The idea that designers circa Win7 "ruined" windows UX/UI is just revisionist history. Windows has had pretty terrible UI/UX basically forever, and most Linux folks have known this since the early 90s, where KDE, GNOME, etc. were vastly superior to anything Microsoft was putting out.Sorry, but talking about revisionist history. KDE had their first stable release in 1998, years after Windows 95. KDE was inspired by CDE, but almost equally by Windows 95 (see e.g. the launcher in early KDE versions). Before KDE, we were mostly using fvwm, twm, etc., which had extremely bad usability for non-expert users. The GNOME project was started after KDE, because some folks were unhappy that KDE used Qt, which didn't have a free software license at the time.
In fact, most ideas you see in MacOS these days can find their roots in early (and often experimental) Linux interfaces (from multiple desktops, to launchers, to Exposé).
Well, that's saying like "most ideas for the iPhone have their roots in...". Sure, there may have been environments that give some overview of applications. But Exposé set the gold standard for this feature and relied very heavily on GPU-accelerated compositing (Quartz compose). Something Linux desktop environments and Windows only got years later. Quickly after Exposé was added to Panther, you saw folks in the Linxu world trying to copy the feature to KDE and GNOME. See e.g.:
https://store.kde.org/p/1220207
(Also see how clunky and ugly it looked compared to OS X Exposé. Since the icons all have different resolutions, some are sharp, others are very pixely. The design is quite ugly, the Kopete window is cut in half. Etc.)
The Linux development has largely been reactive, even to this day. E.g. once hamburger menus started popping up in Google's design language, GNOME started to copy this idea. Thanks to which GNOME doesn't have application menus anymore (which is absolutely disastrous for desktops.)
most ideas you see in
I think this also expresses an issue with the Linux-approach to the desktop (by and large). In the end it is not about features, ideas, or being there first. It is about forming a consistent and coherent interface. Linux desktops fail here in even basic things that have been solved in other desktops for decades, such as consistent keyboard shortcuts between applications.