I've had the opposite experience. Stock Kubuntu 18.04 provides pretty much the experience I want with just a few tweaks to fine tune the touchpad and font DPI. Once the base system is installed it only takes a few more minutes to set up my dev tools using Ansible.

On Mac OS, I'm also pretty happy with the stock interface, but I spend quite a bit more time downloading and installing dev tools. Then I end up running out of memory because Docker for Mac and Minikube both end up running Linux virtual machines in the background.