Completely useless for the past 20 years. I have it always hidden with 0 loss of functionality.
It provides no info about what windows are open, it does random things when you click on an icon, it has an indicator that tells you that an app is in memory but may or may not have a window. And all these become even worse once you have multiple monitors / spaces.
Just copy whatever gnome/kde/windows are doing. All of these have figured it out. Only macOS needs an investment of like $50 per year in helper apps to deal with the poor app and window management.
Different paradigms. macOS is app-document based while Windows is, well, window-based. Some functionality is also delegated to Exposé/Mission Control.
It all depends on what one’s used to. I always end up frustrated trying to daily drive window-paradigm desktops (including KDE, etc) because windows being the only logical unit of organization makes keeping everything wrangled feel a lot more difficult. As a result, I only run Windows and desktop Linux distros on machines that I’ve assigned to a single purpose (which only ever see 1-4 windows open at any given time).
What apps are document-based nowadays? 90% of people's app use is in browsers and Electron apps that end up being an agglomeration of tabs and documents. And MacOS has objectively horrible window management for apps that run multiple windows.
That's another thing that varies between users. I still use a number of document-based apps written in AppKit and there still exist cross-platform apps that aren't single-window things. Sublime Text and Obsidian come to mind (the latter even being Electron).
macOS window management is basically not managing them at all and allowing them to pile up and overlap like papers on a desk, with relevant parts of each peeking out. Exposé is there for the occasion when all windows or all app windows need to be seen. It doesn't try to micromanage them all into being maximized or tiled. Not everyone's cup of tea but it works for me.
You are saying the the dock on Mac OS has been ‘completely useless for the past 20 years’? I mean I can think of at least three uses… And certainly more if I bothered to actually count?
Isn't dock also responsible for mission control? There was a trick to set an extremely long show-timeout to effectively permanently hide the dock, if that works it's probably better.
Interesting. I've only been a (work) mac user for 2 years now and I don't really have anything against it, as long as I can move it to the side (looking at you, Windows 11) - I am not even hiding it.
I mean, sure, it's not i3 and I can't fully work without using a mouse, but alt-tab, and cmd-space and the occasional click work for me. Work as in: as a user with opinions on most software I am just now actively wondering why I never had problem with it :P
It provides no info about what windows are open, it does random things when you click on an icon, it has an indicator that tells you that an app is in memory but may or may not have a window. And all these become even worse once you have multiple monitors / spaces.
Just copy whatever gnome/kde/windows are doing. All of these have figured it out. Only macOS needs an investment of like $50 per year in helper apps to deal with the poor app and window management.