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!
There are a lot of differences and a lot of similarities between the operating systems here. It will take you time to get used to no matter what you do. Start by swapping your apps on your existing Mac, trade out any apps that you know won’t work on Linux with apps that do. That way, you spend some time in your existing environment with the new apps you’re going to need going forward.
Next, make sure to test out your peripherals in a live environment. Does everything you use with your computer work correctly? If not, find out why. See if you can mitigate it, or if you’ll need to replace stuff.
Finally, be willing to experiment. I know others in this thread will recommend various desktop environments and distributions to you. Try many of them. GNOME is good and simple out of the box, feels kinda mac-like, but if you want to completely replicate the functionality of macOS, KDE Plasma has more options for that like global menus and the file management app (Dolphin) is incredibly extensible and customizable.
Try to have fun with it, and don’t give up. It takes time to learn a new way of working, and you will likely have frustrations along the way, but ultimately the goal is to learn and figure out what works best for your needs.
This is really good advice thank you! Someone mentioned using a usb to test. How can I test? It seems like quite a hassle to set it all up just to find out it’s not my thing.
If you’re on a Mac, you can likely use an app called “Balena Etcher” to create a bootable Linux USB… if it’s an Intel mac, you can just boot that right up by holding option at boot-time. If you’re on an Apple Silicon Mac, you are not going to be able to boot most Linux distros there. If you’re on PC, you can usually stick the flash drive in and mash F12 at boot-time to get into a menu, select the USB stick, and then it’ll boot you into a “live environment” to test with. That way you can just poke around and see if you like it. Almost all distributions come with a live environment by default.