> I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.

The tiling window manager thing is epidemic on Hacker News, and I think the explanation is two fold: Hacker News obviously leans towards programmers, programmers in general don't like the mouse, tiling window managers, as a general rule, are about avoiding needing to manage windows with the mouse.

The problem with that viewpoint, to me, is that, programming is literally the only complex modern computing task I can think of that isn't mouse-centric. E.g., if you're doing CAD, spreadsheet work, media editing, 3D, audio editing, all of those tasks are mouse-centric and the tiling thing just feels silly to me in that context (like I'm going to put Cinema 4D in a tile?). So it solves a problem I don't have (managing, what, my IDE and terminal windows? this isn't even something I think about) and makes seems like it would make things I think are hard today, even harder (arranging the Cinema 4D Redshift material graph, render preview, object manager, and geometry view where I can see the important parts of each all at the same time, which I do by arranging overlapping windows carefully).

> > Window management sucks

> I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.

For me, not so much the window management, but task management. I very strongly believe that the task bar (I guess the Dock bar in MacOS) should have a separate item for each open window of an app. If I have 3 Firefox windows open, that should be 3 entries in the task/dock bar so I can switch between them in a single click. I can do this in Windows, can't do it in MacOS.

One of the problems I have with MacOS is that it's not obvious how to start a second instance of an app. Sure, some apps will have a "New Window" option. But what about apps that don't, like Burp Suite? If I bring up the launcher, then click Burp Suite when one is already loaded, it just shows me the existing one.

You can't start a second instance of an app. Or rather you can (run the app binary from the Terminal) but apps are not required to expect you to do this, and it would probably lead to data corruption from them writing to shared files.

A weakness of this is you can duplicate apps and launch the duplicate, even though they have the same bundle ID, so they might still fight over things.

No your problem is you brought over your expectations from non-macOS systems and the. expected the Mac to be similar. That isn’t how it works. Do you complain that Windows doesn’t have a bash or that Linux doesn’t support ACLs easily?

Even as kids we were fiddling with batch/bash scripts, how many kids do you see using apple script or whatever? It's the ease of accessibility.

Powershell now is lot more powerful than what Apple can dream to offer. MacOS is an opinionated OS for people who want to do simple tasks. MacOS apart from good looks offers nothing else.

> MacOS is an opinionated OS for people who want to do simple tasks.

Sums up how I feel about MacOS perfectly.

Which is why I'm so utterly baffled that it's become so popular among tech workers.

> Do you complain that Windows doesn’t have a bash or that Linux doesn’t support ACLs easily?

Don't both of those exist now?

The reason the Mac is more "app-centric" is Conway's law; developers own apps so it's thought if you tried breaking apart an app it would fail, since previous "document-centric" efforts like OpenDoc failed.