Heh, I did the opposite - I did my best to copy OS X, until eventually I realized that what I really wanted was just GNU/Linux (ish), at which point I mostly stopped the theming and used the system for itself. And having since used real macOS for work... it does some nice things (the command key, mostly) but I'd take Debian over Darwin any day. To each their own:)

^ my exact history too.

I've had a couple dual boot windows and I couldn't even figure out how to code on it effectively. (web dev js stuff)

To this day I don't understand if I am meant to have git bash, command prompt or powershell, or all of them or what.

Mac's are reliable, but I personally find them clunky for standard development.

Ubuntu is my safe place, the UX/DX makes the most sense to me.

Just OOC, do you currently run a stock Ubuntu distro or a derivative? (and if so, may I ask which one?)

I think this would be extremely useful in increasing Linux desktop adoption. There's an enormous number of Windows users who hate Microsoft's changes to the Windows GUI and wish they could still run XP or 7. There's also a need to make sure it is stable enough that users never have to resort to the command line and that it runs "non-free" software out of the box, especially software originally developed for Windows. The latter, of course, is a necessary compromise to get people who aren't FOSS purists to use the operating system. I think the focus should be on Windows rather than Mac because Mac users generally like Mac.

Linux adoption, in my view, is held back by the existing community's lack of desire to deliver what the average user wants. Things are obviously better on that front than they used to be but Ubuntu is still quite bad at doing what non-technical users want from a computer. Most Linux users seem perfectly fine with that.

I think this would be a great feature, though faithfully reproducing a Mac desktop will likely be difficult, between making Command/Meta-based key shortcuts consistent through the system and making sure the global menubar actually gets populated.

The latter of those is actually the more difficult of the two. Last I knew the GTK plugin that provides application menus through dbus was broken, and many GTK apps don't have a menubar anyway (anything that doesn't fit into a hamburger menu gets binned). Qt apps are better here but there's some bug under Wayland that prevents menus from being pulled from those.

There really ought to be an XDG standard for UI toolkits to provide their menubars to system bars, HUDs, accessibility utilities, etc with.

Not for me, but the closest you can get is Zorin OS Pro, https://zorin.com/os/pro/

KDE is the only desktop environment that I've used on Linux that successfully lets me mimic macOS, not in style, but in the top menu bar and app menu placement, the dock, window decorations/button placement, hot corners etc. The overview feature is also very macOS-esque.

I'm not using a macOS theme, but all of the buttons are in the same places and it works great with my macOS muscle memory. Same thing with key shortcuts, KDE has a customizable shortcut system for practically anything you'd want to do.

I tried doing the same in GNOME and it seems that they want you doing things the GNOME way, which is just different enough to be an annoying experience, personally.

GNOME resembles macOS in that it's not yet another Win9X-like desktop, but that's about where it ends. Its closest commercial cousin is probably iPadOS, even though that's not what the GNOME devs were trying for. While it's obviously not as limiting as iPadOS is, much of the UI and interactions are strikingly similar, as is the overall ethos.

Where macOS has always been about progressive disclosure with tons of little power user affordances hidden in plain sight, GNOME is more about paring everything down to the bare essentials in a polished way.

That's actually a fairly common discription of both DEs.

While it's been a couple years since I last used a Mac and I thankfully haven't had to use Windows 11 (only 10, sparsely), I've used all four platforms within the past 3/4-ish years and I'd say it's a pretty accurate blanket statement.

KDE is really intuitive to use as a previous windows-user, and gnome... well certainly feels like they're _trying_ to be MacOS, not sure how familiar it'd actually feel to a recent MacOS convert though.

It's definitely true with KDE Plasma. If you squint at a KDE Plasma desktop, you see a Windows Start menu and System Tray.

The similarity is more vague with GNOME (3) and Mac OS, IMO.

>The thing is - making a consistent, easy to use well thought out operating system experience is a gargantuan task and it must take gargantuan time money and effort to do it well.

Not really: Apple did it long before they were as large and rich as they are now. The key is forcing limitations on everyone, including independent software vendors, and mostly ignoring backwards compatibility. Apple has always controlled their environments to a large extent, and used that to push their vision of how a UI should work. And having a highly centralized company with a dictatorial and perfectionist CEO contributed to this. MS, by contrast, seems to have long been a company that more closely resembled an organized crime syndicate, with different factions constantly fighting or backstabbing each other, and the central leadership not strong enough (or perhaps not caring enough) to enforce a single vision unless it was about monopolizing the market and putting competitors out of business.

>multitasking is not smooth, tasks don't end when asked, the system won't shut down, applications freeze.

I think you just need to stop crappifying your Windows installs.

A lot of what you said did happen in the days of Windows 9x, but all the Windows NT releases including Windows 11 have been rock solid.