Do you have concrete examples in mind of improved UI and UX in Windows and Mac in the past 20 years? I'm genuinely curious because comparing my memories of Windows XP and Windows 7 I can't think of any great innovations.

Windows 10's innovations were so bad I left the OS entirely with extensive telemetry, an abusive and confusing cloud account system, ads on your desktop. The only UX improvement I saw was being able to enter your session with a pin that doesn't require you to press the enter-key, but they even botched that by not letting you type letters and not showing any warnings: Something we learned was necessary 20 years ago with the caps-lock warning. Can't speak to Macs as I only recently began checking them out.

I've been studying Desktop Environments for a FOSS project, I have over a dozen VMs setup with different distros and operating systems using different DEs, and they're all basically the same. It strikes me as unfair to say Linux is copying either Windows or MacOS. I see a lot of innovation in open-source, there are a lot of innovative desktop components, settings and paradigms (Compiz comes to mind, have you seen such a customizable compositor in MacOS or Windows?) but it's natural that distributions end up choosing a common visual language by default, simply because it's what people know and expect.

Ah okay I was using innovation more in the way it’s used to describe a distinct big impactful change. I didn’t know the meaning of the word is simply change.

I included “either” at the end to point out I don’t see any of the three desktop OSes having done much of anything for a long time.

20 years for Mac is a long time though. OS X was just coming out then. I think just based off the fresh OS and simpler/cleaner user interface Mac was doing initially were decently big changes. You could say that only goes up to ~10.4 before there aren't many impactful positive changes besides security changes every one has been doing. 10.4 came out in like 2005.

Isn't the Windows 11 UI basically a total ripoff of Plasma?

KDE for example can trace it's heritage from CDE, which is based on Motif, which predates Windows.

> Aren’t most Linux UIs largely copying or being strongly influenced by Windows?

No.

Whenever I fire up a Linux distro, I can never shake the feeling that the UI is just a subpar ripoff of Windows and MacOS. I can't really pinpoint anything, but it just doesn't feel as polished. And that even includes the mainstream distros like Ubuntu.

i3, sway and pop shell aren't a subpar ripoff of anything. they are plain superior to what you can get on other platforms.

Pop is the only one of those three that I'm familiar with, but I'd very much call it a subpar MacOS ripoff.

Try cinnamon. It's better than the current generation of Windows UIs.

That’s funny because windows 11 is such a Gnome 40 copy that it hurts.

If that is true, it’s like saying iPhone has done some copying of Android and is too funny.

Still, Android dropped their entire Blackberry inspired/copied design and copied iPhone instead in 2007/2008.

It's not just true, but blatantly obvious. Compare the design language of Big Sur with GTK 3.38 which predated it, and as the other anon mentioned, Windows 11 is effectively just GNOME with Dash-to-dock enabled. Whether or not Microsoft knowingly copied it is a different argument, but I find it hard to believe that their designers weren't at least inspired by the touch-friendly, reactive desktop UIs built with GTK.

So does that not make what I said even stronger? It isn’t really that amusing for the original (iPhone, windows) to copy aspects of the original inspiring copiers.