Which DE should I choose

I still can’t find any window or screen that DOESN’T zoom as demanded by ALT scroll wheel - amount and speed determined by user motions…

Can you explain why this isn’t what’s needed? Or what doesn’t work (does whole displayed screen(s) - both monitors in my setup)

Thanks to all who are sharing their knowledge for helping me. I really require a system wide magnification since my vision is very low, I cannot navigate the OS without it. I tried the KDE plasma magnification; however, it is not provided as an accessibility setting, but a desktop effect. It has fewer options in its settings such as making mouse centered for moving the magnified area. I must admit, cinemon looks the most promising option from all I looked at. That’s very sad since I would have liked a more macOS like design. Although Cinemon looks the most promising, I have three concerns with it.

  • The maximum zoom level which is 15.0 is not enough for me in some text, is there a way to increase this limit?
  • As I have said in previous posts, I cannot alter the magnifiers zoom in some states like when right-clicking or when language selector pane is open in settings.
  • In some apps like settings, the scroll event from key+scroll action is carried to the window my cursor is hovering over, which causes it to scroll as well.

I might be too picky with this concerns; however, they are annoying to me. I just would like to ask whether is there a solution to these concerns.

Do you mean how it looks or how it works? If you mean how it looks, most Arch distros can be customised to look like MacOS.

A workaround for this is to make the text on the screen bigger by default. This way, when you zoom in, it would circumvent the limit.

All I can say to these two issues is that if you’re going to use Linux, remember that Linux is not MacOS or Windows.

The sad truth is you’ll have to get used to it or find another DE that works the closest to the way you want.

Or maybe find an app that integrates with the DE. This is something you’ll also have to test yourself.

PS: I hope this comes off as advice and not anger/annoyance. :pray:

I perfectly understand what you mean, thanks for the advice :). I understand that there somethings different with Linux compared to Windows and MacOS. I believe to MacOS to have the best accessibility features and Windows being incompetent about it. For Linux, either there are no enough resources or user base in need of these features. So, I just want to ask two questions.

  • Is there an easy way to make Cinemon look and function like MacOS (in terms of window management, desktop, menus)
  • How can I increase text size on Cinemon and would that have side affects?

I’m not 100% sure about the zoom but if you want something as MacOS as possible the answer is surely GNOME for your desktop environment, which looks like MacOS with the serial numbers filed off :laughing:

GNOME does include accessibility options including screen magnification but I’ve never experimented with them, so I can’t say how good/bad they are.

I tried gnome magnification and the main problem it has is that it is a bit buggy and unnecessarily tries to shift zoom focus to a text field when there is one around and there is no setting to disable it.

You can achieve the look on Cinnamon, Gnome, KDE, etc. — the DE doesn’t matter when it comes to the visuals.

However, the functionality ranges from already implemented to does not exist depending on the DE you choose to work with.

The look is achieved through icons and theming like these: Popular MacOS Theme

You can install them manually, or use the AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?O=0&K=whitesur

There are also YouTube channels like LinuxScoop who provide guides and downloadable customisations. However, their downloaded customisations are made for Ubuntu-based distros, I believe, and may not work. So, you’d have to follow their guide to be sure.

For functionality, you’d have to find what you are missing and then search the web for them. I’ve only ever used a Hackintosh VM over 10 years ago, so Mac functionality is not something I am familiar with.

As I said above, there may be some apps for Linux that make it function similarly to Mac, you’d just need to try to find them and then hope they work for you.

For text size, you open Cinnamon’s System Settings.

Cinnamon System Settings > Accessibility > Visual > Visual Aids > Large text

or

Cinnamon System Settings > Font Selection > Font Settings > Text scaling factor

or

Cinnamon System Settings > Font Selection > Make the font sizes larger by default

Or a combination may work better for your needs.