A MAC-Like Experience on Linux
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Linux Desktop Environments
Macos Alternatives
User Experience
The article discusses achieving a Mac-like experience on Linux, sparking a debate among commenters about the best desktop environment and design choices.
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Oct 4, 2025 at 10:31 AM EDT
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I used to use Windows and using control key for everything was leading me to have severe wrist pain. That ended ~14 years ago when I was forced to use Macbooks for work. The position of the command key and using my stronger thumb for all shortcuts is so vastly superior to stretching my pinky to reach control. It's bizarre the rest of the industry is still stuck with this design. I wish system76 and pop os would be strongly opinionated about this and design their laptops and keyboards to be more mac-like and use something like Toshi as the default. I had a mini rant about this on reddit recently. I still find it bizarre that System76 made the launch keyboard with a different layout for the super key than their laptops.
It's worth saying that one advantage of atomic linux is that you can easily switch between the flavors.
It’s cutting edge, but not bleeding edge ;)
https://neon.kde.org/
I've managed to find a setup with Gnome that largely gets out of my way and operates quickly enough.
I would also gladly move permanently to Linux if it had full iCloud support, with stuff like native iMessage at least
I only wish there were a better X server for iOS these days. VNC is a bit fiddly.
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.
Gnome team probably made the (correct) choice that they couldn’t reasonably maintain a massively customizable de with their resources.
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?
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.
There are also enough famous GJS memory leak issues in the past.
https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem...
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.
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.
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.
Linus is basically famous for saying "no", there's a reason for that.
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.
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.
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're a bit of a twat lol
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.
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.
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.
Opposite view, macOS for me looks like a toy UI I can do no real work with.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/liqui...
I can’t imagine dealing with Linux without these conveniences.
In saying that, the touchpad experience on the MBA is a touch better, and of course, the battery life is much better on the MBA (as is the thermal effeciency).
In spite of these minor shortcomings, I'm super happy with my ThinkPad in terms of just how stable and reliable it's been under Bazzite/KDE, like never once have I had any issues with the suspend-resume functionality - something that even Windows machines struggle with every now and then.
If only the Snapdragon ThinkPads had first-class Linux support like the x86 ones do... I reckon they can come pretty close to the MacBooks in terms of battery life, unfortunately they're not quite there yet.
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.
https://github.com/vinceliuice/MacTahoe-gtk-theme
https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme
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.
Linux is bound to be the number one gaming machine in time; general apps aside.
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?
- 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).
1. proxy icons on document windows
2. column view for drill-down ui's especially in file managers
Microsoft could take some lessons for COM tooling out of how KDE does plugins and inter application IPC.
https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/12/22/1300 is a good summary of where things were after a year or so.
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.
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.