Not sure if that's old people painting the past rose, but System 7 was not awesome. Cooperative scheduling and lack of memory protection were anachronisms already in 1991.

I think we're talking about different things here. The UI might have been superior in MacOS, but the technical foundations of Unix clearly were. Something OSX tried to (belatedly) reconcile. Nothing stops you from adding an awesome UI on top of Linux (although I'd say UI will always be a matter of personal taste and prior experience).