which is an free/libre Figma-clone. For my particular usage it's been great, I prefer it to the others I've tried recently. However, it's still in heavy development, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are missing features compared to more mature offerings.
> The big caveat with Figma is that you don’t full own your data with it. It technically lets you export, but the file format is undocumented and subject to change at any time.
True for project files, but you can export images and SVGs.
> it’s very much geared specifically toward UI design and prototyping, whereas something like Affinity Designer or Sketch also work well for generic screen-targeted vector work.
That's where the plugin ecosystem comes in. It's quite usable for simple/modern vector work that's more component oriented graphic design than hands on illustration.
I gained NVME drivers for using larger SSDs, so tolerated the changes, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to make the leap to ARM M1 if Big Sur is holding me back so much.
All I need from a filesystem is to be able to mount it and read and write files.
APFS isn't writeable on Linux or Windows without additional drivers. Nor is HFS+. It's quite inconvenient. If ZFS was usable in that way, I'd consider it! But for now I still have to keep my boot volume as HFS+ so I can at least read files, and use FAT32 to shuttle data around.
For me macOS design peaked when they moved from the super readable Lucida Grande to Helvetica Neue because it looked hot on retina displays. I'm not sure which version that was exactly.
Purely from a visual standpoint I like the Big Sur redesign way more than I expected. It looks like it was made for dark mode, unlike previous versions where dark mode was kind of an add on. The whole material/translucency thing is really coming together. Not so happy about the non-visual aspects though, like all the unlabeled, barely distinct line icons.
Ha, I had no idea. That's kind of a problem, yeah. They REALLY fixed that with San Francisco which has, by my count, a crazy 18 cuts across 8 variants, counting only generic sans serifs.
Eh, in a UI font though? I appreciate the lack of italics in the UI of my system (which is running Mavericks, so has Lucida Grande), it keeps the menus clean and there are better ways to add emphasis where truly needed.
Not necessarily in the UI. But, as the default font, it was the one that a lot of apps would er... 'default' to. So, if you were writing a text document in such an app and then went to make some text italic you'd realise it wasn't available so would have to change fronts.... which could then affect the layout, no. of pages required etc.
> Purely from a visual standpoint I like the Big Sur redesign way more than I expected. It looks like it was made for dark mode, unlike previous versions where dark mode was kind of an add on. The whole material/translucency thing is really coming together.
Yeah, I actually like Big Sur more than I expected to, and it's the first version of macOS with a dark mode that I actually stuck with. Most of my quibbles stem from choosing minimalism over discoverability, e.g., hiding the document proxy icon, making all the keyboard shortcuts in menus grey because somebody clearly decided that looked prettier and more subtle rather, etc. But in practice, all the shirt-rending over how the excessive transparency would make everything unreadable and illegible just hasn't matched my experience.
Interestingly enough, iTerm is the biggest sticking point for me in switching back to Linux: none of the Linux terminal applications have the quality of life features I depend on in iTerm
Yeah, I recently switched my main machine from macOS to Pop!_OS 21.04 (another "install and forget" distro based on Ubuntu, so kinda similar to Elementary OS) and I miss iTerm so much that I sometimes slide my chair over to the music workstation (which is still a Mac) and SSH in from iTerm just to do stuff in the terminal.
I think iTerm is probably not just the best terminal on any platform, but also one of the best software applications ever made, period. I would looove to have something like it on Linux, but I've spent several evening beers googling it, after switching to Linux, and there just aren't any.
Random things I like about iTerm, off the top of my head:
- not only is it extremely customizable, it can sync those settings across multiple machine easily via any shared-folder mechanism (I use Syncthing, but you could use iCloud Disk or Dropbox or anything)
- infinite history/scrollback retention, even across restarts
- extremely good performance, regardless of having dozens of windows open (maybe only on high-spec Macs? that's the only kind of Mac I use, since macOS is so crazy slow generally)
- timestamps on every line, hidden by default but can be shown after the fact whenever you want (e.g. hmm... when did this script output this line of text? oh, last night at 1AM, it must be hung then, kill it)
- detaches your sessions when it updates itself, then restarts and re-attaches them
- scriptable, so each project can have a little script that opens iTerm and opens a tab that runs a local dev server, another tab with REPL, another tab with unit tests in watch mode, another tab with whatever... and so on
I recently migrated to Kitty because of iTerm’s abysmal performance issues, and it’s quite better. The performance is top-notch, the terminal’s scripting APIs are (for my use cases) better than iTerm’s python API, and the config uses plain text.
A bunch of little things: iTerm’s jump/mark feature is really useful, especially combined with shell integration and triggers. iTerm can detect soft splits (e.g. tmux or vim splits) and confine the selection to one side of them. Also it’s split-pane navigation functionality is pretty smooth.
The big issue is that a lot of what makes iTerm great is that it isn't trying to be cross-platform: many of my favorite apps are intentionally single-platform and take advantage of what that platform provides.
The beauty and elegance of Mac OS died with Mac OS X, when they foolishly decided to keep the NeXT-isms instead of sticking with tried and true Mac principles like the spatial Finder.
I’ll be that one person who will say that the peak of desktop environment design is currently gnome (with guake for a drop down terminal and top panel workspace scroll). It’s extremely keyboard driven and working with 4 different workspaces is just extremely pleasant. Using super for both overview and search is a really nice touch too. Just my opinion - avoiding using the mouse really is nice
Gnome is actually quite good I find myself at odds with some of their defaults for workspaces but they're in the right ball park when it comes to aesthetics and organising the UI.
I would very much like to have a guake like terminal for mac os. That and a workspace persistent file explorer. But I think that kind of desktop enhancement that is bug free and feature full is hard to come by.
Also since you're on Linux I'm looking for a linux alternative for this tool. https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/choose It's a gui chooser I don't know if such a thing exists for linux. I suspect it might be quite easy to implement one with electron.
By the way what I'm not looking for is something like alfred for linux. That would be an overkill.
Gnome 3 absolutely wasn't horrible last I used it, I only had to fix the wildly inefficient alt-tab implementation and thta took a few minutes searching and clicking one checkbox I think.
(I think there was a nunber of issues with extensions but I guess that is fixed now.)
Looking at screenshots of Elementary, it's so much more obvious how things work and what widgets do than on modern Mac OS. I've been running it in various VMs for a few years but didn't seriously consider switching to it full time until Big Sur was announced. I have too many paid-for Mac apps like Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Photo Mechanic, and others that prevent me from moving to Linux full time.