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.