Comment by fedeb95
8 hours ago
I have been a long time Android fan because of the tinkering you could do more easily than Apple. Then I started appreciating some of the design decisions behind especially iPhone, and it's been almost 7 years of iPhone usage.
Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.
I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.
I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:
- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?
- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?
- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?
- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?
- Why don't I have any system tray icons?
- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?
> Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?
Having had issues with KDE I decided to give GNOME a try recently. The decision made to remove these buttons absolutely perplexed me beyond belief.
this is a fair point. I am referring to more "objective" things, if anything can be, in design. Let's take as an example the alt+tab behaviour with multiple virtual desktops. In GNOME, as it is in Windows too by the way, alt+tab cycles inside the virtual desktop you're in, allowing for efficient matrix-like navigation, and allowing to split tasks between desktops. On Mac OS, alt+tab cycles on all your open programs, making you jump between desktops. To me, this is rather unintuitive. It could be habit, but there is a clear difference in result regardless of habits, and I think the most productive choice is the GNOME-Windows one, and the more "intuitive" one in the sense of what a user might expect out of a virtual desktop, that is, creating a new desktop with its own apps. Of course this is my impression and I am well free not to buy a Mac :)
Debian Trixie Gnome 48 or so. In Settings | Multitasking right down the bottom there is App Switching with two options: 'Include Apps from all workspaces' and 'Include Apps from the current workspace only'. Debian has the all workspaces option set by default. Gnome Tweaks is installed, and the extensions to have minimise and maximise buttons on the right of windows are switched on by default.
(I think that this situation is worth pointing out because there is potential for talking past one another as a result of the default choices made by different Linux distributions).
You can do that same thing just a little different way. Say you want to go through all open apps in one desktop. On my mac its 3 fingers scroll up on trackpad then all windows are exposed. Basically the same function as what you want. Yes technically you are clicking on a window not the application icon but who cares.
3 replies →
My experience was the same. GNOME is by and far imo the best DE on Linux when it comes to consistency and being the most accessible to non-technical users. However it’s far, far behind macOS’ UX.
Also re: not to mention with extensions they’re single threaded JavaScript applications essentially so when one crashes it literally crashes the entire DE. Just unacceptable.
GNOME 2 used to mimic Classic Mac OS UI, plus it was super customizable and easy to create extensions for.
Peperridge Farm remembers.
God I miss GNOME 2... I will never forgive the GNOME devs.
My favorite part of GNOME is how the Windows 8 start screen wannabe truncates the names of apps, and provides absolutely no way to see their full name.
Don't know if it's still the case on the latest version, but for like a decade, opening it on Ubuntu would greet you with an icon named "Software Upda..." and another one named "Software & Up...". Every time I saw it, I'd have to stop and scratch my head for a minute, wondering how such a thing could remain unchanged for so long.
Debian Trixie so Gnome 48 or so. Yes, program names truncated in the overview but when I hold mouse pointer over the icon, the full name appears. Not ideal, but I'm assuming borderline acceptable for discovery of applications by examining their icons.
The worst: ImageMagick icon shows four lines of wrapped name/comment in brackets, the last line of which is unreadable as it disappears under the icon below in the grid, so very much not ideal! I'd rather the icon title appeared wider and in a solid colour over the nearby icons when moused over. I'm using a largish font on a small screen (1366x768). Most are OK.
(I have to admit to rarely using the 'Show Apps' or 'nine dots' function, I usually just mash the windows/mod4/super key and type a couple of letters of the name then hit enter)
- Why do I need a damn extension for everything in Gnome?
Something to keep in mind is that you don't have to use GNOME. There are a ton of window managers that run on Linux, and you can find one that works better for you.
There's not much choice on Mac unless you install Linux on it.
It's linux, you can do everything in the terminal. I've never understood what purpose a "desktop" serves.
Want to start Firefox? type "fir<tab>" in your terminal and hit enter.
Want to see your files? Type "ls" and hit enter. Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities and you can leave those mouse-pushers in the dust.
4 replies →
Mac is just a different philosophy. Yes there are window managers for mac if you really want to replicate linux window management. That is possible for you. There are several tools for this, e.g. Amethyst.
But really mac is less about having every square inch of your monitor filled with a dozen different applications sized perfectly to fit the exact information you want on these screens. You can of course do this if you like but thats not really the philosophy.
The philosophy is that this is a real life desktop. Just like papers on your desk. Do you resize papers various ways and print them to maybe 3 inches across and lay them out on your desk such that you can see every paper at once, no space from one page to the next? No. You have piles. You thumb through piles and pull out stuff you need and lay them loosely next to eachother. Nothing is fixed in any constraints. Stuff can overlap or have space in between.
This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
1 reply →
dios mio!
i just came back to GNOME from KDE after messing something with my system (disk space was eaten fully i don't know why) but all your points are mostly invalid... you can literally start GNOME out of the overview with a simple extension install, then you can launch your apps via whatever you f** want! dmenu? custom shortcuts? mouse gestures? a python script that will listen to your voice? based on weather? come ON, you talk like the bash doesn't exist
your max. and min. buttons are just a toggle in Tweaks app - i have a dedicated button on my mouse which toggles the speed sensibility (inside GNOME not on hardware), really useful for doing digital collage work on GIMP
now the extension critic i found it valid! but who knows how far someone can get with AI... personally i had a custom text box at my top-bar after 2-3 prompts which informed where i'm with my keyboard layer (running QMK, doing HID communication)
Apple is a big pile of shit with biased design much harder to modify but also: locked down to the point your now eating ads. in your expensive premium aluminum box
I got a third party replacement battery in my iPhone. The battery works just fine and the reason is simple, I no longer live in the US, where the phone was purchased, and if I want to keep my 2 eSIM slots, then I can't get the phone fixed in Hong Kong. Anyone who thinks Apple is very convenient has never lived in multiple countries, imo.
But that's not the worst of it. It took me some time to realize this, but when I wanted to see why my battery was draining so fast one day (I suspect Youtube has a long standing bug that causes it to go turbo drain mode for some reason, the app is incredibly poorly programmed and leaks memory over time, if you didn't know).
But lo and behold, I couldn't see the per-app battery usage breakdown! Why is that? Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.
I followed the same progression and am also now contemplating going back to Android with my next phone. Cramming ads in Wallet, the way ads pop-in in YouTube, and the overall clumsiness of Liquid Glass have me really questioning whether the "just works" aspect of Apple's first-party cross-compatibility is worth it.
I just got my kid a cheap flip phone that isn't as dumb as I wanted, because it's got KaiOS, a FireFox OS offshoot. An undiscovered country with just a few thousand apps in their store, and a web framework to make your own. If HN would get into it like it's an e-ink display, we could have all the little apps we need, and no ads or distractions.
Thank you for your comment. We’ve charged F1: The Movie to your default card.
Same here, I’ve gone from Apple fanboy to slowly dropping all of my Apple products as it becomes time for new purchases. They are just no longer looking at users like me. They keep focusing their efforts on things I don’t care about, while locking me out of control over my system more and more each macOS release. That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old… why bother fighting that?
The only thing in the Apple world I’ve become hopelessly dependent on is iMessage. It’s going to be painful to leave all those group chats. Everything else I use has a great Linux replacement.
2026 is finally going to be the Year Of The Linux Desktop for this former Apple user.
> That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old
Say what you will about Apple (I loathe so much about my work macbook), but this seem untrue unless you have a pretty loose definition for "a few". My inherited 7 year old iPad is still getting updates, and this year's Mac OS is the first to not support Intel hardware, the most recent hardware being 6 years old.
3 replies →
There are a few projects that let you access iMessage on non-Apple devices. I've been using https://github.com/lrhodin/corten-matrix to relay iMessage to Matrix, and there's also https://openbubbles.app/ for something that runs solely on an Android phone.
1 reply →
I’ve managed to move all of my inner circle family and friends to Signal. We always had one holdout android user and now we don’t care that he’s on android. As a bonus, because I’m on a computer much of the day, I can use a keyboard to send signal messages.
There’s one non-tech sister in law who won’t install signal (but is somehow ok with Snapchat) so she’s just not included on the group chats.
I'm the opposite. I started as a die hard iPhone fan, eventually switched to Android and never looked back. My wife has an iPhone and every time I use her phone I find myself wondering wtf their UX designers are thinking.
I have no loyalty, I've switched back and forth several times. I haven't concluded that either is better than the other, just different (and these days, not really -that- different). Though I do appreciate the tight integration between the iPhone and my MBP, that is definitely a sticky feature.
Same here. Owned every initial iPhone but went to Pixel a little while back and it's a much better experience.
With that said, something Apple does very well is the ecosystem integration between devices across form factors. I miss that, but not enough to switch my phone back.
>wtf their UX designers are thinking
I am starting to believe that Apple got rid of any UX talent they had, replaced them with interns and spent the saved $ on marketing.
right now I have the same feeling; some time ago I felt that entering the iPhone "mindset" made sense as you could gain in ease of use by sacrificing some "control".
Well even if you think the iPhone UX is great, they'll change it for no reason in the next release.
Wild take. I use both and iOS (other than settings menu which is absolute garbage) makes much more sensible design decisions than Google. And even Androids good design decisions are just variations on things they took from iOS. OG android was better. Now they’re just trying to be iOS+
Me too. Android for the most part has much better UI.
The rotation thingy alone infuriates me on iPhones. The Android implementation is perfect.
Android keyboards are in a different class from iOS. And I use a source available privacy respecting one.
VPNs work much better on Android.
Settings is laid out better.
Haptics are used much more which I appreciate.
lack of back button is a crime.
can't customize home screen launcher.
clock alarms often doesn't work
I like Vanadium (Chromium) a lot more than Safari. Everything is so well thought out. For example, on iOS, the open in new tab brings you to that tab so if you want to open a bunch, you have to go back to the tab you're branching off of. On Chromium, it works like on desktop.
default apps arent as well implemented as android. Can't change a lot of them which seems anti-competitive. I'm talking about picking which apps open and stuff like messaging app, not the default apps that come with the OS's quality. Apple might get a win there. Apple notes is awesome.
The Android password manager integration is much better at autofilling and detection.
I prefer iOS UX wise but I agree with you on keyboards, settings, alarms
Edit: and rotation
I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints. Even doing heavy workload, it manages surprisingly well.
What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.
On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...
I feel like Apple is always pushing the dev side forward in pretty awesome but small ways.
I’m super excited for containers. Yes they exist without Apple recreating them, but built in container runtime for the OS is developer forward thinking
One step forward two steps back. Containers are cute. Used to be able to boot into another OS entirely just a few years ago.
I highly recommend Asahi Linux. It runs pretty well on MacBooks with the M1 chip.
Unless you want to use external monitors
6 replies →
> I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints.
Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.
"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.
[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.
Sorry I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I'm happy you also found yourself a good machine! :)
And btw my Air has 16 GB of RAM.
1 reply →
IPhone users switching to android due to enshitification and android users switching to iPhone due to the locking down of third-party apps and if you're forced into a walled garden might as well go to brushed aluminum one.
Basically everyone is getting shafted.
Agreed, I swapped to iPhone about 4 years ago, because I couldn't find a phone for myself from a tons of options(one company did that, another did something else, etc..).
iPhone is nice, but it has its quirks and stupidities. Android is nice, but has some other stuff I don't like.
I wish there would be a third option that would take the best of those two worlds.
I honestly miss my Windows Phone, solid performance and battery life. The platform was never big enough for there to be much issue with third party apps and I could write what ever software I wanted and load it onto the phone without too much pain.
I’m almost in the market for a new phone and I wish there were more options than Android/iPhone. I’m looking at maybe going for a GrapheneOS phone of some sort though
Wasn't Google ordered by courts to low third party app stores? So more freedom?
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I thought I was the only one.
Maybe it's because I started on Windows and Gnome "feels" closer? Hard to quantify. Like they're US and Britain, while macOS is China.
Ah yes. Gnome. The beloved Linux distro that does not hold the Linux community back in any way shape or form. They’re doing a good thing by holding wayland development back and keeping us in the 90s forever! Go Gnome!
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all.
You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
I like macOS but we should be honest about some of its basic functionality being unintuitive. The “traffic lights” were pretty confusing to me for a while. Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that (though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great). Yellow minimizes, fine, whatever. Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window. And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.
The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder, signified only by an arrow, with no explanation of what it’s doing or why. Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it. So sometimes I would end up with an app running without having been installed. Therefor some of my apps wouldn’t show up in Launchpad, etc. Now that I understand the process, it’s pretty cool. And it’s simple, in a sense. But it fails any definition of intuitive.
The scroll direction of a mousewheel cannot be controlled independently from a trackpad. So one or the other is bound to feel wrong to most people.
There are simple things Apple could change to fix most of these, but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
All of those quirks would be intuitive to a mac user, but to the parent's point, they are unintuitive because it works differently from Windows. Before the green traffic light went full screen it was Zoom, not maximize. It fit the window to the content, the logic being why would you cover a huge display with white space just to read an 800px wide document. Fullscreen breaks long time macOS behavior, throwing that window over to its own space and breaks the desktop centric design.
Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.
I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.
Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.
1 reply →
Yeah, macOS is in a difficult position because some paradigms it's just had forever, and changing them would be unintuitive to established users even though they're not intuitive for a newcomer.
For me, I always felt like the dragging an app into a folder is pretty intuitive. I feel like it follows the unix "everything is a file" philosophy; installing is just putting the app file somewhere on your computer.
But everything else I pretty much agree with you.
I wonder why they decided to go with traffic lights. It doesn’t really map at all to the things you want to express on a desktop OS. Yellow=hide car but leave it running, and red=… destroy car?
The funny thing is, it could almost work on something like iOS, where (if I understand correctly) focusing away from an app suspends it typically. So that could be the red button. I’m not sure what yellow should be. Maybe put the app into a sort of non-interactive mode where it stays on the screen but doesn’t do any processing, just queues up notifications.
2 replies →
I love MacOS and it’s my primary OS and I couldn’t agree with you more on every single one of your points.
They have not had any innovation in desktop UI since 2005.
I have an iMac G5 running Tiger and the desktop environment is almost identical in every way. Except now it doesn’t look pretty like it did in the Aqua days.
1 reply →
> Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that
It’s supposed to grow to the size it needs to fit the content. That button was never a “maximise” but a “zoom” (you can confirm this by checking the “Window” menu in an app).
> Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window.
It depends. The general rule is that for apps which can only ever have one window (e.g. System Settings), closing the window quits the app. For apps with multiple windows, closing the window only closes the window.
> And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.
We (the users) are the ones who call them traffic lights, though. As far as I’m aware, Apple hasn’t suggested that as an analogy.
> though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great
The old behaviour is still there, if you ⌥+click.
> The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder
The insight there is that (most) apps aren’t really “installed”. You can grab that file (actually it’s a folder, a package bundle) and put it and run it from anywhere.
> Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, that UI is part of the DMG. If an app is distributed as a zip, for example, you won’t see it.
> but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
But it’s not. You yourself listed an example where it changed (zoom/maximise). Installing apps with PKG files used to be more common. The scroll direction thing isn’t that old, it was only some time after iPhones that trackpads changed the default motion.
The keyboard shortcuts are way more inconsistent on Mac. On Windows and KDE (and I presume Gnome though my experience is very out of date), Ctrl shortcuts pretty consistently relate to the window that currently has focus, and Meta/Windows shortcuts relate to manipulating and navigating windows as entities. No such rule of thumb exists in Mac.
The simplest example of that to me is Cmd+T to open a new tab, Ctrl+Tab/PgUp/Dn to cycle through tabs, whereas it's Ctrl for all of them on KDE or Windows. There simply is not a way to deterministically switch to a specific other program/window, where in Windows/KDE you can do Win+1 to move to the first program on the taskbar (and so on with other numbers). And the behavior of Home/End is very inconsistent between programs, with seemingly no consistent way to move the cursor to the beginning of the current line.
Keyboard shortcuts on Mac are a lot more consistent than windows and Linux actually. On a Mac command + C / V is copy / paste. In Linux sometimes it’s control + c, sometimes it’s control + shift + c.
2 replies →
Does ctrl+a not work for you? ctrl+a and ctrl+e work for me across every app I use on my Mac.
4 replies →
I have used a lot of systems, and inside them a lot of programs (I make design choices for a living, even if they are at a lower level, UX and intuitiveness exists also in libraries). I was comparing Mac OS to GNOME and not to Windows because Windows is almost the same as Mac OS relative to my point, just worse.
It being different is a fair point, and when designing a system you always make tradeoffs; what I feel is that Apple tradeoffs and design goals are slowly turning more toward additional monetization after you buy the product than focusing on the product per se.
Yeah, I feel that in my bones. They've started down this road, and I don't know they'll be able to turn back.
yeah it took me years to get used to the nuances of MacOS after growing up with windows. Both are fine.
>> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
> You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
My first guess would be Linux. Although maybe they used Gnome as a one-off, liked it, and then switched to Windows for some reason.
They are both infuriating, as a long-time user of both.