Anecdotal I know, but I very recently got a macbook air after years of practically exclusively using Linux and the opinionated user interface drives me crazy.

Here's a few pain points:

- Scroll direction can only be set globally so either touchpad or mouse scrolling feels awkward for me

- You need an extra click on another window before you can interact with it

- No focus-follows-mouse (there used to be 3rd party plugins but those seem to be gone now)

- While basic split screen tiling works and you can set up a global kb shortcut to move windows to left/right of the screen, Firefox seems to completely ignore those

- If you're running multiple displays macos for some reason always picks the most awkward display to open new windows in

- I really miss being able to grab and resize windows using a modifier key like in XFCE

I'm sure I'd get used to many of those, but the lack of focus-follows-mouse and easy window manipulation are the big one for me and I don't think that'll change much. Actually I think those were already pain points when I last tried out Mac OS in the late PPC days.

There's of course plenty of things that I like, especially the tight integration with my iphone and trackpad gestures (although I'm not sure how ergonomic using the trackpad all day is).

I was hoping it could become my main driver at home, but now I ordered a Ryzen mini PC for that.

edit: Oh, I completely forgot the biggest deal breaker for me at the moment. As of now the GUI version of Emacs (either downloaded through brew or from https://emacsformacosx.com/) doesn't work. MacOS simply refuses to start the binary.

- You need an extra click on another window before you can interact with it

- No focus-follows-mouse (there used to be 3rd party plugins but those seem to be gone now)

- While basic split screen tiling works and you can set up a global kb shortcut to move windows to left/right of the screen, Firefox seems to completely ignore those

- If you're running multiple displays macos for some reason always picks the most awkward display to open new windows in

- I really miss being able to grab and resize windows using a modifier key like in XFCE

All of these things can be done with yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

> - You need an extra click on another window before you can interact with it

I don't have this issue, I can interact with a window just by hovering over it with the mouse pointer

> - If you're running multiple displays macos for some reason always picks the most awkward display to open new windows in

You can set the default display in the settings (under arrangement, drag the white bar to the display you want to make the default)

Agree about the other issues though.

> I don't have this issue, I can interact with a window just by hovering over it with the mouse pointer

Hm, maybe it's just Firefox that's a bad citizen here, like with the global shortcuts.

Do not blame Firefox, this is actually how MacOS UI works by default: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/269622/macos-windo...

I think the other poster has some addon installed and forgot about it.

I don't think I do, I'm a fairly recent convert to macOS. I'm running Big Sur and I can interact with any window the mouse cursor is over. I can scroll any window I'm hovering over, and with a single click can perform an action.

Same. You have to click the window before typing something, but scroll does follow the mouse.

How about button clicks?

No, but I understand the rationale. A button click is an input much like typing. Plus, when I want to give a window focus, I'd rather not look for a non-button to click.

But, having clicks work on hover instead of after focus is fine, and simply has a different set of trade offs.

you have to hold 'option' to click on a button in a window without focus

Not Option, but Command. If you hold down Option and click in another window, the current window hides. You can also hold down Command and drag a window that doesn't have focus.

You can also switch focus to a window without raising it by holding down Control+Option and clicking the window.

At any rate, a lot of these things can be chalked up to different philosophies, I think. Personally, I really don't like focus follows mouse; when I was using FreeBSD and Linux many years ago, I would try it and then end up disabling it after a short while.

It is worth noting that Terminal has a hidden preference for focus-follows-mouse:

    defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -bool true

You can also change that setting, along with those of some other quirky system things, in third-party apps like TinkerTool and Onyx.

- for scroll direction: https://mos.caldis.me/

- resize and move windows with shortcuts: https://rectangleapp.com/

both free and open source

If a Linux user suggested people to download external 3rd party software to make their desktop experience nicer they'd get absolutely blasted and be told that users shouldn't be expected to tweak stuff and download 3rd party tools. Why is this acceptable for macOS users?

This make no sense. The entire linux ecosystem is nearly all 3rd party software. And people routinely recommend not only installing a tool, but installing entirely different window managers.

That's a red herring. These 3rd party tweaks don't make the Mac desktop experience objectively "nicer", they are tweaks to make it more familiar to people used to other, non-Mac desktop environments.

Personally I consider the stock macOS desktop experience to be perfectly fine.

There's a certain Zen to using Apple interfaces (IMHO): You have to relax and just accept that this is how it is, and it's best to get used to it.

I fully understand if you find this to be not really good enough, but this is the only way to make them work for you.

There's truth to this. After years of using macOS as my primary OS, both Windows and Linux w/various DEs become progressively more irritating the more windows are open because they both expect micromanagement, be it from the user, or automated as with a tiling WM.

Under macOS, windows just kind of exist as they want to be and pile up until you intentionally change them, and the environment doesn't push you to manage it, so you end up not putting much thought into anything but the 1-3 windows you're using at that exact moment.

The mac approach taps a bit into spatial memory too, which makes auto-tiling like with i3 irritating because then windows no longer have an inherent size or position — it all continually changes as windows open and close unless I start maintaining window sets, so at the end of the day I'm still putting more thought into management than I would've under macOS.

Because of this it's long been a desire of mine to have a Linux DE that closely mimics macOS. Some will point to GNOME, but it's more like iPadOS if it were adapted to the desktop. Elementary gets closer but still misses the mark. It would be a neat hobby project to take up but figuring out how to get started is rough, especially with all Wayland example WMs and tutorials being for tiling instead of traditional floating.

Ah yes, but if you suggest that someone do this when using Linux, you get shit on.

Gnome is still by some distance the most popular user interface on Linux, and is also very strongly opinionated and appears to lack customization options [1]. The project's "our way or the highway" approach is frequently vocally criticized and compared to Apple's approach, but as a whole seems to be appreciated well enough. I wouldn't say the Linux community as a whole are assholes about this.

The fact that many online Linux users take offense to lack of customization is not really something to worry about in my opinion. I used to customize Linux installs endlessly, but only truly found zen when I stopped worrying committed to stick to Fedora's default install.

[1]: Besides the point but Gnome is arguably far and away the most customizable desktop shell on Linux, as its extension "mechanism" consists of literally overwriting the JS code that powers its shell interface. For better and worse.

To be fair, customizability and freedom aren't Apple's selling points.

And to be even fairer, user experience consistency isn't one of Linux's selling points. While there is some limited consistency within individual graphical shells, the Linux ecosystem naturally favours a diversity of opinions instead.

Because Apple interfaces are highly opinionated and generally fairly consistent, learning to do things the Apple way is a valid life choice for many people.

macOS does have mouse-following interaction in some situations. If you move the mouse over a background window, you can scroll it with the trackpad/wheel. You can't click on things or type in it because that's dangerous and would make people afraid to accidentally touch the mouse in case they move it.

Of all the things, accusing GNU/Linux of opinionated GUI just doesn't make sense at all to me. There's like 30+ different desktop environments you can use. So many so that there's a need for articles like 10 best Linux DE's of 2021, and those don't even scratch the surface anyway.

I think you've misread my comment. It's the macos GUI that's opinionated.

Allright. :)

- Grab and resize windows: you can try https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize.

For the scroll direction check this out https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/

Since you're already using brew, I am running emacs-plus@27 on Big Sur on an MacBook Air M1 and it works perfectly.

  brew tap d12frosted/emacs-plus
  brew install emacs-plus@27

Edit: code

The Emacs startup failure may be due to bad preferences left behind by Emacs in ~/.emacs.d; try moving those aside or deleting them.

Don't think so. It's telling me there's an issue with the binary's signature. (I'm using a macbook air M1, so maybe it works fine with x86)

In any case I guess it'll get fixed eventually.

For whatever it's worth, you can launch Emacs from the command line.

cd /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS

./Emacs-arm64-11_2

I really think we're getting there. Wayland is a much saner, more consistent experience than X11 ever was. I use Fedora and with Gnome and Mutter you get a solid experience. Not everyone likes Gnome but I find it to be generally pretty good and productive to work in.

There are some gaps in Wayland - screen sharing being the obvious one. But these gaps are in the process of being closed (pipewire being part of the picture). Give it another year and I believe that Wayland will be a solid solution for all the major use cases (multi-monitor, high-dpi, screen sharing).

My other issue with Linux as a workstation solution is OOM handling, and even that is being worked on!

Nvidia really needs to get on Wayland already. I tried a few months ago to run KDE on Wayland+Nvidia it was literally unusable. I could not put a panel down without bugs. I'm running mixed DPI with the Nvidia driver and it's just easiest to make seperate X screens despite all the downsides that brings :/.

I'm going to be sad that a lot of little WMs are probably never going to make the jump. I'm not sure Wayland is ever going to get that many.

nVidia works fine on Wayland on Gnome because Gnome implemented nVidia's EGLstreams as well as GBM

There are lots of things you've learnt for Windows and Mac that make you productive. I can say this with certainty as someone who hasn't used Windows for almost 15 years and has never used MacOS. When I come into contact with those systems I have no idea what's going on. Windows has a million buttons all over the place and MacOS has really weird, unintuitive behaviour and "gestures" that you need to just know, somehow.

The best way is just to take the plunge. Immerse yourself by removing other OSes from your own PC. In a few weeks you'll be flying.

I sincerely hope that one day, MacOS or Windows can provide a GUI that provides as smooth an experience as the i3 tiling window manager.

I've written this before, but it's not going to happen without a large amount of apps, that people actually want and can use. And that's not going to happen unless there's all the necessary tooling, especially for UI. mac/iOS and Windows have great support for building user-oriented applications. And then it still needs a centralized way to monetize the development work. And to get all that, you need a ton of paying users, not a bunch of freeloading tinkerers. It's simply not going to happen any time soon.

There's already GTK and Qt. What more do you want?

> And then it still needs a centralized way to monetize the development work.

I disagree: once you put money into the equation, the quality of packages will go down as programmers try to shake as much money out of the users. Compare programs like MATLAB vs GNU Octave or Photoshop vs GIMP for example.

> And to get all that, you need a ton of paying users, not a bunch of freeloading tinkerers.

Do you really? I mean you are basically saying that the only way linux can compete is if it sacrifices most of what makes it good in the first place. I really doubt that users think "hmm today i'm going to pay for a bunch of crappy apps that each do some trivial thing for me while uploading my data to the cloud, then watch some ads, and then wade through a bunch of graphical menus to disable this one stupid feature I don't like, i love using iWinux this is so much better than other OS's".

> There's already GTK and Qt. What more do you want?

There's GTK2, GTK3, vanilla Qt, KDE-Qt with additional tooling... The problem in Linux is the lack of integration between these tools. The fragmentation of the GNU/Linux ecosystem forbids the possibility of an unified API like HaikuOS kits. (https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/)

Doesn't Windows have a similar problem? MFC, WPF, UWP? Plus Qt, GTK too...

You have a skewed view of what it’s like on Windows or macOS. I certainly haven’t paid for a bunch of crappy, trivial apps — the utilities I use are all free (and don’t upload my data to the cloud, nor make me watch ads).

And are you saying that gimp is a superior product to photoshop? It’s not like you can’t get gimp or octave on non-free OSes, but for some (good) reasons illustrators and scientists and engineers choose to pay for photoshop and matlab.

So nice

Hmm, I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I recently logged on to an (admittedly older) mac machine and it took roughly 3 minutes to fully log in. Then I spent some significant time fumbling around a clumsy gui like a pleab.

After that, cd’ing around my minimal - yet blazing fast - thinkpad w/ void linux felt nearly exhilirating. Didn’t have to touch the mouse for many minutes at a time.

One of the issues is that most of the money comes from big corporate sponsors that are nearly exclusively going to be running Linux on a server with no GUI.

These businesses have no interest in trying to develop a desktop UI when Mac OS and Windows work fine already and someone else is doing all the work for it already.

It's not just corporate sponsors though. Many Linux developers and most hardcore Linux nerds have an irrational distain for GUIs. They think that Vim is the best thing since sliced bread and if you don't want to use the terminal to set up WiFi then you're a noob that belongs on Windows.

Not everyone is like that but that's definitely the prevailing attitude. A good example is the regular hate that SystemD receives. Nobody wants a modern system that supports hotplugging and GUI configuration. They think you should edit init.rc files by hand and reboot your desktop (laptop? what's that?) whenever you plug something in.

The reason people like Vim isn't because they hate GUI's. I use a Mac because I like the GUI, but I still do most of my development in Vim because I'm more productive in it. Most of these hardcore Vim (or Emacs) users stay that way because they've built up years of muscle memory and customizations that makes it the most productive editor for them. I also use VS Code and for some stuff I work faster in VS Code. But there's a good argument that a keyboard driven UX is faster than a mouse driven one since you can input things so much faster than with a mouse.

I personally hate SystemD also, but that's more because it makes it such a pain to stuff like look at logs. I never remember the correct journalctl command. Just let me cat/tail a file like everything else. I don't know anyone who hates SystemD because it allows GUI configuration. It's just that SystemD made some other changes also that people don't like.

Don't use Gnome and you have all these issues with the GUI fixed.

I think that elementaryos has had the best shot at this as of yet.