Can you select the default button on a dialogue with space bar on macOS yet?

You mean, the colored one that is always pressed on enter key ?

Space will select the currently selected/highlighted button

Return will select the default whether it is selected or not

Escape will select cancel whether selected or not

In addition to what others have said, you should enable Keyboard Navigation in System Settings > Keyboard to control more of the UI by pressing Tab.

Cool, thank you. I've been off Mac for about a decade but I was surprised back then that those kinds of KB controls weren't on by default.

Yeah, it is just an accessibility setting that needs to be turned on.

This is such a weird request; perhaps an OS has deemed this shortcut superfluous?

I've been using macOS for quite some time and I have the same feeling. I think it is a great system in general for your "average Joe" but for development and power user stuff it is inferior to Linux.

Don't even get me started on Docker and how it works on it.

The Mac OS X of around 15 years ago had an elegant simplicity to it that I really appreciated. Everything just seemed to work well.

That seems to have been lost. New and often unwanted features just add to the complexity. A lot of first party applications seem subpar. And iCloud often seems more like a nuisance than a feature.

I still like Apple hardware but I’m looking forward to trying Asahi Linux soon.

15 years ago I thought I would never buy a non-mac laptop, now I hate using the one I'm forced to for work.

I'm a Windows wizard first and foremost, but I have to give credit where credit is due.

MacOS is very clear about what it will and won't do. So long as you subscribe to the One Apple Way(tm) and adhere to what MacOS will do, you're golden; and a common man's use case almost never goes beyond what MacOS will do.

Combine that with a consistent design language and I, sincerely, would recommend a Macbook Air of some description to most people. MacOS Just Works(tm).

Windows and Linux are for the tinkerers, for the masses MacOS is the best option out there.

It's possible that a thing is simply inferior to another. Not everything has a place in the world. The amount of tinkering and preferences available on macOS is staggering, and makes Windows an also ran. Remember that Microsoft straight-up removed the ability to have the taskbar on the sides of the display. It's just gone. Microsoft can be commended for its software back compat, but its UI has deprecated so many uses through the years that Apple has diligently kept, hidden to varying degrees.

To this day, if you want, you can run Finder with no chrome, as a strictly spatial file navigator. There is a vibrant, reactive, and profitable market for third-party software to change the capabilities of the OS. Windows has a market too, but it is far from what the mac community manages to make. macOS is still a tinkerer's dream to a greater extent than Windows.

I would say that Linux is better only for a particular type of power user/dev.

In my case, as a computer user of 27 years who’s been writing code in some capacity for around 20 years, macOS is preferable because its stock config is the closest to how I want things to work. It takes very little config prodding to get to my productive “happy place”.

With Linux on the other hand, reaching that same “happy place” feels like a Sisyphean task… no matter how lunch time I spend on tinkering it still isn’t “right” and that further detracts from productivity because it’s distracting. I don’t think I could make Linux my primary OS without developing my own DE, which rather than Sisyphean is Herculean.

Unless you're shipping an iOS/MacOS app though, getting to that "happy place" is usually the same number of tweaks away. At most places I've worked, the Linux build environment is just the one we use for production, and the MacOS one is ported to Darwin so devs can work on it. Like the parent said too, if you're working in a Docker environment it becomes almost a no-brainer. MacOS has it's uses and you can argue for it in places like design and video editing. For development though, MacOS feels increasingly less-relevant as time goes on. It's not a bad thing, but the majority of Mac devs I've met in the past half-decade do their work over SSH or in a VM.

For Docker purposes I’d rather keep a headless Linux box around that I remote into with a Mac than have to try to live with the Linux desktop as my daily driver.

Same experience here, coming up on a year however. I was assuming at first that I was just used to Windows since that was my primary OS my entire life, and tolerated any finickiness/configuring to my needs on Linux DEs. But it still hasn't clicked with me.

Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly fine and probably works great for most people. But there's been a plethora of tiny issues and problems that make it juuust annoying enough to use for me that I'd rather not.

Window management is one example. Needing a third party program running to fix scrolling with a mouse is obnoxious. Had an update that failed because it couldn't close a program, I clicked the cancel option on the dialog, and when I later closed that application then the machine restarted and applied the update. I haven't had even Windows force an update on me like that in years. The VPN client will store a password, then not use it (although maybe that's related to the host?). There have been other issues for me, those are just the ones I remember.

It's a shame too, I love the hardware of the MacBook: screen, speakers, track pad, even the keyboard are all great. If this was a personal device I'd probably be getting into Asahi despite its very much in development state (and yes I know a lot of what I like about the hardware has underlying software making it great which doesn't translate to Asahi right now, but I'm confident it'll get there one day).

I can't believe how bad Finder is despite having to use it daily on work machine.

That one view where icons don't snap to any grid but move like pixels in a raster editor... I am baffled as to why did it ever got made, and how is it staying in every new version.