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Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by k__ on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @06:35AM (#16323764)
I have no idea...

I'm came from ~18 of Windows & Linux usage and everyone always told me macOS is THE OS with the best usability.

But I can't confirm this.

Minimization of windows is shitty and maximization even more.

When I maximize, often just the height is changed, when I go back to "normal" the height and the width is changed, so I always have to adjust the width manually.

When I minimize a few windows, it's impossible to get back the right one without luck.

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by _mrmnmly on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @07:10AM (#16323887)
Know what you're talking about. Since I've switched back to Linux I can't imagine working without workspaces - each one dedicated for specific task/app - and every time staying with specific order so e.g. 1 workspace: Browser, 2nd: Code editor, 3rd: Terminal, 4th: File explorers etc. I used to it so much that I automatically use shortcuts to access it immediately - switching between minimized windows using alt + tab keys is a nightmare.
Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by tclover on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @10:02AM (#16324801)
Windows 10 actually supports this feature, still can't get used to it though... win+tab -> switch between virtual desktops, or ctrl+win+left/right arrows.

and if you have many windows open (in win 10 at least) you don't have to press alt+tab 10 times in a row to choose your desired program, you can hold alt+tab and use arrows.

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by oflannabhra on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @10:19AM (#16324936)
Yep. Curiously, though, you cannot share running programs or windows across "desktops" in Windows, although you can share them across Spaces in macOS.
Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by theclaw on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @07:22PM (#16329167)
Yes you can, it was added in the Creators update. Hit win+tab and right-click the window, you can choose to show that single window across all desktops or all windows from the app across all desktops.
Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by epicide on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @09:07AM (#16324438)
You can accomplish (mostly) the same thing with Spaces on Mac. Granted, I don't believe you can really script any of it. All manual, but it still works pretty well for me.

Some days I still really miss dwm, but having Photoshop, Ableton, and several other things Just Work™ makes it worth it.

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by syrrim on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @10:16AM (#16324912)
The problem with spaces is that any time you cmd-tab between spaces, those spaces will be repositioned relative to each other to be adjacent. This also happens whenever a window opens a dialogue that forces you to switch to it. This means that you can't reliably keep spaces in a strict order.
Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by fiddlerwoaroof on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @01:11PM (#16326622)
You can disable this behavior in

System Preferences > Mission Control > Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by epicide on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @10:59AM (#16325298)
I have never seen either of those things happen. I even just tested the first one.

Perhaps it's a setting or was the behavior in an older version of macOS?

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by dredmorbius on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @02:46PM (#16327415)
If I alt-tab between apps, or open a new window in an app from a particular space, I'm warped to wherever OSX very wrongly thinks I ought to be.

Motherfucking maddening as hell.

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by dm319 on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @08:07AM (#16324105)
Yes, this is something I do to on linux, and it's great particularly when you're doing something that gets quite messy with lots of windows open - when you're working with lots of files, or you the program (like GIMP) opens up several windows. If you need to do something else it's so nice to just leave it all and move onto a nice clean workspace without having to minimize everything.
Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by lou1306 on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @10:37AM (#16325084)
You do have multiple workspaces on Windows 10... Though if you mean "automatically assign application X to workspace Y", which many Linux WMs are able to do, you're out of luck.
Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by klibertp on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @04:36PM (#16328234)
I used to use VirtuaWin[1] on Windows, which adds virtual desktops to it. It's possible it doesn't work in the most recent Windows (although, given Win compatibility, it could just as well work), but until Windows 7 (when I stopped using Windows) it was a life-saver. I used Enlightenment (E16) on some of my computers back then and after working with multiple desktops I just couldn't live without them. I mostly use 3x3 layout, with the main application I work with at the center, and other applications to the sides. Works great for me!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtuaWin

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by digi_owl on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @02:10PM (#16327128)
Sadly the workspaces are very much mouse oriented (want to switch between workspaces? Thats win+ctrl+number!).

And there is no proper UI element for checking if you have anything open in a different workspace without opening the switcher.

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by jhasse on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @02:33PM (#16327317)
You can switch with Ctrl+Win+Left/Right, too.
Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by digi_owl on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @05:43PM (#16328655)
While true, it does not alleviate the finger yoga...
Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by jhasse on Thursday February 08, 2018 @02:40AM (#16330799)
Not to different from most Linux DE's Ctrl+Alt+Left/Right.
Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by digi_owl on Thursday February 08, 2018 @01:35PM (#16334393)
At least any sane DE allows me to define them to be less gymnastic.
Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by analogic on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @06:58AM (#16323833)
After using a mac for ~6 months now, I finally understand what happened to gnome3/unity, clearly designed by mac users.

I mean it's perfectly usable once I got the basic gestures down and installed the app that let me independently set the track pad and mouse wheel scroll directions, but will go so far as to say that both xfce and MATE are objectively better at window management.

Partly I think their hands were tied by the too late to change decision for the always there contextual top menu bar. Or this is just 25 years of using win95 clones talking and I'm set in my ways.

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by herbst on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @07:19AM (#16323922)
I wouldnt say Gnome is by or for mac users. In fact in many ways it is way more similiar to Metro than to OSX. Gnome 3 just broke the common Windows 95 workflow, however many others did before.
Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by analogic on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @07:24AM (#16323945)
ya tbh i never tried using it for more than 10 minutes
Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by herbst on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @07:31AM (#16323977)
Personally i love it but it took me way more than 10 minutes to realize why :) IMO it is highly underestimated, mostly because you need to change your workflow which takes time, but when you did it feels super productive.

You wouldnt judge i3 or other completely different approaches after only a few minutes.

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by NoGravitas on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @07:47AM (#16324029)
I feel absolutely the same about Gnome 3. One of the biggest things, I think, is that it puts workspaces absolutely in your face, so using them is a much more natural part of the workflow than in Gnome 2. It's also more keyboard-friendly than Gnome 2 (though it still could use some work in this area). Despite being rather large (gnome-shell on Wayland is typically the second-biggest RAM user on my laptop), it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on.
Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by herbst on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @08:35AM (#16324241)
> it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on.

absolutely :)

What i like the most is you are just a super key tab away from basically everything so focus on a single thing feels natural and right. There is no way to lose anything either, its all there. Always.

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by dm319 on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @04:37PM (#16328242)
I'm going to have to give it another go then, though I do love my MATE desktop.

The last time I tried it, I got frustrated when working with a lot of pdf sources - hitting the super key just presented me with a myriad of white rectangles where open windows would frequently rearrange requiring a slow manual search to find the file I was looking for. This can be less of a problem with a taskbar, as the filename is the main identifier, and being 1 dimensional it is easier to scan and preserves its position better.

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by mwaitjmp on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @11:37AM (#16325645)
What's strange on a mac is somehow having the ability to completely lose windows.

Another frustration is trying to view two apps together on the screen at the same time, if one of the apps itself contains multiple windows. I'm not at my desk to try this but let's say you have multiple chrome windows open, all with their own tabs, and you want to view your current chrome window overlayed on a window from another app. To do this you have to manually minimise all of your chrome windows one by one so they will all move of the way, to allow you to switch between apps and view them both at the same time.

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by joeframbach on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @12:52PM (#16326453)
Here's my workflow for this situation.

Four fingers up, expose. Drag the windows you need up top into a new desktop. Command (or control? Or option? Or a combination?) Plus the right arrow to switch desktops. Try all the combinations until I get to the right desktop or throw the damn thing out a window.

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by k__ on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @12:52PM (#16326451)
Always have this issue with Xcode.

Somehow it is able to open up the device manager and THEN give the window in the background focus when I switch to my editor and back to Xcode with cmd+tab.

So I have to move the Xcode window down, to grab that backgrund thing what seems to be part of Xcode.

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by jasim on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @07:14AM (#16323912)
I use ShiftIt (https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt), and ctrl+alt+cmd+M maximizes the window just like you expect.