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Comment by svrtknst | Hacker News Reader

I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?

Like, yes, I know there are many flaws with both. A lot of sound, technical issues with windows and macos. A slew of UX ones as well. But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_.

Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications. Stuff often just works.

My experience with the distros and desktops Ive tried in Linux have felt like windows 98 with a janky web interface on top, or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.

Often feels like a thin veil on top of a technically-inclined terminal OS.

Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels?

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> Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels?

That'll depend on how much time you want to invest. /r/unixporn has a lot of _beautiful_ looking desktops but almost all of them come with a non-trivial list of configuration files and plugins ... etc.

> or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.

To an extent, this is how things feel on macOS and windows. Some things from the native app store, some things through brew/chocolate and other things are the old "go to example.com/download and then move .app or click .exe" pattern.

> /r/unixporn has a lot of _beautiful_ looking desktops

The emphasis here should be on the word _looking_ instead. A lot of these desktops (majority are hyprland setups) reveal themselves to be superficial jank when you try to do anything remotely commonplace, like connecting to a new wifi network. It's great that windows slide around at 60fps, but if your answer for managing your network is to open the cli, what even is the desktop for?

And I say this as someone who uses Gnome and maintains his own extension forks.

> but if your answer for managing your network is to open the cli, what even is the desktop for

Precisely but I'm on the "if you can see your desktop at all, you're not using the computer right" side of the coin. I use KDE because keyboard shortcuts and infinite customization and reasonably powerful automation. I do not care what things look like, so long as whatever the look like, they stay in the same spot that they have been in for the last decade.

I think my distro changes the wallpaper every point release for KDE but I'm not really sure, I only see it briefly after a reboot.

AppImage is the clear winner on the Linux desktop for things that aren't in the repos or for users that are unwilling to engage with apt too much. AppImage provides a macOS like Application experience. Flatpak is on life support; there isn't much going on there but it still works.

> Flatpak is on life support; there isn't much going on there but it still works.

Since when is Flatpak on life support? Everybody (except Ubuntu) is pushing for it, from the regular desktop distros like Feodra all the way to image based distros like KDE Linux and Fedora Silverblue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068400

https://www.osnews.com/story/142467/flatpak-not-being-active...

The KDE plasma UI feels like all the best parts of windows 10 to me. The default taskbar+clock+system tray+start menu UI feels exactly like windows 10 to me. But you can also customize it very easily. The settings menu feels a bit more like MacOS than windows’ control panel though.

Several linux distros use that UI. Im on NixOS but i probably wouldn’t recommend that as a starting place. I’ve used bazzite and it worked pretty well out of the box. But i think there’s ubuntu and debian variants that use plasma that are probably pretty good as well.

Yup, Plasma has also gotten really good. It started to get really good with 5 and has polished like crazy with 6. It's defaults are now pretty close to perfect out of the box for me as a long time windows user.

I'd say it's close to the windows 7 or 10 experience. But without any of the clutter that has crept in.

The recommendation for the average inexperienced user trying out Linux for the first time should be Kubuntu. Full stop. Saying this as an Arch and Gentoo user.

Feels like we do these rather often? Tons of people can comment with whatever they're using which they feel are great, and others can tell of their experiences with using the same and not being impressed. It's a rather endless list...

But to answer seriously: Have you tried KDE Plasma as a desktop environment? I think Fedora's KDE spin is among the better options for a distro: https://fedoraproject.org/kde/download

I personally think it's the best desktop experience, and always miss it when having to use Windows at work. I've never really worked with Macs.

KDE and Gnome are the most prominent and they "match" in the sense that they are mature environments that are quite usable. These have been in development for decades. For some reason, in the case of Windows, that doesn't mean much. I've never seen a Windows version with a buggy task bar but here comes Windows 11 with a task bar that forgets application icons (and replaces them with the generic application icon) and is generally sluggish to the feel, in my experience. Scrap my entire first sentence: it's Microsoft's turn to make an operating system as good as the competition.

There are several good quality distributions. Linux Mint is often mentioned, it comes in different flavors, including its own Cinnamon, which would also not feel too alien to the average Windows user. In my opinion, Fedora is also a good choice based on the last few years of running it on various laptops.

It's very easy to run some popular distribution in a virtual machine to get a feel for things if you're just curious.

It’s hard to say what really nice means. I have been using Ubuntu for more than a decade for all my home laptops. But I also researched models are very compatible with Linux. Also besides steam, some basic libreoffice spreadsheets and dev tools we mostly use browser and web based things. So our coverage of all the possible Desktop apps and configurations is minimal.

So I never felt like paying a “linux tax”. Quite the opposite, when I dual boot into Windows 10 it irritates me to no end. Random web based link and ads in the start menu. Updates are kind of a pain - they halt both the shutdown and the startup process. I don’t like the flat UI look in general.

As far as overall consistency and polish nothing beats MacOS but well Macs cost more. So if you look for design and UI polish and have the money that’s probably a better choice.

I've been running Bazzite exclusively for two years and, honestly, it works fine. It does work better than Windows for me, which refused to install on the same hardware.

I install everything from Flathub, I don't think I've ever installed an APK (is that a thing?)

I don't think the Linux distributions can really do anything better by themselves at this point. Most of the issues you run into are because you're trying to run Windows software (via Wine/Proton) that may have issues, the hardware support is subpar (Nvidia) or the Linux version of the app is poor.

It did finally cross the line for me where using Linux is more enjoyable than Windows or Linux, which I honestly never thought would happen when I started using it on and off ~20 years ago.

The problem with linux hasn't been the GUI for a long time, even 20 years ago you had flashier GUI than win / mac. Personally I don't care about GUI and just run i3 with shitty looking dialogs.

The problem with linux has been either hardware compatibility or when things don't work it's a pain to figure it out however I have good news on that front! For the life of me I've never managed to send audio to my monitor / TV speakers when running linux but now with Gemini I've managed to finally fix it. So if you're scared about things breaking and spending hours inside man pages.. just copy paste your console into an LLM and it'll probably help you out.

> For the life of me I've never managed to send audio to my monitor / TV speakers

Click on the volume applet, select the device.

Any decent distribution nowadays works just fine with that, and uses pipewire.

Zorin OS asks whether you want a Windows-like or MacOS-like desktop during setup.

My top recommendation for a Windows user though is Linux Mint. It's desktop is called Cinnamon and while it doesn't look exactly like any Windows desktop, it's familiar enough that people don't have trouble switching to it. Linux Mint seems to be the, "It Just Works", Linux distro these days.

Beyond that, if you don't mind installing themes, most Linux desktops can be themed to look like whatever version of Windows, MacOS, etc. that you want. Getting the feel can be more difficult. KDE Plasma is very customizable though if you are willing to spend the time.

> is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?

I guess if you install systemsettings from kde3, a text editor from gnome, remove 90% of the features from dolphin you're in the vicinity of the mess they are.

I just switched to Linux because Windows is _really_ bad lately.

I recommend Linux Mint. It has the windows feel for sure. I am not exaggerating when I say it works better than Windows.

I didn’t customize anything. Just installed it and connected to WiFi.

Key things to consider: - installing apps sometimes isn’t as easy as running an exe. But really you get the gist of .deb and .AppImage files really fast. - I don’t game but I’ve heard GPU drivers just work these days. - I am a heavy excel user. LibreOffice isn’t even close. However, for basic stuff it is usable. Excel is too bloated these days anyway so it is a pleasure to work with something that runs fast. YMMV.

Mint doesn't support latest hardware. I've just tried to install the very latest Mint released a few days ago on ASUS ProArt P16 with 5090 and it couldn't even boot the Mint installer, it just froze with the Mint logo on the screen. You typically need to wait up to 1 year to get the latest HW supported on Mint, sometimes it won't even fully support it like my previous Zephyrus G14 with a 4090 that never got e.g. display brightness control implemented.

> is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?

Sure. Ubuntu, for example.

I don't know what people's expectations are in terms of UX & GUIs, but I have been perfectly happy with Ubuntu over the last 10-15 years.

Other than gaming (I am not a gamer) and some specialized applications (Photoshop, etc.), I can always find an application on Ubuntu that worked for me: Libre Office, FreeCAD, KiCAD, IDEs, most programming languages, ...

There is no problem with installing stuff either. In the last 10 years, I did not have to build anything from source and "apt" (or its GUI equivalents) works perfectly fine.

This is the same stuff that comes up every time in these threads, and at some point, you have to consider that maybe you're holding it wrong. For example: "installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source"? Like Windows and macOS aren't hellish wastelands of unreliable and inconsistent installations? Really?

Microsoft Store? .msi? Custom .exe installer that litters random junk in inscrutable places and that is impossible to know how to cleanly uninstall? Just a zip file that you dump somewhere? Chocolatey? WinGet?

Or, macOS: Is it a .dmg with an .app that you drag to Applications? A standard installer? A custom installer that does who knows what? App Store? Homebrew? MacPorts? Just a tar.gz with random crap in it?

Meanwhile, 99% of my Linux software is "apt install foo" and that's it.

Linux can be a much cleaner and more coherent desktop experience than Windows but at some point you have to respect that you are using a fundamentally different operating system. If you're trying to use Windows on your Linux computer, you are going to have a bad time.

> Or, macOS: Is it a .dmg with an .app that you drag to Applications?

   - In 98% of cases it is a .dmg with .app ... so drag and drop or App Store install.
   - 1% of cases it is a standard installer and that is mostly because the developer is old-school and too lazy to make a .app (e.g. here's looking at you Microsoft)
   - The remaining 1% (Homebrew/Macports) is really for the power-user, and in most cases you can just download a pre-compiled mac binary from the developers Github anyway.

For example I have never used Homebrew/Macports because my 1% power-user software has been available through the developer's Github (e.g. `bazel` etc. all publish mac release binaries )

> Meanwhile, 99% of my Linux software is "apt install foo" and that's it.

But `apt install foo` is a synonym for "custom installer that does who knows what" and/or "tar.gz with random crap in it"

Why ?

Your average user will blindly follow `trust me, sudo curl foo | bash` ...

And your average user is unlikely to look at the apt package build rules and/or source and/or dependency list and in the majority of cases will just answer `Y` to any questions from `apt`.

- In 98% of cases it is a .dmg with .app ... so drag and drop or App Store install. - 1% of cases it is a standard installer and that is mostly because the developer is old-school and too lazy to make a .app (e.g. here's looking at you Microsoft)

Part of my job is automating macOS software deployment. I do this all day. I can confidently tell you that your percentages are way off. I wish you were right because dragging an app bundle into Applications is obviously the correct way to do it. But alas, that is very far from the world we live in.

For example I have never used Homebrew/Macports because my 1% power-user software has been available through the developer's Github (e.g. `bazel` etc. all publish mac release binaries )

This is "a tar.gz with random crap". Convenient perhaps, but it doesn't help your argument that macOS is less of a hellscape.

But `apt install foo` is a synonym for "custom installer that does who knows what" and/or "tar.gz with random crap in it"

No, it's really not. It knows what files it puts where and can cleanly upgrade and uninstall with a predictable and standardized method. It's not that I usually care where the files are strewn exactly, it's that I want consistent installations done in a systematic and coherent way; I don't want to rely on an UNINSTALL.EXE that, like the installer, I have no idea what it does.

KDE, you need to use KDE.

In terms of features and usability, nothing comes close to KDE, and that includes Windows and MacOS. The integration is tight - everything works with each other. Settings has flatpak permissions, the system monitor has widgets you can just use as widgets, the search backend is available in so many places. Functionally, it feels cohesive, and there's basically nothing you can't do.

Once you get it set up (which can be a pain) arch with KDE plasma is very good. KDE is very windows 10 like and intuitive. Arch gets rid of that issue of a mix of different installation methods, other than installing yay, I've never had to manually install something beyond "yay -S pkg", the aur and PKGBUILD files do really solve this issue of painful installations.

There really isn't much to set up especially for anybody diving in with Kubuntu

I felt the same way for a long time. I switched to linux Mint with cinnamon last september because I'd had enough of windows 11 and feel completely at home on this desktop. I still have to boot windows to play some VR games, unfortunately, but otherwise I'd never touch windows again or miss it.

It's a GUI designed to run from a CLI, not a GUI with a CLI bolted on.

I think you'll always pay the tax on Linux, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing from certain perspectives.

As far as app installations, system things come in from dnf on fedora 43. Everything else I install is usually a flatpak from flathub.

Linux Mint/Cinnamon matches Windows GUI and maybe makes a lot of things better. You may need to pay the Linux tax in a few other areas, but as far as UI and basic tools/settings aspects, they have it really good.

> I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows

So crappy ? Maybe something bloated like Ubuntu or Fedora.

KDE/Plasma you only need to change the default behaviour of the mouse selection and you will have a better Windows like experience out of the box.

I installed CachyOS with KDE Plasma for my 8 year old and it feels way better than Windows or MacOS, with fewer bugs too.

> Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications.

Multiple desktops on Windows is not a nice experience for me. When you switch the desktop on one display then they ALL change for every display. I need them independent ala macOS or it is just so infuriating to use. Win11 also has big Fisher Price sized title bars now and macOS Tahoe isn't far behind. I think the GUI designers are on magic mushrooms when coming up with these designs.

> is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?

I guess if you look for one you can find Linux distribution with ads in start menu

> But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_.

not to me

> Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications. Stuff often just works.

For me on Lubuntu my two desktops work well. Required a bit of googling how to setup, but it took me more time to fail at removing similar Windows annoyance.

Package managers are great, I have configuration of my packages in Ansible and single script run installs all my software except VSCodium and Android Studio.

Stuff nearly often just works.

Not sure what you mean by gestures.

> installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.

Even that beats what I remember from my Windows days that required going through billion of installer wizards, with decent chunk of them trying to bring some unwanted stuff.

And my install is nearly pure install from OS packages with some minor annoyance for Android Studio and VSCodium.

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