_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Make macOS consistently bad unironically
Myrmornis wrote 7 min ago:
The rounded corners are nothing compared to the notch camera making
part of the top of my applications invisible.
kirubakaran wrote 4 hours 20 min ago:
Everyone knows that Tim Cook committed to 100% carbon neutrality. But
not many know that they're achieving it by releasing Liquid Glass and
attaching a dynamo to Steve Jobs' corpse.
podgorniy wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
I see in this story organisational boundaries between teams. Teams
which don't have common coordination space (or used for something more
__important__). Responsible people don't care enough to mitigate such
deviations earlier
retsibsi wrote 10 hours 58 min ago:
I think it's a happy quirk of the blog's tagging system (#Programming
is a category tag), but the ending feels quite profound:
> Now at least everything is consistently bad. #Programming
hackrmn wrote 12 hours 11 min ago:
For all his infamy, Jobs held Apple together in large part through his
uncompromising perfectionism and attention to the kind of details that
have since been demoted to "we'll fix it in the next version" or the
equivalent of "# temporary". Every company is a bit of an ant-farm, but
this one either has no single queen to lay down the law, or the queen
is "trying things out" :P
Jobs used to laugh at Microsoft for all manner of inconsistencies in
behaviour and user experience with Windows, but now Apple is contending
with the same problem, in part due to exposure as macOS has never been
so popular and prevalent, and now there are ever growing amount of eyes
calling them out for those inconsistencies that have been appearing
more and more frequently without Jobs' leadership style.
_the_inflator wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
I see you point, but I think that Jobs not per se held Apple
together. This is Tim Cook doing as well and arguably on a way larger
scale.
The one thing that distinguished Jobs from the rest ever since is the
fact, that he was Apple's greatest fan boy. If you have a look at the
Itunes introduction, Jobs sits there and for around 2 hours showcases
every feature and function. He was so into the product, that this
keynote is for me the most nerdy ever conducted by him.
The others as well always show him being the company's No 1 fan and
host of every feature there is.
Imagine to have a boss like this. He set the standard for product
development in every regard.
And this is what slipped. Consistency is lacking and according to
biographies about Cook, he has a very huge focus on him as a person.
This is always wrong. It is about the product, nothing else.
There will never be a Jobs again. And it is getting worse from here:
the old guard is mostly gone. Even the myth of Steve Jobs is nothing
Gen Z cares about.
We live in the Post-Jobs phase and Cook seems to be overshadowing
Jobs, as sad as this is. All innovations except the headphones date
back to Jobs. All the scale that Apple reached to Cook.
I bet Jobs would rather have a way smaller scale with great products.
This luxury lifestyle is nothing Jobs liked.
Sad, but true.
grliga wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
this is why I want Jobs back, not as CEO but as head of software or
head of software QA
kwertyoowiyop wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
One wonders what Jobs would think of Liquid Glass.
andai wrote 3 hours 44 min ago:
"We call that new user interface Aqua, because it's liquid. One
of the design goals was that when you saw it, you wanted to lick
it!"
06:45
URI [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ko4V3G4NqII&t=6m45s
ale wrote 3 hours 29 min ago:
You have to realise every single UI up to that point was solid
white or grey and unable to access alpha channels. And the fact
that they expanded upon this design âlanguageâ with the
transparent Imac cases made it all cohesive and 2YK hip.
imranstrive7 wrote 12 hours 25 min ago:
I tried something similar while building my tool site â biggest issue
was SEO indexing. Fixed it by improving internal linking instead of
relying on sitemap.
JohannesCortez wrote 13 hours 3 min ago:
One way to make the mac consistent
fredgrott wrote 13 hours 10 min ago:
Somehow this little hidden setting via CLI
defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES
Makes thing bearable....note log out to see it change.
You still need to then turn transparency off via settings see
this
URI [1]: https://tidbits.com/2025/10/09/how-to-turn-liquid-glass-into-a...
romanovcode wrote 14 hours 17 min ago:
This was one of the first things I noticed after upgrade and was
confused. I had an understanding that people in Apple UX are extremely
meticulous when it comes to every single little tiny detail. I guess
those times are over.
leptons wrote 8 hours 26 min ago:
They still obsess about it but they seem to be idiots, and always
have been. Nobody has ever been able to explain reasonably why "about
this software" is the first thing on the first menu of every MacOS
program - it isn't useful exept maybe once a year. It's a ridiculous
UX choice, always has been. Don't get me started on Finder.
red_admiral wrote 15 hours 1 min ago:
Not a mac user here - why can't you use the same method to set the
corner radius to 0.1 or something and effectively turn of the
roundness, but without root?
duskdozer wrote 14 hours 51 min ago:
>The reason why you need to disable SIP, is that to edit the dynamic
libraries that system apps like Safari (which has crazy bad corners)
use, you need to edit system libraries that exist the root.
cjmcqueen wrote 15 hours 39 min ago:
Send Apple feedback
URI [1]: https://www.apple.com/feedback/
dmd wrote 15 hours 24 min ago:
Iâm honestly intensely curious what you thought this comment would
contribute.
bengale wrote 13 hours 54 min ago:
That's not a thread you want to pull on, it applied to the majority
of the comments on the internet.
DeathArrow wrote 17 hours 2 min ago:
At some point in time, Apple used nice software to be able to sell
expensive but mediocre hardware.
Now they sell expensive but nice hardware and they have mediocre
software.
It seems you can only choose one out of three, nice hardware, nice
software, good price. Apple is always choosing high price, and they
either gave customers nice hardware or nice software, but not both.
search_facility wrote 16 hours 48 min ago:
Well, this is a business model, not a coincidence... They are in the
battle of selling fresh hardware each and every year consistenly
stackghost wrote 19 hours 39 min ago:
I feel like the only dude on the planet who uses fullscreen workspaces
on Mac.
The number of times I have noticed the corner of my windows is
precisely zero because each important application gets its own
workspace, so the window frame doesn't get rendered. Sometimes I'll
tile two windows side by side on my external monitor but even then this
is a complete non issue for me.
Are you guys just running everything on the one desktop workspace in
windowed mode? That seems like madness.
fingerlocks wrote 16 hours 6 min ago:
I asked this same question years ago in one of those threads that was
all windows people complaining about cmd+tab. No responses.
That means there are exactly two of us.
stackghost wrote 3 hours 6 min ago:
Fullscreen gang assemble!
technical_sway wrote 21 hours 35 min ago:
I'm sure they'll try to market this as a feature so you can see how
many windows you have open
7jjjjjjj wrote 22 hours 14 min ago:
I hate rounded corners. I use stylus to apply "*{border-radius: 0
!important;}" to a bunch of sites, including YouTube.
zarzavat wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
People obsess about SIP but just remember that SIP does nothing to
prevent the most common type of malware (ransomware).
If you use SIP and use package managers (npm, cargo, pip, etc) outside
of a VM you are substantially more vulnerable to attack than someone
who doesn't use SIP and doesn't use package managers.
So if you want to fix your corners, you can do it guilt-free by
adopting some better security practices around the malware delivery
systems / package managers that you have installed on your computer.
halapro wrote 19 hours 44 min ago:
SIP protects the OS, not you nor your files. If you run third party
software that can run `rm` of course you're vulnerable to data loss.
Apples and oranges.
SIP guarantees that you will be able to turn on your computer in safe
mode and remove the malware, whereas without it your OS is toast.
zarzavat wrote 11 hours 3 min ago:
Yes but it's the files that are the important part.
If I had malware then the fate of the hardware is at the bottom of
my priority list, I'm probably going to be replacing it anyway. I'd
be more concerned that someone is going to steal my AWS credentials
to run a cryptominer and I get a bill for hundreds of thousands of
dollars!
The only solution to malware is to not install it in the first
place. By the time SIP is useful you are already very screwed. SIP
makes you safer in the same way that having a parachute on a plane
makes you safer, technically yes but the difference in safety is
marginal.
saagarjha wrote 15 hours 52 min ago:
SIP also backs some security mechanisms to ensure that they remain
functional and not easily bypassable.
nomel wrote 20 hours 56 min ago:
Sure, if you run software from strangers on the internet, while
explicitly giving them access to your systems, bad things can happen.
But SIP is definitely a net good that makes many things directly
impossible.
Do you have a system in mind that prevents the user from doing this?
bigyabai wrote 20 hours 8 min ago:
> Do you have a system in mind that prevents the user from doing
this?
Sure, macOS could adopt an iPad-style security system that refuses
to run all software outside the App Store. It works on iPhone and
iPad just fine, all the prosumers love it.
It's not like native darwin triples are a popular compilation
target. There wouldn't be any vast tragedy if the macOS shellutil
authors were told to use zsh in a VM instead, it would separate the
parts of macOS that Apple cares about from the parts they don't
seriously support. WSL and Crostini achieves this on vastly weaker
hardware with great results.
tgv wrote 16 hours 55 min ago:
macOS does precisely that out of the box, doesn't it? You have to
change some settings to run other software. I've got it set to:
allow notarized, warn for internet downloads (even if notarized),
everything else after explicit permission.
ddtaylor wrote 1 day ago:
I have never been happier to be a long time Linux user. Our systems are
working significantly better than ever before and I have personally
converted more people to Linux in the last year than the 15 years
before that.
noisy_boy wrote 20 hours 17 min ago:
Particularly KDE. They have had some ups and downs but finally they
have built a great foundation with Plasma and Plasma dark mode with
Breeze is such a great balance of flexibility and fairly consistent
look and feel. I stuck around with Gnome for too long in the name of
simplicity but once you appreciate that Plasma gets out of your way
once things are exactly how you want it, I have come to appreciate
not having to install extensions for everyday "normal" things a lot
more.
_kidlike wrote 17 hours 56 min ago:
Plasma has been a bit buggy since v6 :(
they tried to do something with remembering "how you left things"
between sessions, and even when disabled things are still weird...
Also some power management related hooks are not working as well as
before. Like if you put the computer to sleep at night, and wake it
up in the morning, the automatic dark-to-light theme switch doesn't
trigger. at least not always.
Still the best system to work with though!
zeroq wrote 1 day ago:
Reminds me of Adobe Gripes ( [1] ).
When Adobe suite was de facto standard for designing and coding
interfaces (you know, Flash) their own software was so immensely bad
that there was enough material for a guy to make fun of them on a daily
basis for a good couple of years.
URI [1]: https://www.tumblr.com/adobegripes
bmiekre wrote 1 day ago:
Yâall are wildâ¦
alzar wrote 1 day ago:
great catch on the corner inconsistency. hadnt noticed until reading
this now i cant unsee it.
this is actually one of the reasons i ended up going all in on a tiling
wm (aerospace). once youre tiling, windows are edge to edge so the
corner radius thing mostly disappears. the trade off is giving up
floating windows,
the DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES approach is clever though. making everything
consistently rounded is way more pragmatic than fighting apples design
decisions or disabling SIP.
travisgriggs wrote 1 day ago:
Mac OS has become what would happen if Harley Davidson merged with
Volvo Truck and some high up said that to "reduce costs" and
"homogenize the brand", the design groups needed to be merged and put
forward a unified design. If I was less lazy, I'd have a !AI thing whip
me up a mashup drawing.
varispeed wrote 1 day ago:
I've been running Sonoma and it's going to stay that way for
foreseeable future.
rc_kas wrote 23 hours 50 min ago:
wish I did that :(
josteink wrote 2 hours 36 min ago:
I held out until my work MacBook got force-upgraded by IT.
I've never used my Linux ThinkPad more than after my MacBook got
macOS 26.
gib444 wrote 1 day ago:
In window management, anything other than i3 is an unequivocal
downgrade.
Rounded corners are just...bizarre. Just because the laptop casing is
physically rounded !? (Yet the menubar squares it off off at the top,
and the bezel squares it off on the bottom...)
diego_moita wrote 1 day ago:
Windows gets a lot of (deserved) bad rap for bloatware but MacOS is
just a little less bad. "Features" that we can't uninstall (e.g.: Siri,
Apple Music), arbitrary changes in the UI, ...
True, the "blessing" of forced online accounts, telemetry and
advertisement didn't arrive to MacOS, yet. But, I wonder how long it
will take us to get there.
zackmorris wrote 1 day ago:
Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the
upgrade. Also I can't paste filenames in the save file dialog in some
apps. And the URL field in Safari is just weird.
My computer was running so slowly that I had to minimize transparency
in system preferences somewhere. I think I also turned off opening
every app in its own space. And I hid the icons on the Desktop in
Finder settings somehow, which helped a lot. There are countless other
little tweaks that are worth investigating.
I also highly recommend App Tamer (no affiliation). It lets you jail
background apps at 10% cpu or whatever. It won't help with WindowServer
or kernel_task (which also often runs at 100+% cpu), but it's
something.
I can't help but feel that there's nobody at the wheel at Apple
anymore. When I have to wait multiple seconds to open a window, to
switch between apps, to go to my Applications folder, then something is
terribly wrong. Computers have been running thousands of times slower
than they should be for decades, but now it's reaching the point where
daily work is becoming difficult.
I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating
systems using other OSs as working examples. Then we can finally boot
up with better alternatives that force Apple/Microsoft/Google to try
again. I could see Finder or File Explorer alternatives replacing the
native ones.
bubblesorting wrote 11 hours 15 min ago:
Kernel_task is often the os thermal throttling, when was the last
time you hit the vents with a can of compressed air?
dvfjsdhgfv wrote 13 hours 29 min ago:
I'm very worried one day Apple will start enforcing upgrades to Tahoe
just like Microsoft is doing with Windows.
bengale wrote 14 hours 1 min ago:
Yeah this is my actual issue with Tahoe. It blows my mind people keep
bringing up the corners when WindowServer is complete trash now.
epcoa wrote 14 hours 24 min ago:
> I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating
systems using other OSs as working examples.
Why? No one has shown that LLMs produce particularly good code. You
can get a lot of useful shit done with what is still slop, but there
is no reason to believe there's any evolutionary improvement.
msla wrote 16 hours 20 min ago:
Is this a case of "It Just Works" or "You're Holding It Wrong"?
DeathArrow wrote 17 hours 7 min ago:
>I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating
systems using other OSs as working examples.
Even if that would be possible, you can't run commercial software.
And for many people, the software they run is more important than the
OS.
kalleboo wrote 17 hours 26 min ago:
kernel_task using 100% is the system thermally throttling and the OS
spamming NOPs to cool the CPU down
saagarjha wrote 15 hours 56 min ago:
This is usually not the case.
fainpul wrote 16 hours 3 min ago:
I don't know much about CPU internals, but this sounds like
bullshit to me. A NOP is still an instruction that uses a cycle -
why should that cool the CPU down? The CPU frequency should get
reduced to lower the power consumption and hence the temperature.
p_l wrote 15 hours 41 min ago:
It used to be the case with intel macs and their atrocious
confluence of cooling system, thermals, and power supply system
(the CPU actually was not really to blame).
But when RAPL and similar tools to throttle CPU are used, the CPU
time gets reported as kernel_task - on linux it would show
similarly as one of the kernel threads.
saagarjha wrote 15 hours 54 min ago:
Not all cycles cost the same amount of power. (Not that you would
want to spam nops for thermal management, you should idle the
core with a pause etc that actually tells the processor what you
are trying to do.)
jbverschoor wrote 16 hours 25 min ago:
Any way to see that?
nixpulvis wrote 18 hours 16 min ago:
Nobody's been at the wheel for a while, it's just not a race car,
it's a barge.
root_axis wrote 18 hours 53 min ago:
> Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they
should be for decades
I've been hearing this complaint for decades and I'll never
understand it. The suggestion seems completely at odds with my own
experience. Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel
faster and faster as time goes on.
I remember a time when I could visually see the screen repaint after
minimizing a window, or waiting 3 minutes for the OS to boot, or
waiting 30 minutes to install a 600mb video game from local media. My
m2 air with 16gb of memory only has to reboot for updates, I
haphazardly open 100 browser tabs, run spotify, slack, an IDE, build
whatever project I'm working on, and the machine occasionally gets
warm. Everything works fine, I never have performance issues. My
linux machines, gaming pc, and phone feel just as snappy. It feels to
me that we are living in a golden age of computer performance.
washadjeffmad wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
>Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster
and faster as time goes on.
One analogy is that the distance between two places in the world
hasn't changed, but we're not arriving significantly faster than we
before modern jetliners were invented. There was a period of new
technology followed by rapid incremental progress toward shortened
travel times until it leveled off.
However, the number of people able to consistently travel between
more places in the world has continued to increase. New airports
open regularly, and airliners have been optimized to fit more
people, at the cost of passenger comfort.
Similarly, computers, operating systems, and their software aren't
aligned in optimizing for user experience. Until a certain point,
user interactions on MacOS took highest priority, which is why a
single or dual core Mac felt more responsive than today, despite
the capabilities and total work capacity of new Macs being orders
of magnitude higher.
So we're not really even asking for the equivalent of faster jet
planes, here, just wistfully remembering when we didn't need to
arrive hours early to wait in lines and have to undress to get
through security. Eventually all of us who remember the old era
will be gone, and the next people will yearn for something that has
changed from the experiences they shared.
realo wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
Ok. Today we have multi-Ghz processors, with multiple cores at
that.
Photons travel about 1 foot per nanosecond ... so the CPU can
executes MANY instructions between the time photons leave your
screen, and the time they reach your eyes.
Now, on Windows start Word (on a Mac start Writer) ... come on ...
I'll wait.
Still with me? Don't blame the SSD and reload it again from the
cache.
Weep.
mig39 wrote 8 hours 57 min ago:
Base model M4 Mac Mini -- takes 2 seconds to load Word (and ready
to type) without it being cached. Less than 1 second if I quit
it completely, and launch again, which I assume is because it's
cached in RAM.
coldtea wrote 11 hours 21 min ago:
Not sure where you're getting at. MS Word, full load to ready
state after macOS reboot takes ~ 2 seconds on my M1 mac. If I
close and re-open it (so it's on fs cache) is takes about ~1
second.
lstodd wrote 6 hours 10 min ago:
You, and sibling comment author just never experienced the
truly responsive ui.
It is one where reaction is under a single frame from action.
EDIT: and frame is 1/60s, that is 16.(6)ms. I feel bad feeling
I have to mention this basic fact.
This was possible on 1980s hardware. I witnessed that, I used
that. Why is it not possible now?
coldtea wrote 58 min ago:
I've used 1980s hardware. In the 80s. And used UNIX and
HP/Sun/SGI/etc hardware since the 90s. Not only it was no
"truly responsive", nothing opened in a "single frame"
(talking about X Windows). Took way longer then 1-2 seconds
to open a browser on a blank page for example, and for many
programs you saw them slowly drawing.
KronisLV wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
> Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster
and faster as time goes on.
This very much depends on what hardware you have and what you're
doing on it (how much spare capacity you have).
Back in university I had a Techbite Zin 2, it had a Celeron N3350
and 4 GB of LPDDR4. It was affordable for me as a student (while I
also had a PC in the dorm) and the keyboard was great and it worked
out nicely for note taking and some web browsing when visiting
parents in the countryside.
At the same time, the OS made a world of difference and it was
anything but fast. Windows was pretty much unusable and it was the
kind of hardware where you started to think whether you really need
XFCE or whether LXDE would be enough.
I think both of the statements can be true: that Wirth's law is
true and computers run way, way slower than they should due to bad
software... and that normally you don't really feel it due to us
throwing a lot of hardware at the problem to make us able to ignore
it.
It's largely the same as you get with modern video game graphics
and engines like UE5, where only now we are seeing horrible
performance across the board that mainstream hardware often can't
make up for and so devs reach for upscaling and framegen as
something they demand you use (e.g. Borderlands 4), instead of just
something to use for mobile gaming.
It's also like running ESLint and Prettier on your project and
having a full build and formatting iteration take like 2 minutes
without cache (though faster with cache), HOWEVER then you install
Oxlint and Oxfmt and are surprised to find out that it takes
SECONDS for the whole codebase. Maybe the "rewrite it in Rust"
folks had a point. Bad code in Rust and similar languages will
still run badly, but a fast runtime will make good code fly.
I could also probably compare the old Skype against modern Teams,
or probably any split between the pre-Electron and modern day
world.
Note: runtime in the loose sense, e.g. compiled native executables,
vs the kind that also have GC, vs something like JVM and .NET, vs
other interpreters like Python and Ruby and so on. Idk what you'd
call it more precisely, execution model?
jclardy wrote 14 hours 46 min ago:
I think the best example is in iOS. On old iOS versions, the
keyboard responsiveness took precedence over everything, no matter
what. If you touched the keyboard, it would respond with an
animation indicating what you are doing. The app itself may be
frozen, but the self contained keyboard process would continue on,
letting you know the app you are using is a buggy mess.
Now in iOS 26, you can just be typing in Notes or just the safari
address bar for example, and the keyboard will randomly lag behind
and freeze, likely because it is waiting on some autocomplete task
to run on the keyboard process itself. And this is on top of the
line, modern hardware.
A lot of the fundamentals that were focused on in the past to
ensure responsiveness to user input was never lost, became lost.
And lost for no real good reason, other than lazy development
practices, unnecessary abstraction layers, and other modern
developer conveniences.
radicality wrote 7 hours 3 min ago:
Yeah long ago when I was doing some iOS development, I can
remember Apple UX responsives mantras like âdonât block the
main threadâ, as itâs the thing responsible for making app
UIs snappy even when something is happening.
Nowadays seems like half of Appleâs own software blocks on
their main thread, like you said things like keyboard lock up for
no reason. God forbid you try to paste too much text into a Note
- the paste will crawl to a halt. Or, on my M4 max MacBook, 128GB
ram, 8tb ssd, Photos library all originals saved locally - I try
to cmd-R to rotate an image - the rotation of a fully local image
can sometimes take >10 seconds while showing a blocking UI
âRotating Imageâ¦â, itâs insane how low the bar has
dropped for Apple software.
dvfjsdhgfv wrote 13 hours 27 min ago:
This trend was obvious when they started removing physical
buttons. My thought was, man these people do put so much faith in
software.
yourapostasy wrote 15 hours 27 min ago:
> Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster
and faster as time goes on.
The modern throughput is faster by far. However, what some people
mean when they talk about "slower" is the latency snappiness that
characterizes early microcomputer systems. That has definitely
gotten way worse in an empirically measurable fashion.
Dan Luu's article explains this very well [1].
It is difficult today to go through that lived experience of that
low latency today because you don't appreciate it until you lived
it for years. Few people have access to an Apple ][ rig with a
composite monitor for years on end any longer. The hackers that
experienced that low latency never forgot it, because the
responsiveness feels like a fluid extension of your thoughts in a
way higher latency systems cannot match.
URI [1]: https://danluu.com/input-lag/*
duskdozer wrote 14 hours 53 min ago:
I wonder if this ties into why I'm baffled at the increasing
trend of adding fake delays (f/ex "view transitions"). It's
maddening to me. It's generally not a masking/performance delay
either; I've recompiled a number of android apps for example to
remove these sorts of things, and some actions that took an
entire second to complete previously happen instantly after
modification.
basilikum wrote 14 hours 22 min ago:
Have you tried disabling animations in the System Settings?
Some apps respond to that.
duskdozer wrote 13 hours 48 min ago:
Ohhhh trust me, I have, assuming you mean "Disable
animations". The three duration scale developer settings too.
Thank you for suggesting it, though, just in case.
Some apps do respect it, but sometimes it's hardcoded, and OS
settings don't seem to override it. Even the OS doesn't
respect it in some cases, but I think it used to. Flutter
apps? Forget about it.
mlyle wrote 18 hours 18 min ago:
My M4 Max 128GB ... 90% of the time is like you say.
10% of the time, Windowserver takes off and spends 150% CPU. Or I
develop keystroke lag. Or I can't get a terminal open because Time
Machine has the backup volume in the half mounted state.
It's thousands of times faster than the Ultra 1 that was once on my
desk. And I can certainly do workloads that fundamentally take
thousands of times more cycles. But I usually spend a greater
proportion of this machine's speed on the UI and responsiveness
doesn't always win over 30 years ago.
jbverschoor wrote 16 hours 25 min ago:
Or contactsd lol
Spotlight doesnât make sense either.. caches get evicted, but
thereâs no logic that prevents it from building it back up
immediately
Log processes are fine, but they should never be able to use 100%
/ At the same priority (cpu+io)
aetimmes wrote 1 day ago:
I think we're already seeing the operating systems that AI can build,
and I don't think they've been an improvement.
girvo wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
The fact microsoft keeps messing up my Windows 11 gaming desktop, I
think you're right.
classified wrote 18 hours 44 min ago:
Gaming is one more area where Linux has surpassed Windows. I'm
using Valve's Proton to run Windows games on Linux and it's
smooth as butter.
girvo wrote 13 hours 58 min ago:
Yeah if I wasn't a Valorant addict (and competing in Contender,
pushing for Invite if we win this season) I'd drop it for Linux
entirely.
jodleif wrote 16 hours 32 min ago:
Yes, except for the odd anti-cheat that needs kernel level
access
mentalgear wrote 1 day ago:
QubesOS seems a great migration target: it runs Apps/OS in secure
sandboxes - and even with that overhead doesn't seem worse than the
terrible MacOS 26 performance.
saagarjha wrote 15 hours 54 min ago:
I think suggesting QubesOS to someone is coming from macOS is a
really bad choice.
AceJohnny2 wrote 1 day ago:
> Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the
upgrade
That's because some app is spamming window updates.
It's been an ongoing problem for many releases. AFAICT, WindowServer
100% CPU is a symptom, not a cause.
jbverschoor wrote 16 hours 28 min ago:
Symptoms with no way to understand why.
If Apple would give insight about this, the developers wold get bug
reports and complaints
Similar to the electron shit
sunnyps wrote 1 day ago:
But apps shouldn't be able to hammer WindowServer in the first
place. If your app is misbehaving, your app should hang, not the OS
window compositor!
FWIU there's really no backpressure mechanism for apps delegating
compositing (via CoreAnimation / CALayers) to WindowServer which is
the real problem IMO.
saagarjha wrote 15 hours 56 min ago:
People don't really like apps that stutter.
duskdozer wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
And maybe that would get enough users to leave or complain that
managers might allow some dev time to fix bad behavior.
steve1977 wrote 18 hours 20 min ago:
And I could imagine SwiftUI only makes this worse, because it's
quite easy to trigger tons of unnecessary redraws.
htx80nerd wrote 1 day ago:
Half the people in IT have no business being here.
haunter wrote 1 day ago:
I usually use Linux and Windows (pretty much split 50/50) and tbh this
is why I never could switch to Mac full time even though I've have had
and still have several Macs at home. The full screen beahavior is
weird. Is the dock should overlay every single window all the time? If
not then why is the dock not hidden by default? If yes then full screen
is actually "maximum size app window without overlaying the dock"?
What's even the point of the dock actually? The other one is the open
window =/= running app behavior. Wait 2 hours later this app is still
running in the background even though I've closed all windows?
brailsafe wrote 1 day ago:
Seems like it just depends what you're used to, change is frustrating
and sometimes totally unnecessary.
MrDrMcCoy wrote 20 hours 41 min ago:
Change without further qualifier implies doing something equivalent
or better by different means or with a different look. What people
are observing is a specific kind of change: regression, where the
experience of appearance or result of action are worsened or no
longer an option at all. It's a trend I've noticed in Apple since
the move to unibody.
ymolodtsov wrote 1 day ago:
Apps and windows things is actually great though if you learn yo use
it and don't disable minimizing windows to the dock
edelhans wrote 17 hours 14 min ago:
I keep jearing this but after years of using MacOS Is still hate
the windowing behavior. There is already a way for windowless apps
to run - its in the top right corner of my menu bar. Why not use
this if you _really_ need windowless apps to run in the background?
Also dont get me started on window switching...
whatever1 wrote 18 hours 33 min ago:
It makes absolutely no sense to have a windowless app. Why would
anyone run photoshop without a window?
There are apps that they need to run in the background, sure. They
have a spot in the menubar.
Oh no I forgot, you can only have 5 of them. Not 6. Why? Because
FU. Go buy a third party app (bartender) that records your entire
screen to do basic app management that the OS should do.
I hate MacOS.
gonzalohm wrote 1 day ago:
What about the minimize and maximize buttons being swapped without
any way to customize it. That one drives me crazy.
Shorel wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
The buttons are not swapped. The close button is the one further
away from the center, closest to the corner.
Same as in Windows. It just makes sense.
LtWorf wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
Come to kde, you can customise everything
brailsafe wrote 1 day ago:
What do you mean swapped?
gonzalohm wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
That usually, maximize is next to the close button and all
buttons are usually on the right side of the window bar
brailsafe wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
Oh that's just how it is on Windows though. Seems like on mac
the minimize button provides a buffer between maximize and
close. I'd rather accidentally minimize if I'm trying to
maximize than close the window
Octoth0rpe wrote 1 day ago:
With only a little sense of self aware irony, one thing I hate about so
much dialog these days is how vehement opinions are. I don't
particularly like the rounded corners, and think it's a regression.
It's also... fine. It's not the difference between usable and entirely
unusable. And I see this kind of attitude all over the place now. A
slight change, some slightly non-ideal behavior and all of a sudden a
product is THE WORST THING EVER. We will be ok with inconsistently
rounded windows. I think people need to be a bit more tolerant of
design decisions that are opinionated, and likely worse but also not
breaking.
Ads in a start menu can die in a fire though.
bigyabai wrote 1 day ago:
I feel the opposite. macOS has had excellent UI in the past, and the
rationale was usually that Apple took designer feedback seriously.
Designers told Apple that advertisements in the notification menu was
a no-no, they warned about layering text on low-contrast glass
effects. They stopped OSX' UI from becoming visually bloated and
low-density like the eventual Big Sur+ design language. We only get
these kinds of issues when the chain of communication is cut: [1] [2]
If you want ads in Spotlight or Launchpad, telling people to tolerate
"opinionated, and likely worse but also not breaking" features is
exactly how you get it. It's how Windows got there.
URI [1]: https://noheger.at/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/scrambled...
URI [2]: https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-...
dmix wrote 1 day ago:
I've been using Tahoe since the beta and the borders haven't bothered
me once.
I get the UI consistency thing but it's okay to transition to new UI
things gradually than making radical changes all at once. If this is
still an issue 2yrs from now it will be more of a concern about their
commitment.
streetfighter64 wrote 1 day ago:
> disabling MacOS system integrity [protection], which results in
making them possibly vulnerable
Not really, if you have malware that has root access on your system I
think you're already pretty screwed, especially considering that you
don't even need root to read all your saved passwords and personal
files
URI [1]: https://xkcd.com/1200/
hmokiguess wrote 1 day ago:
I use this [1] to try and have a consistent feel to it, but I wish I
could make it less rounded
URI [1]: https://github.com/FelixKratz/JankyBorders
jasonhemann wrote 1 day ago:
I love that there are people who are observant enough to notice these
kinds of things, a vanguard for those of us who are blithely unaware
and protected due to their vigilance.
cardanome wrote 1 day ago:
I wish I were less observant.
My neurodivergency makes me feel actual distress over those corners.
I am not being dramatic. It sucks.
tencentshill wrote 1 day ago:
Apple used to know this. You don't notice these things, but your
subconscious does. You start to trust it less when things get
inconsistent and don't "just work".
amelius wrote 1 day ago:
Never trust people who play mind tricks like this.
nostromo wrote 1 day ago:
Clearing notifications on macOS Tahoe is ridiculously tedious. The
"Liquid Glass" button is slow to respond, the notifications hang for a
bit before being cleared, and then sometimes you have to jiggle the
cursor to clear the next one. It's absurdly frustrating.
And the updates to Music (formerly iTunes) are so bad the entire team
should be dressed down, Steve Jobs style.
alexalx666 wrote 18 hours 30 min ago:
The "Liquid Glass" button slowness on macOS is tolerable (coz I can
really point at the center of a button with the mouse pointer)
compared to the same problem on iOS 26. I have to literally tap
several times on core system UI elements like navigation bar left and
right buttons for the touches to register, this is Bad.
sampullman wrote 19 hours 11 min ago:
Agreed, I've blocked all notifications for years. Maybe it got worse
recently, but I thought they were annoying since at least Big Sur.
sooheon wrote 1 day ago:
Also went from one click to two clicks
ymolodtsov wrote 1 day ago:
I think these buttons weren't too responsive for about three major
MacOS versions
batmanthehorse wrote 1 day ago:
The notification buttons have always felt a little squishy and
unresponsive since they were added. Theyâre terrible.
amarant wrote 1 day ago:
I must say that all this fuzz about the corners actually reflects
rather well on macos.
If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've
got yourself a pretty decent OS!
It's not gonna make me leave my darling Linux, ofc, but i think this
whole debacle can only be interpreted as praise.
On second thought, it might also be considered a mediation on people's
tendency to bike-shed.
arendtio wrote 13 hours 1 min ago:
I think it is more like the newest incarnation of sub-optimal user
experience decisions. 20 years ago, their system was great for the
time. However, nowadays it feels like a system that has been
developed over time by different people with different concepts in
mind.
Currently, MacOS has the worst window management compared to Windows
and (all) the Linux desktop environments. I mean, where else do you
have such problems with resizing windows or just switching between
windows, not to mention the inconsistent feature sets when you want
to work with virtual desktops...
annie511266728 wrote 19 hours 26 min ago:
Or maybe people focus on corners because itâs one of the few
visible things they can actually complain about â the real issues
are harder to pin down.
alpaca128 wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
The border radius would be less jarring if the UI was actually
designed for it. But it just cuts off elements like the scrollbar,
which looks quite janky.
steve1977 wrote 17 hours 45 min ago:
Yeah there's even first party applications like Logic Pro where the
rounded corners cut off text.
freetime2 wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah "notorious inconsistency issues in windows corners" almost feels
like an oxymoron to me. Perhaps it is notorious among graphic
designers, but I'm sure the vast majority of MacOS users will never
notice or care.
hennell wrote 13 hours 19 min ago:
My colleague update his Mac a while back and I commented on the
wild difference in corners between finder and word from across the
room. I had to walk round and physically point at them for him to
know what I was on about, and then he says "oh yeah, guess they are
a bit different"
To my designers eye it was the first thing I saw, to him it was
nothing.
I still think it's bad and a sign of a change in apple focus/style,
but it's clearly not an issue at all for a lot of people.
Said colleague did get cross when he struggled to resize a window
though. Turns out inconsistent corners means inconsistent handles.
And that is a real problem.
SunshineTheCat wrote 1 day ago:
I was thinking the same thing. I actually agree with most of the
complaints people have made about the corners, but it seems so small
compared with literally every interaction I have with Windows.
As someone who works on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Windows stands alone
in my opinion as the "stepping on legos with no socks on" of
operating systems.
bengale wrote 13 hours 58 min ago:
I think for a lot of us mac users we never get contact with another
OS so it can seem like the world is ending. Reality is the Tahoe is
terrible compared to older versions, but still incredible compared
to others. IMHO as ever.
hskalin wrote 9 hours 58 min ago:
As a lifelong windows (upto 10) and linux user, no I did not find
MacOS (using as the primary os since 7 months) incredible in any
sense of word in comparison. Only thing I like is the mac
hardware
iLoveOncall wrote 1 day ago:
This is not the biggest flaw, this is just the most recent flaw.
MacOS has been shit for as long as I've used it (8 years) and
probably for much longer than that. There are many lists available of
MacOS problems ( [1] for example), it's just that there's not much
point making a new article about the Finder that's been shit, and
unchanged, for a decade.
URI [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/12rw1sn/a_long_list_...
gcapu wrote 1 day ago:
I think you miss the point. How would you feel if you had a Ferrari
with a noticeable scratch? Yes, it is great to have such a nice car,
but it'd be a pity. So much much effort was put into the whole thing
and this little detail is what lingers on your mind.
ablob wrote 1 day ago:
> If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows,
you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
This argument would also make Windows 11 a pretty decent OS by
extension via "If the biggest flaw of a OS is the position of the
start menu you've got yourself a pretty decent OS".
In general I could use any minor nuisance as a proof of decency - or
inject some to form this argument on purpose as a manufacturer.
People don't like if their environment changes in minor unsolicited
ways. There's always gonna be fuzz about these things and that means
that the fuzz itself can't be used to make any strong argument
whatsoever.
red_admiral wrote 14 hours 57 min ago:
For Windows, you also have an ad, an AI, or both appearing in every
other app.
contextfree wrote 22 hours 0 min ago:
On the specific issue of window corner roundedness, Windows 11 is
great IMO. The corners are rounded when the window is floating
free, but change to square when it's maximized or snapped to a side
of the screen. The perfect design.
akdev1l wrote 1 day ago:
I think people are more complaining about windows crashing on
updates or Microsoft putting ads everywhere or forcing one drive
Thatâs way more than just the âposition of the start menuâ
bloomca wrote 1 day ago:
It is just the most obvious, macOS is a death by thousands cuts
thesuitonym wrote 1 day ago:
It's not even close to the biggest flaw, it's just the most obvious
one.
amelius wrote 1 day ago:
The biggest flaw is that the system is opinionated, so you cannot
change anything you dislike.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs not only that itâs opinionated, itâs that itâs
idiosyncratically opinionated. It would be different if it had a
boring, middle-of-the-road opinion.
Rebelgecko wrote 1 day ago:
Or at least consistent opinions
necovek wrote 15 hours 0 min ago:
It seems it'd at least getting consistently bad opinions on it.
kibwen wrote 1 day ago:
It's not that it's idiosyncratically opinionated, it's that its
idiosyncratic opinion is insane, user-hostile, and flies in the
face of decades of experience crafting user interfaces.
amelius wrote 1 day ago:
Different for the sake of being different.
nananana9 wrote 13 hours 41 min ago:
This would be fine too if there wasn't a legion of unhinged
"designers" in position of power throughout the entire
industry that mimic every bad decision apple makes.
Apple design is only different on release, after a few months
I start getting force fed apple-isms in programs that don't
have anything to do with them.
chimeracoder wrote 1 day ago:
> If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows,
you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
There are loads of other flaws with the OS. It just so happens that
people care a lot about the design of Apple's products, so people
talk about these details.
mikey_p wrote 1 day ago:
On the other hand the fact that it sometimes makes it hard to resize
windows means that it breaks something that Apple operating systems
have been capable of doing without issue for nearly 45 years.
leptons wrote 17 hours 28 min ago:
It took decades before Apple finally let windows be resized from
any side. For so many years the bottom right corner was the only
way to resize a window. Their window system has always been crap.
NwtnsMthd wrote 1 day ago:
It's not the biggest flaw, there are plenty others, but it does seem
to be universally disliked.
For example, there is not much you could do to Finder to make it
worse.
leptons wrote 17 hours 33 min ago:
Finder used to suck. I mean, it still sucks, but it used to suck
too.
intrasight wrote 1 day ago:
I disagree as it shows a fundamental flaw in terms of separation of
concerns that's probably manifest throughout the operating system.
Or to stay it another way, if we see shit like this then we know the
whole thing is a hack.
justonceokay wrote 1 day ago:
Thatâs funny to call Mac OS a hack compared to windows. Now
windows is trying to be backward compatible with DOS and
thatâs⦠something. But when we read blog posts explaining why
things are how they are in windows i always get the heebie jeebies.
steve1977 wrote 18 hours 15 min ago:
I know it's popular to shit on Windows (and often it's even
justified), however DOS compatibility is long gone. It was still
available in 32 bit Windows 10, but not in 64 bit versions.
intrasight wrote 1 day ago:
> compared to Windows
I never said that
justonceokay wrote 1 day ago:
Well sure we can compare it to niche OS like Linux or
vaporware. But without comparison then we probably arenât
taking into account the real life complexity of a desktop OS.
As a related anecdote, my friend said my car was ugly. I asked
him what cars he thought looked good. He said âI donât like
carsâ. As a result I realized his opinion was worthless
master-lincoln wrote 14 hours 17 min ago:
Calling linux niche is funny. Most used OS on the planet.
I guess you are only interested in the desktop looks part
which on Linux is done by different window managers (like
KDE, Gnome, Sway, ...) which can compete with MacOS in my
view.
I was recently forced to switch from Gnome to MacOS Tahoe and
the UX is so bad it's frustrating. Mission Control has no
features apart from switching windows it seems (can not close
windows, not change dock icons which all works on Gnome).
Password fields often have no option to view the cleartext
entered. This is especially confusing because symbols that I
used daily are suddenly not printed on my keyboard anymore
and I have to memorize shortcuts to enter them.
In finder I see no way to go to the parent folder, isn't that
something people on macs do? It just feels like it's years
behind open source alternatives...
Concerning your car story: have you tried other Operating
systems? Otherwise your opinion might be worthless here...
alpaca128 wrote 23 hours 17 min ago:
When a computer doesn't boot you don't need to compare it to
another to see that it's broken. Some things are just obvious
without comparison.
bigyabai wrote 1 day ago:
You can compare it to prior versions of macOS, if you insist
on assessing it from a relativistic standpoint. Apple didn't
have this issue 10 years ago.
DavidPiper wrote 1 day ago:
Apple didn't have this issue 1 year ago :-)
brailsafe wrote 1 day ago:
Eh, it might be or it might not, why is that a valid indication
that everything else is wack? There certainly are other things that
are bad, maybe many, evidently, but I don't think the corner
problem is a fair indicator of that exactly. Numerous things can be
discretely bad and poorly directed without there being some ebola
virus of bad throughout
amarant wrote 1 day ago:
Hmm, that's a good point actually! Hadn't considered that!
stingraycharles wrote 16 hours 34 min ago:
Itâs like the famous artist putting a clause in a contract that
they wanted bowls of M&Ms with the blue ones removed.
Not because they necessarily cared, but because it functions as
an easy-to-verify proxy for whether the venue actually read the
contract.
scelerat wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
The artist was the band Van Halen; the forbidden color was
brown
URI [1]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/
lucasay wrote 1 day ago:
The pill tabs are what get me too. I can ignore most visual changes
after a while, but those somehow manage to feel both more distracting
and less informative at the same time.
_jab wrote 1 day ago:
Between the rounded corners that don't reach the edges of the viewport,
and the behavior when opening a new app for the first time, it feels
like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't
expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them
half-sized somewhere in the middle.
Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications
like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt like a bizarre
assumption to me.
barbazoo wrote 8 hours 55 min ago:
This has always been quintessential Mac for me. First thing I noticed
people do on macs much more than PCs was not expanding the windows.
Windows are always just floating around. There's no equivalent to the
maximize button, it's funny but I don't even know anymore what that
"maximize" button on macs does but I remember it's not what I would
expect.
viktorcode wrote 15 hours 35 min ago:
I use several non-fullscreen windows over desktop. Stage manager
makes switching between them very convenient. But I do use full
screen windows, they live in their separate spaces. I see no reason
whatsoever to maximise any window without it going full screen mode
dwb wrote 16 hours 1 min ago:
âMaximisingâ windows full screen, apart from the
genuinely-full-screen-takeover mode you can put windows in (where
they take a virtual desktop slot too) has never been an idiomatic
part of the Macintosh UI, since the beginning. The âzoomâ button
traditionally meant âtoggle between a user defined window size, and
a size that is just big enough to avoid scroll bars appearing, where
possibleâ. It goes back to the spatial desktop metaphor.
Personally I try and work with that as much as possible, though
itâs not always ideal.
hrmtst93837 wrote 16 hours 22 min ago:
A lot of it is just old Mac UI dogma. On a multi-monitor or ultrawide
desk the default behavior still acts like everyone wants a few polite
little windows drifting in the middle, so browsers, IDEs, and other
dense apps start half-crippled until you drag everything into place
by hand. Apple seems weirdly attached to the idea that the desktop
should feel like an oversized tablet, and it's anoying.
jonhohle wrote 22 hours 1 min ago:
I never understood running apps in full screen. Unless it's an IDE,
Video Editor, or some other app with tools filling all nooks and
crannies, I want windows that fit the content. I don't want to launch
a text or document editor in full screen, read a PDF in full screen.
Typically I don't even want to watch a video full screen. I also
generally don't want tiling. I want to arrange windows with parts
peeking out behind other windows to reference while I'm working on
something else. I want some sense of "space" related to where I left
a window.
sumanthvepa wrote 23 hours 7 min ago:
I rarely run my apps fullscreen. It's because I have multiple 4k
monitors connected to the machine. Using an app even chrome or an IDE
fullscreen would be too big.
But do use apps fullscreen when Im traveling. The laptop screen is
too small to use chrome or vscode any other way.
dubya wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
I almost never use full screen windows on a Mac. Things like video
are full screen, but that's a swipe to another workspace.
Half-screen windows on a 27" screen are already bigger than a sheet
of letter paper. Lots happens in terminal windows, which vary a bit,
but are usually around 100x60, and maybe 1/6 of the screen.
I do have Rectangle installed, so apps generally get at most the left
or right half of the screen, with a shortcut for badly behaved
websites that need 2/3 to look right. Apps are usually pretty good
about remembering window positions, so mostly you futz with it once
and you're done.
thatfrenchguy wrote 1 day ago:
Thatâs because you use the button to make them whole screen?
VerifiedReports wrote 1 day ago:
I almost never expand an application to be full-screen, even on my
laptop. This despite the fact that I'll resize an application's
window to fill the whole screen except for the dock. I think that's
why I don't maximize it: I want the dock to remain accessible.
A lot of stupid things about Mac window management stems from the
mistake of forcing all applications to share a single menu that's
glued to the top of the screen. This essentially turns your entire
desktop into ONE application's window, within which its actual
windows float around.
Historically this led to the Mac's penchant for apps that spawned an
irritating flotilla of windows that you had to herd around your
screen. Not only did this deny users a way to minimize the whole app
at once, but it also sucked because you could see everything on your
desktop (or other apps' UIs) THROUGH the UI of the application you
were trying to use. A dysfunctional mess.
Around 15 years ago, I estimate, the huge advantage of a single
application window finally permeated the Apple mindset and things
have gotten much better in that regard. But Apple should have
abandoned the single menu in the transition to OS X, and put menus
where they belong: on applications' main frames. That would make the
desktop a truly unlimited workspace and eliminate the daily
irritation of the menu changes its contents behind the user's back
because he clicked on another application's window (perhaps to move
it).
Multiple times a day I minimize an application and then attempt to do
something in the application that's now filling the screen... only to
find that the menu still belongs to the application that isn't even
shown. It's just so dumb.
But then... this is the GUI that, for decades, would only let you
resize windows from ONE corner and NO edges. Apple grudgingly,
half-assedly, and unreliably addressed that in the 2000s, only now to
make it even less reliable in the shambolic Tahoe UI.
pico303 wrote 1 day ago:
Iâve been using Macs for development for 20 years, and even on a
small laptop screen I donât expand windows to fill the screen. So I
guess, yes, there are a few weirdos out there at least?
matwood wrote 18 hours 23 min ago:
Consider me another weirdo. I donât know why anyone would use
full screen. Even games I want in a windowâ¦
somat wrote 16 hours 5 min ago:
It is when the application comes with it's own window manager,
blender comes to mind.
jlarcombe wrote 1 day ago:
Actually yes, I have all windows overlapping and none expanded to
fill the screen, unless I'm really doing something very specific that
needs as much space as possible. But the rounded edges are still
slightly annoying.
kelnos wrote 1 day ago:
I know lots of people on laptop screens who don't maximize windows.
It seems weird to me to only use like 80% of the screen's real
estate, but sure, whatever.
On large external monitors, I think it makes total sense not to have
every window maximized, though. Probably less usable that way.
kccqzy wrote 1 day ago:
I hate maximized windows. I like it when my windows are not maximized
but I usually do have significant overlap between windows. Then I
switch between windows based on the sliver of window thatâs visible
even when other windows are in focus. Itâs the spatial way of
thinking; just like how Finder purists think each folder on your disk
should remember its own window size and location so you use your
spatial memory to locate Finder windows. I find that this is
significantly faster for my brain to process compared to the Windows
style where almost all windows are maximized and people use Alt-Tab
to switch between windows.
I would in fact say that the culture of not maximizing windows was a
small reason why I switched to Mac OS X in the early 2000s.
alpaca128 wrote 23 hours 31 min ago:
> compared to the Windows style where almost all windows are
maximized and people use Alt-Tab to switch between windows
Or just use the taskbar, which is literally made for switching
between windows. Or it was, before Microsoft forgot its purpose.
kccqzy wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
Still not my style though. When you close a window, all windows
to the right of it in the taskbar get moved leftwards. This
breaks spatial memory.
alpaca128 wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
You could say the same about the Dock in Mac OS.
michael_storm wrote 1 day ago:
Some users switch apps by dragging windows around the screen, like a
messy stack. A friend of mine didn't even know about Cmd+Tab to cycle
through open apps. Users are weird.
matwood wrote 18 hours 18 min ago:
I use a mix of Cmd-Tab and a hot key to see all non-minimized apps
(Mission Control?) to pick from. Iâve realized that that Iâm
faster at seeing the color of the window Iâm looking for than
remembering the app name.
piekvorst wrote 1 day ago:
I never have any window in the fullscreen/maximized mode. Some are
pretty large, such as IDE, and they sometimes touch one or more edges
of the screen/dock/panel, but never occupy the entire space. That was
true even on my 14in MacBook with 125% DPI.
That said, I am a huge fan of manual window management.
stavros wrote 1 day ago:
I hever have any window in fullscreen, but I always have all
windows maximized (obviously except the ones that can't be
maximized, because of course settings couldn't possibly be made
maximizable, what, that's crazy talk).
zahlman wrote 1 day ago:
> Does anyone actually do this?
Yes (but not for a browser). My terminal windows are 80x24, pretty
much always. I do this today on Linux, I've done it through multiple
versions of Windows, and I did it in my childhood on a 9" B&W
"luggable" Mac screen.
I just like it, okay?
justonceokay wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm not trying to defend because I donât like it either. But the
Mac workflow has always been much more alt-tab focused than windows.
With alt-tab and alt-shift-tab (reverse order) I feel like I can fly
through my apps at the speed of thought.
Lots of native applications also pop up multiple windows with the
expectation that they kind of just float around. But at least in Mac
you can scroll on an app that isnât in focusâ¦
wouldbecouldbe wrote 1 day ago:
I exclusive use complete fullscreen mode for apps i'm actively using
and on large screens connect the workspaces, on small screen swipe
back and forth. So I you never actually use that.
massung wrote 1 day ago:
Just wanted to note that this is how I work. I rarely have any window
full screen/maximized and hate it when a website or application is
built assuming a giant monitor with a maximized window.
Iâve never found a setup with multiple desktops or similar with a
way to quickly switch between apps Iâm using more than âeditor
slightly more left, browser slightly more right, â¦â and just
clicking on a border I know brings that app to the front. Iâm sure
many think Iâm crazy. Thatâs ok. :)
That said, I generally hate the new OSX UI. Every UI element that is
non usable just became larger and wastes space I should be able to
utilize. Likewise, it made some operations insanely frustrating
(hereâs looking at you, corner drag resize!).
joemi wrote 1 day ago:
When I'm using my macbook's screen, I usually expand a browser window
to fill the whole screen -- it's a 13" screen so not using the whole
thing makes things feel small. But most of the time my computer is
plugged into an larger external monitor (20-something inches, maybe
27?), and there I don't expand any windows to fill the whole screen.
I like having separate not-full-screen windows which partially (or
mostly) overlap.
Somewhat relatedly, we use Windows at work, and it drives me crazy
when I hop on a computer after someone's been using it and they have
every single thing maximized, even Windows Explorer, on 27" monitors.
A maximized browser, I get... I don't do it myself but I understand
how it can be useful, but maximizing Windows Explorer is just insane
to me, and yet a lot of my coworkers do it.
karlgkk wrote 1 day ago:
> Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand
windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized
somewhere in the middle
The assumption is that the window should be the size of the content
of the document inside.
It turns out that this approach works well for many applications,
especially what the mac was designed for in the 80s and 90s. And it's
horrid for modern "pro" applications.
donatj wrote 1 day ago:
Bring back the floating toolbars of the early 2000's and it'd be
fine.
kogir wrote 1 day ago:
MacOS assumes you wonât full screen every app because all of them
ship with large enough, high enough resolution monitors that full
screening a single app is a waste of valuable space. Unlike on cheap
laptops with 1080p screens.
I suppose you could splurge for a Mac desktop and then get the
cheapest, smallest screen possible, but I hope itâs rare.
alpaca128 wrote 23 hours 35 min ago:
> full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space
Any space not used for the task I'm focused on is wasted. For me
the actual problem is that switching apps/windows is too slow
because of UI animations.
LeifCarrotson wrote 1 day ago:
I run 27" 4k and a 34" ultra wide monitors on my desktops, and my
main laptop is a P16S with a 16" 3840x2400 OLED typically docked to
one of those screens when not on the go, and I almost never use
windows that are not snapped to fullscreen or at the very least to
halves or quarters. "Large enough" scarcely applies to a MacBook
Air or Neo with a 13" display, and I bet a TON of those get docked
to cheap 21, 24, and 27" 1080p screens.
I'd like to be able to snap things to the middle third, especially
on the ultrawides.
Only little calculator widgets, property panels, and modal dialogs
that get immediately closed after use don't get maximized or at
least docked to fill some region. I hate the cluttered, layered
feeling of having a bunch of non-full-screen windows overlapping, I
want to have a dozen apps open and making optimal use of the
available display area.
kellpossible2 wrote 1 day ago:
writing this reply on a 13 inch macbook air...
daemonologist wrote 1 day ago:
Yes! After many years of using only linux or windows machines, I was
assigned an iMac at an internship and noticed the friction with
fullscreening things. I decided not to fight it and spent the next
year happily working in little windows and making frequent use of the
"mission control" gesture.
However, after the internship I went right back to fullscreen/window
tiling in linux, so I can't say I really preferred it. Even now as a
Gnome user with a big monitor and magic trackpad on my desk - which
gives me ~equal access to either approach - I fullscreen everything.
bombcar wrote 1 day ago:
I don't know what it is, but fullscreen on Mac (even dock-showing
"fullish screen") feels wrong in a way that fullscreen on
Windows/Linux feels "right".
cosmic_cheese wrote 1 day ago:
I think itâs partially because on Macs, the desktop has always
been a more pivotal component of the OS thanks to ubiquitous drag
and drop support and mounted volumes showing on the desktop,
among other things. At least for me, itâs not unusual to grab
images, text snippets, and other things from apps and drop them
on my desktop, making it more of a workbench than it is on other
platforms.
Another component is how ability to overlap windows is
emphasized, allowing the currently relevant portion of them to be
visible without taking center stage or stealing any space from
your main window(s).
Both are part of a larger difference in mentality and workflow
style.
brooke2k wrote 1 day ago:
for the longest time I never did this, but then I got a gigantic 4K
screen, and I realized that it was almost giving me vertigo having
apps like my IDE fullscreened, because I literally have to move my
head in order to look everywhere.
so in response I changed my windowing strategy to having a set of
windows floating around at exactly the size I want them, and then the
advantage of the enormous screen is just how many windows I can have
open at once
that being said, I use KDE not MacOS, and 90% of Mac users I'd guess
are on laptops, so using this strategy sounds completely insane to
me. On laptops I still default to fullscreening or "half-screening"
most apps.
stalfosknight wrote 1 day ago:
Maximizing everything whether the document fills the screen or not is
very Windows user behavior. macOS is not meant to be used that way.
wryoak wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs very rare that I maximize an application. Iâm always
stacking. However, I donât think itâs an optimizing assumption: I
am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange my
windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got too close
to an edge of the screen
In general my browser is dead center or slightly to the right so I
can access my other windows (terminal, throw away text editor, etc)
easily where command tab is insufficient (when I have multiple
terminal windows, eg)
alpaca128 wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
> I am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange
my windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got too
close to an edge of the screen
Strange, I constantly get annoyed by how slow and unresponsive the
Mac's tiling is when dragging windows to the edge. At the top it
has at least half a second delay for no reason. But at least the
newest version now has caught up with Windows 7.
1e1a wrote 1 day ago:
Turn off System Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> Windows -> "Drag
windows to menu bar to fill screen"
janwirth wrote 1 day ago:
I just use yabai...
qingcharles wrote 1 day ago:
I've always disliked MacOS because it is so janky about maximizing
windows.
I have a 39" ultrawide and I keep every window maximized. I have OCD
about this. I can't stand things all layered on top of each other. I
like to focus on one screen at a time.
Chromium browsers have been rolling out split tabs and I use that on
a couple of tasks where I'm constantly cutting/pasting between sites,
but that's about it.
sarmasamosarma wrote 1 day ago:
I never work in full screen. Itâs bizarre to me that people do. I
donât need full screen for anything, even Pycharm.
freetime2 wrote 1 day ago:
I use Rectangle [1] for window management. I only use three
shortcuts: full screen, left half of the screen, and right half of
the screen. My editors and Chrome are always running in one of these
modes.
But for other apps where interactions tend to be brief like Finder,
Messages, Notes, Music, etc - yeah I don't usually expand them to
full screen.
URI [1]: https://rectangleapp.com/
paustint wrote 11 hours 25 min ago:
Exact same for me - but I also use the shortcut to move windows
between monitors.
I use cmd+tab and cmd+~ a ton also as I have multiple browser
profiles and windows open and usually a few instances of ide with
different projects.
And always close tabs with cmd+w and apps with cmd+q to avoid
running apps with no visible windows.
I feel super productive with this workflow, never need to fiddle
with manual resize.
When someone is screen sharing and they have a bunch of random
sized windows it drives me crazy.
9dev wrote 1 day ago:
Hey, workflow buddy! I do the exact same. I feel seriously
handicapped without these shortcuts.
peacebeard wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, all the time. I understand that if you have a setup where you do
everything in your IDE you could reasonably leave it full screen all
the time and I get why that works for some people. I'm not one of
those folks and I use separate IDE, terminal, browsers, and other
windows and use window management to allow myself to see multiple of
them at the same time and switch between them by clicking on what I
want.
Also just want to be 100% clear: Tahoe is bad and I hate the changes
and I don't think the OS should prefer one way of working over the
other. I just hope it's helpful to explain my perspective.
FroshKiller wrote 1 day ago:
I use a MacBook and a Mac mini personally, and I do not generally
maximize any application that isn't implicitly a full-screen
experience (e.g. a video player or a computer game).
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
macOS only recently got an option to make windows fill the screen.
For most of history what most people would assume is a maximize
button (the green one) was actually a zoom button. It sized the
window to what the OS thought was appropriate for the content (to the
best of my knowledge and experience with it).
Apple then made things go full screen, but in a special full screen
mode, so macOS worked more like the iPad.
By the time they added a way to maximize windows in the way Windows
does, the idea of maximizing an app has largely worked its way out of
my workflow. It was always too much trouble, and I find very few apps
where it provides much benefit. Web browsers, for example, often end
up with a lot of useless whitespace on the sides of the page, so they
work better as a smaller window on a widescreen display. In an IDE,
it really depends on whatâs being worked on and if text wrapping is
something I want. Ideally lines wouldnât get so long that this is a
problem.
With the way macOS manages windows, I often find it easiest to have
my windows mostly overlapped with various corners poking out, so I
can move between app windows in one click. The alternative is
bringing every window of an app to the front (with the Dock or
cmd+tab), or using Mission Control for everything, neither of which
feels efficient.
I could install some 3rd party window management utility, I suppose,
but in the long run, it felt easier to just figure out a workflow
that works on the stock OS, so I can use any system without going
through a setup process to customize everything. Itâs the same
reason I never seriously got into alternative keyboard layouts.
raydev wrote 20 hours 40 min ago:
It's been more than 10+ years that I've been able to Option+Click
the green button to fill the screen. Works for any app, and always
has, unless that app explicitly disallows resizing. That's not
recent.
AlexandrB wrote 20 hours 22 min ago:
Wow, I learned something new.
Why is it that some of the most useful features in Apple products
are impossible to find on your own? I recently also learned about
"three finger swipe to undo" in iOS instead of shaking the damn
thing like it owes me money.
hedora wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
Note that fullscreen breaks command tab. Create two safari windows
(or FF, Chrome, doesn't matter - except that Apple shipped safari,
so we'd expect that to be able to render a window to the screen
correctly).
Full screen one. Switch to the other. Now, use just cmd-tab and
cmd-` to get to the full screen safari window (cmd-` switches
between windows in the same application, which is literally never
the right thing, but I digress).
For what it's worth, the third party tool 'altTab' mostly fixes
this.
Bonus MacOS UI bug: I had to exit altTab to confirm they still
hadn't fixed cmd-`. When I re-opened it using cmd-space, finder
defaulted to the version in ~/Downloads instead of /Applications,
then read me the riot act about untrusted software trying to change
accessibility settings.
One more thing: I'm still not using MacOS 26, so all my complaints
are about the "last known good" release.
stevage wrote 1 day ago:
I use a third party tool with shortcut keys that cycle between:
full height, left half of screen; full height, right half of
screen; full height, full width.
It works well for me, makes it easy to get two things side by side
without wasting space.
otikik wrote 1 day ago:
rectangle [1] is pretty much essential for me because of this. I
use only a few keypresses (maximize window, move to one of the
halves of the screen horizontally) but that is enough. My mouse
very rately interacts with the borders of any window, or those
buttons. I had to click on the green one that you mentioned in
order to see what it did (yuck).
URI [1]: https://rectangleapp.com/
flomo wrote 1 day ago:
Right, Macs always have had the premise of "spacial window
management" (or that's what Siracusa called it), so that's probably
how you are 'supposed to' do it.
Full Screen Mode was their answer to maximize, going back many
years now (10.7).
wtallis wrote 1 day ago:
The spatial Finder was something different: having each folder
open a new window, and that particular folder's window always
re-opening in the same position on screen, with the same window
size and same layout of files inside. Having the position of each
folder remain consistent and persistent allows you to remember a
file's spatial location much as you would for a printed document
on a physical desk (exactly where you left it), rather than
having to recall its path in the file system hierarchy.
Obviously all of that works better if Finder windows don't
usually fill the screen, but it's not a hard requirement.
flomo wrote 23 hours 33 min ago:
With the classic OS, all the windows were supposed to work this
way. And it seems most apps still do remember their window
positions, making it easy to find them. (Expose even keeps the
positions consistent when you 'zoom-out'.) Which is why Mac
users tend to position their windows rather than relying on
alt-tab or the dock or another app-switcher.
(IMO the spacial Finder was designed around floppies and small
folders and didn't work so well with hierarchical folder views,
so no big loss...)
achandlerwhite wrote 1 day ago:
by only recently do you mean 15 years ago with Lion?
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
Lion got Full screen, but Fill screen came later. Best I can
tell, that was in Yosemite, 11 years ago. That still feels
relatively recent, as it is in their current California landmarks
era and no the big cats era.
hbn wrote 1 day ago:
You can double click the grab handle area of a window (which is
less obvious than ever in Tahoe) and it'll fill the window to the
display.
Except Safari, which just fills out the window's height vertically.
Kinda weird to make an exception like that but I don't hate it,
because I generally use Safari for reading, and shrinking the
browser's width forces lines of text to not get too long if the
website's styling isn't setting that manually.
empressplay wrote 1 day ago:
You can double click on any part of the top title bar (that
doesn't have buttons in it) for example in Calendar you can
double click beside the magnifying glass in the top right and it
will maximize the window.
ezst wrote 1 day ago:
I don't understand how we keep hearing so often here about
Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly
designed with a lot of attention paid to detail, while every
practical productivity advice involves some undiscoverable
trick, or combinations of tricks, that seems so arbitrary and
obtuse. I don't like Mac, in large parts because of that. No
amount of marketing and peer pressure will convince me of the
superior elegance and sophistication of something that hates
you for wanting windows maximised. Those hidden tricks only add
insult to injury as pervasive reminders of your presumed
inadequacy, that you need to suffer to have things your way,
and that Apple is magnanimous to even let you have them.
chongli wrote 1 day ago:
Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and
cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail
That was the Mac in the 1990s. It was designed for, and
highly usable with, a one-button mouse. It didn't have hidden
context menus or obscure keyboard shortcuts. Everything was
visible in the menu bar and discoverable. The Finder was
spatially aware with a high degree of persistence that
allowed you to develop muscle memory for where icons would
appear onscreen every time you opened a folder.
There was almost nothing hidden or lurking in the background,
unlike today (my modern Mac system has 500 running processes
right now, despite having only 15 applications open). We've
had decades of feature creep since the classic Mac OS, which
has made modern Macs extremely hard to use (relatively
speaking).
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
Every system has its issues. It's really a question of which
issues you can live with and which system ultimately fits
your workflow best.
After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen
all the time, I can't really go back. Even on Windows I find
myself working the way I do on macOS. Full screening every
app made more sense on a 1024x768 screen (or smaller). Once I
moved to a widescreen display (which happened to coincide
with getting my first mac) running full screen felt like the
wrong move most of time.
Web pages would look something like this:
| <- whitespace -> | <- content -> | <-
whitespace -> |
| | Lorem ipsum |
|
| | dolor sit amet, |
|
| | consectetur |
|
| | adipiscing |
|
| | elit. Morbi |
|
| | convallis ante |
|
Making the window smaller meant less wasted space and less
blinding white space. Once I got used to that idea, it
carried over to most other apps.
ezst wrote 9 hours 16 min ago:
> After I got used to working in windows instead of full
screen all the time, I can't really go back.
Sorry if this comes across as disrespectful, but it smells
like Stockholm Syndrome. You are choosing not to use the
full extent of your screen estate, and that is your fine
choice, but that is no excuse for making it hard. If you
compound the whitespace, the thick borders and the
generally oversized UI controls, not much of "productive
space" remains available to get the work done. I am not
interested in macOS as a content-consumption-first vehicle,
though that's clearly where Apple is steering.
duskdozer wrote 14 hours 24 min ago:
This is just that things are (poorly) designed now as
mobile-only and not even mobile-first.
somat wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
It is situational but I think on a modern wide screen(or
screens) if it is a single text-like document(like a web
page or a terminal) you want 2 or perhaps 3 side by side.
if the app implements it's own window management(like
blender) a single full screen is best. Overlapping windows
are important to have, but almost never desirable, it
usually happens because you ran out of room.
hedora wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
The problem I have with this is that I was using a
1600x1200 21" display in 2000, and got used to workflows
for it back then.
I am currently running a 16" display at a similar
fractional scaled resolution (because Apple stopped
understanding DPI after shipping the first LaserWriter,
apparently).
Over that time, my eyes have not gotten better to match
display DPI, so I'd rather have web sites just adjust the
font size so that there are a reasonable number of words
per line instead of rendering whitespace.
Non-full-screen windows would make more sense if Apple
supported tiling properly, like most Linux WMs and also
modern Windows.
MacOS sort of supports tiling in a "program manager shipped
it + got promoted" sort of way, but you have to hover over
the window manager buttons, which is slower than just
manually arranging stuff. If there are any keyboard
shortcuts to invoke tiling, or a way to change the WM
buttons to not suck, I have not found them.
al_borland wrote 23 hours 7 min ago:
1600x1200 is still a 4:3 aspect ratio, I think I agree
that scaling that makes sense. Full screen really got
problematic with 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios. That's
when the empty gutters in most apps, and especially
websites, became really pronounced.
As for tiling in macOS...
You can use the mouse to drag windows into tiled
positions. Grab a window and when your cursor hits the
side, corner, or top edge of the screen, it will indicate
the tiling position, much like AeroSnap on Windows from
some years back. You can also hold the Option key while
holding the window to get the tiling regions to show up
without moving all the way to the edge.
Keyboard shortcuts exist as well. Go to Settings ->
Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts... In the dialog that
opens, go to Windows. There you can see all the options
and customize them if you'd like. Or set shortcuts for
things that might not have one yet.
If for some reason dragging the windows around doesn't
work, go to Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> the Windows
heading. There are toggles to enable or disable dragging
to tile, and the Option key trick. You can also turn off
the margins on tiled Windows, which you'd probably want
to do.
I've never been a big fan of window tiling myself. There
was a time when I needed a lot of different windows
visible at all times, but that hasn't been the case in a
long time. I find tiling makes things too big or small,
it's never what I actually want. I drag the window up to
the top of the screen to invoke Fill from time to time,
but that's about it.
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
This is running "zoom". When I try it in Finder, it doesn't
make the window full screen, it actually made it smaller.
When I use the Window menu, Zoom replicates what
double-clicking the top title bar does, while Fill maximizes
the window. This holds true with the behavior you describe in
Safari as well.
It just seems like a lot of apps treat Zoom and Fill the same
now (I tried Calendar, Notes, TextEdit, and NetNewsWire), which
adds to the confusion.
Latty wrote 1 day ago:
People do this, yeah. Even on Windows I've been over someone's
shoulder walking them through something and it drives me nuts they
work in a tiny window in a random part of the screen.
crest wrote 1 day ago:
Yes. I think the assumptions are made by people with two displays of
at least 32" and â¥4K resolution.
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
I think itâs more of a carryover from the original Macâs in the
80s.
Trying to maximize a window, even 23 years ago when I first moved
to OS X, was a completely manual process. It was designed around
windows, not walls. And screens were much smaller and lower res
back then.
pdpi wrote 1 day ago:
I do this on macOS much more than I do on Windows, yes. MacOS flows a
lot better if you're willing to adopt its window management style.
As you said, browser and IDE are the big exceptions, plus things like
Lightroom or my 3d printer's slicer.
Even VS Code usually lives as a smaller window when I'm using more a
text editor rather than as an IDE.
akdev1l wrote 1 day ago:
The window management style of Mac OS is complete chaos imo
I have been using it for years and I just gave up entirely on
managing anything and if I zoom out to see all my windows it looks
like the freaking Milky Way from windows I forgot
mulmen wrote 1 day ago:
In the office I have dual 24" monitors. At home I have a single 38"
ultrawide. In desktop mode I almost never have one app taking up my
full screen. In portable mode yeah, all full screen. The only
exception is IDEs which get their own spaces and are basically
self-contained tiling window managers anyway.
Reason077 wrote 1 day ago:
It depends very much on the size of the screen. On a small 13â
laptop screen? Sure, youâre going to be running apps full-screen a
lot of the time. On a big desktop monitor? No, except for games and
playing movies, Iâll almost never expand an app to fill the entire
screen.
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
Last time I had to work on just my laptop screen (16â), I
actually found Stage Manager pretty useful. On a larger screen, or
for more casual use, I do not.
cdaringe wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs painful for me to watch senior engineers drag windows around
and resize, hunt and peck for what theyâre looking for. I suppose
thatâs what an emacs user may think of me when I move code around,
but I suppose such things arenât critical for overall productivity
cpuguy83 wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah this is the assumption, even pre-OSX.
I won't claim to know the majority of mac users, especially not since
the large uptick in the 2010's... but it seems, in my experience,
very much the norm to not maximize windows and I wouldn't be
surprised if people who do maximize are mostly Windows converts (not
that there's anything wrong with that).
thesuitonym wrote 1 day ago:
I actually feel the opposite? The current green button action not
only makes the window fill the entire screen, it also hides the menu
bar AND creates a new virtual desktop and hides all of my other apps.
And it seems to me that's what the majority of people want.
Meanwhile, I want to use my graphical, mutli-window preemptive
multitasking operating system to, you know, use multiple applications
at the same time.
jiehong wrote 1 day ago:
One issue with windows maximised with the green button is if you
have more than 1 window of the same app: you might alt-tab to the
app, but cmd-` is not switching to the other window of the same
(while id does if not maximised.
akdev1l wrote 1 day ago:
It does weird things in multi monitor because dragging a window on
top of the newly âmaximizedâ window somehow does not work
RussianCow wrote 1 day ago:
I honestly can't say I've ever seen a non-techie expand a window to
full screen using the green button on macOS. I'm not sure why,
because in theory, I agree with you.
thesuitonym wrote 1 day ago:
In my experience supporting Mac users, it's about 50/50. I think
a lot of them have been conditioned to not maximize windows
because it hides everything else, and they don't understand how
to get back to their other windows.
alpaca128 wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
I don't maximize windows because it means a 1 second delay, as
for some reason Mac OS still does the hardcoded workspace
switching animation even for that. Which means entering/leaving
fullscreen in a video player is also delayed every time. I
don't get it, not even the accessibility settings can disable
this waste of time.
moron4hire wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, anything that has an MDI metaphor going on should be ran
fullscreen. Otherwise, what's the point? If the idea is to use the OS
desktop space as the application window organizational space, then
don't let people make apps that have different document panes.
This goes towards something that I've felt for a little while: at
some point in time around the early 2000s, operating system vendors
abdicated their responsibility to innovate on interaction metaphors.
What I mean is, things like tabbed interfaces got popularized by Web
browsers, not operating systems. Google Chrome and Firefox had to go
out of their way to render tabs; there was no support built into the
OS.
The OS interfaces we have now are not appreciably different from what
we had in the early 2000s. It seems absurd that there has been almost
no progress in the last 25 years. What change there has been feels
like it could have been accomplished in user-space, plus it doesn't
get applied consistently across applications, thus making it feel
like not a core part of the OS.
MacOS in particular was supposed to an emphasis on the desktop
environment being the space of window and document level
manipulation, as exemplified by the fact that applications did not
have their own menubars. All application menu bars were integrated
together at the top of the screen. Why should it be any different
with any other UI organizational feature? Should not apps merely be a
single window pane, accomplishing a single thing, and you combine
multiple apps together to get something akin to an IDE out of them?
Well, I don't know if they should be. But they can't. Because OS
vendors never provided a good means to do it. Even after signalling
they wanted it.
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
Opera had tabs. Tabbed under Unix had tabs. Dillo had tabs. TCL/TK
had damn tabs in 1997.
moron4hire wrote 1 day ago:
Thank you for the additional examples of how the major OS vendors
failed to respond to clear need within the market.
kuschku wrote 1 day ago:
KDE actually had it for many years, until Gnome pushed for
CSDs, and with (at the time) CSD-only wayland that feature
disappeared.
kelvinjps10 wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure if I understood correctly but i3 has tabbed windows
and no window titles
fwip wrote 1 day ago:
I seem to remember Windows XP using tabs in a lot of its settings
pages - and possibly earlier versions as well.
moron4hire wrote 1 day ago:
It did, but those were static tabs. It was pretty easy to create
tabs as a form of sub-organization. But the treatment of tabs as
documents was new-ish to Chrome/Firefox. Other applications
treated multiple, concurrent document views as whole, resizable,
sub windows inside of an "MDI" panel.
Look at how older versions of Word, Excel, and Visual Studio
worked. The tool trays stay consistant as you move between
document windows. The entire application is minimizable and
quittable together as one.
Photoshop still uses this metaphor. In the ealry and mid-2000s,
Photoshop on Windows had a window for the application separate
from the documents, but on Apple OS9 and OSX, the only
representation of the application itself was in the menu bar.
Document windows and tooltray windows both floated in the same
desktop space as every other window.
I haven't checked on the GNU Image Manipulation Program, but I
seem to remember it retained the same "no application window,
tooltrays and doc windows exist in the DE" metaphor for much
longer than Photoshop.
There is also a difference in the way that Chrome renders tabs in
the window title area. That's a part of the UI chrome that one
would expect to be in the perview of the UI toolkit, but Google
took it on themselves.
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
Virtual desktops in Unix predate Visual Studio. I'm pretty sure
there was a concept of tabbed interfaces somewhere in the Amiga
or BeOS or any other OS. [1] Don Hopkins himself can enlighten
us about it (NeWS) better than me literally anyone in this
thread, jut wait.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)
moron4hire wrote 1 day ago:
What does that have to do with my criticism of the two most
popular operating system that they failed to innovate or
adapt in areas that showed obvious need?
dbatten wrote 1 day ago:
> it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most
users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave
them half-sized somewhere in the middle
IMO, this has been their assumption for years, and it actually turned
me off when I tried getting used to Mac circa 2006-2007. Coming from
Windows at the time, I just couldn't get over a weird anxiety that my
application window wasn't maximized, because it didn't look like it
completely snapped into the screen corners.
Now, using 34-inch ultrawide monitors almost exclusively, I never
maximize anything... it'd be unusable.
leptons wrote 8 hours 38 min ago:
Ultrawide without a virtual screen manager is a missed opportunity.
Maximize window is still very useful with virtual screen areas on
large screens.
anal_reactor wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
Brother, I have 42 inch 16:9 and I always maximize everything.
wingmanjd wrote 1 day ago:
I just installed Kubuntu last week so I could get the additional
shift-drag targets to split my 34" ultrawide into 3 sections, or
bump to the edges for the half filled.
cluckindan wrote 1 day ago:
Install i3wm, it will change your life.
hombre_fatal wrote 1 day ago:
Something I realized after spending a few months in sway (i3)
and then niri is that I only care about a few windows (code
editor, terminal, browser, apps I use moment to moment).
All the rest I'd prefer to just summon as-needed and then
dismiss without navigating away from the windows I care about.
sway/niri want me to tile every window into some top-level
spot.
Took me a while to admit it, but the usual Windows/macOS/DE
"stacking" method is what I want + a few hotkeys to arrange the
few windows I care about.
aquariusDue wrote 3 hours 26 min ago:
Yeah, I came to the same conclusion a few months back. Sadly
I had to ditch KDE for GNOME due to an issue[0] specific to
NixOS but after going through the gauntlet of tiling window
managers and PaperWM/Niri over the years I've also settled on
a traditional DE.
[0]:
URI [1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/126590
cluckindan wrote 11 hours 31 min ago:
Maybe awesome-wm would be better for you then.
yepguy wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
I'm surprised to hear that niri didn't work for you, I feel
like it's a really good middle ground between tiling and
floating window managers. It handles a lot of window resizing
and arranging for me, without being too rigid. Windows can
have any width they need without having to evenly divide my
monitor.
opan wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
In sway, put the lower priority windows in another workspace,
or the scratchpad, or in tabs/stacks. You can bind keys to
focus specific programs by their appid/class also, so even if
they're on another workspace or monitor it'll jump right
there.
It sounds like the scratchpad may be especially close to what
you want.
setopt wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm currently using Krohnkite [1] to get dynamic tiling in
KDE, and Klassy [2] to get i3wm-like pixel borders instead of
full window decorations.
[1]
URI [1]: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite
URI [2]: https://github.com/paulmcauley/klassy
bobthepanda wrote 1 day ago:
While I don't maximize anything on a monitor that wide, I do
appreciate Window's snap to half/quarter functionality for monitors
that wide, and I wish Mac had the same ability natively.
inventor7777 wrote 1 day ago:
I'm pretty sure Tahoe added that behavior natively. I personally
use Magnet on Sequoia, however, so I am not 100% certain.
jen20 wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
This was added as built-in functionality in Sequoia, not Tahoe.
Personally I still use Magnet, which has worked well for over a
decade and has a few more options.
Bengalilol wrote 1 day ago:
You can hold the 'option' key while dragging a window in order to
set it in mosaic mode (you may need to activate the mode in
Settings > Finder and Dock > Windows)
drivers99 wrote 1 day ago:
> I wish Mac had the same ability natively
Hover over the green button in the top left of the window. I
recently found out about that menu for moving a window between
screens, which is also an option it has. (I also just found them
in the Window menu if you prefer that. I dont; the options take
an extra level of hovering to get to.)
wtetzner wrote 8 hours 25 min ago:
> Hover over the green button in the top left of the window.
Weirdly it still doesn't quite do what I want. It leaves a gap
around the edge of the window for some reason.
zadikian wrote 20 hours 32 min ago:
Option-clicking the green button maximizes it similarly to
Windows, rather than going fullscreen. I never used fullscreen
just because of the slow animation it used, and now it makes
even less sense on my new MacBook with the notch. It basically
replaces the menu bar with a blank bar.
mjcohen wrote 1 day ago:
Damn. Never knew that. TIL
Brajeshwar wrote 23 hours 51 min ago:
I will wait for you to discover these Keyboard Shortcuts -
Press the `fn + ^` (that globe key + control) and then try
`c`, `f`, and all of the four arrow keys.
setopt wrote 1 day ago:
You can also long-click the button instead of hovering. Also,
see the menu bar entries related to window management, which
replicates these same functions but can be bound to keys in the
system settings.
pc86 wrote 1 day ago:
I can't speak to the quarters but you absolutely can snap windows
to the left and right halves in MacOS.
dionian wrote 1 day ago:
i do quarters all the time. it used to be with third party
apps. iu think its native now
girvo wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm pretty sure it does? I havenât installed anything and it
has the ability to do half and some other layouts through the
window menu and snapping IIRC
ffsm8 wrote 1 day ago:
As a 38" ultrawide owner myself, I use vscode or intellij maximized
most of the day, depending on the codebase I'm
Browsers only ever get maximized to the left/right half screen for
me too
Which is something macos should really improve on though, the ux is
pretty bad compared to Windows and Linux there
plandis wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
MacOS has a built in 4x4 window tiling which works for this
purpose for me. I donât find ever wanting more than 4 windows
open on an ultrawide. Definitely not as powerful as something
like xmonad but useful for the majority of my use cases.
eru wrote 22 hours 51 min ago:
Windows also has this kind of tiling built-in. It even comes
with default keyboard shortcuts.
wholinator2 wrote 21 hours 35 min ago:
Here to say ubuntu's got it built in as well
troad wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
So does Mac: [1] .
Obnoxiously, it's part of the recent trend of overloading the
Globe/Fn key, so it's hard to do with third-party keyboards.
URI [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/mac-help/mchl9...
saagarjha wrote 15 hours 50 min ago:
Can you not change the shortcut?
jmspring wrote 1 day ago:
I split a vs code window and a browser or a browser and terminal
window on my 13" mb air. Usually need additional context on the
same screen.
nine_k wrote 1 day ago:
I constantly stretch windows to maximum height.
I maximize windows of graphics and video editors.
eightys3v3n wrote 1 day ago:
I've seen half a dozen Mac users and none of them maximized the
window very often. They usually had a mishmash of like 12 windows
open and randomly all over the screen. Then they used the Alt-Tab to
get between them. Basically wherever it opened is where it stayed.
LtWorf wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
That's because windows management on osx is terrible.
Spunkie wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe this explains some of the bizarre questions I've gotten from
mac designers.
The other day I was explaining to one that their designs fixed
width looks silly once it got up towards 4k resolutions. But the
designers main concern was if people actually used full screen
browsers on 4k monitors and if there was any point in thinking
about the design at that resolution.
There are plenty of times I enjoy have 2 browsers side by side of
even 4 browsers in a square, and being able to do that is one of
the benefits of having a 4k monitor. But without a doubt the
majority of my time is spent with a full size browser window open,
and I observe the same from all the other windows/linux users I
manage that use a 4k monitor.
In service of keeping this post simple, I've ignore system
display/ui scaling. But still... the question/assumption from the
mac designer completely blew my mind.
Spunkie wrote 1 day ago:
And actually typing that all out just unlocked a bunch of
memories about how many times I've been:
1. On a screen share support call with a mac user
2. Asked them to pull up a webpage
3. They pull up a super tiny ass browser window to the point
I can't really see anything
4. I ask them to full screen the browser so we can actually
read shit
5. The mac user just straight up panics or acts like like
I've spoken an alien language to them.
The same process happens when I need a mac user to get to an apps
settings that on a windows/linux computer would normally be under
something like File > Preferences/Settings. They have no idea
what I'm talking about or know just barely enough to know they
don't remember how to do it and panic.
Then I have to go google it and remember that CMD+comma(â+,)
exists and reveal it to the mac user like it's actual black
magic. And then I immediately forget about it until 6 months
later when I need to support a mac user again and I repeat the
whole cycle again.
alpaca128 wrote 23 hours 52 min ago:
On Mac OS Settings is located in the menu named after the
program, left of File and Edit. For example Firefox > Settings.
wmil wrote 1 day ago:
Window management is one thing that MacOS has long been weirdly bad
at.
I think there's a conflict between the users who use it on studio
displays and users who use it on 13 inch laptops. The Mac team at
apple won't pick a side or come up with two solutions.
That's not completely true, they've been pushing swipe between
fullscreen apps for a while.
But that doesn't make any sense on an iMac.
So the recommendation from pro users is to use Alfred to manage
windows.
akdev1l wrote 1 day ago:
Yes MacOS breaks down the user until they give up on window
management
eszed wrote 1 day ago:
This is me. I tend to order projects onto their own desktops[0],
each with several app windows open. With an external monitor
there's plenty of space, and... Yeah: with command-tab thoroughly
committed to muscle memory it usually doesn't matter much if they
end up on top of each other. If it does, I'll put them next to each
other. Stickies usually go out of my eye-line to the left side of
the screen, so I'll keep that otherwise clear.
I sometimes maximize something - other than video calls: those are
always full-size - on the laptop screen, but otherwise not at all.
I can see how a full-screen IDE makes sense, but I don't use one,
so I always want a couple of terminal sessions running alongside my
editor.
There are vanishingly few contexts in which I find full-screen
helpful. Not criticizing anyone else, or recommending my way of
working, but it's what works for me.
[0] I would like better support for desktop management: naming and
shortcutting, particularly. Years ago I tried some (I think it was
Alfred, or a predecessor) add-on that promised that, but it was
super flaky. Does anything exist that works well?
cosmic_cheese wrote 1 day ago:
This is me almost exactly. Windows pile up being whatever size
feels appropriate, organized only by virtual desktop. If screen
#2 is a laptop screen or the program in question is an IDE with a
billion panes I might resize it to fill the screen, but otherwise
itâs rare. I practically never use full-on fullscreen.
Itâs so ingrained I tend to get frustrated on other desktops,
which are nearly all built around the Windows mentality of
keeping displays filled to the brim with tiled or maximized
windows.
Even on the handful of times with maximize/tile on macOS, itâs
with a gap of a few pixels of desktop peeking through so it
doesnât feel as âboxed inâ and claustrophobic.
doubled112 wrote 1 day ago:
Probably not the norm, but I use a large 4K monitor and no scaling.
I havenât maximized a window in years. They look ridiculous like
that. Especially web pages with their max width set so the content
is 1/4 the screen and 3/4 whitespace.
amarant wrote 1 day ago:
I too have a huge monitor. How anyone can use one without a tiling
window manager is beyond me
doubled112 wrote 1 day ago:
A tiling window manager adds a bunch of keyboard shortcuts I
canât get used to. Not worth the mental load of having things
change places on their own either.
Itâs probably a me problem, but Iâm going to open stuff and
then leave it scattered around all day. Itâs fine.
I donât use more than a couple of virtual desktops either. Just
one for current tasks and one for background apps.
ryandrake wrote 1 day ago:
I have three 27" screens (iMac in the center and two thunderbolt
displays on each side) and I use most of my "daily driver"
applications fullscreen (single monitor). So, things like Xcode,
VSCode, web browsers, mail, Quicken, Spreadsheets and Word
Processing, and so on. This gives me usually at most 3 things to do
at once. Occasionally, for smaller apps, like calculator, messages
and so on, I won't fullscreen them. But for my main workflows, it's
fullscreen all the way.
My actual biggest pet peeve with this setup is the vast number of
web sites that deliberately choose to limit their content to a tiny
column centered horizontally in my browser, with 10cm of wasted
whitespace on each side.
alex_c wrote 1 day ago:
I use a 40â 4K screen.
If I ever accidentally full screen a window, and itâs not in
night mode, I am instantly blinded by a wall of mostly white empty
background!
Wowfunhappy wrote 1 day ago:
Do you have the brightness on your monitor set really high or
something?
I frequently use macOS on a projector, it doesn't quite fill my
wall floor to ceiling but it comes close. I don't use full screen
often, but I do it occasionally as a focusing strategy, and it's
fine.
amarant wrote 1 day ago:
Projectors are way easier on the eyes than monitors though.
You're shining a bright light on a wall, which you are looking
at.
With a monitor you are shining a bright light at your face,
while staring directly at the lightbulb!
Wowfunhappy wrote 1 day ago:
Doesn't bouncing off the wall just effectively make the
"backlight" dimmer? The light reflected off the wall is
hitting your face versus the light from the screen hitting
your face. It's still light regardless.
If you're using a monitor in the dark the way you use a
projector, you should turn the backlight down. If you're
using it in a well lit room, the brighter backlight should
have less of an effect.
amarant wrote 1 day ago:
In principle, it's the same as staring at the moon Vs
staring at the sun.
The fact that it's bright outside when the sun is up might
help, but it's nowhere near enough to compensate!
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
> The light reflected off the wall is hitting your face
versus the light from the screen hitting your face. It's
still light regardless.
It sounds to me you've never actually looked at a monitor
display large swaths of white before, it's brighter than
light hitting a wall for sure, even with the brightness
down, extra so when the ambient lightning is dark too.
Wowfunhappy wrote 23 hours 56 min ago:
I've definitely seen large monitors that are unpleasantly
bright in the dark, but I've also seen an overly bright
projector that was similarly unpleasant. I genuinely
don't understand why changing the backlight wouldn't fix
everything. A projector's image isn't diffuse like a
lightbulb, if it was you wouldn't see an image.
amelius wrote 1 day ago:
Without scaling, those rounded corners look not so rounded.
doubled112 wrote 1 day ago:
Computers were better with square corners anyway.
jiehong wrote 1 day ago:
interesting! But, the default scaling makes them look bigger.
dcrazy wrote 1 day ago:
FYI, the article incorrectly claims that SIP just controls write access
to /. It does way more than that.
lapcat wrote 1 day ago:
I don't see where it says that. Can you provide a direct quote?
dcrazy wrote 1 day ago:
Footnote 2.
lapcat wrote 1 day ago:
The footnote 2 link doesn't actually work for me, for whatever
reason.
What does it say?
rzzzt wrote 1 day ago:
"Arguable, since you just loose security over /root, which is
not a big deal if someone already gained access to your
machine, at least for me."
It doesn't render for me either, but is in the HTML at path...
.../html/body/div/div/main/div[3]/div[6]/div/div[2]/div/p
Edit: SIP has a series of control bits for a diverse set of
protections. You can see what these control (and which bits
"csrutil disable" toggles) in this include file:
URI [1]: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/f6...
dcrazy wrote 10 hours 22 min ago:
The link or the footnote itself doesnât render for you? It
renders on mobile Safari, just by scrolling to the bottom of
the page.
rzzzt wrote 51 min ago:
The footnotes appear to the left of the main body of text
around the position they appear in (viewing in a desktop
browser). The article has grown a third note in the
meantime and these are all visible now.
gnarlouse wrote 1 day ago:
One of my claude code projects was going to be "theghostofsteve", a
social media platform where people post things they love and hate about
appleOS things. Likes/Dislikes would be "genius/it's shit". And in all
likelihood, the platform would surface that most users think "it's
shit."
The platform would aggregate by major/minor version, and you could see
in totality whether the current version of macOS/iOS would make Steve
proud of miserable.
Ultimately I decided against it, for defamation/cease-and-desist
reasons, and not wanting to find out. But it needs to exist.
Joel_Mckay wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were a team, and Jobs would regularly
tell people their work was "shit" if it didn't make sense.
Apple traditionally burned out its talent, and is no longer
structured to follow Jobs original vision. There is a lot of
goodwill with the users, but just like Sony/HP/IBM/Microsoft/Sun it
can't last forever. The process-people entrench themselves, and ruin
everything... just as Jobs predicted. =3
gnarlouse wrote 4 hours 33 min ago:
What does Woz have to do with it
Joel_Mckay wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
Jobs often set project goals well beyond current technology, and
the people around him were responsible for actually getting
product out the door.
Naively asserting stuff is "Shit" and firing people that disagree
with you on superficial deliverables is not a difficult role.
However, teams pushing new technology out to the general public
is challenging, and even Apple gambled on the wrong product at
times.
Jobs was right about a lot of marketing trends, but also was a
controversial character. I would recommend watching the classic
interview just prior to his return to Apple, as it aged well...
=3
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRZAJY23xio
ykl wrote 1 day ago:
Wouldnât âinsanely greatâ/âitâs shitâ be more Steve than
âgeniusâ/âitâs shitâ?
skrrtww wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure if these selectors are hit in SwiftUI or not.
pram wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not a fan of the look in Tahoe (especially Apple Music wtf happened
there) but most of it I can totally ignore, and don't even notice
anymore. Except for the tabs. I have Sequoia and Tahoe machines, and
the tabs in Tahoe are so unbelievably bad in comparison. Like this ugly
pill shape. I rarely hear this get brought up but they're astonishingly
ugly, worse than the previous design in every way.
hbn wrote 1 day ago:
You're not alone, I was calling out how ugly Safari is in Tahoe a few
weeks ago! [1] Probably my least favorite redesign in the whole
update. Why is everything an oval? It's just bizarre.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282085#47310011
rafram wrote 1 day ago:
This isnât a part of macOS 26 that bothers me, honestly. I donât
spend a lot of time stacking windows and measuring their corners.
rc_kas wrote 23 hours 51 min ago:
I truly hate it, so so much. Mentally I'm already planning out what
OS I'm going to migrate to.
LtWorf wrote 22 hours 12 min ago:
Try both gnome and kde if you come on linux, and remember that on
kde you can customize anything you don't like.
kibwen wrote 1 day ago:
In other words, MacOS is fine as long as you're undiscerning and not
at all detail-oriented. Imagine telling Steve Jobs that this was the
prevailing attitude needed to make using a Mac bearable.
rafram wrote 13 hours 42 min ago:
These inconsistent corner radii are actually intentional, FWIW -
the radius depends on the windowâs function (main, utility,
etc.). I donât think it looks great, but thereâs no lack of
attention to detail.
mabedan wrote 1 day ago:
To me it's a little like the situation with charging the Mighty
Mouse. It's become a meme to post a picture of it on its side being
charged, but if you own one it doesn't really matter, as you charge
it once a month for 15 minutes while you're at lunch.
There are things which definitely do bother me like the Liquid Glass,
but the window corners really don't bother me. And I'm into design
and constantly inspect parts of ui with Digital Color Meter app.
yborg wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
You have a truly Magic Mouse if yours charges in 15 minutes. In my
experience, it is hours to charge from zero, which until I put an
always-running monitor in the menu bar for the mouse battery level
is what you are guaranteed to have since there is no other
indicator of mouse battery level.
I used to roll my eyes at the complaints until I actually had one
of these, and it is appallingly bad engineering. Especially since
the previous design, which was functionally identical just needed a
10 second battery swap.
JellyPlan wrote 1 day ago:
I don't either, the only thing that annoys me is it's much harder to
resize windows, so the usability is worse
dilap wrote 1 day ago:
i use a an auto-layout tool, so having windows stacked on top of each
other is super-common for me, and the fact that they all peak thru
each other (like the screenshot in the blog) looking absolutely
terrible drives me crazy
post-it wrote 1 day ago:
I can't say I've had any issues with the corners, or noticed any
difference after upgrading to macOS 26. But this is neat.
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