It can't do the literal entire thing an operating system is supposed to do: manage applications and their resulting windows, in a sensible way.
I want to know what application is running.
Sure it's in the dock!
I want to find a specific application window.
Go fuck yourself right to hell.
Wait, the taskbar doesn't show the running windows, like it does on every other OS? It's at least discrete right?
It discretely takes up 1.5cm of the bottom of the screen at all times. It's so discrete it doesn't even need to use the corners.
Uh, alright, well that's all the system space you need right?
Yeah of course just that bottom inch or so .... And a top of screen system level menu bar to display what windows does in the bottom corners.
/sigh/ ok, fine, I just want to be able to full screen a window and still see what else is open.
Burn in hell and die.
I want to be able to easily switch left and right between open windows.
Go full screen or I will shoot you.
I want to move an open window into the other monitor.
You can't because you're full screen dumbass.
I want to let a window present a popup like they normally do.
You can't because youre full screen dumbass. Why would you be full screen?
I want an application like Slack to be able to popup and remove notifications when is appropriate.
Choose to have every single notification persists on screen until you manually remove it, or miss all your notifications.
Can't we trouble you for something in between, where we trust an application and let it manage them in a way that makes sense based on their context?
You can trouble me for something in between these cheeks, shit stain.
Like honestly, I fucking hate what an advertising and AI filled mess Windows is, but it can actually manage your windows and virtual desktops in a way that makes a modicum of sense.
It feels like a single Apple product manager decided that the way that they use their computer (a single application at a time, no windows to manage) is the only way anyone does, so who cares if we implement a nonsensical full screen paradigm, it makes one tiny niche edge case slightly simpler.
At least the virtual desktops work pretty good.
A Mac application can keep running without having an open window. That’s also why the menu bar is not attached to the window.
Minimize button, minimizes the window into the dock.
You can also hide an application, or hide all others, which is a very useful feature.
X closes the window, it doesn't minimize it. The application stays open until you explicitly quit it.
Staying open but hidden is what we call "minimize." "Explicitly quitting" is what should happen when you click the exit button.
Minimize hides that specific window. The window still exists, it's still taking up memory, anything it's doing is still running.
Close closes the window, kills any tasks that window is running, but leaves the basic program still running so if you click on it again it's already ready to go, you don't have to fully reopen the program.
You have to decouple the concept of program from window.
You’ve coupled the idea of window and application in your mind because that’s how Windows has worked for years. Mac has never worked like that. An application is separate from its windows and has ownership over them. An application can happily continue running with no open windows and still be useful (you control it with the menu bar at the top of the screen).
One of the most annoying things for me on Windows is when I close a Word file and want to open another one, if the one I closed is the last window then the entire program needs to restart which is very slow. On a Mac this never happens.
Having not touched a Mac in about twenty years, is there a visual indicator that the application is still running when there are no open windows? Steam, for example, displays an icon in the systray on Windows, or the equivalent on Linux DEs, to show that it's still running even though you closed the main window. Does MacOS have an equivalent system that all its apps hook into? If it does, then that's fine. But if it doesn't, then that's a serious problem.
Yes, there’s a dot under its icon in the dock. If the application is in the foreground then you’ll see its name in the top left, the first menu in the menu bar to the right of the Apple menu.
It’s also the case that regular applications (as opposed to background processes) cannot be running without having an icon in the dock. Icons can be left in the dock for quick access to launch those applications. If an app is not left in the dock then running it will add it to the dock along with a dot underneath it, along with a bouncing animation to draw your attention to it being added to the dock. Quitting an application that’s not normally pinned to the dock will cause it to disappear from the dock.
A) on windows that does not have to happen, that is a choice by the office developers. If they want they can instead close a window but still have a service running in the system tray that can bring them back up instantly. Famously stuff like Steam and Discord work like this ootb.
B) the alternative, is that on MacOS you either:
close the last window, and accidentally leave an application running that chewing up memory for no reason
think you're on the last window and go to explicitly close the application using Command Q, only to find out you still had another window open behind it or on another monitor that you needed, because MacOS provides no logical way of finding windows.
Mac OS has memory compression and paging built in. If you leave an application running with no open windows, it’ll be idle in that state (it can also be idle with open windows, if you’re not interacting with them or running calculations in them) and when memory is low the operating system will first compress the memory of idle applications and later page them out (copied to storage and removed from memory) to disk (a fast SSD on a modern machine). An application that is paged out is so fast to page in and resume working that I’ve never even been able to tell when it happens. It basically feels like the computer has infinite memory available.
In practice that means you can leave every single one of your applications open and you won’t have any memory issues unless they’re all actively working and allocating memory to get work done. I leave almost all my commonly used applications open for months at a time with no issues. If there were any applications leaking memory or wasting battery then the system would warn me under the battery menu (listed as an app using significant energy).
The Mac has tons of ways to find windows. For one, every application has a Window menu in the menu bar that lists all open windows, lets you switch to the ones you want (they may be on separate spaces) as well as more advanced stuff such moving and arranging and resizing all windows for an application:
Other ways to find windows include command-tab which cycles applications (but will bring up a window from that application if there are any open) and the trackpad gestures 3 finger swipe up to show all open windows in the current space (and be able to switch spaces or rearrange windows into different spaces) as well 3 finger swipe down which does the same thing but only for the windows opened by the current application.
Ignoring your speculation on the source of my expectations, the expectation that when an application is not doing something I asked it to (i.e. making draw calls to my window manager, processing data, polling for updates or notifications, etc) it doesn't run at all is not unreasonable.
To continue to run when I've instructed it that I'm done and that I have no further work for it is a violation of my intent in interacting with the machine I own. On Windows that violation is up the app developer and most that implement such systems have a settings option to disable staying alive. On MacOs Apple has made the decision of what I want, and, at least in my case, it's the wrong one. On Linux I have extremely acute control over whatever the heck my computer is doing and it works how I like it. Linux is a good OS.
But that's the thing, you haven't instructed it that you want it to quit, you've only instructed it to close a window. That's what that button does, and its function shouldn't change based on whether it's the last window in the application. Plenty of uses for running programs headless and not having them take up resources by keeping a window drawn (though certainly less of an issue now than it used to be).
Dunno, I like more granular control instead of changing functions based on context when it comes to basic UI. If I want to quit a program, I quit it. If I want to close a window, I hit the UI element that does that, and only that.
But this split goes back to the late 80s: Microsoft was late to the multi-window paradigm, and their first implementation pretty much was wrapped in one program, one window. If a program needed multiple windows or panes, they were all drawn in a parent window. Closing that parent window closed the program. They caught up I think with Windows 3.1 (and not fully until Win 95, though my memory is fuzzy, it's been 31 years!), but kept the program-window coupling because their users were used to that, and it's stuck. Linux desktop environments were built more towards the Windows paradigm so as not to confuse the largest source of new users, so now that stuck, too.
It’s quite easy to explicitly tell an application to stop running: Quit (command-q). The Mac has worked this way since 1984. If you have unsaved documents you will be prompted to save them (though most modern apps have used the OS’s built in support for autosave for years now) and then all windows will be closed before the app quits.
Closing the last open window of an application is not an instruction to close the application, it’s an instruction of the form “I am done working with this document now.” No more, no less.
This dates to a time when computers could reasonably be expected to work on single documents that consume all available memory such that the user must close the current document before opening a new one. Furthermore, in those days the application itself may reside on a different floppy disk from the document itself. Forcing the application to close upon closing the last document would then force the user to swap floppies in order to restart the application and then swap floppies again to open another document.
I digress. The floppy swapping issue is clearly no longer relevant but the metaphor remains: the Mac was conceived as a virtual desktop where users would work on their documents using applications (tools). If I’m cutting a piece of paper with a pair of scissors and then I put away the piece of paper, I don’t expect the scissors to put themselves away at the same time. I took out the scissors deliberately and I will put them away when I decide I’m finished with them.
In macOS there's the general concept that every window should represent a document. You can have several documents open, such as PDF files, web pages, Word documents, etc. For a running application, you can have zero or more documents open at the same time, meaning you can close all documents and still have the application open.
🤷♂️
If I close all documents I don't want the app running. It takes up visual space in the dock making it more cluttered and it takes up more RAM or swap space that I'd rather have allocated to things I'm doing than to things I've told the computer I'm not doing.
Understandable, but it's just not how macOS works; it's an intentional paradigm. I guess the use case is "dealing with documents", opening, editing, closing, in repetition.
But closing the application and all its open documents in one go also has a common UX pattern: Command+Q. So if that's what you really want, do that instead of closing windows/documents.
It's just a very simple matter of making happen what you want to happen instead of not doing that. 🤷♂️
With all this said, I don't think macOS is a good operating system. It's very well thought out and very cohesive and very nice looking, great for beginners. But it's just not practical for me. The window management is clumsy and lacks a lot of features, I don't like how applications are installed (or uninstalled; sometimes packages can't be easily uninstalled), and I don't like how the hardware will just not support the latest operating system after a while.
With Linux, I can just keep going and upgrade the system in perpetuity and it'll just keep going.
I also find tiling managers are good, but after about 15 years with i3 I've committed myself to Niri. It's so good. A whole new paradigm that fits my mental model very well.
That makes absolutely no sense at all.
Why not? Sounds reasonable to some extent.
That isn't what happens. Minimizing means you can restore the current window as is. Closing a window means a new one will be generated from the application with whatever default settings you have.