Comment by iainmerrick
3 days ago
As a long-time Mac user, I'm comfortable with this UI style, but I do recognise that it's weirdly inefficient. It's very strange that this is the UI that won out in the 80s (to the extent that Windows became a massive hit in the 90s, anyway).
A tiling UI would have been much easier to implement! But the original Mac had overlapping windows with pixel-perfect drop shadows. It's a bit nuts when you think about it.
I actually like it, but only when you have virtual desktops. But the MacOS implementation, Spaces, is not great. It clashes with their window management model (you switch between applications, then you can switch between windows). There's no way to restrict the switcher to applications that have windows in the current space.
Floating works great when you can filter the current set of windows using virtual desktops. And when the switcher follow suits. My issue with tiling is that it works great on laptop, but on bigger screens, it sends things to the far side when splitting.