My parents have this old 2015 MacBook Air that they wanted to use but couldn’t due to no security updates and slow running. I convinced them to let me load up fedora on it instead of junking it. They only really need it for some basic document writing, email, and web surfing so I figured this is perfect for them.
Made a bootable drive with Fedora 43 work station on it, figured gnome would be the most Apple like spin. Everything went super smooth until I realized that the WiFi drivers weren’t installed lol. I also didn’t have a Ethernet adapter for usb-a so I had to overnight it to me while my parents swore I bricked their Mac all night. Got the adapter this AM, hooked it up, installed the drivers and other necessary tweaks, and viola! This Mac has new life.
So far my parents are liking it and understanding it (even though my mom seems more excited about the snoopy wallpaper and Firefox theme, lol). Getting their emails on thunderbird was driving me crazy. Nothing to do with thunderbird, they just didn’t know their passwords smh. All in all not bad. To new Linux converts
What are the advantages?
KDE can be set up such that a ex-mac-user barely has to re-learn anything.
The difference is that while gnome looks a lot like MacOS, it isn’t exactly like it in terms of layout. An ex-mac-user will look for certain things in certain places, and won’t always find them. (such as power off/restart being up in the left corner)
Meanwhile, the customizability of the KDE desktop means you can manually put the same things in the same places as on MacOS. You can put a krunner search button in the same spot as the spotlight search button. You can make a panel that behaves like the dock, floating and shrinking to fit the number of icons in it. You can have a top panel with a power menu on the left end, and you can display a global menu to the right of it. Even the krunner keybind is the same, and spotlight people tend to pickup krunner like nothing.
Finally, the KDE settings application seems to be the most similar to the modern MacOS settings application.
The big caveat being that the user will need someone who can instruct them with setting this up, or who can set it up for them.
Thank you for elaborating!
It’s really not that difficult with a Global Theme; anyone can do it. There are step by step tutorials on line (such as this one from howtogeek) for people who want to do it manually. The benefit of manual is if there is a major KDE update it is more likely to be completely unaffected; very rarely Global Themes can break and need their own updates.
The Mac ones are the 2nd most popular in the Global Theme store and well maintained though.