I would say try a few out, see which DEs (desktop environments, pretty much the part of the OS that you look at) you like. I recommend trying Fedora Workstation (which is GNOME, a purer form of it compared to Ubuntu’s flavour, and is unrelated to gnomes of the fantasy world), a KDE Plasma distro (like Kubuntu or Fedora KDE), as well as Mint (which is Cinnamon) and ZorinOS (I think it uses a custom variant of GNOME, but I’m not sure).
You either love or hate GNOME, there’s a lot of padding, and it’s very “minimal” and “clean”. Some people say the UI is similar to Mac in that it has a bar on the top and the “dock” (GNOME’s version of the taskbar) looks very similar to Mac. It also has a bunch of touch gestures and such, so it would be good if you have a touchscreen laptop, for example. Make sure to look at GNOME extensions, which helps you customise GNOME to your liking (e.g. transparency, having the dock always be shown kind of like one Windows)
KDE Plasma, out of the box, looks similar to Windows. It, however, is the most customisable and you can change pretty much anything (position of the taskbar, text size of different parts of the UI, colours of all the buttons, etc.) and it’s kind of overwhelming. I particularly like KRunner (which is kind of like Spotlight on Mac and lets you search apps, files, settings, etc. straight from the desktop). Currently I’m using KDE Plasma.
Cinnamon is Linux Mint’s homegrown take on GNOME, which tries to mimic Windows 10 to ease the transition to Linux. Mint focuses on the usability of its GUI apps, so you won’t have to touch the terminal as often (I do recommend you learn how to do simple things like apt to install apps, it’s really useful!). If you don’t like the excessive padding and touch-optimised design of GNOME or think KDE Plasma isn’t for you, Cinnamon might be what you want.
There’s also a bunch of other DEs like Xfce (which is lightweight and meant for lower end devices), MATE (which keeps the design of old GNOME, so it looks less “modern” than other DEs), and COSMIC (which is by System76, recently went from Alpha to Beta so it isn’t perfectly stable yet, but it looks pretty cool with tiling and such).
Take your time to pick, you can always swap out your DE (that’s one of the cool things with Linux, you can literally change the desktop of the entire OS if you want to! It’s kind of insane if you think about it. Recently, I switched from GNOME to KDE Plasma with little issue on Fedora. So don’t be afraid to pick the “wrong” desktop, you can always change it after the fact! You can even install multiple and choose which one to use when you log in, but that will mean having an excess of default apps, meaning multiple file managers, multiple calendar apps, etc.)
I would say try a few out, see which DEs (desktop environments, pretty much the part of the OS that you look at) you like. I recommend trying Fedora Workstation (which is GNOME, a purer form of it compared to Ubuntu’s flavour, and is unrelated to gnomes of the fantasy world), a KDE Plasma distro (like Kubuntu or Fedora KDE), as well as Mint (which is Cinnamon) and ZorinOS (I think it uses a custom variant of GNOME, but I’m not sure).
You either love or hate GNOME, there’s a lot of padding, and it’s very “minimal” and “clean”. Some people say the UI is similar to Mac in that it has a bar on the top and the “dock” (GNOME’s version of the taskbar) looks very similar to Mac. It also has a bunch of touch gestures and such, so it would be good if you have a touchscreen laptop, for example. Make sure to look at GNOME extensions, which helps you customise GNOME to your liking (e.g. transparency, having the dock always be shown kind of like one Windows)
KDE Plasma, out of the box, looks similar to Windows. It, however, is the most customisable and you can change pretty much anything (position of the taskbar, text size of different parts of the UI, colours of all the buttons, etc.) and it’s kind of overwhelming. I particularly like KRunner (which is kind of like Spotlight on Mac and lets you search apps, files, settings, etc. straight from the desktop). Currently I’m using KDE Plasma.
Cinnamon is Linux Mint’s homegrown take on GNOME, which tries to mimic Windows 10 to ease the transition to Linux. Mint focuses on the usability of its GUI apps, so you won’t have to touch the terminal as often (I do recommend you learn how to do simple things like apt to install apps, it’s really useful!). If you don’t like the excessive padding and touch-optimised design of GNOME or think KDE Plasma isn’t for you, Cinnamon might be what you want.
There’s also a bunch of other DEs like Xfce (which is lightweight and meant for lower end devices), MATE (which keeps the design of old GNOME, so it looks less “modern” than other DEs), and COSMIC (which is by System76, recently went from Alpha to Beta so it isn’t perfectly stable yet, but it looks pretty cool with tiling and such).
Take your time to pick, you can always swap out your DE (that’s one of the cool things with Linux, you can literally change the desktop of the entire OS if you want to! It’s kind of insane if you think about it. Recently, I switched from GNOME to KDE Plasma with little issue on Fedora. So don’t be afraid to pick the “wrong” desktop, you can always change it after the fact! You can even install multiple and choose which one to use when you log in, but that will mean having an excess of default apps, meaning multiple file managers, multiple calendar apps, etc.)