Just discovered Setapp. 

I'm not a Mac user...never have been...though I do have an Apple 2C I bought complete for $5.  It turns on but doesn't apparently have an OS so if I had a second one I'd have matching bookends...

Jafo

reply 2

I'm not a Mac user...never have been...though I do have an Apple 2C I bought complete for $5.  It turns on but doesn't apparently have an OS so if I had a second one I'd have matching bookends...

🤣

Not sure this is what you want...sounded a bit fishy to me. 😉

https://www.pocket-lint.com/laptops/news/apple/131818-turn-an-old-apple-imac-into-an-aquarium-yourself-or-buy-one-ready-to-go/

It is, also, possible to install Windows 11 on a MacBook 😁

Although it looks like you are wanting to learn Mac OS which is something I haven't tried in quite a while.

You can customize the Mac dock, change icons, about it.  I have dabbled in customizing  Mac.

Came a bit further right now. Just testing, what is possible.

Yes, definitely. macOS is actually pretty customizable once you stop expecting Windows-style “theme packs” to be the main approach. Apple gives you quite a bit natively now: Dark/Light mode, accent colors, icon and widget styles, folder colors, Dock behavior, wallpapers and desktop widgets.

For a hybrid Windows/Mac setup, the first thing I'd install is Rectangle. It gives you proper window snapping and keyboard shortcuts, so you can get much closer to the Windows workflow without fighting macOS every time you arrange windows. It's free, open source, and works on both Intel and Apple Silicon.

For the menu bar, Ice is a good free option if you're on macOS 14 or newer. It lets you hide, group and rearrange menu-bar items and even customize their appearance. If you don't mind paying, Bartender is another established option with much deeper menu-bar organization and presets.

I wouldn't go crazy with system-modification tools at first. I'd spend a week using the Mac mostly stock, then fix the specific Windows habits that annoy you. That tends to produce a much cleaner setup than trying to make macOS look exactly like Windows.

The advice to run it stock for a week and then fix only what annoys you is good for behaviour and poor for appearance. Those are two different problems.

Behaviour you can repair piece by piece. A snapping tool here, a menu bar tidier there, and each fix stands on its own merits. Appearance does not work that way, because the eye compares. Change the accent colour and the icons and leave the rest, and you have not made it yours, you have made it inconsistent. It is almost right, which is somehow worse than wrong.

That is the trap I fell into on Windows. I spent the better part of a year correcting individual things that irritated me and ended up with a desktop assembled from four different eras. What finally helped was choosing one look, applying it everywhere, and accepting the few places that refused to co-operate.

Whether macOS will let you do that at all I cannot say, as I have never owned one. If it will not, then the honest answer to c242 is not three tools but this: customise the behaviour and let the appearance be Apple's. That is a perfectly reasonable way to run a machine. It is simply not the same hobby.

To be honest: I sold all macs and got myself a decent windows mini pc and laptop again. I found Mac OS quiet annoying. it just doesn't fit most of my workflows.

Admit the truth: Tim Cook had it out for you and wanted you to suffer. Apple made an OS designed especially to drive you nuts. Das ist völlig klar, ja?

Well we all know Win has it's rough edges, too. But I didn't want to gain permission again and again and again to tag my music after every other update. Just a small example. 

😡 Talk about annoying behavior. Ugh.

That is fair, and it takes something off what I said. I claimed behaviour repairs piece by piece, and what you are describing is a case where it does not, because there is nothing to install between you and the decision. The system asks, you say yes, and next month it asks again.

So I would narrow it. Behaviour repairs piece by piece where the system lets a tool stand in front of it. Where it will not, there is no fix to buy, only a habit to accept, and that is a different thing.

I have my own short list of those on Windows. Not permissions, but small settings that come back changed after an update. I stopped correcting them at some point. It was not really a decision, I just got tired of it.

Which is why selling the machines reads as reasonable to me rather than dramatic. Une petite chose, répétée, ends up being the whole experience of using the thing. The music tagging is not the point of it. It is being asked every time.

Recoat would be able to change system icons on the fly.  There used to be "Flavours",but due to restriction imposed by Mac, "Flavours 2 Lite" : https://youtu.be/yL-pv_ziAVc  is the last version featuring 128 hand-picked themes strictly for OS X Yosemite before cease in 2015. 

As this is nearly a necrothreat I still want to mention found quite some apps to customize the Mac. 

What usually kills a customisation tool is not the platform being hostile. It is the platform changing shape faster than one small company can follow.

Flavours stopping where it did is the pattern rather than the exception. A tool hooks whatever the current version presents, the next version presents something slightly different, and the work restarts from a worse position each time. Nobody has to forbid anything for that to end badly.

Windows skinning lasted as long as it has because the surface it hooks moved slowly enough to be worth chasing. Not because Microsoft was welcoming, which it has not especially been, but because a tool written for one release mostly still worked on the next, so there was something to maintain rather than something to rebuild. Where that stopped being true, and the taskbar is the obvious case, the tools have had a much harder time of it.

Which makes the list worth having. Anyone going the other way wants to know which of those apps has survived a version change, not which one looked best while it was working.

Flavours stopping in 2015 reads to me less as Apple shutting a door than as nobody being able to afford to keep walking through it.

I paid for Object Desktop in 2008, let it lapse, and picked it up again this year. Whatever moved on the Windows side in between, somebody was being paid to go and chase it, which is not a thing a one-off purchase funds... I did not think of the subscription that way at the time. I thought I was buying the skins.

The question I would be asking about any of those apps is not what it can change. It is what the machine looks like two updates later.

On this side I keep a running tally of the applications that ignore my theme. It never reaches zero, it just changes membership. A tool that has to be put back by hand every time something updates is not consistency, it is a hobby.