Why is resembles Windows important? Macos does not and is doing fine, so is Chromeos, so is Android.

Even Windows can be quite different from older versions of Windows.

Because if you wish to convince people they should switch from Windows, that's a very important factor. People do not like change, and they want the skills they have to transfer over as much as possible.

My parents would break down in panic if they did as much as moved a single icon to the left on Android phones. To them it was almost as if they broke the phone.

So why have so many people switched from Windows to MacOS?

I can't speak for every single one of them but I can say that some of them probably did it by choice and was prepared to handle the friction in the beginning until they get used to it. I know lots of people who switched from Windows to Mac where power users / had good computer habit.

However, I don't think some of the older people are willing to go through all that. I wish to see an easier option for people who wants a smoother transition from Win10 to something else, especially now since Win10 is being discontinued october this year.

This is a bad idea. You can make Linux look like Windows on the surface but people are going to then be surprised and frustrated when it doesn't act like Windows, it will come off as cheap imitation. People get confused about the idea of something as simple as the concept of a single root file system, they will not understand that coming from a world of C, D, and E drives. It's best to make it look foreign to them so that they don't have their expectations subverted when they realize it actually is a fundamentally different operating system.

Yes there's an awful lot of change from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Especially if you try to do anything at all in the settings.

PopOS is more Mac than windows but it's what you're after.

KDE is as close to win as you can get on a linux kernel

Kde isn't a distro?

I gave my husband Manjaro and he's fine. I gave him a shell script to force update discord (ugh) but he only has to double click it.

People like to freak about how arch isn't for newbies but honestly it's fine. I find it to be just as stable as Debian.

But let's be real, aside from gaming, 99% of what the average user does with a computer is open a web browser. Dekstop apps are secondary. If you put a Firefox/chrome button in the task bar, you've covered most user requirements.

Power users who actually need a bunch of proper desktop applications have a different set of needs. It's impossible to generalize, but a very large fraction of those users would probably be happy with the Linux alternatives, or wine and proton. A lobotomized W10 LTSC VM is also quite usable.

most users won't know or care they're on Linux if the browser works.