I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE land.
PS: switching from GNOME to a KDE desktop session was absolutely trivial and quick on Ubuntu btw.
But then I switched to Linux and a lot of apps, specially gnome and gnome-inspired apps, have such terrible design as well. I'm going to spare you the details because I could rant about it for hours.
You're running a pre-release?
In some areas KDE has also taken inspiration from macOS, and imo significantly improved over the original. The best example in my view is the Present Windows desktop effect, which is fundamentally a take on Exposé/Mission Control but massively outdoes those equivalents in usability by adding fuzzy filtering as you type to select windows. A less appealing version of that (Contexts) is something I have to pay money to a proprietary app developer for on macOS.
The applications selector, the settings drop-downs... spatial Nautilus... it didn't just start with Gnome 3. These are all poorly-implemented, half-baked versions of MacOS features. It has been going on for years.
I mean, the thin scroll bars for $deity's sake! On MacOS this makes sense because the trackpad and trackpad/mouse work, and work very well. On Gnome, it makes no sense at all since you can't hit them with the mouse pointer.
The pain is very real with Gnome.
It's a very, very poor ape of MacOS.
I disagree, macOS has both a system tray and a global menu, a totally foreign concept for Gnome
Gnome wants to be a touch-screen/tablet OS, and it shows with their design choices
Unity 7.0 from canonical was closer to macOS
Apple has 4 distinct OS and UX for their different form factors (watch, phone, tablet, desktop)
Gnome's future looks even more Phone/Tablet oriented: https://linuxiac.com/gnome-background-apps/
I quit the gnome ecosystem when Canonical announced killing Unity, that was my perfect Desktop Environment, it was perfect, it's sad..
This applies to Pantheon too, even if it’s prettier. There unfortunately isn’t a Mac-like DE.
They stopped using Unity years ago, but it came back recently as a flavour. You can throw it into a VM and see how it is if you're exploring.
Well, that looks very opinionated to me. And I have an impression that opinion is from someone quite far from being competent on UI matters. I see it — the background kill switch — as a great simplification and I use it all the time. I absolutely hate the mess of background apps in tray, be it macOS or Windows. Here, it’s way simpler.
I say this as someone who has used the latest versions of KDE and Windows until around the release of Windows 11 (but I have seen that too).
Is it though? I mean, it is advertised by magazines and shills as such, but it really is not in practice, never has been. Back in the days, Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro, since then many distros have caught up - my go-to for many years that I also successfully got non-nerds to use has been OpenSUSE.
The original name was Mandrake, precisely because it would magically autoconfigure all your hardware and software - well before Ubuntu existed.
The issue Mandrake/Mandriva always had, was that they would go a bit overboard with the approach, ending up with a system that could feel a bit sluggish - because it had all sorts of stuff preinstalled "just in case". It was also a bit of a separate kingdom - used RPM but wasn't really compatible with the wider array of RedHat packages.
The Ubuntu innovation was that they hit a better middle ground: they were fundamentally Debian-compatible, and their autoconfiguration worked well (particularly with 3d cards, at the start) but also gave you a fairly fast desktop.
These days it's all much of a muchness really.
Still, the experience seems to have served me well in the end. I do miss that feeling of discovering all the weird themes and window managers they packaged by default, I don't get the same vibes of "any UI is possible" these days (even though the UX is probably much better by conventional criteria).
In 1999 I paid about $30 for a copy so I didn't have to spend weeks downloading it over 56k.
Memories…
I eventually learned enough to install debian-netinst and get everything working, probably within about a year.
I am a heavy Mac user at home (for about 20 years), and a heavy Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) user at work, and I don’t see that at all. Gnome is infuriating even for a Mac user. I don’t like KDE either, so I use XFCE, but I am absolutely not at home in Gnome.
I feel that this perception that Gnome is Mac-like is because the Gnome devs have strong opinions and don’t tend to compromise. But as a piece of software and desktop environment, Gnome is not more “Mac-inspired” than KDE.
I find it more that Gnome is following Android/iOS trends. They're trying to be the mobile DE, but Linux (aside from Android) on the mobile phone was DOA.
I think you could say Gnome is better than MacOS's DE, or that it's worse (to be clear, I don't think it's worse really), but my point was more that the design philosophies are close along so many axes