I’m on board that we need to become independent from big tech. As someone who is fond of the Mac user experience, from choosing hardware to how you navigate through apps, I need a guide to make the switch, so if you know of any great guides for Mac users, I’d greatly appreciate it!
Edit: you have all been very useful. I now know a bit more how to start and what it would mean to switch!
Ignore people telling you you have to use GNOME. Use whatever looks good to you. I actually have a KDE Plasma desktop with a Mac-like layout. The DE doesn’t matter much though.
I will say that Gnome will act like you expect out of the box, but it’ll only ever do that. KDE can act like whatever you want, and you can customize it to fit what you want easily. Luckily, like you said, it doesn’t matter. You can install a new one and run either/both.
Fully agree that the DE doesn’t matter much. I’ve used KDE and XFCE the most over the years, and cinnamon, gnome, and even enlightenment a bit over the years. I was never a big fan of gnome, however I recently got a 2in1 laptop, and after a few days of tinkering… I think gnome is a bit better for that kind of interaction than than the others.
There are things to like and dislike with all of them I’d say.
I used a customized XFCE with Peppermint OS 10. They did a redesign with 11 and it just wasn’t the same. I miss that desktop so much. XFCE is great, especially on lower-end hardware. The biggest downer for me is no global menu support.
The Mac themes on KDE are pretty great, and so is the customizability. KDE makes things very easy to tweak until you like it. GNOME does not.
I went from Mac to Linux and use Plasma because I really can’t get on with GNOME. People go on like its 1:1 to macOS, but it really isn’t. GNOME feels so much more restrictive to me.