I was trying things along the lines of hyprland, sway and i3. I have this idea in my head that a touch screen tiling WM would work really well (from what I’ve seen that’s what people love so much about the iPad nowadays anyway)
Hyprland has something called hyprgrass I think which enables touchscreen gestures, still in the process of figuring out how to install that in NixOS though. (it’s got a nix.flake but it’s not in nixpkgs and I’m still unsure of how to install flakes to a traditional configuration.nix setup)
+1 have been trying to make a Linux tablet work. Gnome is alright but it’s got a crap CPU and 2gb of ram and nothing lightweight has good touch support annoyingly
If your main concern is UI distro doesn’t really matter, the thing you need to think about is desktop environment, most big distros let you choose from a few
TL;Dr I would suggest looking for a distro with kde plasma as it’s quite customisable and looks quite clean out of the box. Personally I prefer gnome out of the two but you definitely hit a wall eventually customising it
Gnome is what Ubuntu and fedora use by default I believe and looks somewhat like Mac (but is fairly distinct from everything else, you kinda have to see for yourself)
KDE Plasma is what the steam deck uses in desktop mode and looks kinda like modern windows.
Cinnamon is what Linux mint uses which also looks like windows 10 and is designed to appeal to windows users
Pop!os recently released their own DE called cosmic, but they were originally using their own customised version of gnome
I think pretty much anyone buying one those laptops who wants Linux already knows how to install it and let’s be honest if it ships with any given distro I think most would install their preference over it anyway
I think you eventually get used to it whatever you wear
I tend to be the shorts and t shirt in the middle of winter guy, but when I put a hoodie on it’s the most comfortable, perfect temperature you could imagine
If that’s the only reason for switching couldn’t you just install kde’s file browser on gnome though? Or any file browser for that matter I don’t think it forces you into Nautilus
What’s wrong with it? I’m currently using nautilus as my file browser on hyprland and it’s more than servicably
I don’t really use a file browser that much anyway so I might not be the best person to comment though. Tend to find it quicker and easier to move files around from a terminal then any file browser for everything except choosing a file for something
I don’t think gnome is particularly customizable visually, you can change theme and use extensions if you really want to buy their main focus is making one really good UI and I’ve gotta respect that
At least in my opinion gnome looks far better than KDE out of the box, KDE just looks like windows to me
Gnome has fairly good window snapping as well I think and stuff like pop shell and forge for tiling
The launcher is quite nice to use, fast and search oriented (I never used any of the start menu on windows besides the search bar anyway so the fact it’s the main focus is nice)
Virtual desktops (only on Wayland) are very well implemented and feel very smooth, three finger swipe works a charm, with the forge extension it tiles servicably as well
Also just one of the nicest looking DEs imo. I have since switched to hyprland because I wanted first class tiling support but I have my system UI looking very similar to gnome’s, using mostly gnome’s applications
Having used gnome on Ubuntu a couple years ago I have to say it has come miles recently (also Ubuntu’s gnome in my opinion is not as good as vanilla gnome) - it feels very clean and intuitive out of the box
I think that’s what makes it great for newcomers though. If you show them something pretending to be windows they’ll think why not just use windows, if you show them something better they might be more impressed
Coming from Windows gnome was pretty intuitive for me, it’s got much of the same workflow still even if buttons are in different places