macOS 27 Golden Gate: The Ars Technica Review

Re:macOS 27 Golden Gate: The Ars Technica Review by bigyabai on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @06:19PM (#49733829)

> It almost feels like they took a tablet OS and then adapted it somewhat to desktop use.

GNOME is designed to be touch-agnostic, which makes better use of padded UIs than macOS 11+ does. With a rumored touchscreen Macbook still coming down the line, I think GTK and the GNOME developers skated to where the puck was headed. macOS and iPadOS are both constrained for touchscreen users. GNOME is kinda the perfect UI for where Apple sees hardware converging.

I don't think GNOME can adopt any more macOS idiosyncrasies without being a worse holistic experience. The Overview/search accelerator on the Super key is faster than Spotlight search. The desktop switcher is a better-supported use of the menubar than forcing an unsupported global cluster. GNOME could try to cram these round pegs into their square hole, but they know it wouldn't improve things.

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Re:macOS 27 Golden Gate: The Ars Technica Review by cosmic_cheese on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @07:10PM (#49734285)

And that’s fair, GNOME doesn’t need to be a macOS-alike, but it’d be nice if something was!

As an aside, I have yet to be convinced that touch on desktop operating systems makes any kind of sense and the MacBook Ultra or whatever it ends up being called is unlikely to change my opinion on that. I much prefer an old-style low-whitespace, data-dense, pointer-first UI like OS X used to have. I’m tired of the virtual real estate on my screens declining year after year for the sake of functionality I’ll never use.

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Re:macOS 27 Golden Gate: The Ars Technica Review by bigyabai on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @07:42PM (#49734564)

I think that data-dense paradigm died with Catalina, sadly. GTK/Libadwaita has a lot of room for improvement, but I've come around substantially on their direction. Touch UIs are an inevitability of HID, and most attempts at accommodating them (cough Windows 8 cough) go too far towards alienating desktop users. A compromise has to be made that supports tablets, phones and desktops in the same UI, or else GTK will have to reinvent the wheel for each platform it supports. The final product GNOME settled on wasn't one I liked at first, but it's admittedly super polished on my Magic Trackpad and touchscreen laptop. Apps like Tuba[0] and Resources[1] are high-quality apps in every aspect ratio and input method. It doesn't feel awkward to poke at or click on at all, despite the glut of padding.

The future of desktop computing is probably going to be weird. I don't know how companies like Microsoft will manage to curb-cut their OS while also expanding to new UI/UX paradigms. Simplicity feels like a safe bet, and there's a lot of runway left to build the plane before the wheels go up.

[0] https://flathub.org/en/apps/dev.geopjr.Tuba

[1] https://flathub.org/en/apps/net.nokyan.Resources

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Re:macOS 27 Golden Gate: The Ars Technica Review by cosmic_cheese on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @08:17PM (#49734841)

That’s the beauty of Linux though, users can use the software that suits them best, at least in theory (said software needs to first exist). Even if it’s deemed a dead end by some, data-dense desktops of various flavors can continue to exist for the users who prefer them.

GTK/Adwaita themselves aren’t terrible (particularly with CSS to tone down the acres of padding) but I still take issue with the quasi-mobile app direction in GNOME-oriented apps.

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