Mac look alike?

[Tom H]

> I understand fully that Ubuntu is no Windows clone, but Ubuntu is what
> the guy's asking for! We can't turn him away, especially to Windows or
> Mac.

The OP is not asking for Ubuntu. He is is asking whether he can make
Ubuntu look and behave like a Mac:

"Are there settings that could be used for a similar look and
functionality on the desktop? Are there things that a Mac does that
can be cloned?"

And the HONEST answer is NO.

He can make Ubuntu look like a Mac (and the OP does say that he thinks
that his daughter likes the OS X eye-candy) but he cannot replicate
the OS X experience.

The few (from a default OS X install) that I can think of off-hand:

Laptop sleep (here I can only compare OS X to Vista/XP) is much faster
and preserves power better, the latter by orders of magnitude. So this
is a maybe...

>From what I understand from the Mac4Lin documentation, you will have
the Dock, Stacks, Widgets, but you will not have Expose.

You will not have OS X's Network applet.

You will not have Apple's filesharing protocol (and, if you do install
netatalk, you will have to download the source and recompile it AFAIK
and AFAIR).

You will not have OS X's Sharing applet.

You will not have OS X's Bonjour integration (avahi needs some
configuration to behave as seamlessly and to behave the same way).

You will not have iTunes to connect your iPhone/iPod without a Windows VM.

Please note that I am not saying that OS X is better than Ubuntu.

What I am saying is that you cannot fully evaluate OS X by modifying Ubuntu.