Why hide the password box, then, unless you think that users learning to type and have magically it go somewhere invisible is a good UI design…

(Interesting aside: I complained to someone on the Mac Safari team that it was difficult to search open tabs, and he told me that apparently this feature already exists! You go into the tab overview, and…just start typing. A little search bar will pop into appearance in the top right corner. Why it couldn't just be there and have keyboard focus from the start, I have no idea…)

Worse, this creates a bad habit. What if the UI changes and now it's the username that pops up first, not a password box?

So it's a hard-to-discover feature, and a misfeature unless you elect to keep this behavior forever.

Because this only happens on the lock screen when there's no user to be entered/selected. There's no slide-up on the initial login.

Wow, I would’ve never guessed that. Apple has a terrible habit of burying obscure UX features.

It’s a shame really because these undocumented features mean 99% of people WON’T ever use them. Isn’t that counterproductive to engineers?

Why aren’t employees speaking out against this?

macOS hides the password field to encourage people to use Touch ID instead, but Ubuntu probably doesn't even support fingerprint login...

Every mainstream Linux distro supports fingerprint login natively just by virtue of using PAM.

Funnily enough, so does every Mac by virtue of using PAM ;)

Ubuntu does support fingerprint login if you have supported hardware.

Unless slack steals the focus. Happened to me a few weeks back. Then slack gets your password and enter key, and the login screen doesn't.

The irony being that there's a vocal group of GNOME users complain that newer versions full-stop prevent windows from taking focus and install an extension to being the behavior back.

Can't please everyone I suppose.

It wouldn't be a problem if it is an option which can be configured, I think.

Steam remote streaming did something similar, while on the road with my laptop it presented me with my Kubuntu login screen... so I logged in, fine... and now my computer at home is sitting unlocked and unsecured.