KDE and XFce DEs are the most customizable to look like MacOS (nothing to do with distros, you can use any distro and then use these DEs to make them look like MacOS). Here’s my XFce: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114653608461737248

Geary is as simple as they come.

I have tried it, I downloaded it. But while it kinda works now, you can’t untangle AI code in the future. It becomes too complicated and difficult to debug. Any project that uses mostly AI, doesn’t have a future. It only has a temporary present, while things are still simple.

I’m allergic to AI code. It’s worse than spaghetti. I wish it wasn’t AI-made, for the most part.

It’s mostly entertainment, but it has some good info sometimes.

I understand! I follow mostly illustrators who do “cottagecore art” (apparently that’s a thing), and while many still sell prints, stickers exploded in popularity in their online shops about 10 years ago, and overtook print sales. This is my art btw, on fediverse: https://pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli Do you have a pixelfed with your art? I’d love to check it out!

Most of the illustrators I follow on IG, do stickers. Here’s just one of the 600 i follow: https://www.instagram.com/cecileberrube/ Maybe you’re into different type of art, that’s why you haven’t seen this kind of product. But cottagecore and lifestyle illustration usually produce stickers.

I’m a watercolorist, I actually paint on paper. I don’t like digital artworks, they feel sterile to me. I don’t sell anymore, but others who do watercolor/gouache, that I follow on instagram (i.e. indie artists, not gallery artists), can’t easily sell stickers anymore, because all that sticker-type illustrations (e.g. teapots with nice designs, animals etc), have been taken over by AI designs on Etsy. Stickers has been the primary way these artists were making money in the last 10 years. Very few people buy prints, as they’re more expensive.

Just install a distro that doesn’t fail like that by overwriting system files on a whim. You’re saying that you’re going from an arch based system (which are prone to get weird errors every few weeks), to NixOS, which has at the very least a steep learning curve. My assessment is that you are asking for trouble yourself. I know that Debian-stable sounds boring, but it never breaks like that. If you’re truly burnt out as you say, you would go with the safe, unglamorous solution. I used to tinker with Linux all the time (I started on slackware in 1998), now I just run Mint on laptops, and Debian on my PCs. I just don’t want bad surprises anymore, I’m at an age that the OS needs to work as expected.

You will have to reinstall the OS, and redo the partition table (256 MB boot partition (that’s enough for a single OS), 2 GB swap, and the rest / root partition). Then install Debian with XFce on the / partition. You use it normally as with any other Debian-based OS, that Zorin is also one of them, but you use the terminal to update the system. It’s very usable.

For 16 GB SSD with 4 GBs of RAM (which is what most Chromebooks used to be), you will need Debian with XFce, with 2 GB of swap partition. Nothing else will either fit, or work properly. I have given away 3 such laptops to friends with that setup (Arch might fit ok too, but because I was giving it to friends, Debian was easier to work with). After installing the v12 Bookworm Debian OS, with libreoffice, a couple of simple games (e.g. solitaire), Gimp, and that 2 gb swap partition, I was left with 5 GB free space. I had to occasionally do sudo apt autoremove to make sure the space wasn’t eaten away, but overall, it stayed steady (dh -h will give you that info). With Trixie, you might end up with 4 GBs of free space, as it’s bigger. Bookworm has updates until 2029.

If the issue is under X11, try their Wayland session. Otherwise, you will have to wait until December, when they go fully Wayland with their more stable version. If you’re already using Wayland, use X11. I don;'t think there’s much to do otherwise for such an issue.

Anything from Debian. I even run Debian-Testing, and it’s rock solid. Also, Linux mint, on my other partition.

Only thing bothering me on the cosmic desktop is really the fact that the app menu doesn’t have a shadow behind its window. So white menu on white window on the back, you can’t see where one window starts and where the other ends. A patch for that would be great, to be honest.

You are the only one with the answer closer to what I’m looking for, everyone else is thinking in terms of user accounts, where root can override. An encrypted volume can not be unlocked by root without having the password of the said volume.

No, it’s something else actually.

I’m having trouble with wifi with two macbook airs from 2011 and 2013. Those broadcomm chipsets are simply not maintained anymore well on the linux kernel. The solution: a $5 usb wifi adapter. Works wonders (blacklist first the internal wifi).

Mint is very, very stable. However, not all hardware is compatible, especially since Mint is using older libraries. For most people, Mint is the best solution. For your hardware, it seems to be Debian-Unstable. I personally use both and I’m happy with both.

Linux user since 1998 or 99. Debian-Testing for my desktops, Mint for my laptops. I like things that work well with a GUI (I dislike the terminal, despite being well familiar with it), without bad surprises (Debian-Testing is surprisingly stable).

Ι must say that Arch Linux’s wiki pages are easily understood. But man pages are not. I can’t follow the standard manual format. Just like with IKEA instructions, they just don’t make sense to me. My brain is like that. But Arch Linux pages are good.