I need to vent.

A couple of days ago I switched to macOS, and I’m just shocked that basic things in macOS ARE NOT implemented. The most simple functions are missing, and many can’t be fixed in any way.

Here’s a list of the main macOS screw-ups:

1. Keyboard

Simply unergonomic garbage. I touch type, very fast (66 wpm). It’s critically important that I can quickly reach key keys. Everyone knows the standard keyboard, but no, at Apple they decided to do it their own way:

a) Tiny Enter, positioned far away, which you have to reach for with your pinky and break it.

b) Extra button next to Shift. The key Shift key is made the same width as letter keys, which doubles the distance to it. I constantly ]put a square bracket ]- where I need to put Shift]. Why do you need a square bracket when typing in Russian? And you know what’s the funniest part? You can only type the opening bracket through Shift. 🙂

c) But Caps Lock, which nobody needs, is made 20% wider, because of which Shift suffered and all the keys shifted sideways. Caps Lock is fundamentally a useless key, but nobody wants to think of removing it or moving it to the edge of the keyboard.

d) They changed about 5-7 keys in the layout. I had to set up a regular QWERTY layout, which doesn’t match the printing on the keyboard, because Ё was moved right next to Enter for some reason, period and comma were thrown onto Shift (6 and 7 number keys). Such a frequently used symbol as a period, hiding it under Shift! Only someone who doesn’t even try to think about keyboard internationalization could come up with that.

e) Unreasonably large empty space on the keyboard edges. The keyboard could have been made 10% wider, but there are speakers there for some reason, which could be smaller.

2. Dock

This is macOS’s huge pain point and a separate topic for discussion.

a) On a Mac, to close an application, the “red button” is not enough (by the way, you can’t move them to the right like I’m used to. From Linux I know that moving buttons is easy with proper window manager architecture). The button is not enough - you need to find the application in the dock (the panel at the bottom), right-click, then click “Quit”. Without this, it will stay in the dock until you turn off the PC and will clutter it with its presence.

At the same time, clicking the X means something different for each application. For some it’s equivalent to “minimize to tray”, for others “minimize”, for third ones “close completely”, for fourth ones “minimize but don’t save state”. You need to memorize how each application interprets the “X”. As a result, I stopped closing applications altogether, which is also bad, because they eat battery and RAM.

b) In macOS you can’t “minimize to tray and hide the icon from the dock”. If you launched a utility that should only hang in the background and work without your participation (VPN, Discord, Telegram, cloud), you get an icon in the dock. Again. And there’s no way to remove it even with third-party software. As a result, even for me, a minimalist pedant, the dock goes from 5 programs at the start of the day to 10-12. Digging through this is terrible, and seeing a quarter of the screen occupied by this dock is also terrible, so I hid it and don’t use it at all for task management anymore.

c) The hidden dock appears with a disgusting 2-second delay when you hover the mouse over the area at the bottom of the screen, and this can only be changed through the terminal.

d) The Finder icon and trash icon will be in the dock forever. And there’s no way to remove them. I don’t understand why they’re in the dock. I can still understand the file manager, but the trash? What am I supposed to drag there? I won’t delete an application by dragging it to the trash, files are deleted with a hotkey or through right-click, applications can’t be closed, most applications don’t support dragging to trash. And if you drag an icon from the dock to the trash, it will unpin from the dock, but still remain there, because the application remains running (closed, minimized, in tray, who-the-hell-knows-what). Funny.

e) I’ve tried all methods and ways - you cannot make extra applications not be in the dock, or make the red button close the application completely. You can only remove the dots at the bottom of the dock for open applications (which are in a who-the-hell-knows-what state). But this will only remove the dots, and it will seem to you that your dock is getting cluttered by itself, for no reason. This is confusing and annoying, and doesn’t solve the problem.

f) If you click on an application icon in the dock and it’s minimized, it will expand. And if you click again, nothing will happen. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ It would be logical to minimize the application to an icon. No, and there’s not even such a setting. So you quickly checked messages in Telegram or the browser by expanding it with a click on the icon? Reach to the farthest corner of the screen to return the application back. Very annoying and doesn’t stop over time. I ended up stopping minimizing applications altogether. Now I use Mission Control, which is the analog of Gnome 3 “parachute”, when you see all open windows in one view. Although I couldn’t configure showing it with 1 key - they’re all occupied by useless application functionality. Still thinking about how to manage windows without suffering and wasting time on sweeping mouse movements across the desk.

g) By default, everything under the sun will appear in the dock - recent folders, recent applications, minimized windows, who-the-hell-knows-what applications, pinned applications, trash, notifications. This clutters the dock so much that after half an hour of work the icons become the size of microscopic dots. Fortunately, at least part of this garbage can be turned off.

3. Fullscreen mode

You don’t have the option to “expand the application to full screen under the notch”. There’s only “expand to full screen and hide the top bar, leaving a wide black stripe”, or “zoom” the application (i.e. like in Windows expand to full screen by stretching the window, but without hiding elements like bars and dock).

4. Bloatware

I don’t need Safari, Apple Messages, Contacts, Apple Notes, Chess, Garage Band and Stocks. Can I delete them, you think? Only through safe mode and removing files from under root (and I still don’t know if the system will crash because of this). Compared to Linux, where you can delete even the screen, even the kernel, this is of course regression. However, even compared to Windows - there you can at least delete solitaire and the video player! And who said Windows is garbage?

5. App Store

Just as useless as the app store in Windows. But there at least the applications are quality because of the wild prices for publishing. But they’re almost all paid starting from $10.

6. Hotkeys

On a Mac you CANNOT configure launching an application with a hotkey. Only through workarounds and hacks. On a Mac many hotkeys cannot be configured at all. For example, change Mission Control to whatever I want. I launch the terminal every few minutes when working on a PC, and now I have to reach for the dock, where it lies in a who-the-hell-knows-what state.

7. Clipboard

There is NO clipboard manager on a Mac. In Windows this was introduced back in the first builds of 10, but here there still isn’t one and won’t be, they say on forums. That is, to swap two text elements, you need to minimize-expand the application 4 times. I installed software for this, but all I found was buggy or paid.

8. Bugs

Someone said there are no bugs on macOS? You’re mistaken. During initial setup I caught two application freezes, 2 system application crashes, my monitor connected through a USB-hub died, the keyboard died and a Bluetooth mouse didn’t want to connect. Still haven’t solved the monitor problem. When I was setting up the macOS app store, my account broke several times and the application closed with an error. Periodically the keyboard cursor breaks, periodically visual glitches, for example wallpapers don’t show in settings.

9. Natural Scrolling

On a Mac it’s impossible to set the scroll direction for mouse and trackpad separately. I want the trackpad to scroll in one direction and the mouse in another, like all normal people (that’s how our brain works). However, you must choose either one or the other, for all devices. This problem has not been addressed for many years.

10. External keyboard support

No support for other keyboard layouts. I have an external keyboard with a full set of keys. Guess which key doesn’t exist for Mac? Actually several keys at once. On the external keyboard the Delete button is F15. Logically, such a key doesn’t exist and it now does nothing. You can’t reassign it, only with keyboard macros. Same with Scroll Lock, Num Lock, Insert, Home, End, Page Up, Page Down and others. Now on your keyboard these are just pieces of plastic.

11. No Delete key

We now delete files through Command + Backspace. Nonsense, considering how often you need to do this.

12. Multi-window and multi-screen

There is no multi-window and multi-screen support.

a) You can’t expand an application to the whole or part of the screen by dragging it to its edge. Forget about snapping, split screen, dividing space between multiple applications, tiling, everything.

b) Terrible support for multiple monitors. Want to move your browser from one monitor to another? There’s only a button in the menu “Move to screen…”, but when moving the window doesn’t change size - you’ll get a piece of window that climbs onto your second monitor and is taller than the space on the monitor, and due to the lack of snapping support you’ll manually adjust the window pixel by pixel to the size of the screen where you moved it. Terrible pain. I gave up on the Mac screen when a second monitor is connected because of this.

c) If your main monitor is unavailable or you’re just looking at the second one - you won’t see the dock, status bar, nothing. It’s just an empty board for some single window. Why do I need such a useless second monitor?

On Reddit and in Apple support thousands of complaints have been going on for many years. Zero response from Apple - this is perhaps the only main problem.

However, not everything is so bad. I’ll write later about many very cool features of macOS and Macs in general.