For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web.
If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny second to update results such that if you type one letter too much, your top result goes from program to web search, and pressing enter opens Safari.
Relevant results (folders + files) do appear, but usually you have to scroll.
The search bar itself comes up very quickly though.
If you do consider switching, one warning about Mac is this: Window management is utter garbage. Maximizing is actively discouraged. Tiling left / right etc? Doesn't exist. Everything must be random size and overlap weirdly. Instead, each new version brings a new quick switch or workspace functionality that I have never seen anyone use.
Oh and for some reason, it's less stable than my prior windows machine. Apps just crash a lot, but that's probably due to the Arm64. I mean, remarkably stable compared to computer back when, of course, but compared to Windows 10, I have more crashes and even had to restart a couple of times!
This is not normal: you might have a hardware issue or possibly some kind of invasive corporate security software. The two M1 devices I’ve used have never had a system level crash and application crashes are rare except for the things I’m compiling myself.
For window management, I use Rectangle.app - Macs are all about keyboard shortcuts and that adds all kinds of resize patterns.
For search, I’ve used Launchbar since before Spotlight existed. It’s notably faster for app launching and customizable, and the clipboard history is invaluable.
I had an old Intel Mac start occasionally crashing after taking it in for a screen replacement. I fired up memtest86 and sure enough saw errors. I took it back and Apple replaced the entire motherboard for me for free.
Does anyone know if there’s a memtest86 equivalent for M1 macs? I’m not sure how I’d go about testing the ram on my machine now.
It's pretty hard to believe that the people designing this system use it for work.
At least they got zones, coming from KDE and not having zones nor virtual windows, initially, was a big shock.
not sure how good it is since I haven't used it myself
edit: you have to install it yourself
Does anything do this properly? I use i3[0], and wrote some super janky automation to preserve my layouts when I switched from dock to no dock and back. It has the concept of layouts that can be stored/loaded. So I had a script that would dump the layout, I had to manually run it before disconnecting (couldn't figure out how to detect the monitor disconnect and dump the layout before i3 re-arranged everything). And another script that would load the layout when new monitors were connected (this was easy enough to automate).
I'd be _really_ impressed if something did this correctly without any user hacking.
Also the same on macos BTW. Switching external screens resets all the screen size options, including your laptop display if you’re not at the “default” resolution.
To this day Alfred remains one of the first things I install on a new Mac as a result. Still have access to Spotlight (the indexing service) search, but none of the extra "intelligence" (aka Spotlight the app thinking it knows better than me what I want) unless I explicitly ask for it by explicitly invoking an extra workflow for things like unit conversion, etc.
Alfred can either replace spotlite or run along side it. I’ve found it much faster and easier to use. You can customize it pretty well. (Just don’t download the Mac App Store version as it’s multiple versions behind)
There’s a ton of windows managers out there that help you setup hot keys or modify windows to work how you want. Mac overall is much better with native software not doing its own thing than windows so changes tend to be pretty consistent. I’m using MOOM because it’s on the app store and lets me hotkey all my windows into specific sizes but there’s plenty of other stuff out there depending on what you want to do.
I’ve been using it since v1, it’s extremely configurable, very very snappy and doesn’t suffer from the common AI-problems, that seems to be forced into searches everywhere these days.
(EDIT: it’s a Spotlight replacement)
For what is worth, I use dozens of apps, several big ones and lots of utilities, and no crashes (though I went for all being M1 native). So could just be the choice of apps or some other factor.
Regarding typing to launch apps, you can try Alfred. It's free for basic use, and is what many long time Mac users tend to use for that role, as opposed to Spotlight.
Also, there absolutely is "tiling". There are several third party apps such as Magnet, and there is even a quite basic built-in: click and keep clicked for a second or so the green window button, and it will give you option to put the window in a left/right tile and chose another for the other side, etc.
But it won't let you just tile a single window to a side, it is mandatory to select another window for the other half of the screen. Also it moves those windows to a separate workspace for whatever reason, which causes a delay when entering/exiting this tiling mode because of the workspace switching animation.
I'm glad Rectangle exists. Now I just need something like Mission Control but with keyboard support (seriously, why can't I at least select another window with the arrow keys?)
It sort of does, but it's not as obvious as it should be. Mouse over the green zoom button in the top-left corner of a window, hold the option key on your keyboard, and then "move window left" and "move window right" options appear.
For window management, please consider using the Rectangle app or some other keyboard window manager. Otherwise, I believe its possible to long press on the maximize button to put your windows on the left or right half.
There's also Zoom, activated by option-clicking the green button. This resizes the window to the app's preferred size, which is random, and usually not the full screen (e.g. full screen height but whatever width it had before).
Turns out operating systems named "Windows" are much better at window management. (The maximizing stuff is one issue, the application-first model is another.)
Ohh I never knew about that. Thank you!
Sure it does - long press on the green maximise button and you get a little drop down. For me it includes "Enter full screen", "Tile Window to Left of Screen" and "Tile Window to Left of Screen". Tiling is like full screen but with two apps side-by-side rather than one.
If you want to maximise a window instead of going full screen (that is, make it as big as possible but not overlap the menu bar or dock), Option+Click on the green button or double click the title bar. macOS calls this "Zoom". Safari is atypical in that maximising it only changes the window's vertical height, but pretty much everything else maximises height and width.
All these options are on the 'Window' menu as well.
"I've used computers for x years, and if mac is so intuitive I should just get it, and mac sucks because you can't move folders only copy them in finder". A variation of this I've heard multiple times.
MacOS is intuitive for people who's never used another system in my opinion. If your muscle memory and workflows have been shaped by windows, you're going to have to look up how to do things.
Like, holding down option with certain clicks to reveal more options is not something everyone know, and it's applicable (used to be at least) in many places.
FYI Alfred is the commonly recommended fix for Spotlight. Spotlight has become progressively worse over time. Apple recently removed the ability to remove web results, and disabled the ability to order which results come first.
Mac has a different window management paradigm. It suits some people, it frustrates others. I've switched from Linux/BSD after 15 years there, and it immediately made so much more sense to me. YMMV.
It also makes so much more sense if you have a very large screen. I've tried using dwm or Sway with my 43" screen and it's incredibly awkward. You need first-class support for floating windows, or at least smarter tiling.
But I agree, some things on macOS are not as good (workspaces), or plain dumb/useless (stage manager). For missing functionality, like keyboard-driven tiling, I fix things using Hammerspoon: https://github.com/rollcat/dotfiles/blob/master/.hammerspoon...
I've been using Spectacle (https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle/) which is technically unsupported but seems work fine on an M1 mac and provides all the neat tiling left/right/up-down windows 8 functionality via the keyboard. This is the first thing I install on a new work computer along with Amphetamine.
You can install it with brew too: `brew install --cask rectangle`
AltTab - Windows style tabbing between windows, including thumbnails and tiles for each open window of an application[1].
brew install --cask alt-tab
brew install --cask linearmouse
brew install --cask rectangle
Phew, so I'm not alone. I used a Mac during 2014 to 2018 and window management was the most frustrating thing. I wanted to scream every time I accidentally moved a "maximized" window 1px to the right. aaaaargh.
As for tiling, Mac does do somethings that Windows (IIRC) doesn't. One is, if you move a window or the edge of a window slowly it will snap at the border of another window. So you move fast to get it close then slow down and it will align nicely.
Also, tiling: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948
But I agree that Windows tiling is more discoverable.
The search in Windows start menu does the same thing. This is from progressive return on results intended to get something to the user fast while the searches are still not done. The downside is a shift like you see. I think subsequent results should only append to the end of the results, not change the order of existing results. As someone mentioned, you can turn off the web search results in Spotlight and it will eliminate most of this problem. I’m not sure if you can do that in the Windows Start Menu or not.
Also noticed yesterday that you can tile windows left right by long-pressing on the maximize button.
That's full-screen, not maximised[1].
It's also something I hate - I make an app full-screen and suddenly it's on a different desktop, so my awareness of what apps are on which desktop is completely gone - I can no longer to ctrl-alt-right twice to get from my golang desktop to my browser desktop, I need to move away from my keyboard, lean over to the macbook and three-finger swipe.
As far as Apple are concerned, no one ever docks their MB into an external screen, keyboard and mouse. You're supposed to do all of your work squinting.
[1] Someone will no doubt correct me if I am using the wrong terms.
The green button is just a very ill-considered piece of functionality imho. I find window management on macOS too frustrating to tolerate without moom installed.
I don't understand the need to wait for something other than a search box to draw on the front when I just wanted to search and launch something.
On top of that, there is no way to customise the search result or create aliases. If I installed something portable without writing to registry, I couldn't even find it. And this is coming from a company that is adding AI to their search engine soon.
It also adds shortcuts for things like moving windows between virtual desktops. Why is that not a key binding by default in MacOS?
Tiling left and right does sort of exist natively, but you have to make an app only desktop and then add the second one. It's really clunky and doesn't feel like it's intended for actual use.
It didn't used to be this way, a lot of things about the UX has gotten worse in Mac OS. The nice thing is there is common, well written software in the community to resolve most of the quirks. BetterTouchTool is a REQUIRED install on every Mac I touch and while it is very powerful and has many capabilities, its two most important features for me are rather mundane: Dragging to grid and switching the behavior of the green button back to maximizing the window instead of going full screen (does anyone actually want /full screen/ for a normal application that is not watching a long video?)
If you have the right mix of community written software (much of which is free, but some is paid), Macs become a truly lovely experience. I can't stand Windows these days, when I used to feel very positively about it. Granted, there are great community written programs for Windows to improve its UX as well.
If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny second to update results such that if you type one letter too much, your top result goes from program to web search
This sounds nearly identical to the search function I've used in the windows start menu. It's terrible
I enjoy macOS' maximize (fullscreen to new workspace behaviour) as I usually use it only when using a single screen with a trackpad. However, double clicking the titlebar will maximize more conventionally like Windows, Gnome or KDE.
BetterTouchTool is IMO a must have application on macOS. It supports window tiling.
There’s a $0.99 app in the App Store called Magnet that solves these problems.
It’s absurd that Apple doesn’t build this into their OS and wastes so much time on stuff like Stage Managed, but it is what it is. I highly recommend Magnet.
The Windows 7 start menu search worked very well for the TFA use case. You can still get the equivalent with OpenShell. Microsoft f’ed it up from Windows 8 on.
local hyper = {"ctrl", "alt", "cmd"}
hs.loadSpoon("MiroWindowsManager")
hs.window.animationDuration = 0.3
spoon.MiroWindowsManager:bindHotkeys({
up = {hyper, "up"},
right = {hyper, "right"},
down = {hyper, "down"},
left = {hyper, "left"},
fullscreen = {hyper, "f"}
})It's funny how bad window management is with mac. I'd not be surprised if Apple's UI/UX designers just look at what Windows does well and says "Let's do the opposite of that"
“Window management is different and even though it is a completely different OS I didn’t bother to learn it.”
You might as well have said its command.exe is garbage and back slashes don’t work.
Edit: My experience with Excel - https://twitter.com/martin_ky/status/983019737729916930?s=20
I think visual design peaked a few years ago and now we are deliberately overcomplicating every piece of UI for no apparent reason.
One example is embedded IE/Edge views. It seems that those are a process of its own (sometimes), likely out-of-process COM instances. But if you want to allow one program to access the network that way but not another one, well there is (to my knowledge, and I haven't really looked into this) no way to do that. Same for the 'background download' service, the search service mentioned in the OP (although that's only used internally by Windows afaik, but by several sub-components), etc.
Not to mention, there isn't a whole lot of software left that doesn't need at least some networking for its 'primary' functionality. Whether that's by design I don't know. I blame engineers and marketing/product people equally for not showing enough restraint (i.e. the trope of 'just because they could... asked if they should...' etc). But nobody cares about my opinion on this, and the majority of users don't realize or care - and even if they do, they're as powerless as I am, individually.
I'll type the first few characters of a program installed on the machine, and the top result is the program I want.
But just as I hit Enter, the top result switches out to a web search, so instead of the program I wanted to start, I'm staring at a page of useless Bing results.
Just infuriating, and makes me so glad that I'm using Rofi/Wofi, which never changes the results without user input, and responds to keypresses with no perceptible delay, even when searching across every file in my home directory (via fzf).
But that's surely just a conspiracy theory, no company would possibly manipulate their users because that's how you get promoted, or with stack ranking, not fired.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer
DisableSearchBoxSuggestions DWORD
Set its value to 1.
Should work for Windows 11 and 10
Them random delays when doing simple things in windows is so frustrating.
A desktop should get out of your way, and be so quick you don't notice it. Window switches, minimizing, maximising, launching, closing etc. Or my personal favourite, type and the letters take their time to appear.
Only after you have worked with a system that never ever lags on these everyday actions do you see how frustrating it is to work every day with these laggy things.
I saw some Mac users comment on the lack of lag on their laptops! I'm sure they can identify with how nice it is.
If you’re seeing 500ms that’s either something specific to Chrome (the timing is slow enough I’d believe a network call for something like spell checking or suggestions) or some kind of extension interfering with the normal system behavior. I’ve heard about that with some security software so it can be useful to report those as bugs.
If only MS could get its act straight, clean up its UI framework mess (WinUI, WPF, WinForms, Win32, WinRT, MAUI... sheesh) and stop applying stupid regressive updates and dark patterns.
It's a mixed bag and it's far from not true. You get great tools for performance debugging, you get some system symbols, got get system wide tracing... Unless you don't get the symbols. And even then, you often find the element which doesn't work properly and... that's all. Now you know what fails, but not why and you can't do anything about it anyway.
I keep getting disappointed like that by windows over and over. I find what fails and it doesn't actually change anything.
Another pipe dream to add to the pile: open-source Windows.
Binary patching is kind of a pain to do on system files these days, but it is possible. Usually not worth the trouble to dig in even more to do Microsoft's job for them, but sometimes it might be.
Is MFC still a thing? Don't forget to add that to the list!
Microsoft never has recovered from their dismantling of their test organizations.
I've also have an issue where sometimes the start menu doesn't let me type in the search on the first open until I close and reopen again.
I swear it basically always misses the first key I press if I haven't typed in a while. Sure, it could be the keyboard going to sleep to save power or whatever.
But that same keyboard never had any kind of issue on my other computers, including under Windows, nor on that very same computer running Linux.
I have seen it across multiple machines, different keyboards, different video cards. Super annoying, but at least it is consistent so I can get used to it...
1) Anything not found opens in Edge™ and not your default browser (WTF?)
2) It loads lazily - so sometimes you hit enter and the highlighted item has already changed
3) Partial searches don't work very well.
At this point, I'm wondering if there's a start menu replacement app
Not using Windows for like a decade now, but I always go for a third-party launcher on Linux/macOS. They're fast(er) and more importantly extensible.
Instead of trying to index everything all the time, they function via triggers. If I start my query with "em", it searches emojis, if I start it with "=" it does calculations, if with "tr" it translates stuff for me, if with "fs" it does a file search. If there's no trigger at the start it searches apps on my system, and if no app is found it points me to my search engine (and respects my default browser choice).
Instead of using a default launcher that's trying to guess what I want and makes everything slow as hell, limiting the scope of my search like this just makes things much faster. There must be some launcher for Windows that's comparable to Alfred (macOS) or uLauncher (Linux) and once you try it, you'll never go back.
And i wonder if you could actually convince them that letting the start menu hang while a report gets uploaded is actually a bug, rather than a valued feature.
1) The fact that a process that important could crash.
2) That the upload was synchronous AND silent. Pick one. Just show me a tray message saying "Process blah crashed and we are uploading the crash dump click here to configure your preferences for automatic crash dump uploads".
This is not a case of it being important enough, this is the case for every single application:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120611-00/?p=74...
We seem to have forgotten this very fundamental principle: the user's desires, expressed through input, are paramount for a desktop OS, which means that the OS must be designed from the ground up to respond to input at a very high priority. Mainframe operating systems like Unix (incl. Linux) and NT do not have this critical bit of forethought. Haiku probably does, and I think macOS might, especially on Apple Silicon.
This isn't even apples to oranges, it's apples to radish farm.
A modern OS running on a multi-core CPU has even less reason to hang - one of the cores should always be available to immediately switch context to handle UI events, even if the other cores are running a million processes. There’s no -technical- reason for it to hang, just poor programming.
Edit: Upvoted because despite disagreeing, your comment seems to have sparked a ton of discussion, and that's always great. :)
Somehow this simple trick seems to have been forgotten or is ignored in modern OS development - or if modern operating systems still do this, their process schedulers seem to be pretty terrible at handling priorities.
<< The diff is the amiga is doing maybe three things total.
This is indeed the crux of the problem. Windows Start is trying to do everything at once including guessing what the user may be thinking of wanting including, but not limited to semi-random bing searches. Some would argue that less is more.
However, this is not a popular opinion these days. User is assumed to be an idiot and to not know what they want. As a result, MS menu does 3000 things as opposed to 3 Amiga did.
Though you don't need an RTOS to make a responsive app, of course. It's just there's such a tendency for systems to bloat and become a tangled mess of RPCs and process activations, while using an RTOS tends to tie your hands and keep you from getting into such a mess.
> I think macOS might
macOS is Unix. Specifically, it's a derivative of BSD.
This reminds me a lot of news websites that scroll articles away as you're about to click on them, and in their place right as your thumb hits the touchscreen is a giant advertisement.
Microsoft’s going to need to try harder than this to convince me to keep it enabled.
And recently completely-finished browser downloads have to wait extra long (beyond when the browser says it's done) plus an F5 in Explorer, for Windows to not complain about a "missing file at path" when trying to use the completely-downloaded file. This could be an interaction with a virus-scanner (ESET) putting the file in quarantine or whatever real quick before putting it back out but nothing has changed on my end in the last ~4 years.
I appreciate that the author here is actually profiling stuff.
These kinds of security products always make your system less secure, not more. All those complex components that hook into every part of your system are buggy and contain vulnerabilities that malware can target. Use Windows Defender and nothing more.
2. NT did not begin of as a shell for DOS. You’re thinking of the other Windows desktop lineage that ended with Windows ME.
3. Even Windows 3.x and 9x (the OSs that did use DOS as a bootloader) supported alternative shells. It was literally just a one line change in a config file. I authored one such shell for Win95.
Still, in a manner of speaking, this is encouraged for the Server SKUs, which IIRC Microsoft is trying to push the "GUI-less" version which you do all configuration on remotely with powershell and DCOM and the other half dozen RPC interfaces in Windows. It's not a replacement shell, but it is an example of running WinNT with the UI front-end hacked off.
I never use the start menu, windows search or whatever anymore. When I need to run a program that isn't on my desktop or on my quick run taskbar I press ctrl+alt+s and then a few characters of the name. Pick the result I want with the arrow keys and press enter. Done.
I just bought Start11.
But, synchronously sending a crash dump together with not telling the user that you are synchronously sending a crash dump - that is problematic.
But, I can see how they got to this state.
But, if they are going to upload crash dumps they need to promptly address the crashes and I'd love to know why that did not happen.
Sometimes I page through the Event Viewer entries, trying to find something interesting what went wrong in the last weeks/months.
I'm sure it has been showing up in their start-menu telemetry.
I also wonder why they haven't fixed this issue: https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB/status/160716343915961139... And why this was ever allowed to ship: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/09/29/why-modern-soft... And why this was ever allowed to ship: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/07/11/slower-memory-z...
That being said, it was really fun to read the article. The amount of work and knowledge that went into this has to be immense. Thanks for sharing!
That's the mistake right there, use a proper app launcher (like https://keypirinha.com/) to avoid the freeze and many other issues (like having to move your focus off screen center) with this neglected core OS functionality. While you're at it, you could also rebind it to something more ergonomic like CapsLock tap (but not hold)
Sorry, no! I am not going to install a whole new application only to launch programs - the most fundamental operation that an OS should be able to do on its own. If the OS cannot launch programs using the Win key, it needs to be analyzed and fixed. The OP article does half of that very well!
It's particularly bad when the machine is starting, it seems the machine would rather listen to the music in its head than take commands from me. I wish it would put a priority on getting the start menu up and running even if it meant caching the state of it ahead of time so it can resume quickly -- I mean, there are just a few commands that I type in 90%+ of the time if it had those ready to go and took another second or to look up something obscure I could forgive it.
For me, this can be several minutes after boot. Windows takes forever to actually finish starting up on my work computer, presumably in part because many persistent background apps, even ones that run with elevated permissions, are GUI apps that don't start until the user session.
Definition: A reference to time where the culculated period bears no connection to the reality of that time span. Used to understate the significance of accurate measurement.
Origin: Microsoft Windows' inability to convey an accurate file download, or transfer, time.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Windows%20mi...
The lag in Windows is what made me switch to Mac, Using Finder and Spotlight and managing applications in the Applications folder made me never want to experience Windows again.
The most useful information is at the bottom of the comments:
"I had some of the same issues – just with start menu being too slow. I disabled web search for start menu, and it works, is fast, only finds apps (and other local stuff; documents, folder, settings – but only when you navigate to that specified search target). Bottomline – turning off web search in start menu = speed
regedit/use at own discretion: HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer “DisableSearchBoxSuggestions”=dword:00000001"
https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/
Honestly, I find the less software/features I use written by Microsoft the better for productivity on Windows. Windows has become shockingly slow and buggy since Windows 7 even though I keep upgrading my hardware.
It is unreasonably slow. Everything (the app) indexes every file on all of your drives in seconds, then filters the list instantly as you type.
When I start typing an application name that has a shortcut in the start menu, it shouldn't take seconds to find, period. There is no excuse. I'm shocked how bad windows search is every time I have to use it on another machine.
After trying multiple application launchers, I've settled with UELI. It does a lot of things (much more than windows search), instantly.
I don't know if this is a good solution but I keep shortcuts to my most used programs on desktop. I don't necessarily click on them to open the apps, but if I hit Windows key, the text completion is faster for those shortcuts on desktop.
This is on a newish computer, 11th gen i7, fast-ish NVMe, etc. It was reinstalled when 11 22h2 came out. I also don't have much junk installed (nothing apart from intellij, teams and the rust build chain).
I use Macs though and much prefer it. Apple still has a relatively disciplined and competent engineering org. Everything in Windows is kinda broken/unreliable and it seems to be getting worse over time. Their insistence on using C++ for everything even in 2023 is killing them - bugs like heap corruption in search services shouldn't be happening but stuff like that is everywhere. Windows 10 is indeed abandonware like the article asks, they only really improve 11 now.
So, momentum plus uncertainty about whether other environments are actually better or just different. Plus my job.
REALLY
Just don't call background services, unless the user explicitly requested a remote service! My Linux installs and (to a lesser degree) my Windows LTSB/LTSC installs don't have these issues, you know?