Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

I’m starting a new thing on this (otherwise quite dead) blog, mostly as a service to myself: “Imported Rants”. Its going to be basically copies (sometimes maybe better edited) of rants I posted as comments in other places (mostly YouTube), that have grown long enough to almost be an article in and of themselves.

Today, in response to Brodie Robertson’s question – Should Linux Users Hate Apple As Much As Microsoft? here’s the rant from my comments:

I daily drived Windows for two years – working for a multi-national that only allowed Windows as your main system; I now have a secondary MacOS system in my current job – for iOS development. I dislike Windows, but I hate Mac!

There’s the part where Mac, the command-line part (the part that I use the most often) is kinda-like Linux but it’s not as good with a weird decrepit terminal app and command line tools are all super-old (not SunOS old, but still several years EOLed), while in Windows there’s no such pretention – what ever Linux like behavior you want, you need to install everything yourself – which is better, but that’s not my main concern:

MacOS – the actual OS with GUI that Apple designs and supports – is really really bad. The UI is inconsistent and not intuitive; it is missing basic utilities – that Windows have – like a clipboard manager, a screenshot tool¹ or proper virtual desktops²; the default key bindings are atrocious (the END key takes you to the end of the file instead end of the line – but doesn’t actually move the cursor so if you type something, the view snaps back, how is that useful!??); and there are so many weird little bugs – for example, you can’t set two vertical screens: the UI appears to allow this, but as soon as you set the second one to vertical, the first one resets to horizontal!

It really feels like no one does QA on it and different parts of the core OS have different designers that don’t talk to each other (including different modules in system settings that feature inconsistent behavior – in the same freaking app).

Don’t get me wrong – Windows is bad, you can pry my Plasma desktop from my cold dead hands as that what it will take for me to go back there, but MacOS is a whole different wacky ball game.

Also, if I can rant about the display settings a bit more – the way to configure an external screen is to move the system settings app to that screen, and open the display settings dialog on that screen. If you change something and realize that you need to also change something in the other screen setup, you have to:

• close the current setup dialog
• drag the system settings app to the other screen
• open the screen setup dialog again, to see the other screen setup!

You can’t see the configuration for two different screens in the same dialog! If you missed another thing (or just want to check), then do the whole dance again! HOW IS THAT USEFUL??

end of rant (for now).

1. that can crop and do little annotations [↩]
2. not the “maximize the app and now its gone to its own desktop somewhere and you don’t know where you are anymore” behavior that is the default [↩]

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2023 at 00:03 and is filed under Evangelism, Imported Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.