At least on the latest Sequoia, there has been no hard requirement for an online account. They nudge you towards it, but you can decline and continue. As far as I can remember, macOS has never required an online account to set up a Mac.

You might need it for the App Store if anything, but even then... You don't need the app store for installing software. Mac is at its peak currently, though the new glass UI stuff is a little over the top for me. I miss the old simpler UI. I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually.

Afaik, you can choose to not sign into icloud when creating an account on your mac. It's not a hard requirement like it is on Windows, though they do obviously strongly nudge you to login to icloud.

I didn't know that. Thanks. Setting up my mac once in 5 years means it isn't a screen I've seen very often!

Plasma 6 is really polished and simple. I think anyone familiar with windows would be able to grab and run with it immediately.

No hate for anyone that likes other desktop environments, I as a long time windows user just really appreciate how familiar KDE feels.

The familiarity is great but the thing that really draws me to Plasma over Gnome is that the KDE developers seem to have an attitude of just implementing the features people want even if it's not perfect yet. Gnome is polished, but it's missing so many basic configuration options out of the box.

It's kind of funny because when I first got into linux it was practically the opposite story. Back in the day of KDE 2 or 3 and Gnome 2, KDE was the slow one to bring in features while Gnome felt like the wild wild west.

Now it seems like Gnome has gone down a practically walled garden path which I don't love. Last I tried it, I wanted to launch an app focused and in full screen on startup. The gnome response for that was basically "You're not allowed to do that".

To be fair, it has a thousand different settings and you have to manually click Apply to see them in action.

It's flexible and popular, but I don't know that I'd call it simple. It still feels 90s in a lot of ways.

> Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well

This has never been my experience. Is that new in Tahoe?

It isn't. There's no such thing in macOS. Local and iCloud accounts are not necessarily linked, never been.

Yes, as pointed out, I was mistaken, but then in my defence, I've only ever set up one Mac, 5 years ago, so I've only seen 'that screen' once.

I only use KDE, though it has weird instability from time to time. They just changed which gcc version I'm on so I am not sure if I've noticed the same instability or not. Overall though KDE is the perfect DE for me.