> Windows and all the Linux desktop environments that copied Windows have so much more functionality than the brain-dead macOS that can't even get basic features like window management right.
The window management on macos is light years ahead of anything on Windows. Ever try to deal with full screen windows on either platform? The macos approach is a breeze where fullscreen windows get their own virtual desktop and window chorme, titlebar, dock, etc are managed by the OS consistently. Switching between fullscreen windows and regular windows is sane.
Meanwhile, the Windows approach to fullscreen windows is to just draw a borderless window on top of everything. A stupid approach that some linux desktops decided to copy for some reason.
> Imagine thinking an OS that won't let you easily maximize or snap application windows is any good?
Macos lets you maximize windows easily. Double Click on the titlebar works in most applications. Clicking on the maximize button makes any window a seamless fullscreen window in ways I wish a linux desktop could.
Yeah, snapping might not be baked into the OS. But there are 3rd party apps available for this so it is not that big of an issue.
I like full screen on macOS because I usually get a 2 minute break to read the news while the junior programmer that I'm helping swipes furiously to find the full screen workspace that they lost. Also opening a popout Chrome devtools window on a Mac gets me a break because nobody knows what workspace it ended up in.
The reason the macOS pushes full screen by default is because their idiotic UI design takes up way too much vertical space with the useless Dock that isn't even half as useful as the Taskbar, and the awful, ever-present global top menu bar.
Honestly, I don't full screen anything on Windows or Linux unless it's a movie that I'm watching, because I don't need to.
I usually get a 2 minute break to read the news while the junior programmer that I'm helping swipes furiously to find the full screen workspace that they lost.
Three-finger swipe up. Click on the desktop most to the right.
It's four fingers for me. I've not yet managed to train my fingers to click the desktop most to the right on their own, it still involves visual processing and thought. It'll probably come naturally me in a few more years.
Well if you want to use spaces you need to use fullscreen, and since I find multiple workspaces invaluable I need to put up with the pain of using fullscreen.
Spaces works just fine without having anything in full screen mode. Just do a 3-finger swipe up to bring up the spaces bar and click the + button on the side of the screen to create a new space. Then you can drag windows to the new space.
The global menu bar is one of the things that macos just got right. You always know how to acces your basic functions, like closing the application, saving, etc... without having to look in the UI for that small button that does the same thing.
Another advantage of the menu bar is, that you can always see which shortcut belongs to which action, because most items have a shortcut displayed next to them. On Linux and windows it is trial and error, or looking them up online.
Also it makes the windows look a lot less cluttered.
I think that by "global" they mean that it's on top of the screen, rather than on top of the main window of the app to which it belongs. It's actually hella confusing for new users when they get to running apps in parallel, and switching between them. This is exacerbated by not having well-functioning maximize on windows, so a typical macOS desktop is cluttered with windows from several different apps - but the top menu is relevant to only one of them.
Shortcuts for menu items are normally shown in menus on Windows and Linux, right-aligned next to the label. For Windows, it's part of the platform UI design guidelines, and if you're using standard APIs to define your UI, any item with a shortcut assigned will render appropriately.
I used to move the dock to the side, but with dual 4k 27" monitors there was too much mouse movement to get across to it. Now it's back on the bottom and hidden, and I just use spotlight to launch everything
You can't resize it horizontally to fit the screen, such that icons don't shift position relative to the screen when new icons appear (and either enlarge the dock, or make other icons smaller, to fit).
The window management on macos is light years ahead of anything on Windows. Ever try to deal with full screen windows on either platform? The macos approach is a breeze where fullscreen windows get their own virtual desktop and window chorme, titlebar, dock, etc are managed by the OS consistently. Switching between fullscreen windows and regular windows is sane.
Meanwhile, the Windows approach to fullscreen windows is to just draw a borderless window on top of everything. A stupid approach that some linux desktops decided to copy for some reason.
> Imagine thinking an OS that won't let you easily maximize or snap application windows is any good?
Macos lets you maximize windows easily. Double Click on the titlebar works in most applications. Clicking on the maximize button makes any window a seamless fullscreen window in ways I wish a linux desktop could.
Yeah, snapping might not be baked into the OS. But there are 3rd party apps available for this so it is not that big of an issue.