Notes on the Liquid Glass Tsunami

Following my little saga with the iPad OS beta, I upgraded a few of my Apple devices, including one of my Macs, to the final release versions of all the “26” operating systems, and… It’s even worse than I thought.

First of all, the good bits:

• Surprisingly, my iPad Mini 5 can now run multiple windows (which I wasn’t expecting, although they’re obviously neither abundant nor performant).
• Spotlight now hits most of the sweet spots I used to enjoy with QuickSilver almost a decade ago and lets me search for and switch to terminal tabs, which is… almost wonderful in the middle of the whole mess.
• Terminal can now do 24-bit color and glyphs, although I haven’t really tried weaning myself off Ghostty.
• The windown tiling hotkeys almost make sense, to the point where I turned off Moom to see how much I can do without it.
• The 15 minutes I spent fiddling with the new container feature were fun. It has potential, even if the tooling isn’t all there yet. (Update: I’ve just found out about socktainer and will see if it gives me enough functionality to fool VS Code’s container handling).

Now for the downsides:

• I can see four five different sizes of window corner radius on my Mac desktop. The overall visual design for menus and dialogs is still a joke, and is so badly executed that Apple should be ashamed of shipping it.
• There is a huge amount of wasted screen real estate in every single modernized application window. Even worse than what I saw on the iPad, and significantly impacting information density.
• System Preferences on the Mac is still horrible to use (sluggish, apparently overly dependent on web views, and has at least two different styles of control spacing).
• Every single device I have feels slower. Part of it is certainly the post-install reindexing, but… I fear for my iPhone’s battery life. (Update the morning after: my iPad mini is severely impacted and I can actually watch the battery tick down as I read morning news).
• Sadly, hotkeys for moving windows to other displays (let alone an option to have a “three up” layout) are nowhere to be found.
• Relying on the Globe/Fn key for window management was a mistake because it tends to switch keyboard layouts on me, so I guess people at Apple are neither bilingual nor good testers.

Like I wrote several times over the past few months, I am really happy I have been using GNOME on Fedora for a couple of years, because it currenly looks so much better than the Mac (and I use so much cross-platform software these days) that if there were better business software support (like an official Windows Virtual Desktop client able to do corporate MFA) I would probably have switched by now.

If only I worked at a software company that… Nah, I don’t know anything.