There is a aphorism.

Bsd was made by people who love unix, linux was made by people who hate windows.

I think they hate unix, not windows, because they dragged all legacy nonsense unix had for hardware reasons straight into modern times so everyone can laugh on it.

I've always felt that $BIG_BRAND_DISTRO+KDE got pretty close. It's still Linux, so not quite the same, but as far as look and feel, it's pretty close I think.

I remember some videos where people pretended some KDE theme is how new windows version looks and people had no problems believing it.

If I may suggest, ZorinOS is about as close to windows on Linux as it gets. Found it through a HN comment myself.

There have been several, but what makes Windows Windows is the ecosystem, and no distro can replicate that.

What is that ecosystem now? What do households with windows use that isn't on the cloud?

A lot of stuff is moving to web/cloud stuff, but we are not there entirely.

As one example, I had to take a proctored exam recently, and the only supported OS was Windows or MacOS. Linux was not an option.

Then there is games, Proton is great but plenty of AAA titles are still not compatible.

Just for starters.

Games for sure, the exam software is disappointing.

The problem with the cloud is how often I've run into blanket linux/bsd support bans. Especially when it comes to professional certifications done online. I had one website refusing to work on my FreeBSD or Debian installs. It would just get to a certain point and not let me proceed and multiple buttons refusing to work properly.

Got on the phone with support and they were dumbfounded. Got the idea to just spoof my user agent as a windows box on edge and it worked perfectly afterwards.

Even if not done on purpose there is a lot of crufty shit online that breaks in unsuspecting ways when I'm on a linux/BSD box. Especially if interfacing with the government websites and webapps. Our state fire code website looks straight out of 2002 and has multiple warnings about making sure to use IE6... in 2023.

Maybe its just my use case (fire industry / local government), but it helps to have a mac or windows machine lying around as backup.

Use any Unbutu distribution with MATE or Cinnamon. Like shit dawg, I got my grandma using Linux Mint with MATE.

Changed the background to match the same one on her old laptop and added some desktop icons, and boom 99% of her experience was the same. Had to help her a little with the LibreOffice -- that's a little different -- but otherwise functionally similar to Windows 7 / Win10.

I'm using linux as a daily driver and at this point there isn't anything I can't do on Windows. The hold out for a while was games, but Proton w/ Steam works well and I can play big titles like Cyberpunk 2077.

This is what I ran in 2002 or so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire

Sounds like the last time you used Linux was 20 years ago. Linux been as easy as Windows to install and use for at least 10 years now. My mothers laptop runs Linux Mint and she doesn't know its not Windows even though the colors are all wrong. Why? It's all about the DE - if it looks like windows, walks like windows and quacks like windows, its windows. If she can click on the menu and find the internet then it's a win. Installation was was as easy as windows and everything worked out of the box.

Hell, I installed the Chicago95 XFCE theme on my main system to see how well it emulated the look and feel of Windows 95 and wound up liking it. Why? Because even though it looks dated, the icons were immediately familiar and I felt navigation instantly become easier.

Do not underestimate the power of familiarity. Many of us grew up on DOS/Windows playing games and typing school work up in Word so moving away from those familiar waters is HARD. It's like being an immigrant moving to a new country - you have to put in extra effort to learn to adjust to culture and language. Some can, some cant. YMMV.