Genuinely interested to hear how Finder sorting tilts you. It seems to sort stuff depending on how I choose it to be sorted. Is there a way to do that wrong?

As for the intuitive thing:
I am training people on OS X almost daily. Most of the time when they ask me "How do I do x?" I ask them "How would you try to do it if I refused to tell you?"
About 3 out of 4 times they get it right. Sounds intuitive enough to me.

I will say there are a few things that are super confusing when coming from Windows where the windows way seems to make more sense.

Agreed

Probably. There was this silly error box that kept popping up every time I did ALT-SHIFT even though the command was working fine. Also, the contrasts was too gray-on-white* for me. The window bars on the bottom were utterly unreadable. I just hate to tinker with stuff and I felt like I'd be tinkering a lot with it, so I just nuked it.

*grey-on-white to you, right?

Yeah, no kidding! It is much worse on Windows now ever since they put that stupid Reserve Your Copy of Win10 out. It is even more irritating because it takes a good 30 minute before Windows settles down enough that I can start running benchmarks that don't appear outright insane.

That looks pretty interesting. I uh, still use emacs though.

Yes, this is true. As one of my old coworkers told me: You can have the fastest computer on earth, but it doesn't mean much if you can't cool it down. I'm definitely not a hardware person, so reading the full specs about bus, serial, this, that, etc, is pretty confusing, though I know that is just as important.

I tried it dual-booting, took screenshots of the offending messages, of the partition screen, posted it on a forum, and was told that it is impossible to dual boot the computer. I don't remember the details of why. Call me a spiky-hair for not caring.

I expect the default sorting to be folders before files. As far as I can see there isn't even an option to sort this way. I can't say why but working with multiple finder windows or tabs also feels odd. I find myself dragging stuff to intermediate locations a lot. I'll often do finder->drag to desktop->change location in finder->drag from desktop to that location

I'm coming from Linux not Windows...it would be pretty helpful if I could just "pin" an iterm to the desktop but everything just gets minimized if you pick another window which is also tilting (I basically have a huge iterm on one of the virtual desktops and just arrow key between them and use the iterm for all file navigation/movement etc.)
The brand new ZOMG amazing feature of El Captan where I can tile two windows is also...crap. As far as I can tell you can only tile left/right...well I'd really like to have a console at the bottom or at the top (or preferably "Quake style" on demand with ^ like I have it on my Linux desktop).

But hey at least I can wiggle the mouse and it will get bigger so I can spot it *headscratch*

The thing that tilts me using Macs is that the context menus frequently suck balls. If you don't know how to do something in Windows, right clicking stuff and selecting likely looking options is a pretty good recipe for finding out. On Macs if I right click something frequently there is like one option. I then have no idea how to figure out what I want to do other than stumbling around the application looking for it. Maybe I just don't understand the Mac way of doing things but they never seem intuitive to me at all (unlike iPhones).

I was surprised to not find a "rename file" option in the context menu on osx.

When you learn one way to do a thing and it works, then that way will always make the most sense to you. I'm sure someone that goes from mac to windows would say the exact same thing.

The best measure is when you take someone with no computer experience and see how fast they figure out how to do stuff.

Ah, that one. No, there is no built-in way. Closest built-in version is to sort by kind, won't be at the top, though.

I got so used to it, I don't miss that at all.

There is a handy hack you could try by modifying some core files through the terminal, though.

Launch terminal then go:
Makes a backup of the original InfoPlist.strings file in your home folder under /tmp so you can copy that back if things go awry.
Converts binary InfoPlist.strings file to XML, uses vi to replace "<string>Folder" with "<string> Folder" (note space before), converts that back to binary format.
Then restarts Finder.

You may need to tweak that if you're not using an English version of OS X (ie. not using English.lproj directory). If you're using German, let me know and I'll adjust it to suit that.

Nothing wrong with that.

For moving without renaming, I personally just use patience in one window. Drag the file(s) onto the relevant section on the left in favorites. Hold still over that for a second or so and it opens on the right. Then navigate through there the same way.
I prefer the column view, makes it a tad easier to navigate subfolders.

With El Capitan you may want to try two Finder windows in shared full screen mode. They're in their own space so you can use gestures to get there fast for moving tasks and keep them there for future use.
No, they're not tiled horizontally, but might make it feel different.

Alternatively, you can still go Linux style and just use the good ole terminal.

And there are apps out there to make it easier to suit your style. Total Commander comes to mind. Pretty sure there are several alternatives.

Yep, tiling options are limited. To one. So make that option, not options.

Not sure I understand what you mean with minimizing when picking another window. My windows stay open, just move to the background.
Is that an iterm specific thing? I read that iterm2 has an option to keep it on top.
Maybe iterm2 also has options to minimize/appear on keystroke.

Not having pinning in OS X is intended by design (part of the human interfacing guidelines.) There are some packages that allow you to make it happen, though. I have heard of SIMBL and Afloat as a combo. Have not tested it, as I do not need anything to be pinned.
If I need quicker access to specific apps, I tend to move a window to its own desktop and use gestures to switch.

Regarding the bloating cursor; you'd be surprised how many inexperienced users are thrilled by that. They seem to have a knack for losing their cursor.

No, that's the best measure of what the best OS is for a person who is not familiar with computers. I am obviously comfortable performing basic tasks on any OS. The issue arises when I need to do something a bit more technical, something like viewing email headers to determine if an email's claimed sender is legit. Whenever I try to do something like that on a Mac, it's always an exercise in frustration. I can't tell whether that's just my inexperience or not, but it always seems like such a complicated process. On Windows it should be right click email, view source. It isn't always, because not all programs are good, but it ought to be. On a Mac it is virtually never that. It's usually in some dialog buried 3 levels deep.

Occasionally Windows is frustrating when I want to work outside the GUI. An example from tonight: I download um this might be censored, torrents. Streaming file thingies. Anyway often they're packaged in subdirectories. This leads to my download folder having a million subdirs for no reason. I wanted a command to copy video files from all subdirs into the current dir. This is hard enough in Windows that I gave up before figuring out how to do it.

I assume if I spent enough time on it, the ideal OS for me would be some *nix thing, but realistically (given app support and stuff) the choices are Windows and Mac and I find Macs infuriating.

Exactly. Stuff like that is missing for no other reason than that they appear to think it's a better UX to have short context menus.

Huh? It's there for me.

Yeah, with shortened context menus you do not have everything at your finger tips.

It's actually not that complicated once you get used to how apple's in-house software is structured.

Typically, to change the way some window looks or what it shows and if I don't know the answer, I'll try context menus first, then use the View section in the menu bar.

If that fails (which honestly is rarely the case for me), digging around application preferences follows next. Then searching system prefs if that would make any sense to search there.
Good ole Google comes to the rescue after that.

Eg. The full headers or source display can be found under View->Message
If I use that a lot, I'll remember the keyboard shortcuts (cmd shift H for the former, and cmd option U for the latter) or check if I can customize the tool bar to have a button for that.

In this case, you could add a button to view full headers - not source, though.

Having said all that, I completely understand that for some people it is frustrating to work with OS X. In most cases, though, it's a combination of not being familiar how things are structured and not knowing where to find the answers. Apple using its own terminology for many things makes it just harder to find that info.

I have web mail open full screen in chrome. I click new message. A new, non-full screen window opens. I need some info from the other window. I click it, get my info, and try to go back. No way to do this that I can see other than minimizing my full screen window. :thumbdown:

Command and ` (that one above tab on English Mac keyboard) button to switch between windows of the same application.

Thank you, sir!

Two 27" monitors, old eyes, and the almost invisible default iTerm cursor makes the cursor discovery thing pretty useful. I also don't know what Clown is talking about with non-selected windows minimizing, never saw that before.

Robocopy is a builtin utility to windows Vista and above. That or 7 and above.

Robocopy <sourcedir> <destdir>

Can use powershell to script it or even batch file I'm sure. Can even remove the subdirectories as the last part of the script if you want.

kazana, What version of OSX has that menu option? I wasn't on El Capitan when I tried it.

I have updated to El Capitan a few days ago. Not sure if it was there in Yosemite.

Oh, thought of another. Use arrow keys to select a file. Hit enter to open it. Instead goes to file rename.

This is silly. When I switched there were lots of things I was re-learning that made more sense in OS X.

But if I see two different ways of doing something it's not always hard to be objective when comparing them.

Just as an example window resizing was objectively worse in OS X when I switched. If you had never used a computer before it might have been fine, but if someone had then showed you how it worked in Windows the vast majority of people would agree the Windows way made more sense.

1. Open terminal and cd to the folder there the million subdirs are located.
2. find . -name "*.mpg" -exec mv {} <destination-folder> \;

Should work on mac and linux. On windows you can install cygwin or use git-bash to do it I think.

That's just your bias talking.

BetterSnapTool is free and can be found in the App Store.
It is must have for window resizing and positioning on OSX.

The typical criticism with finder, tends to be searching and I agree that the experience isn't the best but its not really perfect for any OS.
I think mastering the terminal is most optimal solution for searching in the long run and it will be the best option if you master it imo.

One friend did say, he preferred going through his anime collection on Windows compared to with using finder. The thumbnails, I guess are more customizable for previews of images or any media file on Windows vs OS X and that matters to him but he still ended up with a mac.

Typically i've found that all the caveats of Windows, can easily be replaced on OSX or Linux by spending some time googling a solution.
The solution has always for me, been better than what Windows offers, it may require using the terminal or downloading a free/paid app but I feel at the end of the day to be having the best experience on OS X as if I were to be using Windows.

I grew up with Windows computers from a 90s child to around 2012, when I decided to question for myself, how much truth the anti-apple crowd of windows fanboys were spewing on the internet.
Bunch of trolls that probably never used a decent computer running OS X on it, is what I came to as my conclusion.

My first personal computer with OS X, was a hackintosh that had an AMD FX 4100 cpu, took me awhile to get lion on it; this was the day and age where most people thought it was only possible with an Intel cpu to be running a hackintosh.
I ran into kernel panics after kernel panics with it, luckily I eventually got hired, made enough money to get my dream laptop and the rest is history.
I'll refuse to work on a Windows machine now because I can't see how anyone would prefer a Windows experience over a OSX or Linux experience.