I heartily commend you for asking, and was happy to see you get a good response.
“What is the most common distro” is not straightforward to shat because of the breadth of users. Arch is one of the more… esoteric… distributions, it will allow you very, very fine grained control of everything - but it also requires you to be able to make those choices. At the other end of the scale we might find Ubuntu and Mint which are far less customizable* but “just work” out of the box and, as such, are obvious choices for users new to Linux or unwilling to invest in “tinkering”.
Really, the freedom of choice is overwhelming to many newcomers, and at the same time the strength of the whole system.
*Any distro is very customizable. You can make nearly the same changes to Ubuntu and Arch, it’s just that Ubuntu is not designed to make that easy for you.
I loved win XP, but it’s been steeply down hill since then, to this unbearable toddler ui. So I’m with you on that one. I’ve been on *nix for 20+ years now.
If you want to do basic window manager things, like press the meta key (also referred to as the winows key on non-macbooks) + direction arrow to have a window snap to a quadrant of your screen, you have to install a 3rd party application with Homebrew.
you don’t need brew to install a window manager, although the fact that brew lets you treat it like a linux box is great.
Please tell me more.
My new job gave me a Mac. First one I’ve used … that has a colour screen, and boy have things (and myself) changed in the interim. I spent the entire first day figuring out what the buttons even do. Am I really expected to use the mouse (well, trackpad) this much? The first port replicator I bought only did one screen, I’m hoping the one now in the mail does better…