> If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!

This argument would also make Windows 11 a pretty decent OS by extension via "If the biggest flaw of a OS is the position of the start menu you've got yourself a pretty decent OS".

In general I could use any minor nuisance as a proof of decency - or inject some to form this argument on purpose as a manufacturer.

People don't like if their environment changes in minor unsolicited ways. There's always gonna be fuzz about these things and that means that the fuzz itself can't be used to make any strong argument whatsoever.

I think people are more complaining about windows crashing on updates or Microsoft putting ads everywhere or forcing one drive

That’s way more than just the “position of the start menu”

On the specific issue of window corner roundedness, Windows 11 is great IMO. The corners are rounded when the window is floating free, but change to square when it's maximized or snapped to a side of the screen. The perfect design.

The perfect design is no rounded corners. ever.

How do you tell a snapped window from a free-floating window in that case?

I've never really needed that, or I don't understand the need for there to be a difference. I typically tile windows into each corner based on how large I need them. When I need more than 4, I'll manually place them.

What I do notice is the wasted space needed by the entire window border to accommodate rounded corners and how annoying it is to grab a window handle in e.g. Ubuntu w/ GNOME because you're clicking/touching where the corner would be (but isn't, because it's round).

For Windows, you also have an ad, an AI, or both appearing in every other app.

I disagree as it shows a fundamental flaw in terms of separation of concerns that's probably manifest throughout the operating system.

Or to stay it another way, if we see shit like this then we know the whole thing is a hack.

Hmm, that's a good point actually! Hadn't considered that!

It’s like the famous artist putting a clause in a contract that they wanted bowls of M&Ms with the blue ones removed.

Not because they necessarily cared, but because it functions as an easy-to-verify proxy for whether the venue actually read the contract.

The artist was the band Van Halen; the forbidden color was brown

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/

Eh, it might be or it might not, why is that a valid indication that everything else is wack? There certainly are other things that are bad, maybe many, evidently, but I don't think the corner problem is a fair indicator of that exactly. Numerous things can be discretely bad and poorly directed without there being some ebola virus of bad throughout

That’s funny to call Mac OS a hack compared to windows. Now windows is trying to be backward compatible with DOS and that’s… something. But when we read blog posts explaining why things are how they are in windows i always get the heebie jeebies.

> compared to Windows

I never said that

Well sure we can compare it to niche OS like Linux or vaporware. But without comparison then we probably aren’t taking into account the real life complexity of a desktop OS.

As a related anecdote, my friend said my car was ugly. I asked him what cars he thought looked good. He said “I don’t like cars”. As a result I realized his opinion was worthless

You can compare it to prior versions of macOS, if you insist on assessing it from a relativistic standpoint. Apple didn't have this issue 10 years ago.

Apple didn't have this issue 1 year ago :-)

When a computer doesn't boot you don't need to compare it to another to see that it's broken. Some things are just obvious without comparison.

Calling linux niche is funny. Most used OS on the planet.

I guess you are only interested in the desktop looks part which on Linux is done by different window managers (like KDE, Gnome, Sway, ...) which can compete with MacOS in my view.

I was recently forced to switch from Gnome to MacOS Tahoe and the UX is so bad it's frustrating. Mission Control has no features apart from switching windows it seems (can not close windows, not change dock icons which all works on Gnome). Password fields often have no option to view the cleartext entered. This is especially confusing because symbols that I used daily are suddenly not printed on my keyboard anymore and I have to memorize shortcuts to enter them. In finder I see no way to go to the parent folder, isn't that something people on macs do? It just feels like it's years behind open source alternatives...

Concerning your car story: have you tried other Operating systems? Otherwise your opinion might be worthless here...

On the desktop, yes, niche. [There are things like Android with a Linux kernel that I wouldn't call Linux in the sense of a full OS.]

I know it's popular to shit on Windows (and often it's even justified), however DOS compatibility is long gone. It was still available in 32 bit Windows 10, but not in 64 bit versions.

The biggest flaw is that the system is opinionated, so you cannot change anything you dislike.

It’s not only that it’s opinionated, it’s that it’s idiosyncratically opinionated. It would be different if it had a boring, middle-of-the-road opinion.

It's not that it's idiosyncratically opinionated, it's that its idiosyncratic opinion is insane, user-hostile, and flies in the face of decades of experience crafting user interfaces.

Different for the sake of being different.

This would be fine too if there wasn't a legion of unhinged "designers" in position of power throughout the entire industry that mimic every bad decision apple makes.

Apple design is only different on release, after a few months I start getting force fed apple-isms in programs that don't have anything to do with them.

Or at least consistent opinions

It seems it'd at least getting consistently bad opinions on it.

It is just the most obvious, macOS is a death by thousands cuts

It's not the biggest flaw, there are plenty others, but it does seem to be universally disliked.

For example, there is not much you could do to Finder to make it worse.

Finder used to suck. I mean, it still sucks, but it used to suck too.

It's not even close to the biggest flaw, it's just the most obvious one.

On the other hand the fact that it sometimes makes it hard to resize windows means that it breaks something that Apple operating systems have been capable of doing without issue for nearly 45 years.

It took decades before Apple finally let windows be resized from any side. For so many years the bottom right corner was the only way to resize a window. Their window system has always been crap.

> If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!

There are loads of other flaws with the OS. It just so happens that people care a lot about the design of Apple's products, so people talk about these details.

I think you miss the point. How would you feel if you had a Ferrari with a noticeable scratch? Yes, it is great to have such a nice car, but it'd be a pity. So much much effort was put into the whole thing and this little detail is what lingers on your mind.

This is not the biggest flaw, this is just the most recent flaw.

MacOS has been shit for as long as I've used it (8 years) and probably for much longer than that. There are many lists available of MacOS problems (https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/12rw1sn/a_long_list_... for example), it's just that there's not much point making a new article about the Finder that's been shit, and unchanged, for a decade.

I was thinking the same thing. I actually agree with most of the complaints people have made about the corners, but it seems so small compared with literally every interaction I have with Windows.

As someone who works on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Windows stands alone in my opinion as the "stepping on legos with no socks on" of operating systems.

I think for a lot of us mac users we never get contact with another OS so it can seem like the world is ending. Reality is the Tahoe is terrible compared to older versions, but still incredible compared to others. IMHO as ever.

As a lifelong windows (upto 10) and linux user, no I did not find MacOS (using as the primary os since 7 months) incredible in any sense of word in comparison. Only thing I like is the mac hardware

I thought having a MacBook Pro after a few decades of Windows/Linux use would be utopic, but Apple hides a ton of keyboard/mouse shortcuts, so the majority of software is slow to learn and use. Simple stuff like split screen, file handling (particularly compressed files, mounts, and network), or USB device permissions leave a lot to be desired.

It gets worse when you need to add Parallels because a particular lab machine only has Windows support. Being Vim-dependent, I got unlucky receiving the butterfly keyboard model with no physical escape key.

excellent hardware specs, superb battery life, very opinionated aesthetic (I hate it.), not nearly as intuitive as one would assume

Windows 7 was the last great Windows (it took the best of NT4 and 2000 and put it in a consumer package), and like you, I've used them all (Bob doesn't count). I lived with 10 for a long time, and Microsoft was trying to shoe-horn a lot of the nonsense you see in 11 into it. Ads on the Start Menu, and the dock.

But they've gone full-tilt Bozo with 11. The ability to deliver such an experience to their advertisers and marketing resellers was the whole reason for its existence. That is, 11 is about what Microsoft can get from its users, not about letting them use their own computer. It is no longer a suitable personal computing OS.

Warts and usability issues are present in Tahoe, and I wish Apple hadn't made the choices they've made on the UX, but Tahoe remains closer to being something for the user than Windows is.

Linux is generally for the sake of operating a computer (I didn't forget the user, but Linux--sweeps hand--makes the assumption that it's users are developers). That's what's so surprising about the age verification push in some Linux distributions (and their attendant bans for disagreement in the mailing lists or on GitHub).

Yeah "notorious inconsistency issues in windows corners" almost feels like an oxymoron to me. Perhaps it is notorious among graphic designers, but I'm sure the vast majority of MacOS users will never notice or care.

My colleague update his Mac a while back and I commented on the wild difference in corners between finder and word from across the room. I had to walk round and physically point at them for him to know what I was on about, and then he says "oh yeah, guess they are a bit different"

To my designers eye it was the first thing I saw, to him it was nothing.

I still think it's bad and a sign of a change in apple focus/style, but it's clearly not an issue at all for a lot of people.

Said colleague did get cross when he struggled to resize a window though. Turns out inconsistent corners means inconsistent handles. And that is a real problem.

The border radius would be less jarring if the UI was actually designed for it. But it just cuts off elements like the scrollbar, which looks quite janky.

Yeah there's even first party applications like Logic Pro where the rounded corners cut off text.

Or maybe people focus on corners because it’s one of the few visible things they can actually complain about — the real issues are harder to pin down.

I think it is more like the newest incarnation of sub-optimal user experience decisions. 20 years ago, their system was great for the time. However, nowadays it feels like a system that has been developed over time by different people with different concepts in mind.

Currently, MacOS has the worst window management compared to Windows and (all) the Linux desktop environments. I mean, where else do you have such problems with resizing windows or just switching between windows, not to mention the inconsistent feature sets when you want to work with virtual desktops...

How horrible and hacky must your underlying OS subsystems be if you can't even get consistent corner radii for all windows?