That I find interesting. Been trying KDE flavour more recently and the only distro that would work for me is openSUSE (Tumbleweed) KDE. Everything was pretty much perfect. I've tried KDE Neon and Kubuntu, both didn't have the correct dark icons for LibreOffice (as an example).
As a developer about to switch companies, I'm now faced with a forced switch to Linux or if I want I could also stay on Apple (M1). I'm really inclined to say goodbye to Apple, as I have suffered too many uncomfortable changes over the most recent 12 years or so. I feel home in KDE, tried Gnome which I find too hard.
Agreed, KDE is great. The default theme is somewhat disappointing but once configured, it beats OSX and Windows hands down. It's extremely configurable.
I also wouldn't mind Ubuntu/Gnome but I encountered some touchpad issues with my new HP laptop and I didn't want to fiddle too much with the Ubuntu drivers and internals. Kubuntu was just more configurable including the touchpad driver.
This sounds refreshing. I've been trying to convert from Mac to Linux recently and after having tried a couple of distros like Pop and Neon settled on fedora, mostly because of all the modern stuff in there (GNOME on Wayland with zoom supporting it OOTB, btrfs). After having used it for a week intensively, I have experience way too many issues (zoom freezing other windows, firefox crashing when resizing the window and DevTools open where I was thinking is it the React website that I'm just building?, Wifi dropping in the middle of a zoom session and not auto-reconnecting) let alone the different keyboard mapping which I have found too limiting (as everything is done with Ctrl when there are so many other meta keys and Ctrl is just the worst from a positioning perspective as I have to use my little finger instead of thumb like on macOS. Also, fedora asks for too many OS reboots and I don't like to restart the full dev environment all the time.
So far, I have converted back to macOS, which is equally bad from UX perspective, especially the hardened security - I just don't want to opt into every program getting the permission to run, send notifications, access this and that. It's just too much.
I think I will give one of the more non-corporate Linux distros a try. Or, maybe it's Pop, but ideally it should be Debian based, just not with the "outdated" experience.
The problem was not Fedora per se, but GNOME and especially Wayland. Wayland is slightly above vaporware and infested with bugs.
Had you chosen Fedora with KDE you'd probably have 0 problems. I'm using it without any drama for 11 years and I keep suggesting it to co-workers and friends.
Wayland has done so much harm in the Linux ecosystem and that gives me a lot of grief :(
It's a pity that it really is that bad. It didn't have any glitches during normal usage but it quickly fell apart when challenged, obviously. So it's probably still too early and we need more distros picking Wayland up and help stabilise.
What didn't help was probably the desire to force myself into liking GNOME, when normally, I fall naturally into the KDE camp, because it is beautiful without having to make things too simple, like GNOME does. Even though I agree with many of the things GNOME stands for, there is lots of stuff you wouldn't NEED to customise, or use.
The GNOME Xorg session is still available if you need to use it.
It would be nice if it were possible to avoid the compatibility issues with Wayland, but the design of X (and the reliance of applications on X11-specific APIs) is what makes this not really feasible.
Those some things are things, you shouldn't do in the first place, like snooping on windows and events that do not belong to your app or injecting events that end up being processed by other apps.
Do as I did and play with the various distros in VirtualBox for a bit. Have a careful look at the Desktop Environment, i.e., which one suits you. Doesn't take long to figure out whether a distro is for you or not. If you don't like it from trying coming from a Mac, then it won't be good enough for the long haul.
I've tried so fedora, Pop!_OS, elementary, KDE Neon. As a long term Ubuntu / Debian (server) user I was used to apt but would be open to other package managers. Based on my trials, I'm probably going to go ahead with KDE Neon, that is Ubuntu with KDE Plasma Desktop. This seems to be a nice cross-over between Windows 10 and MacOS with sane defaults but enough options to tailor it to my liking.
