Selfishly, as a MacOS refugee and someone who has an on/off relationship with using desktop Linux as my main (and a desire to use it daily); I would love it if there was a shameless clone of the MacOS DE for Linux.
I don't care for customisation, I just want a sensible default that I can get up and running with immediately.
Red Star OS has you covered
Why's GNOME not good enough for this use case?
I use it about once a week and as far as I can tell, Gnome40+ is giving off signs that I might be able to use it as a daily driver (for work).
Looking forward to the updated Files application and whatever else is coming in G42.
That said, there are a lot of design choices that cater more to mobile form factors and the desktop experience suffers as a result.
Then there are non DE related issues like application installation. Chromium has bizarre window and mouse performance issues related to Wayland. Graphics card drivers are difficult to install, even as someone who knows how to read documentation. Flatpak has a permissions structure that doesn't always make sense for certain applications (like OBS, Discord, IDEs) and installing applications using a package manager is very hit and miss (e.g. OBS is broken in Debian Bookworm when installed via apt because of a qt5 dependency)
I don't mean to sound negative - I only complain because I love Linux and want to be able to go to my friends and colleagues and say "you can use this" - feeling confident that they will have an experience on par with MacOS.
There currently isn't a fix for the scroll being slower than other system windows and there also isn't a fix for issues with dragging tabs.
Middle click doesn't work but I think that's system wide
At all? Applications don't receive middle click events?
Elementary OS
The best experience I have had so far is Gnome41 on Debian Bookworm (my current setup which I log into about once a week) - though the DE has some design choices that cater more to mobile desktop environments at the expense of desktop usability (I don't want to appear ungrateful towards the volunteers developing it, it's a great project and I know critique is easy).
I'm talking about a complete rip off. Things like per-window virtual desktops, screenshot/video recording via hotkey. The global menu. The rock solid stability. Window decorations, spacing, fonts and overall feel. MacOS's DE _feels_ really solid.
That or perhaps join the Elementary OS QA team so that it can have a chance at reaching that really solid _feel_.
This is the essence of the issue.
As someone who started on PCs running Windows and Linux for decades, I moved to MacOS for work because it's a zero config Unix based system with a productive and ergonomic desktop environment. I don't have an inherent bias towards Apple/MacOS and currently no longer use it (though I have an old x86 MacBook I use when not working on my desktop)
It was always an issue that I was not able to use my existing PC to run MacOS due to Apple's restrictive license model and since Apple's move to proprietary hardware (M1), I have abandoned MacOS.
I am actively polling various Linux variations to see if something offers me the same level of productivity but am using Windows+Linux within VBox for my work/engineering requirements in the meantime.
So it's not that I want to keep using MacOS specifically, it's that I need to use a Unix based operating system that has the polish, usability and stability of MacOS.
I respect that the Linux ecosystem is maintained by volunteers and I have as much opportunity as anyone to contribute (and I have been trying to contribute by submitting QA tickets to the Gnome project). That said, I would be more than happy to pay a substantial annual license fee for a Linux experience that rivals that of MacOS.
EDIT:
> All of that should be more or less easy to tweak on Linux
A lot of this functionality simply does not exist on Linux. With multi monitor setups, virtual desktops scroll on both screens. Gnome 4 is the first DE to pseudoreplicate MacOS's model.
Screenshots and screen recordings are close but lack the nuance of MacOS (and Windows) that make them valuable. For instance no DE offers the ability to draw notes on a screenshotted area, copy the modified version to clipboard (rather than save a file). There is also no way that I know where you can create an mp4 video of a selected area of the screen as easily as you can take a screenshot.
This is invaluable for me as I like to send detailed representations of bugs, with screenshots, notes and videos. Really helps when working remotely or contributing to something like Gnome.
The DE included software might not get you there but there’s seems to be plenty of variations you could install. Again it’s not as polished but I’m not super picky about the specifics of how my OS appears to function.
I’m looking to add some niceties myself to KDE soon as apart of an attempt to learn some C++ and/or Rust.
> That said, I would be more than happy to pay a substantial annual license fee for a Linux experience that rivals that of MacOS.
Are you looking for BSD?
Joking aside, you're going to have to be a lot more specific than "rivals" MacOS. There are a lot of cases where MacOS has dug itself into arbitrary, insurmountable leads (eg. nobody is going to add haptics to your touchpad with a software update), but there are also cases where Linux whoops MacOS up and down the block (full WINE functionality, Vulkan drivers, Nvidia compatibility, system-agnostic filesystems, etc.)
> A lot of this functionality simply does not exist on Linux. With multi monitor setups, virtual desktops scroll on both screens. Gnome 4 is the first DE to pseudoreplicate MacOS's model.
This is tacitly untrue, KDE scrolls all monitors by default, and most x11 sessions can be configured to do the same afaik. The only holdouts are esoteric window managers like i3wm, where arbitrary desktop/monitor association is just part of their design paradigm. I'm pretty sure GNOME 3 could be configured to do the same, too (the developers just didn't put the option in the default settings app because they don't trust you, I guess). Not sure where you're getting this impression from, but it sounds like a misunderstanding.
> Screenshots and screen recordings are close but lack the nuance of MacOS (and Windows) that make them valuable. For instance no DE offers the ability to draw notes on a screenshotted area, copy the modified version to clipboard (rather than save a file).
Again, KDE's default screenshot utility ("Spectacle") has robust annotation and saving options. I just let it save the screenshotted areas to my clipboard, and it works fine. It should probably be compatible with your GNOME system too, if you want to try it out.
TL-DR:
Linux is not MacOS, for better and for worse. Most of the features you've listed are indeed configuration options, but nobody really ships a "MacOS clone" distro because it doesn't exist. You can't pay developers to make something like that because there's not a single other organization on earth with 200 billion dollars in liquid cash to spend on decadent UIs and eye candy.
This has been the problem from GNU/Linux desktop for ages, the Look gets cloned, yet the Feel dies along the way.