by nine_k | 2025-12-02 06:18:42+00:00
My first exposure to Macs was a Macintosh LC II, with System 6.5. It felt unusual, and the one-button mouse felt very limiting, but the interface felt logical. Even if I would not agree with certain design decisions, I could not fail to notice that somebody had thought them through, and made things coherent. Window management was clunky, but at the time it was clunky basically everywhere. (I missed some niceties of TurboVision UIs though.)

Another time I had to work on (and even develop for) a Mac exposed me to System 9. Again, the interface felt unusual (in a different way), but it was very obvious that somebody had thought it through, and made things consistent and discoverable. Drag everything onto everything and see what happens! Sometimes very neat, and much richer than Windows 3.x or CDE.

I loved the first releases of OS X, it was a real Unix at the foundation, and also a really nice, beautiful GUI on top, snappy even on the translucent triangular Macs. I adopted WindowMaker on my Linux machines, and kept to it for some years. I even hoped that OpenStep would help build some semblance of a new common GUI language across the platforms. Sadly, nicer window management I was used to under Linux did not materialize on Macs yet.

Over about two decades since, I was periodically issued a Mac at work, and grew less and less happy with the direction the UI was taking. It became more and more showy and bulky, even though it kept enviable consistency and polish for quite some time. I wished that the UI could do its job and fade away, but it insisted in taking more and more screen space, larger graphics, etc. It rather stubbornly refused most customizations, like selecting a different color instead of the signature silver / platinum / gray, and the Apple's signature blue accents. Only in 2018 the bastion of gray finally fell.

Last few years made things so much... less ideal that it was finally not only me who complained, but even die-hard Mac fans. The prized consistency, coherence, and, well, integral vision started to deteriorate openly. As if there's no single person who oversees the whole GUI experience and keeps it aligned any more. Not as bad as Windows, but... And, well, still no good window management, not even window snapping (except to screen edges, since quite recently). Still no "Alt-Tab"-like switching between windows (not apps). I bet that that feature has been requested by users countless times. No, go use Showtime, or whatnot.

And, yes, the whole signed binaries thing. I understand why it may be beneficial for quite some users. But for a developer, and in general for a user of software not from App Store, it's increasingly annoying. Well, it incentivizes building stuff locally from source. Publishing binaries is effectively $99/year though, AFAICT.

Compared to that, I'm pretty happy with my Linux Xfce setup. It allows me to customize the UI to my heart's content, and it adjusts to my workflows, not the other way around. Yes, I spent some noticeable time on these customizations, but that expense is amortized over at least 20 years (yes, my configs evolved mostly uninterrupted since 2006 or so). When I have to use a Mac, I sometimes try to find equivalents to some of the niceties I have under Xfce (not the most elaborate DE), and mostly find explanations saying that it's not possible on vanilla macOS and I should not want that. Third-party or open-source software sometimes helps quite a bit though; I'm very grateful to the authors of Hammerspoon and Rectangle.

In short, I'm only a sporadic and involuntary user of macOS, and my lack of desire to switch to it only grows with time, despite the superb hardware Apple offers.

(Thank you for reading my rant.)