It’s fine. The UX is varying degrees of shitty as always but I can do what I need without too much hassle (mostly vscode/vim and the terminal).
The only thing I really miss from macOS is how nice editing PDFs was in Preview (filling out and signing forms). That and Photoshop.
On a laptop or most desktops, Ubuntu LTS or something similar. If you still needed macOS or Windows, don't go hackintosh or dual-booting, that's for the birds, just run macOS or Windows under VMware Workstation.
On a powerful desktop, VMware ESXi and then Windows 10, macOS, FreeBSD, Arch or whatever in VMs. If you have GPUs, you can redirect them to the VM... people even use them for gaming sometimes too with minimal overhead.
In general, in a VM, Arch or Gentoo in a Docker container for userland, probably combined with habitat (hab). CentOS/RHEL/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian packages are always old as the hills and their dependency hell package management is so last century.
The worst thing about desktop Linux right now is the awkward transition from X11 to Wayland and the fact that high DPI support is pretty bad. It’s actually worse in some ways on Wayland despite the support for fractional and per-display scaling because half your applications probably still need to run on XWayland and it doesn’t support scaling at all.
In the last view years, I had gotten the impression that Linux on the desktop had made progress. I was surprised to find the experience at just about the same frustrating level that I last left it a decade ago.
It's all very shiny and translucent. The eye candy must come from the same designers as these fancy gaming graphics cards that are Ferrari red with lots of blinking lights, blinking away inside your computer, under your desk. But that part is not too bad.
What's worse are the inconsistencies and annoyances: windows being placed at locations where it's impossible to grab and move them; model dialogs behind their (deactivated) parent window;
Application UIs follow the Anna Karenina paradigm: they are all unique in their failures. Some have menus in the window, some use the top-of-screen menu bar, other have web interface with Hamburger menus, and then there's Calibre, which must be intended as a cruel joke.
In one non-gnome environment I tried, there was a launcher with menu entries "settings", "system", "preferences", "utilities", and "administration". That's five synonyms as far as I can tell.
There are about six places where I can change settings for the mouse. None of them allowed me to make it behave as it should: it's either dog slow, or jumps 20px for every quantum of movement.
Minor stuff: Search functions that pop up a model "nothing found" alert window whenever they don't find anything. The dialog's "Okay" button isn't focused, so you need to switch to the mouse to dismiss it.
There are three or so places to install software. The Ubuntu Store has no rhyme or reason: search results are a wild mix of well-known software and completely obscure widgets last updated during the Bush administration.
Most of the packages are terribly outdated: the version of Calibre I installed was three years old. And that was from the supposedly faster-moving "snaps" package. The only package manager that didn't give me any trouble happened to be homebrew, ported from MacOS just as recently as me.
Don't get me wrong: I've used Linux daily for at least two decades, on servers via ssh. I'd love to switch to an OSS desktop.
This has really put my opinion of Apple into perspective. There's so much complaining about every new MacOS release on HN and other places, I had started to take them seriously. But the gap to Gnome remains vast, and people claiming to have switched to Linux out of frustration must be lying, or have severely impaired judgement for some reason.