Sonoma annoyances

A lot of people are installing Sonoma annoyances and not always on purpose. If they are lucky they aren’t even aware it has happened because they never come across the, sometimes, odd changes that come with it. However, for others they know things have changed and in typical Apple fashion there is no clear direction on where to change things back to how they were.

Don’t get me wrong, some of these changes are for the better and some are just window dressing and take a few seconds to figure out. But some are  just plain annoying and, in the case of this irritating new feature, hard to find the fix because it is buried in the dumpster fire that is now the System Settings app. But don’t get me started on that.

If you have installed Sonoma (you can find out by clicking on the Apple menu and choosing About this Mac) and you click on your desktop and you should see a grey border appear around the edges of the screen and all your open windows and files disappear.

Had you noticed this before? Has it been driving you nuts?

If not, awesome, but if it has, here is the fix.

1. Click on the Apple menu and choose System Settings 
2. Select Desktop & Dock.
3. Scroll down to Desktop & Stage Manager.
4. Click wallpaper to reveal desktop. Change this setting to Only in Stage Manager.

And while we are on the topic of Sonoma… you might also be wondering why you can no longer shutdown or reboot the Mac from the login screen.

Once upon a time, before bored interface designers were unleashed, there was a Shutdown and Restart button at the bottom of the login screen. Now, for reasons of neatness I suppose, these controls are now in the top right hand corner of the screen. If you click on the Power icon…

… you will now see Restart and Shutdown and Sleep.

What was one simple mouse movement is now two. Just like the new System Settings layout… but don’t get me started on that!