- 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