(many) apps keep running without windows — all you closed was the last open window. cmd-~ switches between windows within a running app. this has been the case since the classic Mac days, & while it seems to drive those who come from Windows bonkers, long-term Mac users (at least all I've known) appreciate this small aspect of macOS as it makes a clear distinction between apps & windows. newer apps (some from Apple) which break this model are still maddening to use.

> many) apps keep running without windows

That's fine, but I do not want to tab into an app whose last windows I have purposely closed. I closed it so I have a cleaner slate of apps to work with. If chrome is closed, it should not show up until I open it again. Not just windows but also linux make much more sense in that regard.

1. do this on a non-us layout 2. do this with Firefox / Chrome and its in-private window. Those are not reachable with neither shortcut for me.

Mac is the most culturally colonialist minded thing in my experience, its i18n support is terrible for smaller languages.

The "windows bonkers" model is strangely copied by most third party windowsin systems, as it makes sense, with having the recency based tab order, and being a global list. For us who work with more than a single software and often have to work between two different software, maybe an editor and a terminal... it is usually pretty handy.

That is fucking annoying on mac. If i close the window, why is it useful to still have the application running without any windows. For example Finder? It still appears when alt tabbing, but when selecting it i get nothing. How is this a good design or good ux?

Back in the olden days, when macintoshes were new, it took literal minutes to load the program off the disk. This was an improvement upon programs taking hours to load off cassette tape. So when you closed the last document, you didn't want to have to wait to load the program again if you were just going to start a new document in the same program. It just kind of persisted from there.

It's fine to keep them active in the background, but the annoying thing is that Mac still shows them when tabbing, even though I closed them on purpose. I closed them because I do not want them to show up on my workspace.

You must be using a different macos than me, or have not attempted to connect a mouse (Scroll Reverser), an external display (BetterDisplay), wanted to have sane power management (Amphetamine), want to reach all application windows with only the keyboard, wanted to close modal popups with only the keyboard, etc...

About telemetry, and ads: It is also present in MacOS, but less invasive indeed. And about not showing something down my throat: the other day my iphone just told me in declarative, with a single accept button: now your system will be updated to ios27 (download of updates was enabled, with manual confirmation).

Also having to unlock every app after every brew update in the applications as they "have been downloaded from the internet"... it is not something i'd call refreshing and not working against me.

> want to reach all application windows with only the keyboard

So damn true. I never got the point of the MacOS windows management approach. It's a joke.

* Switch between non-minimized application windows: "⌘ + Tab" (but not between windows of the same application!)

* Switch between open windows of the same application: "⌘ + `" <- Yes, that's backtick, a different physical key depending on the keyboard language layout, WTF! (but doesn't work for minimized windows of that application)

* Switch between open and minimized windows of the same application: "Ctrl + ArrowDown" and use arrow navigation.

And yes, there's Exposé button/gesture, which, again, doesn't show minimized windows and doesn't work with an arrow navigation.

> it was so refreshing using a system that does not purposely work against the user.

I don't share this optimism, Apple has not been a hardware-first/computers company in a very long time and nowadays makes more bucks profiling your consumption habits to sell you "content" on their ever more "content-consumption" oriented devices.

I always install something like https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos (there are a few choices that all do something similar for alt-tab)

macOS is just a bit behind the curve. For instance a couple of years ago macOS added Windows Vista style permission popups, and Apple really doesn't want you to install UI apps outside the App Store, which is essentially the equivalent of "Windows SmartScreen".