External mice also suck with macOS though.

They could throw some small portion of their billions of dollars into proper quality control and reproduce it themselves if they wanted to. It’s an industry-wide malaise, but it isn’t inevitable. It’s amazing that every year it becomes more and more economically unviable for basic shit to meet the modest standards of usability, yet we can use the power consumption of a small country to have Copilot in Notepad.

Windows has had a “prevent apps from stealing focus” option for at least a decade. It was one of the things that I still dislike the most about macOS, and Apple can absolutely address this.

I can tell you bartender 6 has been perpetually broken since release and does this. I finally gave up on it after the devs sent me “fixes” that never fixed anything.

Dunno, not deleting the posts would be a good start.

> ... what is Apple supposed to do? ...

This seems like an example of a situation that modern machine learning could help with. Take bug reports permissively and look through all of them for patterns. Loss of focus should be the kind of thing that would stand out and could be analyzed for similarities and recurring features. Making sense of large amounts of often vague and rambling reports has been a problem for a long time and seems like a domain that machine learning is well set for.

I did the same a decade ago, and I've been fully content with my Linux-only life - but a new MacBook recently arrived along with a new job, so now I'm using Tahoe whether I like it or not. It's generally difficult to vote with someone else's wallet.

> Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).

I have been using a 4K display for years on Linux without issues. The scaling issue with non-native apps is a problem that Windows also struggles with btw.

Wait, has MacOS finally figured out fractional scaling? Last I looked, Linux actually had better support. And now Linux support is pretty good. It’s really only older apps that don’t work.

Every 4K external display I've connected to every M1- and M2-series Mac running macOS has a known flickering issue with Display Stream Compression that Apple knows about and has been unable or unwilling to fix.

The only reliable fixes are to either disable that DisplayPort feature if your monitor supports it, or to disable GPU Dithering using a paid third-party tool (BetterDisplay). Either that or switch to Asahi, which doesn't have that issue.

The issue is common enough that BENQ has a FAQ page about it, which includes steps like "disable dark mode" and "wait for 2 hours": https://www.benq.com/en-us/knowledge-center/knowledge/how-to...

I recently bought a MacStudio with 512GB of RAM and connected it to a LG 5k2k monitor. For some reason there was no way to change the font size (they removed the text size "Larger Text ... More Space" continuum from the Display section of settings) so I ended up with either super small or super large fonts without anything in-between. In the end I had to install some 3rd party software and mix my own scaled resolution with acceptable font size. This has never been a problem on Linux in the past 10 years, all I needed to do at worst when it wasn't done out of the box was to set scale somewhere and that was it.

I am a full time KDE/Arch user and since Plasma 6 haven't had any HiDPI issues including monitors with different DPI or X11 apps - of which there are very few nowadays.

I use linux at home (with a HiDPI screen) and MacOS for work. The screen works well with both computers. I mostly just use a text editor, a browser, and a terminal though.

Linux has bugs, bug MacOS does too. I feel like for a dev like me, the linux setup is more comfortable.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255860955?sortBy=upvote...

MacOS isn't in any kind of position regarding displays. 180+ replies and 300+ upvotes by the 0.1% of sufferers who bother to find these threads, log in, and comment of them. Exteemely widespread, going on for years, thread silently locked.

Sure, you can find some obscure DEs that don't handle that well yet. Or you could just use Plasma and have it all work just fine, like it did for many years now.

> Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).

Meanwhile on MacOS my displays may work. Or they might not work. Or they might work but randomly locked to 30hz. It depends on what order they wake up in or get plugged in.

I suspect the root of the problem is one of them is a very high refresh rate monitor (1440p360hz) and probably related to the display bandwidth limitations that provide a relatively low monitor limit for such a high cost machine.

It also doesn't offer a Mac-style desktop environment, which is one of the things keeping me away. KDE/Cinnamon/XFCE lean more Windows-style, GNOME/Pantheon (Elementary) is more like iPadOS/Android in desktop mode. My productivity takes a big hit in Windows-style environments and I just don't enjoy using them.

I hope to put my money where my mouth is and contribute to one of the tiny handful of nascent Mac-like environment projects out there once some spare time opens up, but until then…

I've not had any issues with 4k display. Mac does handle monitors with different DPIs well, but not really a issue for me. Most hardware I use also just works great. Gaming is great now as well.

The only reason I can't completely switch to Linux is because there are no great options for anything non-programming related stuff I love to do ... such as photography, music (guitar amplifier sims).

GNOME still has some problems with fractional scaling, but KDE works perfectly. I'm using two displays, one with 150% and one with 100%. No blurry apps and absolutely no issues. Have you tried it recently?

Not a problem on my Fedora Silverblue 43 machine with dual 4K 27" screens at 125% scaling. Zero blurry apps, including XWayland ones.

My dude, It's been more than capable for years. I have an ultrawide OLED monitor (3440x1440@165hz) paired with a 4K@144hz monitor. Both HDR, different capabilities. Both have different DPIs set, 125% for one, 200% for the other. My setup required less configuration than Windows does. Right click -> Display Configuration -> Set Alignment (monitor position) -> Set refresh rate -> Set HDR -> Set DPI -> Apply. Done.

Don't knock it unless you've tried it.

This was CachyOS btw. Windows actually required MORE work because I had to install drivers, connect to the internet during setup, get nagged about using a Microsoft account, etc.

CachyOS was basically boot -> verify partitions are correct -> decide on defaults -> create account/password -> wait for files to copy -> done. Drivers, including the latest NVIDIA drivers, auto installed/working.

MacOS doesn't handle HiDPI screens that well either. The most common and affordable high res monitors are 27" 4K monitors and those don't mesh well with the way macOS does HiDPI. You either have a perfect 2x but giant 1080p like display or a blurryish non-integer scale that's more usable.

And god forbid you still have low DPI monitor still!

You're supposed to use KDE with Xorg if you want things to just work. KDE with Wayland if you're adventurous.

Therefore newcomers should use Kubuntu or the likes of it

Could you list some of these little things that macOS does and that you miss?

(I usually miss the little Linux-specific things that macOS does not.)

>ended up having to switch back to Mac over missing webcam drivers and other random hardware issues

This has been my experience every time I try Linux. If I had to guess, tracing down all these little things is just that last mile that is so hard and isn't the fun stuff to do in making an OS, which is why it is always ignored. If Linux ever did it, it would keep me.

As a long-term Linux user, and a regular macOS user, I must say that the motion is mutual. Linux has become way better, and macOS, somehow worse. But resizing and moving windows nearly , and switching between windows (not whole apps) has always been problematic in plain macOS, for reasons mysterious to me.

You can sign up for Apple beta and keep doing iOS 18 updates.

One huge benefit of Tahoe for me is that you can now hide any menubar icon, even if they don't explicitly support hiding. It's a small thing but that alone makes the upgrade worth it for me

I still remember Snow Leopard - I think that's when I started using Mac.

Most of the upgrades since then I have resisted and not enjoyed, though I seem to recall liking Mavericks.

A lot of the big features each time seem to be about tieing further into the Apple ecosystem, which doesn't interest me at all, since I have no other devices and don't use iCloud.

I think also that Snow Leopard era (unibody) MacBook Pro design was peak Mac. It was really full-featured while also having clean intentional design.

> Tiger to Snow Leopard era was fantastic. Things were simple and worked

Was it also great for developers? (Genuine question.)

I'm using a MacBook Pro 2016 for dev still works great, and its still better than every windows laptop available now. The touchpad itself is still superior - its crazy when you think about it. I know people on their 3rd or 4th windows laptop since I've been using mine. I tried a M4 recently and its battery life is fantastic, and its faster so I'll probably upgrade when this one dies, but it still works well.

Edit: just did a google and it seems I can still sell it for about $600AUD, I don't know how anyone is buying a non apple lap top.

Safari can't be upgraded past a certain point on older versions of macOS. That can cause certain websites to break. Minor but annoying.

But you cannot, in general, migrate your data backwards. Apple's system apps will upgrade their data stores forward only. This isn't a problem if you are willing to e.g. re-download all of your (Mail.app) mail.

I added a local-only account to a Win 11 Pro box just two days ago. Nothing seems different to me—the usual horsing around with the no online account stuff but it let me create the account.

I find that it is quite a pleasant operating system!

Recall is turned off by default and Copilot never nags you to use it (like Gemini on Chromebooks/Google Search/Google Docs does).

I completely agree with the UI frameworks thing though. They really need to remove the Control Panel.

I don't have Copilot in my start menu. It's in Notepad, but that is the only place I've found it. This is on 25H2.

> original version of Recall stored these in an unencrypted, insecure database.

Why do you bother mentioning it, given that's been long rectified and that particular version never made it to the production ring?

> six different UI frameworks all present in various spots on the OS

Windows has always been like this. It wasn't until Windows 11 that the Font dialog was upgraded from a Win 3.x look and feel.

> no more local-only accounts allowed.

Just false.

Windows Vista was also notorious for going overboard with translucency effects in the default "Aero" style

It's even sadder. Apple has some of the best-performing CPUs on the market. And even with that kind of power under the hood, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 26 chug and choke and drop frames. What the hell hardware did they target?

> Yes, UAC could be considered as annoyance by some but it's no different than "sudo" on single-user Linux machines and we seemingly have no problems with that (I wish we'd move on past that because it is damn annoying and offers no security benefit).

It was wild to me when I was testing out if I wanted to move over to Linux as my full-time desktop OS how much it was asking for my password. And it didn't even have a mechanism to make it a little less painful such as requesting a short PIN (which I think is a fine option as long as a few incorrect PIN entries forces full password input).

You had way more issues than that on launch, performance of 3d games sucked compared to XP with the same hardware (I remember at least a 30% decrease of FPS) and usb file transfers were so borked you probably had half of the speed of XP transfering on a usb key (which was the primary method of transfering files at the time).

The UAC wasn't even the main problem, the overall performance of Vista was, everything was so much slower.

You know what was worse than desktop users? Server users via RDP.

There was no start button. There are no screen edges to swipe in from. Hot corners are really hard to hit. I still can't believe somebody said "yes, good idea" to using that UI for Server 2012.

They also ridiculed the permissions popups. But now when I plug my AirPods to charge on my MacBook it opens a permissions popup.

I think a lot of people liked the Windows mobile experience. Shame it didn't quite get enough market share.