Yea gnome gets a lot of hate, but I've been using it as a daily driver for a few years and I have a slick, productive workflow with minimal customization. It's free software, it looks nice, and every release is a nice improvement.

I have the feeling it also happened the other way around as well. When Gnome 3 came out the big buttons and huge whitespace seemed ridiculous, especially with Big Sur MacOS looks very similar.

Apple doing it doesn't make it better.

It’s been like this since Gnome 3 was released in 2011. This is why I've always been confused by people who say Linux has an “ugly, inconsistent, unprofessional” UI - to me this looks and feels better than Windows.

Gnome is just one part of the story - the gnome shell was always decent looking and had good themes.

But the apps and the ecosystem really is ugly, messy and inconsistent. For example if you look at the controls you got with GTK out of the box in GTK3 era (when I last tried to build something with it) I remember huge paddings, unintuitive UX (the GTK file picker is the worst I've used) and poor layout controls. Go check out an app like https://inkscape.org and compare it to something like Illustrator or Gnome to Photoshop. The messy jumbled stacks of options with huge icons and paddings instead of being condensed and easy to use - most of it stems from GTK controls being bad.

Now this is all with a huge disclaimer that I haven't used a Linux desktop in over 5 years at this point, maybe things got better but I doubt it - I still use Inkscape for example from time to time and Gimp on OSX and putting the non-native issues aside the apps look terrible on their own because of what I already said.

Unfortunately, it feels like everything is turning into what Linux was 10 years ago. MacOS is better, but the increasing dominance of Electron and Java apps which bring their own UIs into whatever eco-system they encounter is very frustrating. If you are stuck running MS apps on the Mac, they are their own micro-cosm as well.

This was always the case: MS Office used its own widgets since about 1995 on both platforms; Adobe has their own UI controls, and even Apple used custom/dark themes and controls for their pro apps since about forever.

The current state of Apple App Store app is just the cherry on the top.

I don’t use Adobe, so for me, the big culprit has always been MS Office and I’ve been able to mostly avoid it for years. I’m looking more at Slack, VSCode, and other “Essential” apps which have displaced Mac Native tools like BBEdit and if you squint hard, Adium.

I don't think it's inconsistency that bothers me in this case - I don't really care if an app isn't using the same kind of widget design as long it's functional (I spend most of my days in apps that are entirely non-native and I'm fine with them).

The problem is more with GTK design which is crap for 80% of PC applications with dense control layouts, the high padding touch style widgets it offers out of the box work for low density stuff not complex editors).

Even non-native OSX apps integrate into OS in a predictable manner (use toolbar, shortcuts, native file dialogs, etc.)

Maybe you might break the 5 yrs gap with KDE Neon? :)

https://neon.kde.org/

KDE was never my cup of tea - it more configurable than Gnome but I always liked the Gnome look (well 3.0 that is, 2.0 wasn't that attractive to me).

Nowdays I need to develop stuff that deploys to iOS so I'm kind of stuck on a mac.

Gnome looks a bit like you got stuck in an alternative reality where MacOS evolved slightly differently.

KDE looks like you got stuck in an alternative reality and Windows 7 evolved differently. (And Windows 8/10 never happened)

I never really cared for the Windows UI.

Text rendering still looks awful, and it's only getting worse with newer displays at higher resolutions that use scaling.

Looking and feeling better than Windows is a low bar. Or at least it was a low bar in the Gnome 3.0 days.

I was mostly stricken with how much many of the features they are highlighting look straight out of stuff which was unveiled in MacOS about 5+ years ago. Extensive gesture support being a biggie.

Have a look at elementary OS (https://elementary.io), it's much more resembling MacOS.

s/MacOS/webOS/g

from Palm

You need to check your dates.

MacOS’s fundamental look has a pretty consistent chain all the way back to NextOS in the 90s. The Dock, the dot indicator, and many other core pieces are visible in versions of MacOS which predate the launch of webOS. MacOS borrows some bits from webOS as well, but the fundamental Dock layout is right out of NextStep.

I didn't mention any dates, and I believe it doesn't need to be the one who came first to inspire others ;)

Well what I meant to say is they were both inspired by the OS I'm going to release next year.