*** The official 2023 and 2024 Mac mini thread (it has the M2 chip, the M4 chip and everything!) ***

Eddie99 said:
I also recently tried switching to a Mac Mini M4 and I agree with @jazzy68, I'm not liking the experience compared to Windows, and I don't think it's just because I've been using Windows for years.

On Windows when I want to close something I can just instantly snap the mouse to the top right and click, whereas on macOS to close an app you have to go to the dock icon, right click and select quit. The quit button at the top left doesn't actually quit, and it takes longer than Windows to select anyway because it isn't at the very top of the screen.
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I just do Command+Q. After a couple of days it becomes muscle memory.
Eddie99 said:
I dislike the menu bar at the top as you get less vertical space in a web browser, I tried hiding it which was even more irritating because it pops back up when changing tabs which changes the position of the tab. Another irritation is that there's an outline at the side of apps, you can only get rid of it by going into full screen which I don't like.
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I have the menu bar set to hide as well. It only shows when you mouse over it at the top of the screen. I just tried to see if I could recreate it like to say when switching tabs but it doesn't happen for me. I also tried using Control+Tab and it doesn't show then either so I'm not sure what is happening your end. Never really had an issue with the outline but fair enough.
Eddie99 said:
I'm not happy with the general performance/snappiness of the OS either, benchmarks say it has blazing fast single core speed but it doesn't feel as snappy/responsive as a slower CPU on Windows. For example web browsers can take a couple of seconds to open which is instant on Windows, and there's a noticeable delay entering/exiting full screen in IINA video player during which the image is frozen.
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Can't comment on that. Chrome and Safari open reasonably fast on my M1 MBA with 8GBs of RAM. Are you sure you weren't using up all your available RAM and ended up swapping?
 
Cromulent said:
I just do Command+Q. After a couple of days it becomes muscle memory.
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Still not as fast as just snapping my mouse to the top right and clicking, and sometimes I like to sit back and would have to reach for the keyboard.

Cromulent said:
I have the menu bar set to hide as well. It only shows when you mouse over it at the top of the screen. I just tried to see if I could recreate it like to say when switching tabs but it doesn't happen for me. I also tried using Control+Tab and it doesn't show then either so I'm not sure what is happening your end. Never really had an issue with the outline but fair enough.
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It might be because I'm used to just snapping my mouse to the top of the screen when switching tabs on Windows, but it seems like it would be slower if you had to be careful not to move the mouse to the top.

Cromulent said:
Can't comment on that. Chrome and Safari open reasonably fast on my M1 MBA with 8GBs of RAM. Are you sure you weren't using up all your available RAM and ended up swapping?
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Yes I'm sure, nothing else open except for a VPN app, password manager, and a program called LinearMouse that I had to install to fix scrolling and mouse acceleration. I suppose the web browsers could be caused by an extension.
 
Even on Windows pressing X top right doesn't always close the application, some minimise to the tray. On macOS, the red button just closes the window. The original idea behind it was that it would be faster to open the application again when things like slow HDDs and RAM limitations were a thing, and I guess it's kinda stuck.

As for window position/full screen, either use Apple's built in window management feature, or better yet install something like Magnet which gets you Windows like behaviour.

macOS has its quirks that's for sure. But I just adopt my workflow around them and things like Cmd + Q become second nature. I'd choose that any day of the week over the issues which Windows has such as forced updates, full screen 'options' post update, privacy concerns, forced AI which ranges from extremely difficult to impossible to turn off etc etc.

Regarding the performance comment, something must be wrong with the device or application/configuration for it to behave like that. Any M series Mac should be highly performance especially compared to a slower CPU on Windows.
 
Karl said:
As a daily windows user, I don't see any of this.
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Plenty of folk having issues in this thread:

*** Microsoft Windows 11 Thoughts & Discussion Thread ***

So it’s coming it will be live streamed by Microsoft for the new upcoming OS. 24th for your calendar people… > Windows 10 was released on 29 July 2015..... > It's been reported that Microsoft will no longer be using version numbers for their OS.
forums.overclockers.co.uk forums.overclockers.co.uk

Just go back through the past few pages, but there's been many complaints for at least 6 months.
 
I use Windows a lot too - both my MBPs (16 & a 14) fire up a Parallels Win 11 in the background at logon. You have to stip Win11 down to get rid of all the crappery like adverts & stuff, but it's not a terrible OS. I don't really get the Team MacOS *OR* Windows.

Perception of performance can be interesting though. Office on my Mac can feel a little clumsy even on my M4 Max compared to my say Samsung Book 360 i7 thing, yet if I ask it to do anything requiring a bit of grunt (some of my Excel sheets can be fairly intensive) then the M4 leaves my Windows machines for dust, even the MS-A2 with it's 16 core 9950AMD or whatever it is.

The mere fact though that the launch time etc. can be a bit slower on the Mac can hit on that perception though, with the idea of it feeling 'snappy'.
 
Karl said:
As a daily windows user, I don't see any of this.
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Much like Mac users don't see the complaints of others I imagine! I find it pretty interesting. Adverts on Windows irritate me more than they should, but then if something is free then you're the product aren't you?

Anyway, would still prefer a 2025 version of AmigaOS. AROS perhaps.

EDITed to add, currenty playing with this, and setting up a Netware 3.12 & Netware 4 system. This is what boredom and having too much kit hanging around does to you.
 
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At the work PC the No.1 thing that I hate is when I boot it up it loads all the news in the start menu....like WTF... if I want the news I will look for it, don't waste resources fetching it and then displaying it.

This really stands out and evident when the PC is old.
 
Performance tuning out the window! I remember back in the day (I'm an ex-Microsofty) seeing all the discussions about not including the seconds on the clock in the toolbar because of performance. Now it seems all that guidance is out the window for advertising and 'additional services'.

Still, must work for them I guess.
 
Raymond Lin said:
At the work PC the No.1 thing that I hate is when I boot it up it loads all the news in the start menu....like WTF... if I want the news I will look for it, don't waste resources fetching it and then displaying it.

This really stands out and evident when the PC is old.
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I wonder if this is like an ios vs android thing. I don't have anything in the start menu because I turned it all off - just the basics.

I used to use an imac and enjoyed using it, but I was using parallels for dev work, and it was too resource intensive to run two OS at the same time.
 
ChrisD. said:
Plenty of folk having issues in this thread:

*** Microsoft Windows 11 Thoughts & Discussion Thread ***

So it’s coming it will be live streamed by Microsoft for the new upcoming OS. 24th for your calendar people… > Windows 10 was released on 29 July 2015..... > It's been reported that Microsoft will no longer be using version numbers for their OS.
forums.overclockers.co.uk forums.overclockers.co.uk

Just go back through the past few pages, but there's been many complaints for at least 6 months.
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Can't say I've encountered issues with the ones I've seen in that thread (slow screenshots, etc) :confused:

It's not a perfect OS, but it's been fine day to day, and I don't find myself tearing my hair out over forced updates getting in the way of what I'm doing.
 
I have Windows 11 Pro on my gaming laptop and have been considering moving to a gaming Linux distro on it. Only thing holding me back is the time it takes to set everything up. I don't hate Windows but I don't love it either. I much prefer the Unix like operating systems. Having said that Windows Subsystem for Linux is pretty good and can do some cool stuff.
 
I don't dislike Windows or Mac OS tbh. Much like mobile phones these days, they are all much of a muchness. None of them do anything drastically different, or faster.

99.9% of my interaction with the OS is pressing start (or command+space on Mac) and typing the application I'm after, and then occasionally moving/resizing/closing windows.

Finder is a bit **** compared to Windows Explorer tbh, but not the end of the world.

The little things like Safari getting 2FA codes from messages and putting them straight into the browser is what makes Mac a bit nicer for me.

But the #1 reason I switched to Mac is that Claude Code isn't supported natively in Windows, you have to use WSL.
 
Yup, that'll do it... Mostly. Doesn't cover OneDrive or some of the annoying ones that pop up in the Start Menu I don't think.
 
MacRS4 said:
Yup, that'll do it... Mostly. Doesn't cover OneDrive or some of the annoying ones that pop up in the Start Menu I don't think.
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I don't have OneDrive, it's the first thing I uninstall when setting up Windows 11. It does come with some bloatware but it only takes a couple of minutes to uninstall it all.
 
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