I hate Microsoft and Windows, I want to choose better AND more importantly, see what all this fuss about Linux being awesomest is about
I hate Microsoft and Windows, I want to choose better AND more importantly, see what all this fuss about Linux being awesomest is about
Distros don’t define the UI.
That’s the desktop environment’s work. Many distros will look and feel exactly alike, because they use the same DE.
These are:
GNOME is their own thing, with very opinionated and authoritarian devs. They are not very flexible in their design and development philosophy. That said, Gnome is a very good and quality DE that does have customization, but is also very different to everything else UX wise.
KDE Plasma is very Windows like, because their thing is to be extremely flexible and customizable. But, with sane defaults that look like Windows as closely as possible. So it is very familiar out of the box, though it can be made to look and work into very unique ways. It is also very good and quite polished, aiming to have virtually everything into a GUI or menu, minimizing the need for terminal commands.
Cinnamon is Linux Mint’s continuation of what Gnome used to be like. Which means that it is very similar to pre-Windows 10 but with modern quality of life upgrades and functionality.
Most distros will use one of the first two, and Mint champions it’s own Cinnamon. Other DE’s are for more specialty or niche distributions.
Very few DE’s capture the macOS experience. Mostly because there’s little interest on it from the crowds that use Linux, so they get abandoned quickly. The closest thing currently is Budgie, which had died for a while, but is now revived by a different group of developers.