A little offtopic, but I'd like the _reverse_ -- a Linux-like experience on the Mac. Mac hardware and underlying macOS so I can run my favorite native apps and tap into the cleanly-syncing ecosystem, but with a non-hacky tiling window manager, relatively stable text-based locations for configuration, permissions/access patterns that don't change under my feet on every system update, and sane, smooth networking.
I consistently use Amethyst.app and it’s okay I guess? It’s great compared with other tiling on macOS, but compared to niri and sway et al it’s a shade.
For well over a decade, Linux has been more comfortable than macOS. The only drawback is that there are plenty of high-quality apps for macOS that are not available on Linux. If there were a straightforward way for developers to write once and deploy anywhere, Linux would have been the number one desktop OS.
Seems like the worst of both worlds. I wouldn't swap my mac hardware for anything so have to do my best to live with macOS but I would take any other OS over it. I just try my best to say inside a terminal if I can.
This. I don’t care much for MacOS. It pretty much gives me a terminal and browser and gets out of the way. But, the hardware, and drivers…. I can reliably shut the lid and open up at a different place and continue working. The battery last atleast a full working day. Displays text sharply. Touchpad works like no other.
I can’t imagine dealing with Linux without these conveniences.
I remain fascinated that we can have whole communities of people like r/unixporn building many user experiences that look great, but the two biggest linux desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) look like fingerpainting compared to macOS.
Clearly there are people who know how to write the software that makes the user interfaces, and clearly there are people good at designing beautiful interfaces, and all of it is FOSS for anyone to copy or build on, but for whatever reason no one can manage to put these two together, such that the big DE's look as good as macOS by default.
I hadn't heard of unixporn before, thanks. I've modified some rainmeter scripts over the years for a cozy and dense performance readout that I bring with me. I've recently ditched windows everywhere I possibly can and have been missing these overlays a little bit. I did find btop and it is about 95% of the way there, but I would like better hooks into UPS power usage and a dense per-core frequency, usage, and temperature display.
In my view, the primary issue is that the FOSS world has a distinct lack of design-minded engineers, which has been the group that's been responsible for the high quality, well designed botique apps that macOS has become known for. That world is much more skewed towards folks that are near-exclusively "nuts and bolts".
There's nothing wrong or bad about that but it manifests quite clearly in the software that gets produced.
Design-minded engineers are great for UI-focused projects because they're the most capable of striking that balance of form and function, or better yet coming up with designs that serve both. By comparison, non-technical designers and fully technical engineers are both at a disadvantage; the designers can make things nice looking but don't have a grasp on what's practical to implement while the technical engineers struggle to design UIs that are appealing to anybody but other technical people.
It's a bit of a self-reinforcing problem. The FOSS world can't attract design-minded engineers because they have such little presence in that culture.
There's a reason why unixporn only ever shows a terminal and a handful of applications in very specific states.
MacOS was (because it sure as hell isn't anymore) so great because it had multiple talented third-party designers all building on the same consistent design system.
There's a great deal of bikeshedding in the world of design.
Sure everyone can design, but there is value in having a team of people who specialise in design, and then having that enforced across the OS.
Design also means giving up on my wonderful ideas for how I think an app should work and subscribe to mimicking how the OS functions: not because this is the optimal design, but because it's going to be the most intuitive for the -user-.
The strength of OSS is the huge amount of experimentation that can go on by having everyone execute their own ideas, this however is not conducive to a unified harmonious design.
> I remain fascinated that we can have whole communities of people like r/unixporn building many user experiences that look great, but the two biggest linux desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) look like fingerpainting compared to macOS.
Opposite view, macOS for me looks like a toy UI I can do no real work with.
Those riced setups look great on screenshots but they usually have terrible visual distinction, the colors work badly with Night Light (orange filter), and they carefully select applications that can be themed or fit the theme.
Once you step outside the facade it'll look disjointed. Applications won't have blur. They'll have square blur corners with rounded window corners. Icons will look glitchy with blur. Etc.
It strikes me as a just a question of taste. No one has to do any significant extra work. Someone just has to recognize e.g. why white space matters, or wasted space, or contrast matters, and then make the necessary changes to the defaults.
It's not like we are arguing about the subjectivity of favorite colors. The basics that macOS, r/unixporn and even Windows get right and GNOME gets wrong are better understood as facts about the human visual system, and how the typical human performs when confronted with the interface.
Iunno, I write GTK4 apps and don't have any real gripes with the toolkit. My biggest issue is the color scheme, besides that I think the Libadwaita look is much easier-on-the-eyes than post-Big Sur macOS. Certainly makes a better use of screen real estate.
> Someone just has to recognize e.g. why white space matters, or wasted space, or contrast matters, and then make the necessary changes to the defaults.
I mean, this is work, but the issue is getting every single program to do it and then keeping it "correct" for the next 10 years as other people try to change.
Yes Mac might always reign supreme (given the latest design changes though I’m not quite sure…) but both DEs will still probably be head and shoulders above Windows forever.
Funny you say that, when MacOS is atrocious. I have to put up with it for work, but I wouldn't touch that crap for personal usage. If Linux was not an option, I would rather handle fucking Windows 11 than MacOS
Was a big fan of the dock about 25 years ago when I used Window Maker. Over that time spotlight and its ilk innovated the launching apps bit, and so, at least for me there is no reason to have it anymore, yet on a mac I cannot make it go away permanently (yes auto hide works - and its become a bit of a pain to set the auto hide delay because the underlying option has changed over the years, but I really just don't want it running at all).
I’ve been using Linux on and off for the past two weeks for software dev. Tried Omarchy, but tiling managers aren’t my cup of tea. I tried gnome, but it felt like I was using an iPad at first. Put on some extensions, but it still didn’t feel right to me. Ive been using KDE Plasma and it seems like a good working environment.
What's the most stable distro for trying out plasma, any recommendations would be good. Ideally I'd like to run Steam games. Another question, does plasma use Wayland?
I would agree that immutable atomic linux desktop is the future. I would go broader than Bazzite and say you can pick from whole range of similar flavors that might fit you a bit better https://universal-blue.org/ for example https://getaurora.dev/en is KDE.
It's worth saying that one advantage of atomic linux is that you can easily switch between the flavors.
Ah my bad, I never looked much into it I guess (haven't used a full DE in years). Apparently neon is built on Ubuntu and KDE Linux is a new immutable-based thing. (They don't list it at https://kde.org/distributions/ and it's not exactly easy to search for with that name..!)
This mirrors my thoughts but as someone who has/is trying to bend KDE into a mac-like experience, there are other big road blockers to getting the same smooth workflow:
- the global app menu doesn’t work for most apps because GTK based ones yanked support and generally don’t implement it. With Firefox being the most commonly recommended browser and it still not supporting this, you have a glaring hole in having a unified UX in daily usage
- consistent and common shortcuts for main functionality. Having everything tied to CMD and being the same in all apps makes for a predictable UX. While you can achieve it with remapping (ex: toshy), I’ve found the experience to have just enough rough edge cases that it breaks me out of my flow constantly
- configurable 1:1 gestures and other non-keyboard centric accessibility features. At the end of the day, every Linux DE is keyboard centric. If you have disability issues that make it hard to stay on your keyboard, then I think macOS generally has the nicest feel (meaning lowest chance of hitting an edge case or bug). GNOME has stability but lacks the breadth of UX features while some other DEs have a greater breadth and configurability but lacks the stability
Overall, you aren’t going to ever get a truly mac-like experience on Linux because no one is specifically targeting the same UX design goals. You can try to tweak things endlessly, but you’ll end up spending more time working out bugs than actually using the system. If you plan to use Linux, be prepared to change your workflow and pick the DE whose design goals most closely match what you’re willing to adopt.
P.S. - I don’t mention aesthetics because I think everyone who brings that up detracts from the actual UX differences. At the end of the day, if you can match the UX entirely, then how the DE looks doesn’t matter. I mean look at how Liquid Glass is changing the look entirely. Yet the core UX principles are still the same and that’s what really matters (for those looking for a mac-like experience).
At my jobs I'm consistently offered to choose between a Windows ThinkPad or a Mac (the devil and the deep blue sea, so to speak). I'd really appreciate a Gnome/Cinnamon/xfce4/KDE/...-like experience on Mac. Even a Windows XP-like experience would be a very welcome improvement.
I think Pop OS! + Toshi for keybindings is the best Mac-like experience. Toshi gives me all the main Mac keyboard shortcuts and in recent years Pop OS has built in something close enough to Spotlight and the dock, that covers the things I find most important about the Mac experience.
Now‘s not the best time to try Pop OS!, unfortunately, as they’ve been focused on Cosmic. They’re making progress, though, so I hope the benefits of Cosmic will pan out, and we’ll soon be in the best time to try Pop OS!.
This is fascinating. I haven't used a dock in macOS in many years. Nor desktop icons (they're there, but I never really see the desktop). I don't really even use the global menubar much either. I guess I use macOS like gnome these days, probably because gnome is more like an evolution of pre-OS X operating systems (more like, not exactly like) than an iteration of OS X/macOS. That's an amusing result because I don't even use gnome on linux (I'm all niri now).
As for KDE, it's an extraordinary project. It is a genuine accomplishment. It's just not for me, because, for me, it's far too distracting, with options and configuration and more options on that invading the unsettled war zone that is my brain.
Mac-Like is quite the stretch. I’ve always found KDE to be the least attractive desktop environment. It’s like the devs spent a decade copying windows and then finally realized that was a mistake and now it’s in sort of a limbo where it looks disjointed. Every kde guide I run across is a tutorial on how to make kde look like something else. Still an excellent group of devs working on it of course. My first task if I still used Linux would be how to make kde look like Enlightenment.
I agree that "mac-like" is a stretch. It's not about being pixel-perfect (as mentioned in the blog post) but rather about very different behaviors and philosophies, and of course even if you enable the optional global menu half the programs don't populate it.
I guess everyone will have their own preferred niche option, but I'm disappointed the author didn't even mention elementaryOS. If they tried it and discarded it as they did Gnome, I'd be curious to know why.
I have been looking into Desktop Linux recently because macOS has taken a bit of a quality dip. GNOME - I'm never going to pronounce it guh-nome, please stop, it's embarrassing - seems to have a strong alignment with the old macOS philosophy. It's opinionated.
It also clearly copies macOS: Epiphany and the Settings app being prime examples.
I installed NixOS on an old T2 MacBook Pro, and it's... awful. Things just don't work, or don't work properly. It actually reminds me of running macOS on PCs back in the day (osx86, etc). GNOME 49 is headed in the right direction I think, but Desktop Linux is still in an absolute state.
As a daily GNOME user, this is inaccurate. OP is comparing each DE's out-of-the-box experience which is obviously not meant to be left untouched. Both GNOME and KDE have hundreds of extensions that augment functionality in various ways. For a macOS-like experience on GNOME not much is needed:
- A dock like the one provided by the excellent Dash-to-dock extension
- Toolbar buttons like fullscreen and minimize can be easily enabled from GNOME Tweaks or with the `gsettings` CLI. They can even be moved to the left side of the title bar.
- Desktop icons are available by default, I know because I explicitly disable them.
- The "system tray" is supported with the AppIndicator extension
- Lots of customization options are available in GNOME too in the Control Center, through GNOME Tweaks and the `gsettings` CLI.
- Extensions like Blur My Shell and Rounded Window Corners can bring the experience even closer to the recent macOS one (I'm not aware of any Liquid Glass extensions at the moment). Shell themes are a thing too, you can change anything.
Ubuntu bundles most of this much friendlier GNOME experience as the default. I wonder what distro OP chose.
Personally, I think KDE doesn't have that much to offer over GNOME, except maybe stability and KDE connect for phone integration.
Yes it is a weak point. In the end, no matter what you choose you'll have to make a compromise. Some people prefer extra stability, others prefer a specific workflow or UI theme. It's entirely up to you and that's what makes Linux so great!
My experience has been that while gnome extensions can break with updates. KDE’s built in customization is already buggy as hell. So your choice is to either use gnome for a generally good experience and disable extensions when something breaks, or use kde and not know what feature will break what.
Gnome team probably made the (correct) choice that they couldn’t reasonably maintain a massively customizable de with their resources.
As someone that used GNOME 1.0, was contributor to Gtkmm for a brief moment, the fact that GNOME 3.0 needs so many extensions, versus GNOME 1.0 - 2.0 default experience, and its dependency on JavaScript already rules it out for me.
Indeed, Ubuntu has to ship additional GNOME extensions for basic features Unity already offered, and they didn't want a revolt when decided to drop Unity.
This is true, I don't like the fact that JS is needed either, but as someone who has used Unity as well, the current state of GNOME is much better in other aspects. As far as I can tell, JS was chosen to make it easier to extend, without requiring knowledge of systems programming languages like C, while also preventing all sorts of memory bugs which could crash the whole desktop (technically still possible, but harder to accidentally do).
Unless you want to significantly change how gnome works (nothing wrong with that! It's awesome you can do tons of experimenting that way) you really only need two or three extensions to work around bone headed decisions from the gnome team.
> versus GNOME 1.0 - 2.0 default experience
I honestly think GNOME pre 3.something sucked and always saw KDE 3 as vastly superior (KDE 3 mod even more so) than gnome of those days. Things got a lot rougher with KDE in version 4 and even 5 but they seem to be course correcting and producing something finally mostly superior to KDE 3.
> and its dependency on JavaScript already rules it out for me.
Its not a full browser running in gnome, but actually their own thing with a much more reasonable footprint (haha get it?) and a lot less baggage than a full web view. There is no npm ecosystem, no crazy 1000s of libraries dependency for each extension, no DOM, very simple and direct CSS implementation, no web APIs and so on. Anyway, what other dynamic language would you recommend to be used in this situation? Python? Would that really be better in terms of speed and memory usage?
> Indeed, Ubuntu has to ship additional GNOME extensions for basic features Unity already offered,
Well, duh, gnome is not unity so for ubuntu to make GNOME into unity they do need a way to modify it, and I bet you they are glad they can just use the extension system rather than keep a giant patchset of C code that they need to maintain each release (well they do, but it's much smaller than it would have to be if no extension system existed.).
Besides, Canonical can easily deal with their own extensions breaking each release because they are the distribution and can plan around it, breaking is more of a problem for the extensions that users add, and I do agree GNOME ought to come up with a better way of handling it.
All of it is subjective of course, and I will admit that once upon a time I was a tinkerer to try and find the perfect DE and UI for me. However, about 15 years ago I just got tired of that pursuit and just decided what MacOS gave me out of the box was fine. Now only tweaked by Rectangle just to handle window tiling a bit better.
What I discovered is that all of the effort I spent trying to get to that place of “productivity” I lost so much time that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. Not to mention the amount of time needed just to replace a machine to get it “usable”. My efforts towards that productive utopia made me not productive.
Hats off though to anyone who actually gets there and gets a measurable net benefit for their efforts. But for those still in that pursuit, I’d recommend trying to just go out of the box for awhile. It can be liberating and you might find those annoyances you are fixated on in your current out of the box OS, might become less important if you just dive in.
I for one love terrible out of the box experiences and have to magically know what extensions are good and will solve whatever problems I have with the DE. It's so freeing to spend all my time hunting down extensions and and keeping them updated or magically have them break when the DE updates. Even better is when all these extensions aren't handled by the distros' package manager!
> I for one love terrible out of the box experiences and have to magically know what extensions are good and will solve whatever problems I have with the DE.
The first day you got your Mac, did you know what apps to install or where you can get them from? Did you know how to customize your desktop or set a screensaver? macOS is becoming less and less intuitive with every update.
No matter what you do, using Linux with any DE requires this to some extent. I didn't know about these things either when I started using GNOME.
> It's so freeing to spend all my time hunting down extensions and and keeping them updated or magically have them break when the DE updates.
Extensions are automatically updated once a new version is released. Finding them is as easy as finding apps in any app or extension store and the same goes for KDE.
Actively maintained extensions have no issues with breaking updates and there's always the option of delaying a GNOME upgrade until things stabilize. Apps like Extension Manager let you know about compatibility issues before upgrading.
> Even better is when all these extensions aren't handled by the distros' package manager!
Your distro's package repositories have no obligation to support installing extensions for your DE. Do you only install Microsoft Store apps?
A little offtopic, but I'd like the _reverse_ -- a Linux-like experience on the Mac. Mac hardware and underlying macOS so I can run my favorite native apps and tap into the cleanly-syncing ecosystem, but with a non-hacky tiling window manager, relatively stable text-based locations for configuration, permissions/access patterns that don't change under my feet on every system update, and sane, smooth networking.
Oh gosh please, I would love to use Niri / Hyprland on macOS — that is the one major driving force keeping me in between the two.
I would also gladly move permanently to Linux if it had full iCloud support, with stuff like native iMessage at least
I consistently use Amethyst.app and it’s okay I guess? It’s great compared with other tiling on macOS, but compared to niri and sway et al it’s a shade.
Same. Aerospace, Yabai and co are great efforts, but it’s just all so hacky and frustrating.
For well over a decade, Linux has been more comfortable than macOS. The only drawback is that there are plenty of high-quality apps for macOS that are not available on Linux. If there were a straightforward way for developers to write once and deploy anywhere, Linux would have been the number one desktop OS.
1. proxy icons on document windows
2. column view for drill-down ui's especially in file managers
Seems like the worst of both worlds. I wouldn't swap my mac hardware for anything so have to do my best to live with macOS but I would take any other OS over it. I just try my best to say inside a terminal if I can.
This. I don’t care much for MacOS. It pretty much gives me a terminal and browser and gets out of the way. But, the hardware, and drivers…. I can reliably shut the lid and open up at a different place and continue working. The battery last atleast a full working day. Displays text sharply. Touchpad works like no other.
I can’t imagine dealing with Linux without these conveniences.
>> Seems like the worst of both worlds
Before the Silicon Mac chips, installing Linux on Mac hardware was the best of both worlds. Asahi doesn't work for me so far, sadly.
I remain fascinated that we can have whole communities of people like r/unixporn building many user experiences that look great, but the two biggest linux desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) look like fingerpainting compared to macOS.
Clearly there are people who know how to write the software that makes the user interfaces, and clearly there are people good at designing beautiful interfaces, and all of it is FOSS for anyone to copy or build on, but for whatever reason no one can manage to put these two together, such that the big DE's look as good as macOS by default.
I hadn't heard of unixporn before, thanks. I've modified some rainmeter scripts over the years for a cozy and dense performance readout that I bring with me. I've recently ditched windows everywhere I possibly can and have been missing these overlays a little bit. I did find btop and it is about 95% of the way there, but I would like better hooks into UPS power usage and a dense per-core frequency, usage, and temperature display.
In my view, the primary issue is that the FOSS world has a distinct lack of design-minded engineers, which has been the group that's been responsible for the high quality, well designed botique apps that macOS has become known for. That world is much more skewed towards folks that are near-exclusively "nuts and bolts".
There's nothing wrong or bad about that but it manifests quite clearly in the software that gets produced.
Design-minded engineers are great for UI-focused projects because they're the most capable of striking that balance of form and function, or better yet coming up with designs that serve both. By comparison, non-technical designers and fully technical engineers are both at a disadvantage; the designers can make things nice looking but don't have a grasp on what's practical to implement while the technical engineers struggle to design UIs that are appealing to anybody but other technical people.
It's a bit of a self-reinforcing problem. The FOSS world can't attract design-minded engineers because they have such little presence in that culture.
There's a reason why unixporn only ever shows a terminal and a handful of applications in very specific states.
MacOS was (because it sure as hell isn't anymore) so great because it had multiple talented third-party designers all building on the same consistent design system.
For the most part, I agree. But sometimes you come across ones like this that clearly go into the actual UX elements of an UI: https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/1l5ll27/hyprland_...
There's a great deal of bikeshedding in the world of design.
Sure everyone can design, but there is value in having a team of people who specialise in design, and then having that enforced across the OS.
Design also means giving up on my wonderful ideas for how I think an app should work and subscribe to mimicking how the OS functions: not because this is the optimal design, but because it's going to be the most intuitive for the -user-.
The strength of OSS is the huge amount of experimentation that can go on by having everyone execute their own ideas, this however is not conducive to a unified harmonious design.
> I remain fascinated that we can have whole communities of people like r/unixporn building many user experiences that look great, but the two biggest linux desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) look like fingerpainting compared to macOS.
Opposite view, macOS for me looks like a toy UI I can do no real work with.
Those riced setups look great on screenshots but they usually have terrible visual distinction, the colors work badly with Night Light (orange filter), and they carefully select applications that can be themed or fit the theme.
Once you step outside the facade it'll look disjointed. Applications won't have blur. They'll have square blur corners with rounded window corners. Icons will look glitchy with blur. Etc.
Sounds like you didn't finish your last rice lol
Like most things, because actually doing it is a lot of hard thankless work that involves saying no to people a lot.
Linus is basically famous for saying "no", there's a reason for that.
It strikes me as a just a question of taste. No one has to do any significant extra work. Someone just has to recognize e.g. why white space matters, or wasted space, or contrast matters, and then make the necessary changes to the defaults.
It's not like we are arguing about the subjectivity of favorite colors. The basics that macOS, r/unixporn and even Windows get right and GNOME gets wrong are better understood as facts about the human visual system, and how the typical human performs when confronted with the interface.
Iunno, I write GTK4 apps and don't have any real gripes with the toolkit. My biggest issue is the color scheme, besides that I think the Libadwaita look is much easier-on-the-eyes than post-Big Sur macOS. Certainly makes a better use of screen real estate.
> Someone just has to recognize e.g. why white space matters, or wasted space, or contrast matters, and then make the necessary changes to the defaults.
I mean, this is work, but the issue is getting every single program to do it and then keeping it "correct" for the next 10 years as other people try to change.
Linus has zero relevance to the Linux desktop user experience.
Yes Mac might always reign supreme (given the latest design changes though I’m not quite sure…) but both DEs will still probably be head and shoulders above Windows forever.
Funny you say that, when MacOS is atrocious. I have to put up with it for work, but I wouldn't touch that crap for personal usage. If Linux was not an option, I would rather handle fucking Windows 11 than MacOS
Was a big fan of the dock about 25 years ago when I used Window Maker. Over that time spotlight and its ilk innovated the launching apps bit, and so, at least for me there is no reason to have it anymore, yet on a mac I cannot make it go away permanently (yes auto hide works - and its become a bit of a pain to set the auto hide delay because the underlying option has changed over the years, but I really just don't want it running at all).
I’ve been using Linux on and off for the past two weeks for software dev. Tried Omarchy, but tiling managers aren’t my cup of tea. I tried gnome, but it felt like I was using an iPad at first. Put on some extensions, but it still didn’t feel right to me. Ive been using KDE Plasma and it seems like a good working environment.
Gnome plus Whitesur-gtk-theme would have been a much better choice. I’ve been using it for many years now and it is a great experience.
https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/12/22/1300 is a good summary of where things were after a year or so.
What's the most stable distro for trying out plasma, any recommendations would be good. Ideally I'd like to run Steam games. Another question, does plasma use Wayland?
Bazzite is basically a third-party SteamOS clone that is intended to run on all devices. It has a Plasma version available. https://bazzite.gg
I would agree that immutable atomic linux desktop is the future. I would go broader than Bazzite and say you can pick from whole range of similar flavors that might fit you a bit better https://universal-blue.org/ for example https://getaurora.dev/en is KDE.
It's worth saying that one advantage of atomic linux is that you can easily switch between the flavors.
I use it with Arch and it’s very stable. It does use Wayland.
Fedora KDE edition is quite stable for me, though it is cutting edge.
KDE recently created their own distro called neon.
https://neon.kde.org/
KDE Linux is the new one, Neon's been around for years. https://kde.org/linux/
Ah my bad, I never looked much into it I guess (haven't used a full DE in years). Apparently neon is built on Ubuntu and KDE Linux is a new immutable-based thing. (They don't list it at https://kde.org/distributions/ and it's not exactly easy to search for with that name..!)
CachyOS is a great way to get started. Plasma has both X11 and Wayland backends.
I’m enjoying using Kubuntu. Yes it runs on Wayland.
It is preinstalled on steam deck
This mirrors my thoughts but as someone who has/is trying to bend KDE into a mac-like experience, there are other big road blockers to getting the same smooth workflow:
- the global app menu doesn’t work for most apps because GTK based ones yanked support and generally don’t implement it. With Firefox being the most commonly recommended browser and it still not supporting this, you have a glaring hole in having a unified UX in daily usage
- consistent and common shortcuts for main functionality. Having everything tied to CMD and being the same in all apps makes for a predictable UX. While you can achieve it with remapping (ex: toshy), I’ve found the experience to have just enough rough edge cases that it breaks me out of my flow constantly
- configurable 1:1 gestures and other non-keyboard centric accessibility features. At the end of the day, every Linux DE is keyboard centric. If you have disability issues that make it hard to stay on your keyboard, then I think macOS generally has the nicest feel (meaning lowest chance of hitting an edge case or bug). GNOME has stability but lacks the breadth of UX features while some other DEs have a greater breadth and configurability but lacks the stability
Overall, you aren’t going to ever get a truly mac-like experience on Linux because no one is specifically targeting the same UX design goals. You can try to tweak things endlessly, but you’ll end up spending more time working out bugs than actually using the system. If you plan to use Linux, be prepared to change your workflow and pick the DE whose design goals most closely match what you’re willing to adopt.
P.S. - I don’t mention aesthetics because I think everyone who brings that up detracts from the actual UX differences. At the end of the day, if you can match the UX entirely, then how the DE looks doesn’t matter. I mean look at how Liquid Glass is changing the look entirely. Yet the core UX principles are still the same and that’s what really matters (for those looking for a mac-like experience).
There are also GNOME themes if you want a FOSS approximation of macOS:
https://github.com/vinceliuice/MacTahoe-gtk-theme
https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme
I’ve stuck to WhiteSur :)
At my jobs I'm consistently offered to choose between a Windows ThinkPad or a Mac (the devil and the deep blue sea, so to speak). I'd really appreciate a Gnome/Cinnamon/xfce4/KDE/...-like experience on Mac. Even a Windows XP-like experience would be a very welcome improvement.
I wish we could go back to trying for a NeXT-like experience.
Windowmaker hasn't been updated since 2023, Nextspace in almost a year, Etoile even longer....
At least the GnuStep folks are still at it. Anyone know of a good distro for the Raspberry Pi for this?
I think Pop OS! + Toshi for keybindings is the best Mac-like experience. Toshi gives me all the main Mac keyboard shortcuts and in recent years Pop OS has built in something close enough to Spotlight and the dock, that covers the things I find most important about the Mac experience.
Now‘s not the best time to try Pop OS!, unfortunately, as they’ve been focused on Cosmic. They’re making progress, though, so I hope the benefits of Cosmic will pan out, and we’ll soon be in the best time to try Pop OS!.
This is fascinating. I haven't used a dock in macOS in many years. Nor desktop icons (they're there, but I never really see the desktop). I don't really even use the global menubar much either. I guess I use macOS like gnome these days, probably because gnome is more like an evolution of pre-OS X operating systems (more like, not exactly like) than an iteration of OS X/macOS. That's an amusing result because I don't even use gnome on linux (I'm all niri now).
As for KDE, it's an extraordinary project. It is a genuine accomplishment. It's just not for me, because, for me, it's far too distracting, with options and configuration and more options on that invading the unsettled war zone that is my brain.
Including a nice IDE (KDevelop), and a full stack framework experience with the maturity of Qt and KDE own extensability on top.
Microsoft could take some lessons for COM tooling out of how KDE does plugins and inter application IPC.
Mac-Like is quite the stretch. I’ve always found KDE to be the least attractive desktop environment. It’s like the devs spent a decade copying windows and then finally realized that was a mistake and now it’s in sort of a limbo where it looks disjointed. Every kde guide I run across is a tutorial on how to make kde look like something else. Still an excellent group of devs working on it of course. My first task if I still used Linux would be how to make kde look like Enlightenment.
I agree that "mac-like" is a stretch. It's not about being pixel-perfect (as mentioned in the blog post) but rather about very different behaviors and philosophies, and of course even if you enable the optional global menu half the programs don't populate it.
KDE really has a "lot going on".
I've managed to find a setup with Gnome that largely gets out of my way and operates quickly enough.
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You can run random binaries on macOS just like you can on Linux.
I guess everyone will have their own preferred niche option, but I'm disappointed the author didn't even mention elementaryOS. If they tried it and discarded it as they did Gnome, I'd be curious to know why.
I've tried a bunch of Linux GUIs. The only two that had a chance were Mint and elementaryOS.
> A Mac-like experience on Linux
Gnome is not like Mac. Who would have thought ? /s
I don't like Gnome but, like the author of the article, i have more than one choice. Ranting that apples are not oranges only wastes people time.
I have been looking into Desktop Linux recently because macOS has taken a bit of a quality dip. GNOME - I'm never going to pronounce it guh-nome, please stop, it's embarrassing - seems to have a strong alignment with the old macOS philosophy. It's opinionated.
It also clearly copies macOS: Epiphany and the Settings app being prime examples.
I installed NixOS on an old T2 MacBook Pro, and it's... awful. Things just don't work, or don't work properly. It actually reminds me of running macOS on PCs back in the day (osx86, etc). GNOME 49 is headed in the right direction I think, but Desktop Linux is still in an absolute state.
whats a T2 MacBook Pro?
It’s an Intel MacBook with an Apple T2 Security Chip.
As a daily GNOME user, this is inaccurate. OP is comparing each DE's out-of-the-box experience which is obviously not meant to be left untouched. Both GNOME and KDE have hundreds of extensions that augment functionality in various ways. For a macOS-like experience on GNOME not much is needed: - A dock like the one provided by the excellent Dash-to-dock extension - Toolbar buttons like fullscreen and minimize can be easily enabled from GNOME Tweaks or with the `gsettings` CLI. They can even be moved to the left side of the title bar. - Desktop icons are available by default, I know because I explicitly disable them. - The "system tray" is supported with the AppIndicator extension - Lots of customization options are available in GNOME too in the Control Center, through GNOME Tweaks and the `gsettings` CLI. - Extensions like Blur My Shell and Rounded Window Corners can bring the experience even closer to the recent macOS one (I'm not aware of any Liquid Glass extensions at the moment). Shell themes are a thing too, you can change anything.
Ubuntu bundles most of this much friendlier GNOME experience as the default. I wonder what distro OP chose.
Personally, I think KDE doesn't have that much to offer over GNOME, except maybe stability and KDE connect for phone integration.
I think the fact that GNOME extensions break/need to be updated with each DE upgrade is a great reason to pick KDE over GNOME.
Yes it is a weak point. In the end, no matter what you choose you'll have to make a compromise. Some people prefer extra stability, others prefer a specific workflow or UI theme. It's entirely up to you and that's what makes Linux so great!
My experience has been that while gnome extensions can break with updates. KDE’s built in customization is already buggy as hell. So your choice is to either use gnome for a generally good experience and disable extensions when something breaks, or use kde and not know what feature will break what.
Gnome team probably made the (correct) choice that they couldn’t reasonably maintain a massively customizable de with their resources.
As someone that used GNOME 1.0, was contributor to Gtkmm for a brief moment, the fact that GNOME 3.0 needs so many extensions, versus GNOME 1.0 - 2.0 default experience, and its dependency on JavaScript already rules it out for me.
Indeed, Ubuntu has to ship additional GNOME extensions for basic features Unity already offered, and they didn't want a revolt when decided to drop Unity.
This is true, I don't like the fact that JS is needed either, but as someone who has used Unity as well, the current state of GNOME is much better in other aspects. As far as I can tell, JS was chosen to make it easier to extend, without requiring knowledge of systems programming languages like C, while also preventing all sorts of memory bugs which could crash the whole desktop (technically still possible, but harder to accidentally do).
> GNOME 3.0 needs so many extensions
Unless you want to significantly change how gnome works (nothing wrong with that! It's awesome you can do tons of experimenting that way) you really only need two or three extensions to work around bone headed decisions from the gnome team.
> versus GNOME 1.0 - 2.0 default experience
I honestly think GNOME pre 3.something sucked and always saw KDE 3 as vastly superior (KDE 3 mod even more so) than gnome of those days. Things got a lot rougher with KDE in version 4 and even 5 but they seem to be course correcting and producing something finally mostly superior to KDE 3.
> and its dependency on JavaScript already rules it out for me.
Its not a full browser running in gnome, but actually their own thing with a much more reasonable footprint (haha get it?) and a lot less baggage than a full web view. There is no npm ecosystem, no crazy 1000s of libraries dependency for each extension, no DOM, very simple and direct CSS implementation, no web APIs and so on. Anyway, what other dynamic language would you recommend to be used in this situation? Python? Would that really be better in terms of speed and memory usage?
> Indeed, Ubuntu has to ship additional GNOME extensions for basic features Unity already offered,
Well, duh, gnome is not unity so for ubuntu to make GNOME into unity they do need a way to modify it, and I bet you they are glad they can just use the extension system rather than keep a giant patchset of C code that they need to maintain each release (well they do, but it's much smaller than it would have to be if no extension system existed.).
Besides, Canonical can easily deal with their own extensions breaking each release because they are the distribution and can plan around it, breaking is more of a problem for the extensions that users add, and I do agree GNOME ought to come up with a better way of handling it.
All of it is subjective of course, and I will admit that once upon a time I was a tinkerer to try and find the perfect DE and UI for me. However, about 15 years ago I just got tired of that pursuit and just decided what MacOS gave me out of the box was fine. Now only tweaked by Rectangle just to handle window tiling a bit better.
What I discovered is that all of the effort I spent trying to get to that place of “productivity” I lost so much time that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. Not to mention the amount of time needed just to replace a machine to get it “usable”. My efforts towards that productive utopia made me not productive.
Hats off though to anyone who actually gets there and gets a measurable net benefit for their efforts. But for those still in that pursuit, I’d recommend trying to just go out of the box for awhile. It can be liberating and you might find those annoyances you are fixated on in your current out of the box OS, might become less important if you just dive in.
Exactly, the article makes no sense. Dash-to-dock is fantastic.
I for one love terrible out of the box experiences and have to magically know what extensions are good and will solve whatever problems I have with the DE. It's so freeing to spend all my time hunting down extensions and and keeping them updated or magically have them break when the DE updates. Even better is when all these extensions aren't handled by the distros' package manager!
> I for one love terrible out of the box experiences and have to magically know what extensions are good and will solve whatever problems I have with the DE.
The first day you got your Mac, did you know what apps to install or where you can get them from? Did you know how to customize your desktop or set a screensaver? macOS is becoming less and less intuitive with every update.
No matter what you do, using Linux with any DE requires this to some extent. I didn't know about these things either when I started using GNOME.
> It's so freeing to spend all my time hunting down extensions and and keeping them updated or magically have them break when the DE updates.
Extensions are automatically updated once a new version is released. Finding them is as easy as finding apps in any app or extension store and the same goes for KDE.
Actively maintained extensions have no issues with breaking updates and there's always the option of delaying a GNOME upgrade until things stabilize. Apps like Extension Manager let you know about compatibility issues before upgrading.
> Even better is when all these extensions aren't handled by the distros' package manager!
Your distro's package repositories have no obligation to support installing extensions for your DE. Do you only install Microsoft Store apps?