I’m on board that we need to become independent from big tech. As someone who is fond of the Mac user experience, from choosing hardware to how you navigate through apps, I need a guide to make the switch, so if you know of any great guides for Mac users, I’d greatly appreciate it!
Edit: you have all been very useful. I now know a bit more how to start and what it would mean to switch!
For a start you would have a bootable pen drive, just to take a look around. If a certain distro doesn’t suit you, don’t install it. After installation, the hurdles get bigger, just as you say.
The two mentioned distros are already tailored towards easy use, but there are many ways to skin the cat. The distributions work with different desktop managers, each with different philosophies. On some distro you can choose or change the desktop manager afterwards (and potentially break your system).
Take the popular cachyOS. Its most useable desktop manager is KDE Plasma, but it has support for a several others (17). Some better, some worse.
Here a tier list of desktop environments showing some desktop manager und Debian 13.
EDIT: Keep in mind, that you can further customize and tailor desktop environments to your needs.