The problem is that very few macOS clone projects reach anything close to maturity, which means that paradigm is barely represented in FOSS desktops. Aside from GNOME (which is iPadOS, not macOS) and its prettier cousin Pantheon, It's just Win9X clones and tiling WMs as far as the eye can see.

That might not seem like a big deal, but if the goal is to get as many people switched away from commercial operating systems as possible there needs to be a healthy range of conventions/workflows represented by meaningfully different DEs so more users find one they can slip on like a comfy pair of shoes. For most people, switching desktop paradigms is something they want to avoid if at all possible because of the immense friction it brings.

Gnome 2 did a good job of taking all the best ideas from Windows and MacOS, then innovating on top. Sun even ran user studies to validate the UI as it was being built.

Then the gnome 3 team intentionally sabotaged it all by intentionally arranging for gnome 3 apps to refuse to coexist with a gnome 2 install.

Sigh.

My theory was that RedHat was concerned about software patents and/or law suits, so felt they had to significantly change Gnome 2, even if it would make people less productive.

That doesn’t explain why they actively sabotaged the work done by people outside of redhat.

Yeah, I thought GNOME 2 was pretty usable. MATE is around now but aging and probably forever X11-only. Rebuilding GNOME 2 on Wayland and with modern necessities like fractional scaling would be a worthy project.

Everything except the Control Centre has been started porting to Wayland, and a few things are even finished: https://wiki.mate-desktop.org/developers-corner/wayland-meso...

XFCE are not that far along, but the developers are tinkering: https://www.phoronix.com/news/xfwm4-wayland-May-2023

Ubuntu Unity did better than most in that department.

Still alive and being maintained, too.

Unity's implementation of a global menu is probably the most consistently functional I've seen at the very least. KDE has this feature but compatibility is more spotty, partially thanks to necessary packages going unmaintained and on my main distro (Fedora) missing altogether.

I agree.

Xfce has a plugin to do it as well, but it needs various strange Gtk settings to tell apps to use it, and I can't get most of those to work.

There are some impressive KDE-based distros out there, and I wish someone rose to the challenge of offering a Mac/Unity-like Xfce-based desktop.

Yeah but always OS X of maybe 10 years ago. They gave up the glossy thing.

Also I disagree about it being unproductive. Not everyone is most productive in i3 or whatever.

Please provide more context. “Proven to be X” without proof nor links …

Funny—i'm very productive on macOS and feel the exact same as you do about pc interfaces (including all linux and bsd environments). I don't even know how i'd go about "fixing" (in my head) the horrifically bad keybindings that make these environments so hard to use.

It's atrocious. I guess people get used to it. It's always baffled me why so many apparently 'power users' opt for it over Windows. Windows has a ton of issues, especially since 10/11, but is infinitely more configurable and customizable.