macOS Sonoma, Clicking Desktop Doesnt Hide Apps? (Solved!)

Hey everyone, it’s your buddy here, back with another tech tidbit that’s been driving me nuts lately. So, I recently updated to macOS Sonoma, and let me tell you, there’s this “feature” that’s been seriously messing with my workflow. Every time I clicked on the desktop, all my windows would just vanish. Poof! Gone! I mean, who thought that was a good idea?

I did some digging, turns out it’s supposed to be some sort of Expose thing. Clicking on the desktop is meant to show you, well, the desktop, and hide all the app clutter. But for someone like me, who’s constantly juggling multiple windows, it was a total pain. I like my mess, okay? I know where everything is in my organized chaos!

At first, I was lost, thinking, “Is this my life now? Is this how it’s going to be forever?” I found some people on a forum saying it was a feature on one of the new Beta updates, so maybe it was just a bug they were testing. But man, it was annoying. Clicking around, trying to find a workaround, and then, bam! I stumbled upon the solution, and it was so simple, I almost facepalmed.

Here’s what I did. First, I opened up System Settings. You know, the usual drill. Then, I looked around for something that seemed relevant. That’s when I saw it: Desktop & Dock. Clicked on that bad boy. And there it was, staring right at me. A little dropdown menu with options related to clicking on the desktop. It was like a beacon of hope in a sea of frustration.

It offered a few different ways to handle how clicking the desktop works:

• Always: Means that no matter what, clicking the desktop hides everything.
• Only in Stage Manager: Now this was interesting. Stage Manager is that new window organization thingy in Sonoma. Seemed like this option would only hide windows if I was using Stage Manager.

I was not using the stage manager feature, so I just found the option to turn it off. Problem solved! No more disappearing windows. My desktop was back to its glorious, cluttered self.

So, there you have it. If you’re pulling your hair out over this macOS Sonoma “feature”, just tweak those settings. Took me a while to figure it out, but it was a huge relief once I did. Hope this helps someone out there! It’s a good practice to always go through your setting options whenever a new update for anything comes out. Hopefully, you don’t have to waste as much time as me figuring it out.