13 ms·

> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack

> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat. One of my absolute favourite features on KDE Plasma with Wayland is the global setting to control what can steal focus. It works wonderfully, and I always miss it when I have to use my work mac or windows computers. See here for docs, under "Focus stealing prevention" - https://docs.kde.org/trunk_kf6/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowbehaviour/index.html#focus https://docs.kde.org/trunk_kf6/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowbehavi...

anonzzzies 2mo ago
That is definitely needed. On Mac it is really infuriating how stuff (auto update etc) just take focus/pop up crap. I am literally never interested in it and am confused why I cannot just say [x] Force apps to mind their own business. We have f’ing notifications for this; why does it need a dialog window?
- frameset 2mo ago
  Maybe it's a hazy memory, but from 2007-2011 my main computer was a MacBook Pro. I swear in that era, when an app wanted attention it would bounce in the dock endlessly. That was annoying, but it let you finish doing what you were doing until you were ready to switch focus.
  - jagged-chisel 2mo ago
    I think you’re right - macOS changed this behavior at some point.
    - anonymars 2mo ago
      People say Microsoft has no UI taste, but they used to be decent. They had sensible guidelines and behaviors For example for this case, the taskbar icon would blink three times and then remain highlighted. So it would grab your attention, but not hold it, and then you could still easily see at a glance which app it was At some point, like many other things, it looks like this either was changed or broke/doesn't work consistently. But I thought it was a nice design
    - cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
      I’m not sure that macOS changed as much as developer practices did. Dock icons bouncing are usually the result of the app opening a modal alert window. Those can’t foreground the host app and they used to be what devs reached for 9 times out of 10. These days though everybody and their dog has a menubar item or daemon running in the background (whether such a thing is actually necessary or not) and the only way windows spawned by apps like that (which have no Dock icon) can get the user’s attention and not have the windows they spawn get lost in the shuffle is for the app to call the foregrounding API, and so that’s exactly what they do. Contrast this to years ago when almost no apps had menu items or daemons and were standalone. There’s also been a staggering loss of decorum when it comes to these things. Companies have become shameless about pestering the user’s attention, and so there’s probably some regular Dock-icon-having apps that call the foregrounding API when they shouldn’t be too. In my opinion menubar items, daemons, and foregrounding are all being abused by devs and Apple needs to get them under control. Apps shouldn’t be able to add menu items or daemons without the user’s explicit permission and foregrounding should he treated similarly to push permissions.
- froggit 2mo ago
  I've really enjoyed how this started happening on windows that some pop ups steal focus during full screen gaming; extra satisfying is that "game mode" is set to prevent that. It's like a little minigame to boost my aggression level.
prmoustache 2mo ago
I never understood the OSes/desktop environments that stole focus by default. So many secrets/credentials have been shared because of that. Just give me a blinking notification that the app/window is available in the notification/taskbar/appdock area ffs. Yes that is one more click/alt-tab but that is much better imho. At least ask for preference on first ever login.
eviks 2mo ago
How would that global app ban help? You do want the application to steal focus when necessary. It's just in this case the user has made the decision to not wait for startup and switch to another app. Aggravating step - he was typing. Is this workflow part of the Kwin settings? It's not interrupting typing part of the settings?
- frameset 2mo ago
  > How would that global app ban help? You do want the application to steal focus when necessary Maybe you do. I don't. With this setting we can both be hapopy.
  - eviks 2mo ago
    We can't both be happy because the setting does nothing for me.
    - frameset 2mo ago
      What? You can set it to let apps steal the focus you want. I can set it to not allow any apps to steal focus. How are we not both satisfied?
      - eviks 2mo ago
        That! I don't want apps to steal focus in some conditions. I can't set it like that because the settings are too primitive. Why would I be satisfied with a primitive binary toggle when I want workflow-dependent conditions?
        frameset 2mo ago
        Did you read the documentation I linked? There's also high/medium/low settings that use XDG signals to determine if focus should change.
        2mo ago
ndriscoll 2mo ago
Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE. It's been great for a long time and only ever gets better. It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish. NixOS has a longstanding issue where library loading (and therefore program start, particularly GUI programs that load a lot) is n^2, but programs still all start in ~1 second or less on my n100 minipc. I still found that to be annoying enough to look into why it seemed so slow (and learned about the loading issue). Can't imagine things taking so long that you actually switch to another task. The same minipc can easily handle my 4k 240hz HDR monitor as well, and the whole experience is completely smooth. The computer also just obeys me. It does exactly what I tell it to, and nothing more.
- noir_lord 2mo ago
  > It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish. That's a pretty good description of it, I even have KDE laid out the same way I did on Windows 7 (or more accurately I guess on KDE going back even further since Linux has been my main OS since the 90's with Windows relegated to gaming). To this day - Taskbar shows window titles, only shows window titles for windows on that screen, there is no grouping, there is no ordering except order opened etc. I think autonomously in terms of which physical screen a window is on and when it was opened relative to others so I know exactly where to look/it'll be - the Mac style (and Linux/Windows style at least out the box) defaults of hiding all windows for an application behind it's icon in the dock never made sense to me, I have widescreens why do I want a doc that only takes up 40-50% of the horizontal space?.
  - thewebguyd 2mo ago
    > defaults of hiding all windows for an application behind it's icon in the dock never made sense to me Not that it's a better workflow, but macOS does make a distinction between hidden and minimized. You can "hide" an app, and all windows will be hidden, only the dock icon showing. Minimize will move that specific window into a separate area onto the dock since macOS treats apps & windows as separate entities. What I absolutely hate though is you can cmd+tab and bring out a hidden app (but it restores all of its windows which drives me nuts), but you can't for a minimized app without holding option before releasing the keys.
DicIfTEx 2mo ago
A fantastic feature, but unfortunately currently broken (as in over- rather than under-zealous) for prevention levels other than 'Low': https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509990 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509990
- Lord-Jobo 2mo ago
  This is the absolute perfect encapsulation of the Linux problem and the Linux appeal: Yes, it has the magical setting to fix all of your problems and frustrations, and yes it’s a finicky broken bitch to actually get working for your use case. I say this with love.
cmiller1 2mo ago
I think this is less a "macOS lacks the feature to prevent focus stealing" and more they never even imagined the scenario where it takes time for the app to open. Instead of even considering that a user may add inputs while waiting for launch, potentially signaling that they are no longer requesting focus from the program they clicked on, they simply designed for the optimistic case where there never IS time for the user to give these inputs before their intention of opening the program is completed. Not saying it's any less bad from a user's perspective, but I think there's a difference in mindset here.
- SoftTalker 2mo ago
  In my experience (admittedly a bit dated now) Mac apps always take a few "bounces" to launch and be ready. There are a lot of nice things about MacOS but snappy application launches isn't one that stands out for me.
- ghusto 2mo ago
  As always, Apple has designed for the happy flow, and nothing else. Mac apps have never opened instantly, this is nothing new.
  - cmiller1 2mo ago
    On the current M series hardware, in my experience, it's rare for the icon to land from its first bounce before the software is up and ready.
  - cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
    They can open nearly instantly, but they need to be well-built native apps. Lumbering behemoths like Adobe CC or anything Chrome-based is going to be a bit slow, and even smaller apps that pull in a big foreign UI toolkit are going to take a tick or two longer to start. It’s too bad that the art of building lightweight applications is becoming a lost art.
  - spike021 2mo ago
    same with iphones and switching between cellular and wifi connections. I'll be walking away from or toward my home or my office and there's just barely a wifi connection, but hardly enough for any requests or responses to even make it through, yet Apple never allows the phone to fall back toward the cellular connection. I can't believe in all these years they haven't implemented a dual setup where they connect the wifi and do some kind of test connection or request to confirm it's a stable signal before entirely switching away from cellular data.
ratelimitsteve 2mo ago
I am doing my best to implement a rule with apps where the third time in a single session you bother me about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the workflow I opened to app for, I uninstall the app. I don't want to update my spreadsheet app, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to tour the new features from the last update, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to sign in in order to access an AI companion (which I also don't want), I want to work on this spreadsheet. I damn sure don't want to leave a review in the app store for you and at this point you don't want me to either. You want me to work on this spreadsheet. Between that and this insane thing MacOS does where when I click an app in the dock any random app opens up (and, per above, begins barraging me with things designed to "direct" my attention) I'm ready to switch to something whose primary feature is not acting like the dev team spent the last ten years trying to arbitrarily bump the number of features up and ending up with a giant pile of buggy features that nobody asked for. And for my final gripe, at least for the next 15 minutes, trying to teach a computer how to do what I mean instead of what I say was a mistake. I learned computers back in the day where there was no attempt at interpretation of intent and instead the machine did exactly what I told it to, and that's how I prefer it because it simplifies the problem space when the machine is misbehaving. I told it to do the wrong thing. That's the only possible answer. But now there seem to be so many layers attempting to interpret meaning from actions that the problem space expands to make room for the idea that I told it to do the right thing, but it guessed that I meant something different and then did that instead. As an example, just trying to highlight something in my Mac's terminal app so that I can copy/paste it. I click the terminal app on the dock, and focus switches to that terminal app but also docker desktop, which is on top of the terminal and doesn't go away when I click into the terminal. Instead I have to interact with docker desktop. So I minimize the app I never asked for, and actually have access to the terminal. I'm using the built-in touchpad and have to select an entire line, so I start from the right with one finger, click and drag. But another finger, or perhaps the heel of my hand, gets close to the touchpad and MacOS is SO EXCITED TO HELP that it decides to interpret that as a right click which results in my selection getting interrupted halfway to bring up the right click menu, whereupon I'm presented with the option to do several things with this approximately 40% of a CLI command including: search for it in webster's dictionary, convert it to spoken word, convert it to Chinese (my choice of traditional or simplified), or try to open it in finder despite it being a portion of a command and not a file. All of this points to a Goodhart's Law situation where someone decided the size of the pile of features was the measure of the quality of a piece of software, rather than how elegantly it does the job the user bought it for. AI has also significantly increased the speed with which a feature that no one asked for and that doesn't work correctly can be delivered.
stronglikedan 2mo ago
This doesn't happen on Windows. Slack loads in the background and the taskbar icon just pulses when it's ready. I have to switch to it manually from whichever app I'm working in as Slack loads.
100percentjake 2mo ago
This is one of the most consistently annoying behaviors I experience in macOS, and I feel so validated seeing others express this as well.
grim_io 2mo ago
That would only happen if you were not looking at the text you are typing. A-Are you looking DOWN ON THE KEYBOARD?!
- zamadatix 2mo ago
  I think there is a law of the universe which says it must happen right after you've mentally decided to type enter but before your fingers have finished.
watersb 2mo ago
1000x this. The single most soul-crushing experience I have on today's tech is the whoopee cushion. I type this on a touch device that randomly Cheevers the words. (It literally changed "changes" just now. Henceforth, my word for this shall be Cheevers.) it Cheevers the words. It offers suggested words that you can tap to complete the word you're typing, and milliseconds before your finger makes contact with the screen, the suggested word flips to Cheevers and your finger taps that. Now with the new improved iOS Liquid Glass, and possibly with janky web app development kits, buttons can move as you try to click on them. UI animation was supposed to help the user. But helping the user is hard. Pop ups. The web needs more pop ups. More "Are you enjoying this app?" in your face. But on the desktop, I recall complaining to a Windows (the OS) developer about stealing focus... in 1995. At the time, classic macOS tended not to do this, but it happened quite often multitasking on Windows, and I couldn't offer any constructive feedback, no obvious solution. The sheer unpredictability, at 100 millisecond time scale... a few hours of this and I'm literally shaking. Because it affects muscle response, a startle reaction. Keeps firing away at the limbic system. If I wanted slot-machine online gambling levels of simulation, I'd go to a casino. I hate this stuff. I hate where "engagement" metrics and the quest for more clicks has brought us. Make it stop. I'm trying to work, here.
contextfree 2mo ago
On Windows, UWP was supposed to solve this (by blocking apps from taking focus directly, but having the OS/shell create an app window immediately on launch and give focus to it) but most apps aren't UWP apps.
bergheim 2mo ago
That has been there since at least KDE 3 and I do agree, I remember learning about that feature. 400 years ago and still chefs kiss.
rbalicki 2mo ago
My "favorite" aspect of the Slack web app, which might have been fixed, as I haven't seen it recently, is if you typed up -> r (I believe it's r) to open the emoji picker, typed a few characters (e.g. "eyes") and pressed enter. Well, if the emojis hadn't loaded by then (and apparently they're loaded fresh every time), they would pop in and often, the a different emoji would be picked than the one that was visibly highlighted when I pressed enter.
xolve 2mo ago
These are the small but extremely user-centric quality of life features that I like about KDE. Most applications I use aren't KDE based (Firefox, VSCode, emacs, movie) but KWin, Dolphin, Plasma panels have unmatched ease whih grows on you.
arendtio 2mo ago
My Arch Linux KDE Desktop with the Haswell i7-4770S CPU (from 2013) actually feels snappier than MacOS on my MacBook Pro M4. Sure, the MacBook has far superior performance overall, but if you just want to move some windows or get a response from a right-click, it just feels slower.

anonzzzies 2mo ago

That is definitely needed. On Mac it is really infuriating how stuff (auto update etc) just take focus/pop up crap. I am literally never interested in it and am confused why I cannot just say [x] Force apps to mind their own business. We have f’ing notifications for this; why does it need a dialog window?

frameset 2mo ago
Maybe it's a hazy memory, but from 2007-2011 my main computer was a MacBook Pro. I swear in that era, when an app wanted attention it would bounce in the dock endlessly. That was annoying, but it let you finish doing what you were doing until you were ready to switch focus.
- jagged-chisel 2mo ago
  I think you’re right - macOS changed this behavior at some point.
  - anonymars 2mo ago
    People say Microsoft has no UI taste, but they used to be decent. They had sensible guidelines and behaviors For example for this case, the taskbar icon would blink three times and then remain highlighted. So it would grab your attention, but not hold it, and then you could still easily see at a glance which app it was At some point, like many other things, it looks like this either was changed or broke/doesn't work consistently. But I thought it was a nice design
  - cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
    I’m not sure that macOS changed as much as developer practices did. Dock icons bouncing are usually the result of the app opening a modal alert window. Those can’t foreground the host app and they used to be what devs reached for 9 times out of 10. These days though everybody and their dog has a menubar item or daemon running in the background (whether such a thing is actually necessary or not) and the only way windows spawned by apps like that (which have no Dock icon) can get the user’s attention and not have the windows they spawn get lost in the shuffle is for the app to call the foregrounding API, and so that’s exactly what they do. Contrast this to years ago when almost no apps had menu items or daemons and were standalone. There’s also been a staggering loss of decorum when it comes to these things. Companies have become shameless about pestering the user’s attention, and so there’s probably some regular Dock-icon-having apps that call the foregrounding API when they shouldn’t be too. In my opinion menubar items, daemons, and foregrounding are all being abused by devs and Apple needs to get them under control. Apps shouldn’t be able to add menu items or daemons without the user’s explicit permission and foregrounding should he treated similarly to push permissions.
froggit 2mo ago
I've really enjoyed how this started happening on windows that some pop ups steal focus during full screen gaming; extra satisfying is that "game mode" is set to prevent that. It's like a little minigame to boost my aggression level.

prmoustache 2mo ago

I never understood the OSes/desktop environments that stole focus by default. So many secrets/credentials have been shared because of that. Just give me a blinking notification that the app/window is available in the notification/taskbar/appdock area ffs. Yes that is one more click/alt-tab but that is much better imho. At least ask for preference on first ever login.

eviks 2mo ago

How would that global app ban help? You do want the application to steal focus when necessary. It's just in this case the user has made the decision to not wait for startup and switch to another app. Aggravating step - he was typing. Is this workflow part of the Kwin settings? It's not interrupting typing part of the settings?

frameset 2mo ago
> How would that global app ban help? You do want the application to steal focus when necessary Maybe you do. I don't. With this setting we can both be hapopy.
- eviks 2mo ago
  We can't both be happy because the setting does nothing for me.
  - frameset 2mo ago
    What? You can set it to let apps steal the focus you want. I can set it to not allow any apps to steal focus. How are we not both satisfied?
    - eviks 2mo ago
      That! I don't want apps to steal focus in some conditions. I can't set it like that because the settings are too primitive. Why would I be satisfied with a primitive binary toggle when I want workflow-dependent conditions?
      - frameset 2mo ago
        Did you read the documentation I linked? There's also high/medium/low settings that use XDG signals to determine if focus should change.
        2mo ago

ndriscoll 2mo ago

Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE. It's been great for a long time and only ever gets better. It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish. NixOS has a longstanding issue where library loading (and therefore program start, particularly GUI programs that load a lot) is n^2, but programs still all start in ~1 second or less on my n100 minipc. I still found that to be annoying enough to look into why it seemed so slow (and learned about the loading issue). Can't imagine things taking so long that you actually switch to another task. The same minipc can easily handle my 4k 240hz HDR monitor as well, and the whole experience is completely smooth. The computer also just obeys me. It does exactly what I tell it to, and nothing more.

noir_lord 2mo ago
> It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish. That's a pretty good description of it, I even have KDE laid out the same way I did on Windows 7 (or more accurately I guess on KDE going back even further since Linux has been my main OS since the 90's with Windows relegated to gaming). To this day - Taskbar shows window titles, only shows window titles for windows on that screen, there is no grouping, there is no ordering except order opened etc. I think autonomously in terms of which physical screen a window is on and when it was opened relative to others so I know exactly where to look/it'll be - the Mac style (and Linux/Windows style at least out the box) defaults of hiding all windows for an application behind it's icon in the dock never made sense to me, I have widescreens why do I want a doc that only takes up 40-50% of the horizontal space?.
- thewebguyd 2mo ago
  > defaults of hiding all windows for an application behind it's icon in the dock never made sense to me Not that it's a better workflow, but macOS does make a distinction between hidden and minimized. You can "hide" an app, and all windows will be hidden, only the dock icon showing. Minimize will move that specific window into a separate area onto the dock since macOS treats apps & windows as separate entities. What I absolutely hate though is you can cmd+tab and bring out a hidden app (but it restores all of its windows which drives me nuts), but you can't for a minimized app without holding option before releasing the keys.

DicIfTEx 2mo ago

A fantastic feature, but unfortunately currently broken (as in over- rather than under-zealous) for prevention levels other than 'Low': https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509990 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509990

Lord-Jobo 2mo ago
This is the absolute perfect encapsulation of the Linux problem and the Linux appeal: Yes, it has the magical setting to fix all of your problems and frustrations, and yes it’s a finicky broken bitch to actually get working for your use case. I say this with love.

cmiller1 2mo ago

I think this is less a "macOS lacks the feature to prevent focus stealing" and more they never even imagined the scenario where it takes time for the app to open. Instead of even considering that a user may add inputs while waiting for launch, potentially signaling that they are no longer requesting focus from the program they clicked on, they simply designed for the optimistic case where there never IS time for the user to give these inputs before their intention of opening the program is completed. Not saying it's any less bad from a user's perspective, but I think there's a difference in mindset here.

SoftTalker 2mo ago
In my experience (admittedly a bit dated now) Mac apps always take a few "bounces" to launch and be ready. There are a lot of nice things about MacOS but snappy application launches isn't one that stands out for me.
ghusto 2mo ago
As always, Apple has designed for the happy flow, and nothing else. Mac apps have never opened instantly, this is nothing new.
- cmiller1 2mo ago
  On the current M series hardware, in my experience, it's rare for the icon to land from its first bounce before the software is up and ready.
- cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
  They can open nearly instantly, but they need to be well-built native apps. Lumbering behemoths like Adobe CC or anything Chrome-based is going to be a bit slow, and even smaller apps that pull in a big foreign UI toolkit are going to take a tick or two longer to start. It’s too bad that the art of building lightweight applications is becoming a lost art.
- spike021 2mo ago
  same with iphones and switching between cellular and wifi connections. I'll be walking away from or toward my home or my office and there's just barely a wifi connection, but hardly enough for any requests or responses to even make it through, yet Apple never allows the phone to fall back toward the cellular connection. I can't believe in all these years they haven't implemented a dual setup where they connect the wifi and do some kind of test connection or request to confirm it's a stable signal before entirely switching away from cellular data.

ratelimitsteve 2mo ago

I am doing my best to implement a rule with apps where the third time in a single session you bother me about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the workflow I opened to app for, I uninstall the app. I don't want to update my spreadsheet app, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to tour the new features from the last update, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to sign in in order to access an AI companion (which I also don't want), I want to work on this spreadsheet. I damn sure don't want to leave a review in the app store for you and at this point you don't want me to either. You want me to work on this spreadsheet. Between that and this insane thing MacOS does where when I click an app in the dock any random app opens up (and, per above, begins barraging me with things designed to "direct" my attention) I'm ready to switch to something whose primary feature is not acting like the dev team spent the last ten years trying to arbitrarily bump the number of features up and ending up with a giant pile of buggy features that nobody asked for. And for my final gripe, at least for the next 15 minutes, trying to teach a computer how to do what I mean instead of what I say was a mistake. I learned computers back in the day where there was no attempt at interpretation of intent and instead the machine did exactly what I told it to, and that's how I prefer it because it simplifies the problem space when the machine is misbehaving. I told it to do the wrong thing. That's the only possible answer. But now there seem to be so many layers attempting to interpret meaning from actions that the problem space expands to make room for the idea that I told it to do the right thing, but it guessed that I meant something different and then did that instead. As an example, just trying to highlight something in my Mac's terminal app so that I can copy/paste it. I click the terminal app on the dock, and focus switches to that terminal app but also docker desktop, which is on top of the terminal and doesn't go away when I click into the terminal. Instead I have to interact with docker desktop. So I minimize the app I never asked for, and actually have access to the terminal. I'm using the built-in touchpad and have to select an entire line, so I start from the right with one finger, click and drag. But another finger, or perhaps the heel of my hand, gets close to the touchpad and MacOS is SO EXCITED TO HELP that it decides to interpret that as a right click which results in my selection getting interrupted halfway to bring up the right click menu, whereupon I'm presented with the option to do several things with this approximately 40% of a CLI command including: search for it in webster's dictionary, convert it to spoken word, convert it to Chinese (my choice of traditional or simplified), or try to open it in finder despite it being a portion of a command and not a file. All of this points to a Goodhart's Law situation where someone decided the size of the pile of features was the measure of the quality of a piece of software, rather than how elegantly it does the job the user bought it for. AI has also significantly increased the speed with which a feature that no one asked for and that doesn't work correctly can be delivered.

stronglikedan 2mo ago

This doesn't happen on Windows. Slack loads in the background and the taskbar icon just pulses when it's ready. I have to switch to it manually from whichever app I'm working in as Slack loads.

100percentjake 2mo ago

This is one of the most consistently annoying behaviors I experience in macOS, and I feel so validated seeing others express this as well.

grim_io 2mo ago

That would only happen if you were not looking at the text you are typing. A-Are you looking DOWN ON THE KEYBOARD?!

zamadatix 2mo ago
I think there is a law of the universe which says it must happen right after you've mentally decided to type enter but before your fingers have finished.

watersb 2mo ago

1000x this. The single most soul-crushing experience I have on today's tech is the whoopee cushion. I type this on a touch device that randomly Cheevers the words. (It literally changed "changes" just now. Henceforth, my word for this shall be Cheevers.) it Cheevers the words. It offers suggested words that you can tap to complete the word you're typing, and milliseconds before your finger makes contact with the screen, the suggested word flips to Cheevers and your finger taps that. Now with the new improved iOS Liquid Glass, and possibly with janky web app development kits, buttons can move as you try to click on them. UI animation was supposed to help the user. But helping the user is hard. Pop ups. The web needs more pop ups. More "Are you enjoying this app?" in your face. But on the desktop, I recall complaining to a Windows (the OS) developer about stealing focus... in 1995. At the time, classic macOS tended not to do this, but it happened quite often multitasking on Windows, and I couldn't offer any constructive feedback, no obvious solution. The sheer unpredictability, at 100 millisecond time scale... a few hours of this and I'm literally shaking. Because it affects muscle response, a startle reaction. Keeps firing away at the limbic system. If I wanted slot-machine online gambling levels of simulation, I'd go to a casino. I hate this stuff. I hate where "engagement" metrics and the quest for more clicks has brought us. Make it stop. I'm trying to work, here.

contextfree 2mo ago

On Windows, UWP was supposed to solve this (by blocking apps from taking focus directly, but having the OS/shell create an app window immediately on launch and give focus to it) but most apps aren't UWP apps.

bergheim 2mo ago

That has been there since at least KDE 3 and I do agree, I remember learning about that feature. 400 years ago and still chefs kiss.

rbalicki 2mo ago

My "favorite" aspect of the Slack web app, which might have been fixed, as I haven't seen it recently, is if you typed up -> r (I believe it's r) to open the emoji picker, typed a few characters (e.g. "eyes") and pressed enter. Well, if the emojis hadn't loaded by then (and apparently they're loaded fresh every time), they would pop in and often, the a different emoji would be picked than the one that was visibly highlighted when I pressed enter.

xolve 2mo ago

These are the small but extremely user-centric quality of life features that I like about KDE. Most applications I use aren't KDE based (Firefox, VSCode, emacs, movie) but KWin, Dolphin, Plasma panels have unmatched ease whih grows on you.

arendtio 2mo ago

My Arch Linux KDE Desktop with the Haswell i7-4770S CPU (from 2013) actually feels snappier than MacOS on my MacBook Pro M4. Sure, the MacBook has far superior performance overall, but if you just want to move some windows or get a response from a right-click, it just feels slower.