forceFullDesktopBar VS apfs-fuse

They nerfed multiple desktops, back in the OSX days you would see a preview of the desktops any time you opened mission control. I use forceFull to get the functionality back but it means I can't run iOS apps from the App Store which sucks.

They should transfer over to your main display (at least that's what happens for me).

This utility might help you see what's going on: https://github.com/Jaysce/Spaceman.

And while we're on Spaces, this utility forces mission control to show full thumbnails of all spaces by default: https://github.com/briankendall/forceFullDesktopBar

I found an excellent tweak from GitHub that lets you force the Mission Control desktop previews to show up without the need to move your cursor up there. It's easy to install, check it out: https://github.com/briankendall/forceFullDesktopBar

OR to attempt to recover data from the old drive, you can use a USB and boot into a Linux Live instance, install apfs-fuse to mount the partition if it is not encrypted. Here's a tutorial to boot into Ubuntu Live. And here is a link to the github repository for apfs-fuse.

There is a WIP Linux fuse based driver on GITHUB (here).

Also potentially useful: apfs-fuse and apfsprogs.

PS: there's apparently an apfs-fuse module out there (read-only though) if you want to copy files from OSX to Linux, although I know nothing about how reliable it is.

i'd try booting a live linux environment and using apfs-fuse , easiest with an arch based distro, recommend manjaro and using AUR to install it.

Assuming you're running High Sierra or later, though, reading the drive on anything other than macOS is gonna take a bit of know-how, because it'll be APFS-formatted, and there just isn't much support for APFS on other platforms currently. You'll need to run Linux and compile apfs-fuse in order to mount the drive.

If the SSD is soldered to the logic board you might be screwed since you can't boot into Target Mode. However, for what it's worth, I yanked the SSD out of an older MBP that tanked and successfully mounted it as read-only on my Linux machine via apfs-fuse. This despite the fact that my wife's 2019 MBA with Big Sur couldn't mount or fix it.