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Operating sysrule
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this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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How is MacOS’s window and external monitor behavior different from everything else?
A) it doesn't consistently remember which window was on which screen when you plug and unplug.
B) the fucking taskbar constantly popping up on different monitors changing the effective space, meaning that you maximize a window, then the task bar moves to the other monitor, now your windows on that monitor have their bottoms cut off by the taskbar and the original has a huge taskbar sized gap
C) when you go full screen on a window, suddenly you can't drag that window around or drag it to another monitor, you have to hit a shortcut to open mission control, then select it in the top area, and move it to another monitor
D) the whole separation of your desktop with open windows and full screen windows being treated equal to the desktop is nonsense. I do not need to conceptually separate a window into a separate space when it goes full screen, on Windows you just minimize it and can always still find it in the taskbar. You launch it from the desktop, it remains on that desktop, it can go full screen or minimize, but it's still always associated with that desktop.
E) MacOS's insistence on reserving both a giant fat taskbar's worth of vertical space at the bototm, as well as a full system menu bar worth of vertical space at the top, all to accomplish less than WindowsXP accomplished with its skinny taskbar.
B and E can be fixed with settings to auto-hide both the top bar and the dock. You can also change the size of the dock to be small if you don’t want to fully hide it. You also have equivalent problems on any OS if you don’t have similar settings.
C and D I’ve experienced in Ubuntu as well. For what it’s worth, while I do find C annoying at times, I find D can actually make it easier to deal with full-screen applications than in windows. In macOS or Ubuntu I can just switch spaces away from the full screen app, while in windows I have to tab out, which sometimes works, sometimes partially works, sometimes doesn’t really work, and sometimes lags a lot before one of the above. Tbf I’m least experienced in Windows and haven’t really tried their version of the multiple desktops thing.
Honestly I think “maximize window” and “make full screen” should be separate behaviors. Sometimes you can get “maximize window” behavior in macOS by double-tapping the top bar of a window. But in both macOS and Ubuntu I use a 3rd party window manager app to help me arrange windows more efficiently.
I’ve definitely encountered A and the even worse problem of a window being stuck on a non-existent display before. I don’t think I’ve encountered it more in macOS than other OSes but I’m not sure. I have one Ubuntu install that has a particularly consistent problem where by default the external monitor and the built-in monitor overlap, which causes some weird behavior, but there is some other weirdness about that install tbf.