making macOS Tahoe usable

Apple's Liquid Glass design language is superficially pretty in commercials and promotional material. this happens to come at the expense of actual usability. this move embodies much of what i find deeply annoying and presumptious about Apple's UX design. the hardware is so good, especially in the case of MacBooks, like the one i type this on, that it's almost impossible to pass up. the software, however, genuinely treats you like a toddler. unconditionally.

it is constantly babysitting you, making you go through official sandboxed channels to do extremely simple things with the very very very expensive product you bought and own. all of this, however, doesn't even begin to annoy me in day-to-day use as much as the constant plague of useless, superfluous, fancy animations that are nice to look at exactly once before achieving nothing but getting in my god-damn way.

macOS Tahoe and Liquid Glass more broadly, serve to worsen this problem substantially. it's really in quite poor taste. all of these excessively bouncy time-wasting animations with comical corner radii and hectares of wasted space. it looks and feels like a toy. the glass effect itself also happens to look ugly in real-world use, especially after the transparency was dialed back substantially following deeply predictable accessibility and readability problems throughout the developer and public betas.

now, the design has landed at this hideous halfway point between the clear, refractive aesthetic the thing was pitched with, and a simpler, more readable "frosted" glass look. the way this manifests in practice is more of an ugly, cheap, tacky, "old plastic bottle" vibe.

so, how do we fix this and get this awful self-serving design out of our way?

first, we need to disable Apple's "System Integrity Protection" babysitter. now that we have actual control of the product we own, we can install yabai for tiling window management and instant space switching. yabai also lets us remove the shadow behind the focused window, helping to clean up our look. we'll also want some smaller utilities like JankyBorders to highlight the active window and Apple Sharpener to dial in our corner radius (i like 9).

now we can adjust some macOS settings to clean everything up. we'll want to enable Reduce Transparency and Reduce Motion in the accessibilty settings. i turn on Increase Contrast and get rid of the dock as well.

i would consider this to be the minimum viable product for a usable macOS Tahoe. i shouldn't have to do this to achieve an unobtrusive, functional experience. Alan Dye is a fucking idiot.

still 100x better than modern Windows, though.

-1/2/26