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iLemming 4 hours ago

One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing. This is unbelievably preposterous and I just can't stop hating Apple for this crap. How the fuck this is acceptable? I just have no words. What makes it even worse that I couldn't even complain about it on their support pages - they just keep removing my comments for being "non-constructive". This is some random bug, and many people have complained about it, how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"? Send them the exact configuration of constellations, the number of monitors I use and their positioning angles, log the keyboard rate and delay, the latency, the level of magnetic interference caused by my Bluetooth devices, etc.?

two_handfuls 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wonder whether this could be a touchpad malfunction, causing phantom clicks that move focus. To diagnose, you could temporarily disable it and use an external mouse.

Avamander 3 hours ago | parent [-]

External mice also suck with macOS though.

TheCleric 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have a Logitech MX Vertical and it works flawlessly.

Arainach 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not sure why this is getting downvotes, it's absolutely true. For a very long time you couldn't even set different scroll directions for external mice and the touchpad - even if it's (maybe? I forget) supported now it's always been an area Apple didn't care about and was far behind Windows and Linux.

mercanlIl an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I assume it’s getting down votes because it’s off-topic. The parent comment was suggesting external mice as a temporary measure to debug the intermittent issue they’re facing.

Whether or not external micr suck on MacOS doesn’t really matter. The objective was to diagnose an issue.

anemoknee an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not supported as of now. Tools like Scroll Reverser are still needed to specify scrolling behavior between the touchpad and an external mouse.

steve_taylor 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Focus stealing has been an issue in windowed multi-tasking environments from the beginning. It's certainly been an issue in all macOS/OS X versions I've used since I started in 2011.

ridgeguy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interesting. This is exactly the problem I've begun to have on my 14" M2 MB Air. I'm on 15.7.3. The issue started with 15.7.1.

Here I've been thinking it's a hardware problem, like some sort of mechanical intermittent. Maybe not.

crazygringo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I appreciate your frustration, but at the same time what is Apple supposed to do? If it's affecting only a tiny number of users, and you just happen to be an unlucky one, and they don't know how to reproduce it, and you can't help them reproduce it, then what? I think they just have to wait until somebody (such as yourself) is able to figure out with some kind of logging what is happening. E.g. the first question to answer is probably what actually gets the focus, if anything? To produce a bug report that at least suggests which area of code might be responsible.

I had a similar problem at one point, then finally figured out it was when I accidentally hit the fn button which triggered the emoji picker window and moved focus to it (IIRC), but it was off-screen because I'd previously used it on a secondary monitor. Reconnecting the monitor and moving the window back to my primary display fixed it. (Obviously, it's a bug to show a picker window outside of visible coordinates, and I think it got fixed eventually.)

But it also might not be Apple at all, if it's some third-party background utility with a bug. E.g. if that were happening to me, my first thought would be that it might be a Logitech bug or a Karabiner-Elements bug. Uninstalling any non-Apple background processes or utilities seems like a necessary first step.

eloisius 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

JoBrad 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

Someone1234 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Windows has no such option, and regularly steals focus, particularly Visual Studio/Debug tools/applications loading. It had an option for a short period with the original TweakUI, but Microsoft removed support for it even in the registry.

No OS should steal focus, Windows absolutely is guilty of it.

pixelpoet an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Windows itself isn't guilty of this in my experience (lifetime of use until Linux switch last year), but other apps like shitty Akamai. Some years ago a coworker wrote this blog post and a simple tool to find out which programs are doing it: https://forwardscattering.org/post/30

AnyTimeTraveler an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Many Linux display managers let you chose what to do, when a window requests focus. For me on Sway, it just turns the border red.

I chose what happens after. Can recommend. I wasn't even aware of my privilege.

jdiff an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Where's that hiding? Discord is horrifically guilty of this across every OS, so I'd love a way to quash that on at least one.

WD-42 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

GNOME on Linux prevents it. You get a notification "Discord updater is ready" instead which you can activate if you want to give it focus - which I never do. F the Discord updater.

tw04 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

nazgul17 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

m0llusk an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> ... 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.

bsder 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"?

Obviously by shutting the hell up, you ungrateful serf. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Seriously, though, if you want this to stop, people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.

I finally pulled the plug on macOS a couple years ago for Linux, and I haven't been unhappy about it. However, I did make a point of buying a laptop that was well supported on Linux (a Lenovo X1 Carbon that was in the same price class as an equivalent Mac).

marssaxman 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

bsder 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, be glad you're working for a company that is still willing to stump up properly for hardware.

Too many companies are balking at spending money on hardware right now. While I would love to think that this will drive Linux adoption, it probably won't. Microsoft is going to cave on TPM 2.0 for Windows 11 or extend Windows 10 support much further.

2 hours ago | parent | next [-]
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DerArzt an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I can't speak for all companies, but the feeling I get from mine is that the issue is more about the maintenance and support for Mac rather than the little extra spend to get a MacBook pro instead of the standard windows box.