I'm not sure Windows is such a great example in the conversation about file systems, what with its "collections" and abstract hierarchy which is sometimes upside down and somewhat – but not fully! – circular.

Open an explorer window, click on your name under "quick access". You're in the home directory. You also have a "Desktop" folder there. Go in there. You see your desktop files. So far so good.

Now go back to your user folder and click "up". You're now in "desktop". What?! Only now, there's other stuff in there. How many desktops are there?!

Now go back to your user folder, choose any folder. Click on the address bar. C:\users\your_name\your_folder. Click twice "up", you expect to be in C:\users, right? Ha!

Now type C:\users\your_name\your_folder, or browse through the C:\ in the left pane. Click the address bar and compare with earlier. Now click up. Very intuitive. Depending on how you got somewhere, your apparent hierarchy is not the same.

Back to the "quick collection" thing, there's a desktop entry there. Click it. Looks like the first desktop folder, so no surprise here, right?. Click up. You end up in "my computer"!

Now, do the same operations in Finder. How many different desktops are there? Not sure how Windows is more logical or user-friendly.

I side with the other poster who said that most "common users" just don't understand file systems, and so they put everything on the desktop because it doesn't go away.

This is really helpful to know - it's one of my biggest bugaboos about using Finder & navigating the Mac GUI.

On the other hand, I suspect this kind of obscure key-based shortcut is a big part of why Macs don't feel intuitive to a lot of users. How could I have known this shortcut exists? It's not broadcast anywhere obvious. My options for finding all these obscure shortcuts aren't great. I could scroll through a submenu in the Settings pane, hoping to find something that looks like it says the thing I'm trying to do (and then that I can figure out what keys it means, since Apple key symbology is VERY arcane). I could stumble across a mention of the shortcut in a forum like this. Or I could Google in the hope of finding something - though that assumes I believe it's doable in the first place, which I didn't in this particular case.

It would also help if Apple chose easier / more intuitive keyboard shortcuts. A "shortcut" which both is the only way to do something, and also requires pressing a minimum of four seemingly-random keys, is not a shortcut at all - it's a mental load on the user that they just have to hold in their heads forever.

Shortcuts mostly appear in the menus, but I remember one in particular being elusive: cmd + down. I've found it out by asking a friend.

I think there is supposed to be a method to the madness, though it's maybe less and less clear nowadays, especially with applications that don't implement them correctly (such as MS Office, electron apps, etc) and people being very used to Windows' conventions.

For example, the modifier keys' names are usually an indication of what you can achieve with them.

CMD (the "flower-like" key, directly next to the space bar) is usually the one used to produce... commands. As in Copy, Save, etc.

Then you have your ALTernative / Option, which usually modifies some other key's usual behaviour. You can obtain dead keys with it. ALT+e / e = é. etc. It also works in menus to obtain alternative actions. You can click a menu, press alt, and see the entries change.

And CTRL deals with control characters. ctrl-c in the terminal, line editing (ctrl-a in any text field goes to the beginning of the line, etc). It's not clear to me why right click is obtained with control and not alt, though...

That is insane. Who came up with that? Why do some entries lose their ellipsis when you hold alt? How is anyone expected to know any of this?

At least, on macOS, if you press OPT, the entries will change. On Windows, if you click right → delete, the file isn't deleted. It's moved to the recycle bin. "How are you supposed to know that?". On Mac, it says "move to trash" or similar. Now say you don't want that. If you hold Shift and click delete, it actually deletes it. But if you hold Shift while looking at the Windows menu, it still says "delete".

There are quite a lot of "have to know" things in other OSs, too. They each come with a mental model which may be closer or further from the user's.

I think the issues we see nowadays come up because many apps work the same everywhere, and people may switch between systems more often, so figure since <app> works the same, everything works the same.

It's also hard to think that what comes naturally is actually a mental model that's been ingrained and not something "absolute".

I guess this is why computers used to have manuals, but who reads those anymore?

You're not. Shortcuts are a power user thing. If you want to move the window you drag it.

> There are quite a lot of "have to know" things in other OSs, too.

Oh definitely. It just seems to me that OSX is exceptionally bad at telegraphing these things. On windows and even linux most all features have something visible to clue you in to their existence. OSX seems to do its best to hide things instead.

Relatedly, IMO iOS took a huge step backwards in UX when iOS7 moved away from a highly spatial interaction metaphor for practically the entire OS—by which I don't mean the skeuomorphism, exactly, but things like folders sliding the screen "open" when tapped, so that they had a sense of physical location within the main screen. Or "slide to unlock" looking like a physical slider so you didn't even need to read it to know what to do. The loss of the security blanket that was the physical (or at least faux-physical) home button has hurt it, too.

It also only worked well when you only had a few files in any folder. If you have 100 files that are related in one folder and you can't find anything without sorting it alphabetically. Depending on how your brain organizes things this might not matter.

Also what size your file manager should be is a function of what else you have on the screen which is inevitably variable so you end up resizing and moving windows to fit in with an arrangement that is different than last time you opened that directory. It's vastly easier if you want 2 directories shown side by side is to just use the traditional split view.

The fact that size and position are arbitrarily chosen even if they are per directory means that there is no mental map between position and position in the filesystem hierarchy.

Spatial browsing is a poor metaphor based on nothing that never made any sense whatsoever.

> Where's file X for project A?

> On the floppy disk for project A.

And that more or less continued for most users through the 90s, but then it got confusing to the entry-level user:

> Where's file X for project A?

> In My Documents, under the folder "Project X".

Which, I'd bet, is one of the reasons why cloud-based editors have taken off - the file is "in Google Docs", rather than in a directory hierarchy on the filesystem. GDocs presents me with a more or less flat view of all of my documents. I hate this - I have to go over to Google Drive to organize them - but I can understand how it'd be much more approachable to the average user.

It's basically hidden entirely in iOS, probably for this reason.

I have left firefox overnight and had a tab decide it would like to eat all my memory.

Linux does have an oom killer to deal with out of memory situations but it will kick in halfway to the heat death of the universe and you will reboot first.

Oom looks just like a crash the UI is frozen however if the offender is killed everything actually is working.

The solution is a userspace oom daemon like earlyoom that kicks in before you actually run entirely out of memory and knows not to kill things like X.

Distributions ought to ship with it.

It's careful attention to detail like this that keeps Linux relevant for the next generation!

(I'm kidding, of course. I was recently trying to reproduce some Node test flakiness that only happened on CI, which has limited resources and exposes timing sensitivity. I had trouble getting this to happen on my 32 core workstation, so I decided to run 100 copies of the tests in parallel which definitely reproduced the issue -- and ran the machine out of memory. The OOM killer kicked in, and chose to kill all the extra Node processes without killing my SSH session, which was nice of it.)

Yeah, I wonder why this happens. I've seen LKML emails trying to address this problem, they even cited Firefox as an example:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/8/4/15

This also seems to be the norm in user space software. I've read a lot of source code where people simply assume malloc never fails. Tried to discuss this on freenode once, apparently nobody knows what to do in case the system is out of memory. Why can't it gracefully degrade?

You mean install it by default? Even good old Debian stable ships with earlyoom (which I'm ofc using, since I saw it mentioned here once on HN).

It sounds odd to me to describe applications relying on a toolkit like QT/GTK which can run in dozens of different environments which in turn run on both X11 and Wayland which in turn can talk to a variety of different GPU drivers as tightly coupled.

I understand the reasoning for protecting the end user, but like UAC in Windows, or Developer Mode options in Android, you should be able to disable these protections. If I want to run a binary, I want to run that binary.

You can also unhide hidden dot folders as well if you wish but by default those are hidden. I don't have the instructions for that right now but a google search can find it for you if you want it.

I suppose it's an attempt to conceal/abstract away the underlying file system structure, which probably makes sense if those folders are already on the sidebar.

You should be able to use cmd+shift+h to always jump to the home directory in finder. I remember having the same real annoyance until I discovered the hotkey.

I go back to Windows occasionally and I still hate every single thing about it. The tiles, the file system, the telemetry, the intrusive updates that guarantee I'll have to wait for an undefined time before I can get some work done, the driver lottery (still...) And many more.

MacOS is more of a workable OS with some really stupid warts. They should have been fixed years ago, but they probably won't be, ever.

Finder is particularly bad, and has needed a complete overhaul for at least a decade.

But Apple's other apps are heading in an MS-ish direction - which is more controlling and constraining, and less intuitive and transparent. It really shouldn't be as hard as it is to export photos from Photos, and the screen grabber should just allow saving to any file location instead of getting in the way with some random-ish defaults, one of which can be customised, if only you remember you need to.

This all reeks of second-rate middle management - untalented PMs trying to justify their existence with poorly-designed updates while more serious issues go unaddressed.

Apple are a weird company. When they're in the zone they can hit it out of the park, like with the M1. But - ironically - desktop UI design is not the model it could be. If MacOS 11 ever happens (not holding my breath...) it would be just as likely to be a step backwards as forwards.

This is a common criticism but it's entirely false. Windows offers a lot more way to delay or refuse updates than macOS. When macOS wants to update, the best you can do is "Ask again tomorrow". And pray you see the popup before it reboots in 60 seconds.

But, I still haven't figured out how to delay Windows updates (granted I haven't looked into it seriously yet since I only use it for casual gaming).

The point is, the default UI allows users to delay they update on MacOS easily, while Windows does not.

macOS just nags you everyday.

1) Edit the toolbar and add "Path" dropdown

2) View menu -> Show path bar

3) Cmd + up/down arrows to navigate up and down the path hierarchy

But of course, when talking about how intuitive Macs are, having all that hidden by default doesn't exactly make it easy to understand where you are in the filesystem. It feels a bit like the Mac side of their desire to just not have a user visible filesystem on the iPad, which thankfully they've given up on it because shooting documents back and forth between apps via Share buttons was terrible.

Kind of ironic considering all the research Apple did that led to the spatial finder.

How often is that? What hardware do you run it on? What distro do you use?

Two different Ryzen APU based computers I've built running whatever Ubuntu happened to be the latest. Tried both KDE and XFCE and they freeze about 1-2 times a week. The computers haven't crashed and if you ssh in everything seems to be running fine, but mouse/keyboard/screen are completely frozen. One computer dual boots Windows and I can run Windows for a month on it without rebooting and it never misses a beat.

Its more stable than it used to be, but the desktop manager still keeps hanging every fortnight or so. Changing the brightness, right after unlocking my laptop is a recipe for getting frustrated, and eventually having to hard restart the computer. Other micro issues pop up every now and then.

The problem with these features is that people have varying needs and don’t understand or respect what they are! Filing is a great example, everyone keeps files, but most people have no organization. That’s why once upon a time companies hired people to file things. It’s also why Apple tried to kill the file metaphor for iOS.

MacOS has the wacky finder UI, but the search is best in class and once people discover it, they just go away and do their thing.

Cmd-click on the folder in the Finder window title, and go up as far as you want?

And any time there is a complaint, the community is like "Oh, dummy, just do this thing that is not obvious at all, how could you not figure that out?"

You can say that again. I never had to interact with a Mac in my life (Macs weren't popular in Eastern Europe so I grew up with Windows and Linux) and later in life at one job interview, the tech lead gave me his Macbook and told me to code a sorting function in JS and stepped out for 10 minutes. Within that time, I accidentally performed some swipe gesture on the trackpad which hid my code editor away with me unable to find it as I had no visible taskbar and all I had visible was a Chrome window so I started googling how to get my code window back. When the tech lead came back I apologized and told him I couldn't finish the task since I hid the code editor by accident and had to google how to use the OS.

I'm biased here of course, but IMHO for someone new to the OS, MacOS UX discoverability is worse than Windows or major Linux DEs.

I've annoyed a couple of people by disabling all their hot corners when I've used their Macs lol.

That or explain the arrow-key centric keyboard navigation, which has fewer exceptions than Explorer.

But there are plenty of shortcuts on Windows that are the way they are for historical reasons, not because of user-centric design.

It's not obvious in the slightest. No affordance indication, no tooltip, no flashing indicator or walkthrough demonstration when you get a new Mac, nothing happens if you hover over it or click it, no real reason to think there'd be extra functionality in an unadorned window title, etc.

I like the hardware and I like the advantages of a *nix OS for dev stuff (compared to Windows - at least pre-WSL), but the only thing MacOS has going for it is looking graphically decent and having decent performance (as far as I can tell). The actual UX is quite odd and arcane in many ways. Definitely not intuitive.