Jabs aside, GNOME is pretty nice compared to where it used to be. Everything still takes a few iterations of touching, but not as many as it used to. Some things are frustratingly unsolvable (see: advanced monitor features), but at least it is a full replacement for Windows on the same hardware. Oh, and contemporary linux distress have audio drivers that appear to work out of the box without having to build the kernel.
When it comes to laptops: it'd be great if anyone made something that competes with a MacBook. It's been a long time. At this point I can only assume there is an economic reason rather than a technical one that Windows and Linux laptops are so bad.
You need to define what's a MacBook for you. I'm not a fan of the form factor, but I've seen dozens of clones of it for years now and kinda wonder where a Surface Laptop for instance fails for you.
You can find some that are 80% in the first two categories. There is nothing remotely in the same league in the last two.
Sounds to me like you never tried any. Which is fair if you're not trying to move away from macs in the first place, but if you're actively looking for alternatives there's a lot you are missing.
I can confirm that there is nothing that comes close. Gnome is an abomination even if it might be appealing on the surface. KDE is still very rough around the edges, despite making a lot of progress with each version. I used XFCE for a long time because it can be tweaked to a reasonably useable state and it is light on resources. KDE can be occasionally dog slow on a $12k workstation with a 64-core Threadripper pro and 256 GB of RAM for a reason I cannot imagine. Using my Mac Studio is a much better experience overall.