Just got a steam deck and immediately checked out the desktop mode, and I was somewhat surprised to see KDE and pacman as opposed to GNOME and apt, I have nothing against the former though a strong preference for the latter, anyone know why Volvo went in this direction?
For what it’s worth, when I moved from macOS to Linux I found that KDE Plasma customisation made it less frustrating to get the appearance and multitouch gestures closer to what I was missing on a Mac.
I know this is silly and I can make KDE do this but at some point, my workflow became a mouse to the top left corner to get an overview and get all the windows so I can swap programs. It started with Gnome 3 years ago, and as far as I know, macOS copied hot corners in a way that’s worse in that it requires changing settings.
The other part of my workflow is pressing a remapped CAPS Lock control or whatever and tilde for my terminal to come out guake style. I use ddterm in gnome.
If I can’t switch windows and call up a terminal guake style, I’ll retire.
The macOS version of it also sucks because you can’t close windows from “Mission Control” or whatever they call they call their Gnome clone. Put an X on each window whereas Gnome lets me do that and clear old shit out the way when I need to.
The bottom line is that when I really need macOS, it’s built into the settings. Gnome is effortless. Windows is a constant battle.
macOS does have a setting to remap the caps lock key and game has to recognize game sometimes. They stole the good ideas from Gnome. But if I can’t hit CAPS Lock+tilde and have a real terminal slide down, your operating system is dead to me.
I’m sure I can get there on Windows if I cared to but I’m too busy deleting Candy Crush or whatever.
Hot corners were in OS X before gnome 3 even existed
I stand corrected. I didn’t really use macOS until a few years ago.
I originally got a MacBook because my work life is all Linux and I was working from home and needed that psychological separation. Like, “This computer is for work. MacOS is for watching basketball.”
You can get the switcher in KDE, but you can’t get a real equivalent to gnome’s view. In gnome you can press super to get the overview, but you can also type to open programs. There’s no way to do that in KDE afaik. It’s the main thing keeping me from KDE
ElementaryOS sounds like a perfect fit for you, if you haven’t tried it already. Superb gesture support and consistent UI across all built in apps
That said, a lot of the gesture support has been implemented in Gnome and KDE now anyway, particularly partial gestures which previously had very poor support IIRC