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On the other hand, KDE is the most configurable DE I've ever seen. I've never looked too much at its defaults because I usually switch to KDE in my "let's customize everything" moments (and get back from it in my "let's learn to live with defaults" ones).

Being able to bind almost everything (including running custom scripts) to a keyboard shortcut, having tons of desktop options you can force by matching window or app properties, using special attributes or regexps, all of that screams "don't use default and customize me" to me, which is where KDE really shines, IMO.

I agree. It's almost customizable to the extent I'd want. Except that several things don't work because they're either not under KDE's control (shortcuts for Firefox, Chrome, Gtk apps, etc.) or its flexibility is subverted by the layering of its concept of Global Shortcuts, Application Shortcuts, and where both of those things slot into event handling along side Xorg.

> I would gladly pay $1,000 for a KDE Neon or Fedora Gnome distro that went through the trouble of thoroughly implementing and maintaining a version with fully Mac-like keyboard shortcuts and keyboard shortcut customization facilities.

From your response to the sibling comment, it sounds like you're looking for a way to swap the Super and Control keys? There are actually settings for that in both Gnome and KDE/Plasma. In Gnome, you can go into one of the sections of Gnome Tweak Tool (I think it's called "Typing") and in one of the lists of options, there's a checkbox for something like "Swap left Win and left Control". In MADE/Plasma, it's in main settings app somewhere there's an identical list of checkbox options (I think it's in the "Keyboard" section, but I might be wrong, as I haven't used Plasma in a while; if you're having trouble finding it though, I can go back and find the exact location tomorrow and let you know)

That just remaps Control and Super/Meta/Command. I can do that with a bunch of things.

What that doesn't do is decouple terminal shortcuts from GUI shortcuts. It just puts the Control key under my thumb.

Ah, I see. I've always preferred having the same key for both terminal and GUI apps, which is one of the reasons that I'm not fond of OS X's shortcuts.

I don't like Ctrl-C being a super, super common thing I can safely and non-destructively do literally everywhere in my working environment, such that it becomes unconscious reflex/muscle-memory, _except_ when I'm in a terminal... where it means usually instantaneous death for whatever I was doing.

Qt (the library KDE uses) has an internal switch to use the GUI key (Command/Windows/Super/...) instead of Control, but it's only enabled on OS X. Making that a user-configurable option for other systems would go a long way. I have no idea what the Qt/KDE folks' attitude toward that would be, but I can see it as a selling point for Mac refugees, so it may be worth your while to investigate.

That would be absolutely amazing. Then the only applications on the machine that would drive me crazy would be Firefox and Chrome, since they're basically impossible to get to work correctly this way. Firefox actually let's you choose a different primary modifier key in an obscure setting, but it's not interpreted consistently.

I'll take a look. Maybe I can have some luck either rebuilding everything in a fork of the KDE Neon repos with that enabled or getting the maintainers to enable it.

edit: and LibreOffice would drive me nuts since it won't just import an exported config from a Mac that has Mac keybindings, and the export format is binary, so hard to export on Linux bulk-modify and re-import, so I'd still have to painstakingly go through its clunky interface to change everything to make sense. But still... that'd all be a huge improvement over the current state of affairs.

Have you taken a look at elementaryOS?

I have. How does that solve the problem I mentioned?

The whole thing uses basically GNOME standard keyboard shortcuts, and two extremely common ones, Cmd-S and Cmd-W, which are normally used universally for "Save" and "Close" respectively are actually for doing things with the window and workspace manager in elementaryOS.

For the most part the shortcuts seem to be inherited from GNOME/Gtk.