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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

Linux is better than Windows on most counts for sure, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to use it full-time without making significant concessions on preferences about how desktop environment stuff works. If you’re someone who grew up on Macs there’s almost nothing in the Linux desktop space that tries to replicate that set of patterns… it’s all Win9X-type taskbar setups, mobile-type setups (GNOME, Pantheon), old niche *nix setups (e.g. WindowMaker), and of course minimal tiling WMs. There’s no clones of Mac OS of any flavor.

I’m proficient with more or less every modern desktop and can get by on any of any of them if I have to, but being happy doing so is another matter.

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> If you’re someone who grew up on Macs there’s almost nothing in the Linux desktop space that tries to replicate that set of patterns… it’s all Win9X-type taskbar setups, mobile-type setups (GNOME, Pantheon), old niche *nix setups (e.g. WindowMaker), and of course minimal tiling WMs. There’s no clones of Mac OS of any flavor.

Have you seen https://hyprland.org?

I know of it but haven’t tried it. It looks kin to minimal tiling WMs like i3, but with a lot of polish applied. It’s nice I’m sure, but it’s not all that Mac-like.

Have you checked out Pop_OS?

Yep. Their tweaked GNOME variant isn’t too bad, but it doesn’t fit the bill much more than vanilla GNOME does. Not that enthusiastic about what I’ve seen of COSMIC so far.

Part of the issue is that people who don’t use Mac’s think it’s only about the looks. The looks are secondary and it’s about all the little pieces of functionality that have been a part of macOS for decades at this point.

What about hyprland makes you think of Mac? These two things barely resemble each other at all.

He said he never found a solution. Hyprland is customizable, so he can make one?

It's the other way around for me, it's all the concessions I have to make on Mac that make it so annoying. All the defaults I don't like, and the inability to change them or find alternatives like I can on Linux.

I "grew up" (from college, before then didn't use computer much) on Linux and I use a Mac at work, it's pretty easy to switch back and forth for me. Just need my tiling WM, my always on screen. I do miss that you could close the laptop lid on Linux without it sleeping. But otherwise, not much complaints either way.

My Mac only sleeps on closing if it’s not plugged in and connected to external monitors. That’s how I would want it to work. How are you wanting it to work? Closing it keeps it on no matter whether it’s plugged in or not?

I want it to stay awake when I close the lid and go with it from my desk to meeting rooms. You can set Linux to basically always ignore the laptop lid close signal, which is what I want.

There's an app for that.

> preferences about how desktop environment stuff works

Having used KDE plasma, I am convinced that there is no other DE that has more knobs to make things exactly how you want it. Though I never liked the global constantly changing bar on the top in Macs anyway so can't comment on whether KDE can be made to do that.

I’ve spent time using KDE and it indeed has a lot of knobs. The options are nice but it’s still a struggle to get it configured the way I like, partially because there are no knobs for some things while some of the existing knobs control things that don’t make that much of a difference to me.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread the issue with its global menu bar is the sheer number of apps that don’t populate it. Even the same exact Electron apps that populate the menubar on macOS don’t bother under Linux. Over half the time it sits up there empty.

I went from daily driving mac and being very used to the desktop environment, and i am really hating everything i've tried in Linux.

Why is there no macOS clone for Linux? Since there is not, maybe now would be a good time for a project to start.

Such a project is something I’ve daydreamed about on many occasions, but the scope is quite daunting, especially if one wants to do it right and e.g. make sure that all core utilities adhere to the HIG and actually populate the global menubar for example.

What about “Pop! OS” ?

Don’t forget the awkward underscore in the name: “Pop!_OS”?

I believe there are a few projects like that:

https://elementary.io/

https://pearos.xyz/

https://ubuntubudgie.org/

Probably better to select and contribute to one rather than starting your own

Unfortunately those are all so far from replicating a macOS experience that the work needed to fill the gaps is about as much as would be needed starting from scratch. Resemblances in all three are surface level at best, and are far from complete even in that aspect.

Others have mentioned a few specific distros. There are also tools like https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy or https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto which make the keyboard and other aspects of the OS behave more Mac-like.

For me, Toshy's out of the box config make it pretty painless to switch between MacOS and Asahi on the same machine.

Gnome is not that different from Mac. You have your Mac-style status bar at the top, dock for apps which you can float or hide, typical window management, etc.

Gnome's top bar isn't a global menu, though. It's completely different and IMO pretty much useless.

KDE has a global menu bar that works like the one in MacOS.

Kind of. Last I checked it’s broken under Wayland, and under X11 there’s a lot of apps that don’t populate it.

I'm using it under Wayland right now. Though you are right that there are apps that don't populate it.

It's pretty hit or miss. And so far, for me, nothing comes close to topping Hyprland -- I'm perfectly happy without a global menu bar at the moment.

Gnome is very different from Aqua.

I used Gnome daily for a really long time. Gnome 3 is actually pretty good these days but it took a while to get there.

Aqua is still pretty solid but some of the shine is starting to fade.

I have all the Apple Intelligence stuff turned off yet I got a pop up ad in the OS for “Image Playground”

Apple’s solution? Turn off Image Playground in Screen Time settings. Ridiculous.

I use GNOME daily on one of my laptops and I don’t agree at all. It has some surface-level similarities, but overall is more comparable to something like iPadOS or Samsung DeX when connected to an external screen+KB+mouse.

The global menubar is the biggest difference, but there’s also a pervasive difference in philosophy throughout the desktop; where macOS will have power user functionality tucked away in a menu or hidden behind a modifier key (progressive disclosure), GNOME will just remove the function altogether.

Pantheon is very similar, except dressed up in an (admittedly pretty) skeumorphic theme that reminds me of OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have its charms, I use it after all, but it’s not a Mac OS analogue in any way.

The funniest thing for me is that on a Mac you can use EMacs-style motion commands (^A, ^E, ^K, etc) just about anywhere you enter text. No suck luck on Linux which requires using Windows's braindead Home/End buttons outside of the terminal.

GNU stuff should support the Emacs shortcuts. In theory GNOME apps too.

> No suck luck on Linux which requires using Windows's braindead Home/End buttons outside of the terminal.

Not really; I have it set up on my box so that I can press Alt + U as a shortcut for home and Alt + O as a shortcut for End (and many other such shortcuts; it's fully customizable), and this works system-wide in every application and even on the raw Linux console without X11/Wayland running.

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