Comment by amarant
1 day ago
I must say that all this fuzz about the corners actually reflects rather well on macos.
If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
It's not gonna make me leave my darling Linux, ofc, but i think this whole debacle can only be interpreted as praise.
On second thought, it might also be considered a mediation on people's tendency to bike-shed.
I disagree as it shows a fundamental flaw in terms of separation of concerns that's probably manifest throughout the operating system.
Or to stay it another way, if we see shit like this then we know the whole thing is a hack.
Hmm, that's a good point actually! Hadn't considered that!
It’s like the famous artist putting a clause in a contract that they wanted bowls of M&Ms with the blue ones removed.
Not because they necessarily cared, but because it functions as an easy-to-verify proxy for whether the venue actually read the contract.
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Eh, it might be or it might not, why is that a valid indication that everything else is wack? There certainly are other things that are bad, maybe many, evidently, but I don't think the corner problem is a fair indicator of that exactly. Numerous things can be discretely bad and poorly directed without there being some ebola virus of bad throughout
That’s funny to call Mac OS a hack compared to windows. Now windows is trying to be backward compatible with DOS and that’s… something. But when we read blog posts explaining why things are how they are in windows i always get the heebie jeebies.
> compared to Windows
I never said that
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I know it's popular to shit on Windows (and often it's even justified), however DOS compatibility is long gone. It was still available in 32 bit Windows 10, but not in 64 bit versions.
I think it is more like the newest incarnation of sub-optimal user experience decisions. 20 years ago, their system was great for the time. However, nowadays it feels like a system that has been developed over time by different people with different concepts in mind.
Currently, MacOS has the worst window management compared to Windows and (all) the Linux desktop environments. I mean, where else do you have such problems with resizing windows or just switching between windows, not to mention the inconsistent feature sets when you want to work with virtual desktops...
It's not the biggest flaw, there are plenty others, but it does seem to be universally disliked.
For example, there is not much you could do to Finder to make it worse.
Finder used to suck. I mean, it still sucks, but it used to suck too.
> If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
This argument would also make Windows 11 a pretty decent OS by extension via "If the biggest flaw of a OS is the position of the start menu you've got yourself a pretty decent OS".
In general I could use any minor nuisance as a proof of decency - or inject some to form this argument on purpose as a manufacturer.
People don't like if their environment changes in minor unsolicited ways. There's always gonna be fuzz about these things and that means that the fuzz itself can't be used to make any strong argument whatsoever.
I think people are more complaining about windows crashing on updates or Microsoft putting ads everywhere or forcing one drive
That’s way more than just the “position of the start menu”
For Windows, you also have an ad, an AI, or both appearing in every other app.
On the specific issue of window corner roundedness, Windows 11 is great IMO. The corners are rounded when the window is floating free, but change to square when it's maximized or snapped to a side of the screen. The perfect design.
I was thinking the same thing. I actually agree with most of the complaints people have made about the corners, but it seems so small compared with literally every interaction I have with Windows.
As someone who works on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Windows stands alone in my opinion as the "stepping on legos with no socks on" of operating systems.
I think for a lot of us mac users we never get contact with another OS so it can seem like the world is ending. Reality is the Tahoe is terrible compared to older versions, but still incredible compared to others. IMHO as ever.
As a lifelong windows (upto 10) and linux user, no I did not find MacOS (using as the primary os since 7 months) incredible in any sense of word in comparison. Only thing I like is the mac hardware
The biggest flaw is that the system is opinionated, so you cannot change anything you dislike.
It’s not only that it’s opinionated, it’s that it’s idiosyncratically opinionated. It would be different if it had a boring, middle-of-the-road opinion.
It's not that it's idiosyncratically opinionated, it's that its idiosyncratic opinion is insane, user-hostile, and flies in the face of decades of experience crafting user interfaces.
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Or at least consistent opinions
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The border radius would be less jarring if the UI was actually designed for it. But it just cuts off elements like the scrollbar, which looks quite janky.
Yeah there's even first party applications like Logic Pro where the rounded corners cut off text.
Or maybe people focus on corners because it’s one of the few visible things they can actually complain about — the real issues are harder to pin down.
It is just the most obvious, macOS is a death by thousands cuts
On the other hand the fact that it sometimes makes it hard to resize windows means that it breaks something that Apple operating systems have been capable of doing without issue for nearly 45 years.
It took decades before Apple finally let windows be resized from any side. For so many years the bottom right corner was the only way to resize a window. Their window system has always been crap.
Yeah "notorious inconsistency issues in windows corners" almost feels like an oxymoron to me. Perhaps it is notorious among graphic designers, but I'm sure the vast majority of MacOS users will never notice or care.
My colleague update his Mac a while back and I commented on the wild difference in corners between finder and word from across the room. I had to walk round and physically point at them for him to know what I was on about, and then he says "oh yeah, guess they are a bit different"
To my designers eye it was the first thing I saw, to him it was nothing.
I still think it's bad and a sign of a change in apple focus/style, but it's clearly not an issue at all for a lot of people.
Said colleague did get cross when he struggled to resize a window though. Turns out inconsistent corners means inconsistent handles. And that is a real problem.
It's not even close to the biggest flaw, it's just the most obvious one.
> If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
There are loads of other flaws with the OS. It just so happens that people care a lot about the design of Apple's products, so people talk about these details.
This is not the biggest flaw, this is just the most recent flaw.
MacOS has been shit for as long as I've used it (8 years) and probably for much longer than that. There are many lists available of MacOS problems (https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/12rw1sn/a_long_list_... for example), it's just that there's not much point making a new article about the Finder that's been shit, and unchanged, for a decade.
I think you miss the point. How would you feel if you had a Ferrari with a noticeable scratch? Yes, it is great to have such a nice car, but it'd be a pity. So much much effort was put into the whole thing and this little detail is what lingers on your mind.
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