I'll probably get slaughtered for saying this, but the more I use OSX and see the really simple stuff that either doesn't exist, doesn't work, or doesn't work well, I end up really confused where most Mac users' complaints of Windows comes from (especially compared to Win7).
This comes from working on a '10 MBP with Lion. Full screen is basically like "Maximize" in Windows. To me it was shocking that in 2011 that was touted as a new feature.
Other things bother me too, like constantly getting the "beachball" for seemingly simple actions and xcode crashing if I breath too hard.
I just assume most people aren't having a similar experience.
As a long time Mac user, I've really only started to become annoyed with OS X with the release of Lion. And by "started", I mean it's so severe that I'm probably going to switch to another OS after Mountain Lion is released.
I feel like Apple is just trying to screw devs and power users over in a desperate attempt to pull in the iOS crowd. Simple things like crippling Exposé and Spaces, which would easily allow to me see all windows and quickly switch between them, to combine it in Mission Control (which is all flash and no substance), was the first thing that annoyed me. Seeing them push the App Store to the point that they're going to make it more difficult for developers to distribute their apps outside it is also worrying.
Also, I seriously never had a single crash or freeze before Lion, and I've been using OS X for a good 7 years or more. Since installing Lion, I've had frequent lockups with many so bad that I've had to force a shutdown countless times. As a whole, everything is obviously much slower and/or crippled with worthless glitter thrown on top.
One of their main selling points in Lion was trackpad gestures, which are definitely great on their laptops, but completely worthless when you want to use a decent mouse with your desktop. Thankfully I kept Snow Leopard on my iMac and it's my main work machine.
I'm not a fan of what they are doing with the App Store (with the notable exception that everything you buy on the App Store is licensed for all your Macs, with possibly a limit of 5).
However, I find "Mission Control" to be perfectly usable. The name is a little dumb, but it's basically just expose with multiple desktop switching added in. What's the "all flash" part you are talking about?
Mentally, I always think of multiple monitors consisting of one space. Mission Control ruins that by displaying each space on each monitor separately, so windows that are side-by-side on different monitors no longer appear side by side in Mission Control. This is a huge mental disconnect. There's also various annoyances:
* You can't drag a window from one monitor to another using Mission Control, even though it will highlight the space you're trying to drop on.
* You can't move Space 1 to another spot or remove it, for no particular reason.
* When activating mission control from a fullscreen app, it shows the windows from Space 1, yet you have to swipe left to go to Space 2.
* It forces you to have different backgrounds per space/monitor, even if you don't want to. Changing your background globally is a huge pain.
With Spaces+Exposé, I could do two buttons presses to quickly see every window in every space. Mission Control removes this ability and instead stacks windows, making it harder to find what I'm looking for. Snow Leopard would easily let me select an individual window in another space with one click, while Lion either requires me to slide several times, pick the window, and do an app-only Exposé, or select a space, use Mission Control again, then select a subwindow. It kills productivity.
Additionally, Mission Control is simply much more laggy-feeling. I could easily switch between apps and spaces with no hesitation in Snow Leopard. In Lion, for whatever reason, it was that decided it was important to eliminate this in order to do a fancy slide effect. Lion also gives you the ability to set a unique wallpaper for each desktop, which is nice for some people, but it forces my computer to refresh the items on my desktop each time I scroll into another space.
Mountain Lion has a checkbox to ungroup applications in Mission Control. It's basically like 10.5 Exposé with an added spaces bar at the top, and a background that shrinks for some reason.
I usually don't mind when Apple tries out a new direction. It seems several of their products have taken two steps back to (try to) make a big leap afterwards, like iMovie and Final Cut Pro X(?).
It's only terrible because Apple forced all users to their Revision A software. Axing MobileMe and iOS development tools before Mountain Lion cleaned the mess up wasn't a nice move.
I have been running 10.8 for a around 2 weeks and the last two days both the trackpad and mouse simply stop registering on click, rebooting into safe mode then rebooting again is the only thing that fixes it, I don't even have any third party apps installed! That's a pretty major bug to have on year old hardware with your new release. It feels like QC is slipping. I may give Ubuntu 12.06 a shot via boot camp this weekend and see if I can get my work done with no loss in productivity. I use vim for my editor anyway so it's not like all that much will be different. (I won't miss the beach ball if this works out).
Ever since 10.3, Expose was a fantastic way to manage lots of windows on a small screen (in my case at the time, a 12" Powerbook). Windows never offered anything similarly useful for me until Windows 7's "hover over the taskbar icon to see previews" feature. Then when Apple added Spaces on top of that, the Spaces+Expose combo was even better.
I don't understand the desired behavior in Lion at all, though. They took away all-windows Expose (I used to have one corner dedicated to all-windows and another to application-windows) and turned Spaces into this weird hybrid thing with a useless-to-me Full Screen mode... Fortunately, my personal laptop is still on Snow Leopard, and my work machine is used with a couple 24" monitors hanging off of it, so I haven't yet had to use the new way of doing things... But with the recent OS X trends I'm not sure my next laptop will be another Mac.
I use the multiple desktops/spaces on lion quite a bit on my MBP 13". Mainly due to screen size. I find the new expose/spaces combo to be pretty good.
I keep a lot of apps open at the same time, and I like to keep each one on it's own desktop with a couple minor exceptions.
I don't like the All-In-One version of xcode... not friendly with a small screen at all. Xcode 3, I would keep the doc window on it's own desktop, Interface Builder on it's own, etc... xcode 4 I lost that ability.
I use "fullscreen" mode occasionally; when I do it's usually a web browser or a terminal window. I'd use it more but even in fullscreen mode, I still want to be able to open a terminal window and keep it on top of the fullscreen app. Like for copying an example from the web.
It's too frustrating to do that if I am having to swipe back and forth between desktops...
You can get that behavior in iTerm2 by giving it a global hide/show hotkey and toggling non-Lion fullscreening on. The terminal appears everywhere whether you're in a fullscreen app or Mission Control.
This is something I've never understood. Yeah, the registry is a nightmare if you have to fiddle around there, but the taskbar? My god, the Windows 7 taskbar is the paragon of desktop computing perfection. It consolidates a launcher, window switcher, search, explorer, notification tray, and clock/calendar into one convenient bar that certainly nevers feels crammed. Microsoft knocked it out of the park with the taskbar. Oh, and Aero snap is cool, too (I know, there are OS X alternatives).
I should also add that Lion does not manage memory well. Opening a new tab in Chrome is a beachball party waiting to happen.
I sat watching a directory copy to our office NAS today saying "About 5 seconds remaining" for around 45 minutes. Something is definitely broken there.
Before that it said "10 seconds" for ~20 minutes and "1 minute" for ~30 minutes.
It was copying... the speed/time calculation just clearly didn't take into account copying lots of small files (<=1KB) is a very different scenario to 1 big file. Let alone it just shouldn't be that slow...
Don't even start me on xcode.... the day it stops resurrecting 2 year old provisioning profiles and refusing to compile "Release" code (until I close project/close xcode/reboot/reopen xcode/delete file from keychain/close xcode/reopen xcode/delete file from keychain/reopen project) because it's summoned them from the dead/ether, is the day I'm a happy man again...
>I sat watching a directory copy to our office NAS today saying "About 5 seconds remaining" for around 45 minutes. Something is definitely broken there. Before that it said "10 seconds" for ~20 minutes and "1 minute" for ~30 minutes. It was copying... the speed/time calculation just clearly didn't take into account copying lots of small files (<=1KB) is a very different scenario to 1 big file. Let alone it just shouldn't be that slow...
So you are new to this "computer use" thing?
Because shit like that happens _all_ the time, in all OSes, from OS X to Windows to Linux, to NetBSD, to Haiku, to whatever.
It can even have 20 different explanations, besides the OS. "Doing a directory copy to the office NAS". Maybe the network configuration? Maybe the NAS?
For major issues and bugs I can understand the complaints --like the buggy XCode.
But do people (and hackers much more), think it means something to have tiny complains about some one-off annoyance that who knows why and how it happened?
Interestingly, these are the issues that people have been complaining about on Windows for decades and apparently have been the reason for people moving to Macs. But now they are creeping up there, too. Has OS X gotten worse, or was it just the enjoyment of using something new that made people not see these problems on Mac?
All OSs have problems. And if you add third party drivers, external services, peripherals, etc, exponentially more problems.
The reasons I use Mac (and lots of people too perhaps) is not because they don't have problems, but because:
1) It doesn't annoy me with 200 popups, update this, approve that, USB connected, etc.
2) It doesn't require me to run a performance hogging antivirus (I know the arguments: Macs can get a virus just as well as, etc. Until that _actually_ happens as often as it did in Windows circa 2000, instead of mere lame trojans that I have to work to install I won't bother. Do people run antiviruses on Linux?).
3) It doesn't come with horrible, horrible, horrible, OEM software.
4) It doesn't look like it was designed by a 17 year old Star Trek fan geek with no design sense (Metro is better of course).
5) It doesn't have 20 year old widgets that still haunt users today. If you ever run some apps with statically linked (I guess) Windows 98 looking "save file" dialogs and such, you know what I mean.
6) It has a UNIX underneath, and I'm a CS (and Linux user for work).
7) It can run professional, top of the line, multimedia apps (which I uses professionally and as a hobby) whereas Linux can't: Creative Suite, Final Cut Pro, Logic, Cubase, Waves, Komplete, et al.
8) 95% of the stuff "just works" without fiddling. Never happened to me on Windows or on Linux (starting from RedHat Linux 5 --circa 1998-- to Ubuntu 12.04).
Because most people's experience with Windows is through the cheapest keyboards, trackpads, motherboards, and displays Dell/HP could buy in bulk and deliver to Best Buy that week. When people talk about Windows, they're talking about 5-year-old beater Inspirons or 16-character HP one-of-three-hundred-identical-laptops-with-different-model-numbers-of-the-week, not EliteBooks, and almost certainly not ThinkPads. When people talk about Macs, they're talking about the Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, or maybe Mac Mini.
As far as software, as someone who supports Windows 7 on a daily basis: I have never spent more than 5 minutes on network printing with Macs. I have rarely spent less than three hours on network printing with Windows. Let's talk about the fact that it's 2012 and when I right-click a printer, I get to choose "printing preferences," "printer properties," and "properties." It may seem silly, but this stuff matters. You shouldn't have to hire the neighbor kid just to use your printer.
Additionally, manufacturers override Microsoft's decent (if clunky) WiFi interface and force you to use poorly designed taskbar-based apps, to the point where smart but non-tech-savvy people can't figure out how to connect to the Internet at a coffee shop. It's often impossible to avoid the concept of "location profiles," "networks" (Home? Business? Work? What the hell gives you the right to open a dialog over my work just because I plugged in an ethernet cable?). On my Mac I go to the Airport dropdown next to the volume control, pick from the available SSIDs, and it's done. Ethernet silently gets DHCP and connects. Details are there if I want them in ipconfig and System Preferences, but I hardly ever do. There certainly isn't crap in my taskbar running stupid 3fps animations and demanding my attention every few minutes. I have never been startled by the audio "Virus database has been updated" coming out of nowhere on a Mac, but this was a daily occurrence for Avast users.
How about "Windows is checking for a solution to the problem"? How about UAC dialogs that silently open behind my current window, so my Install Wizard appears to hang when it's actually just waiting for me to click ok?
Full screen is not basically like Maximize; Maximize is basically like Maximize. Full screen hides the chrome. I would compare it to F11 in Firefox. You don't have to use it; I do appreciate having Spotify and Mail full screen on alterate Spaces, so I can three-finger swipe to quickly read an email or change the song and then three-finger swipe back without altering my primary workpace, but I almost never fullscreen Chrome.
There are things I don't like. I hate that OSX reopens all my windows after I log back in; I don't use Xcode but I understand it's pretty buggy. Still, reports of Lion's transformation to iOS are vastly overblown.
Applause! You brought a tear to my eye. After living a luxuriant Apple-only lifestyle I've had to start supporting PCs again. Re-entering the Junkspace that is Windows has been punishing.
UI completely untouched since 1995. Thickets of new dialog boxes. Incredibly thick layers of shovelware. Grotesque artwork. Limitations that come out of nowhere that require Windows Pro Premium Whatever. IE toolbar/BHO hell. The printer thing alone, sweet Jesus. I literally gave up trying to share a single USB printer to two other workstations over the LAN. It's so unnecessarily difficult it's unreal.
The Mac-o-verse has the same volume of pain, punishment, and failure as the Windows platform, but it usually tends to cluster on the outside of the possibility space. Their failings aren't sitting there in plain view waiting for you to stub your toe.
I've done that quite a bit, but only to make printer discovery on the network actually happen. Are you saying you can use it to share out printers as well?
I think there is a lot to be sad about the anti-windows opinion being linked not necessarily to windows but to the hardware. I personally love windows. I think Vista got a lot more negativity than it deserved and I love Win7. However, My windows machine is an iMac.
I've been consistently disappointed with pretty much every major windows OEM HW maker (with the exception of Lenovo where I just don't like their look and feel). There is something to be said about making people feel good about the HW they're using. Heck, my 2006 white macbook works like a champ and still serves all of the wife's needs (I offered to get her a MBA but she is happy with what she has).
>Because most people's experience with Windows is through the cheapest keyboards...
That part is so true. Running Win7 on my MBA '11 has been the best laptop I've ever had by a large margin. I should say I was routinely buying $2K Windows laptops, not cheap junk, but junk none the less. Hopefully PC makers are serious about stepping up their game.
The only Windows users I need to support are me and my wife with only the newest peripherals, so my experience hasn't been the same. The manner in which the UAC pops up has gotten me a few time though!
I've had similar experiences. A lot of simple things in OSX just don't feel natural or when done give me a result that I didn't expect. I've been using the OS for almost a year now and still feel that way.
This comes from working on a '10 MBP with Lion. Full screen is basically like "Maximize" in Windows. To me it was shocking that in 2011 that was touted as a new feature.
Other things bother me too, like constantly getting the "beachball" for seemingly simple actions and xcode crashing if I breath too hard.
I just assume most people aren't having a similar experience.