That said, Dolphin just got a bug where it crashes during thumbnail generation, and I'm seeing artifacts in Wayland with fractional scaling, but the KDE bug system is very visible and easy to navigate, so that I'm pretty confident these will be fixed soon. (I did know what I was getting into when I left Apple for the Wild West.)
It is totally insane that this is a thing for a user to think about.
As soon as the "designers" got more funding than the coding contributors, the whole gnome org went down the drain. They often trhow away complete systems and replace them with something that are unusable "to drive coding contributors". They are completely disconnected from the community. Ubuntu tries to work around all that (by making their own shell, settings apps, etc) so it is not too obvious, but if you use debian, you probably spend several months without basic desktop funcionality every time they pushed something. Gnome is the inspiration for the systemD politics.
So, no gnome is not closer to macOS. but gnome is broken by using copying macOS as an excuse by the designer teams.
Could you clarify what you mean by this?
Like they wanted CSD and they decreed that everyone, even non-GNOME apps like old games that nobody works on should implement CSD because they are not going to be backwards compatible.
Same with notifications, old apps, third party apps should implement the GNOME way, they do not care for supporting non-GNOME stuff.
But more power for them, they self select a niche user, a "GNOME user" that either is compatible with the GNOME way or they will contort themselves into it.
And about this designers forcing their shit on users, I hit lately a issue with GTK apps where the windows of the app and popups are hard coded and you can't resize them. Because of my bad eyes I use a giant font size and this apps are unusable (I need to research if is possible to trick this windows at runtiem that they are allowed to resize)
then gnome was coopted and took a nosedive and OEM went back to using microsoft for everything. and ubuntu had to write their own shell to survive because gnome tought it would be smart to ship a broken 2.x version with no settings app
The easiest way to make things clear and consistent is to have less things, the idea is you have a clean base then figure out how to add the things people are still wanting the most. If you had whole development teams working on these things then that would work (see macOS) but without that people implement the simplest parts and avoid the rest due to it not being fun, not having an agreed design for them, the design being too contentious, or just a lack of time.