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!
You would have to do that, yes. In all likelihood, you’ll be fine with just picking a distro. As the Señor says, elementary has a Mac-like aesthetic.
I have no experience with that distro myself, but I’d imagine that it allows running a live environment directly from the USB, that will let you test it without installing so you can see if everything that you need to work will work, and also whether you actually like it (running a live environment from a USB will be slower than if you had it installed, so don’t base your “liking it” off of that).
It’s not so much just an aesthetic, you can make KDE and even GNOME look much more like MacOS than eOS will and KDE can even to an extent act like Finder (GNOME not so much, they’re too ideologically different)
But Pantheon is designed to act like Finder. (whilst trying to not infringe on Apple’s designs) It’s the closest thing functionally to the modern Finder outside OpenSTEP.