Comment by cguess
6 days ago
Compared to when I recently tried a Starbook (so, made for Linux) for a few months, MacOS monitor management is like silk. Despite using the same display every day for work, Ubuntu failed constantly to even get the resolution right every day. Meanwhile my Mac somehow guesses which side of the computer the monitor is on (even on new setups) almost always correctly. That last part I have no idea how they do it.
> Meanwhile my Mac somehow guesses which side of the computer the monitor is on (even on new setups) almost always correctly. That last part I have no idea how they do it.
I have no idea how macOS does it, but the obvious thing to try is to leave the relative positioning undefined until the first time the user tries to move the mouse off one screen, and assume they're aiming for the other screen.
It would probably make sense to constrain this to horizontal movements, so that taking advantage of Fitts' Law to hit the menu bar or the Dock (at the bottom by default) wouldn't produce a false positive signal about display positioning when stacked display setups are less common than side by side.
I think macOS makes some trade-offs to give a supposedely better user experience as long you're part of the 80%. If you're not though, yes it is painful.
For me the macOS Display management experience is absolute dreadful. I had the same issues as the author's and I even had to pay actual money for a third party application (BetterDisplay) to fix some of the issues.
The most infurienting one for me is that I can't disable the internal MacBook display when I am connected to an external monitor without closing the lid. Why you may ask? Because I want to keep using the TouchID. However this is impossible in macOS without an external app.
Which external app even allows that?
BetterDisplay allow you to disable the internal monitor while keeping the lid open, this way I can still use TouchID.