My mother has never daily driven a laptop more recent than a nearly decade old macbook running macOS Sierra. (except, briefly, a quite nice work-provided windows laptop that she hated using.)
She is, however, about to buy a 2025 Lenovo Yoga 7 14", and wants to use linux on it.
As the designated “techy person” in my family, I have been tasked with choosing which distro to put on it. I chose fedora it supports modern hardware nicely, and it’s what I use, which would make tech support easier.
What I’m not sure about is what desktop environment she should use. I’m currently split between GNOME and KDE, since they’re the two that are the most polished and work the best on the kind of hardware she’ll be using.
She seems to prefer a more traditional desktop paradigm (dislikes overly flattened ui’s and autohiding ui elements like scrollbars), but given she’s not very techy and currently uses an iphone and ipad quite a bit, so gnome might feel more friendly with how simple it is, and be a bit more touch-friendly.
I asked her and she’s not sure either, so I’m asking here which one is might be better given the hardware and the preferences she’s expressed.
I personally like GNOME/GTK. I think it is easy, but I recommend deviating from the default. The extension “Dash to Dock” is good for a former Mac user because it makes all the pinned apps viewable without pressing the super key.
What I will say about KDE is it can be whatever you want it to be. It is feature rich and its customization is unparalleled. You can customize it into looking like MacOS. I personally think Qt apps look ugly, which is why I go GNOME. KDE also has there ‘K’ naming scheme for apps, which can be confusing to new users who are looking for “Text Editor” when they should be search for “KWrite”.
Both are good. Maybe set up two VMs, one with KDE customized a little to look familiar to a Mac user, and the other GNOME. See whether she has a preference for the look and feel of each, especially the default apps because she will end up interacting with them a lot.