> Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this is completely non nondiscoverable.

This could be a clever designer, if for example the team decided that Mac users don't need manual resolution settings, and this designer lost the argument. So they stick it behind a keypress and make sure word gets out.

The team only cares about what they can see, a common issue with teams. So they don't notice and the designer at least knows they've saved some major pain, at the cost of some annoyance.

If you've worked with people who design for social bell-curve psychology, you have probably been confronted with this problem before. And this is just one possible explanation...

A lot of macOS seems designed this way, it took me months of using macOS daily before I learnt these little tricks, e.g. pressing option before many operations generally shows an advanced menu (advanced network connection stats, finder merge folder option etc). I'd like for there to be an option for power users where this is the default behaviour if enabled.

I've been using MacOS for nearly 15 years now, and I've only just discovered that the Finder toolbar can be customised.

In fact you can park your own shell scripts on it, although setting that up is a bit of a performance.

MacOS just hides a ton of advanced things like that behind the "option-click on things", so it's not like it's an uncommon occurence.

It’s a way to make it possible for customer support to tell people what to do, while not overcomplicating the operating system for the 99.9% of users who do not care about things like manually setting resolutions if they even know what it is.

It’s like the habit of using key combinations to interrupt the boot up sequence, it introduces necessary facilities that aren’t in the way of you don’t need them or don’t even know about them.

This is why community maintained software tends to have better UIs; you just have users and developers (who are often the same) and none of this “bell-curve psychology.” WPA-GUI is awesome for example, but you can’t sell it because it doesn’t look awesome.

> If you kill -9 the fsck

“For science,” right? I mean why would you do that? If you did that on Linux, would things really be better?

On Linux you'd be able to just right-click on the drive in GParted/KPartMan and run fsck again

Regardless of being able to run fsck again, killing it that way on a non journaling filesystem is a great way to lose data.

it can get stuck and not do anything no matter how long you leave it.

> this is completely non nondiscoverable

I also don’t find this discoverable, but option clicking was best analogy to right clicking on Apple since the mouse used to have one button.

Your complaint is like saying that having to copy and paste with ctrl c and ctrl v is non discoverable in Windows with a two button mouse because in Linux it’s just select text and middle click somewhere else.

How is that non-discoverable? Most software literally tells you beside the copy/paste entry that it is ctrl+c/v.

Because the first part is to select text with a mouse?

No It isn't. You have various shortcuts on your keyboard that can select text. With many of them labeled in context menus as well.

> option clicking was best analogy to right clicking on Apple since the mouse used to have one button.

Not high praise for Apple, wasn't the 1 button mouse the laughing stock of mouse users everywhere? :-)

Only the ones who’d learned about two-button mice.

When the one-button mouse arrived, the majority of the population had never touched a mouse.

True, but by the time the one button mouse left, the majority of the population had definitely seen or used a two or even three button mouse.

We're talking about a decision that took 2 decades to reverse.

My Apple Magic Mouse 2 doesn't have a discoverable right click button.

There's still a lot of software which displays ctrl+C/V next to the matching menu entry.

But you select text with the mouse, it’s understandable to continue the workflow with the mouse

"Your complaint is like saying that having to copy and paste with ctrl c and ctrl v is non discoverable in Windows with a two button mouse because in Linux it’s just select text and middle click somewhere else."

No it isn't, because those functions have equivalent menu items.

Easter-egg controls in a GUI are a different (and inexcusable) story.

Selecting text and it going to a clipboard is just as Easter eggy in my opinion. How is a user supposed to discover that?

I'm not sure, but can you actually access a drive on Linux while it's being fsck'd? It sounds quite logical not to mount the drive, although perhaps one could get some mileage from mounting it RO.

> Apple completely hides what is actually going on from the user

That's intentional. I know people, ranging from barely computer-aware to MSc., who don't/can't understand what you would mean by resolution. Or exFAT. Or kill -9. However, they do know how to mess up with the slightest amount of power given to them. Hiding the system is a boon.

I'm a computer enginer, and for me, macOS is a great blend of power and simplicity/usability. I won't be happy if they mess up the OS or the hardware.

It's not really as easy as: macOS is better or Linux is better. Both suck in their own little ways, not as much at Windows, which still manage to cramp up my hand for some reason.

Linux has an amazing level of freedom and flexibility, macOS still have the faster and more responsive GUI. The main reason for me to buy into the Apple ecosystem is still Apple trackpads, both those on the laptops and the external Magic Trackpad. Those are my input device of choice. I really do not want to go back to using a mouse or trackball again.

I really have been appreciating this Logitech MX vertical mouse. Find it more comfortable than using a trackpad all day - https://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/mx-vertical-ergonomic...

Sadly most ergonomic devices is for right handed users only. The vertical mouse is useless if you're left handed, like me.

>Want to manually scale your display to an exact resolution? Go to Displays, Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this is completely non nondiscoverable.

I agree with the UI discoverability point, but it is called out in the documentation.

Do you have a link to the documentation? Genuinely curious to learn how to use my Mac better but a search for "Mac OS Manual" in google turned up no useful results for Catalina.