This is a single datapoint and I am a senior systems engineer using a lot of Linux at work but its desktop experience is not even remotely close to be as good as MacOS. It reached the level that I can give it to people who do not work in IT though.

Depends. In some regards I like Gnome 3 UI as it comes with Fedora more, than Finder. With some details under the cover (doesn't have trouble browsing samba shares after connecting to another network, or per-network interface DNS, so you can resolve hostnames on internal network even when connected to VPN) are something, you get used to really fast.

I have a VM of it. Unity is still as annoying as it was in 2008.

I've heard a lot of reported display/performance issues when running it in a VM. Try installing it on bare metal.

I mean design, not performance...

I enjoy my own tweaked GNOME3 more than OSX.

I'm sorry people keep recommending vanilla Ubuntu to you. Unity is awful, and Ubuntu will be rid of it soon anyway. Until then, use Kubuntu, or Ubuntu GNOME.