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!
For a nice experience I would start with elementary OS or Linux mint.
The first will please your aesthetic from the get go.
I hear a lot of people say stuff like that “start with”. But is it so easy to switch of you picked one? Like don’t you have to get all your files in an external drive and delete a full computer before you can reinstall a different disto?
If you seek that kind of advice don’t better don’t format your drive with all of your data. Try installing distro of your choice on some old hardware you have and use it occasionally and understand if linux in general and specific distro in particular is what you want.
For a start you would have a bootable pen drive, just to take a look around. If a certain distro doesn’t suit you, don’t install it. After installation, the hurdles get bigger, just as you say.
The two mentioned distros are already tailored towards easy use, but there are many ways to skin the cat. The distributions work with different desktop managers, each with different philosophies. On some distro you can choose or change the desktop manager afterwards (and potentially break your system).
Take the popular cachyOS. Its most useable desktop manager is KDE Plasma, but it has support for a several others (17). Some better, some worse.
Here a tier list of desktop environments showing some desktop manager und Debian 13.
EDIT: Keep in mind, that you can further customize and tailor desktop environments to your needs.
Note that you can have a separate partition for the
/homedirectory, under which your user directory is located. Then you could wipe just the system partition and install a new distro there, keeping/homeas it is. But this requires some basic knowledge of partitions and a little attention during setup. In any case, having a backup is always recommended, especially when dealing with operations that can delete all your data.Many distros you don’t even have to do anything but install packages to switch desktop environments, which are really what people are recommending when they’re trying to say what is similar to mac
Ok so what I understand is that the disto has more to do with compatibilities, optimization and updates whole desktop environment is more the UX and user experience?
Yeah the DE is your desktop, launcher, window manager, setting manager etc. So Gnome, KDE Plasma, mutter, etc. It is what most people will notice.
The distro is basically a package manager and assembly of packages. So if you were to use ubuntu for instance, there is a default DE, but you’ll notice there are a bunch of “flavors” available. These are mostly different desktop environments and default applications, but all of the stuff in any of them are in the package lists and available to install regardless of flavor.
The main differences between distros are
It’s a lot easier to switch Distros than switching from Windows or MacOS to Linux in the first place.
But you’re still going to be reinstalling the OS and all your programs again.
However - You can try most Linux distros without installing them, like give it a go for a night, if you don’t like it at all, nothing has changed. If you do, maybe try another night (and another) if you really like it, make the choice.
It’s not easy to switch, but it can be made easier if you keep all your important files in one place.