I would add Keybindings that are the same in all apps. Also, Having Command / Super as the keybinding key is awesome because it opens Control for the Readline / Emacs keybindings and doesn't end up in insane shortcut situations like every linux terminal where "copy" suddenly transforms from CTRL+C to CTRL+Shift+C.

MacOS has by far the best idea and implementation of how desktop keybindings should work (and no, I love vim but having desktop-wide vim keybindings doesn't make sense because not every input field can easily be modal). I'm constantly surprised why no linux distribution has copied this.

That is the one thing I really miss after going back to Linux. Especially the Emacs-style keybinding in all text input were a delight.

FYI: You can enable them in Gnome with Gnome-Tweaks. Apparently a very recent version of Gnome dropped this functionality for reasons that are beyond my understanding (but that's often the case when I look at the decisions that the Gnome devs make).

However, getting the Control -> Command/Super thing to work is much trickier. The best way is to use this: https://github.com/mooz/xkeysnail

However when I tried that, I ran into all kinds of weird behaviours all over the OS. Also, it doesn't work with Wayland.

Another option is https://kinto.sh . It worked perfectly for me out of the box on Pop OS, and with a few tweaks to shortcuts I’m pretty happy with the experience to the point where I can fairly seamlessly switch between computers and not be driven crazy by the shortcuts.

You can't mention Emacs keybindings and claim "keybindings are the same in all apps" when Apple's Emacs keybindings are not the same as Emacs proper. For example moving a word left is now Ctrl-Option B instead of M-B.

Most terminal emulators let you remap Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+V if you really want.

Sure, it's not the full Emacs keybindings. But the existing ones are still better than what Linux Desktops offer. Some of the missing ones can be added by updating the `DefaultKeyBinding.dict` [1]. So in comparison to Linux not only does it have better Emacs keybindings support, macOS also allows adding a ton of custom shortcuts per system - without having to install weird xmodmap daemons that mutate your keys (which you also can do on macOS).

[1] https://gist.github.com/jwreagor/9670905

An eye-opener for me on how useful all the configurability of Linux actually is has been looking into getting macOS-alike keyboard layouts and shortcut behavior on Linux. There's pretty high demand for it (lots and lots of posts all over the Web from people trying to figure out how to make it happen) and there are whole projects based around it, so I assume a fair amount of time has been spent trying to make it work, yet all the options I've found are janky as hell and fail to work under all kinds of common scenarios.

The more distance I get from using Linux as a daily-driver desktop OS, the more it looks like most of the benefits of its configurability and modularity are fairly superficial—especially in its GUI stack—while the harm it causes is deep.

> Most terminal emulators let you remap Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+V if you really want.

But that doesn’t really help does it? Because now you’ve made killing and backgrounding a process just as hard. What you need is an extra accelerator key, which is only available on expensive boutique keyboards and not available at all on laptop keyboards.

> Top menu with reasonable use of available space rather than the half-assed attempt to appeal to a hypothetical normie user on a 2014 tablet/netbook that gnome is doing

This (space efficiency, not necessarily the top menu bar) is the main thing that's keeping me away from Linux at this time. "Liberating" a Macbook Air feels like a great idea right until you have to do actual work on it, at which point, unless you're using the terminal, the screen will be largely empty space and huge widgets, with whatever text or image you're working on cramped between all those beautifully hand-crafted organic breathable widgets.

Edit: I'm not talking about window decorations being large, I'm talking about application widgets being large. You can fit like three macOS buttons in the space of a single Adwaita- or Breeze-themed button. See e.g. this SE thread for a comparison -- not with macOS, but basically the same problem: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/489533/how-to-get-a...

There are many desktops for Linux running the full gamut from large intrusive window dressing to nothing at all and all levels of efficiency in between.

I don't mind window dressing, it's touch-sized buttons, tabs & co. on a desktop monitor that makes it all suck.

This is actually the main reason I can't stand Big Sur and after - why is so much space wasted on touch interfaces if my Macbook has no touchscreen? The Quick Menu is the best/most frustrating example of this, but it's also apparent in the new widget design and settings app.

Pure no, from me. KDE feels much more natural to me now that I've settled in.

Have you tried https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 or any of the similar themes by that project? There's a bit of extra padding still but it's vastly more usable than the Adwaita default. (And of course you don't need to bother w/ the retro icon packs shown in the screenshot, the basic GTK+ theme is plenty enough.)

(The best UI with that kind of widget style today is arguably SerenityOS, but the repo I linked above tries to provide something similar for existing GTK+ apps.)

I have, I've actually written my own GTK theme years ago, before I gave up on it. B00merang Project's stuff is cool -- still way larger than it ought to be but indeed better -- but GTK theming is a raging dumpster fire.

Not just GTK themes but all of the tweaks and extensions that are apparently necessary to have a UI usable by an adult. Even then it's a moving target and some GNOME update will break random shit or remove some control. It's absolutely infuriating.

I find the server 2003 theme to be much more eye pleasing, mainly because it is designed to use more than 256 colors. https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-Classic

While I like the overall feeling of those themes for nostalgia reasons, they've got all sorts of quirks. E.g. toolbar icons aren't correctly aligned (you can see that in the screenshot, on the "forward" and "back" buttons in the left corner) -- both the horizontal and the vertical margins are wrong. It's not the authors' fault. I've poked at GTK's CSS before -- you can't make it work, not at the current abstraction level.

Also, for comparison, a Finder sidebar item is about half the height of the (unresizable) Nautilus sidebar item in the screenshot. Thank God for Thunar at least :-).

Ubuntu Unity still works. It's basically the Mac desktop but better.

You can get even better space efficiency with a tiling WM. A lot of them don't bother with window chrome or even have a status bar with a clock out of the box.

> You can get even better space efficiency with a tiling WM.

If you try to run the numbers on e.g. sway/i3, that barely makes a dent. Realistically, you can squeeze maybe 6-8px out of a sane window decoration before it gets impractical.

Meanwhile you can get like 10px of vertical space just by halving the vertical padding of a default Adwaita/Breeze button, and it's still larger than the equivalent macOS button which non-technical users can click just fine. Sane sizing on three stacked widgets saves more space than any tiling WM.

We can have nice things without going back to 1980s UI paradigms.

Then just don't use Adwaita/Breeze themes if that bothers you so much? And yes, it's tied to the theme. Ubuntu Unity's default "Ambiance" theme uses much less space. XFCE's default theme also uses less space. You can get themes like Chicago 95 for XFCE which also use less space.

You could also just use MATE!

Having visited the third circle of hell before, and having actually gone as far as writing my own theme before giving up the whole charade, I would rather avoid revisiting the fourth circle of hell that GTK theming is.

Edit: also, both Greybird and Ambiance are both really large compared to anything you get on other platforms. It's through no fault of their authors, GTK's layout rules break (or at least broke, I was on GTK 3.24 last I tried it) at low padding values, and it's extremely hard to keep alignment afloat on small widgets. I'm also not exactly young anymore, the text contrast in Greybird's unfocused windows is pretty awful, and fixing anything related to GTK's :backdrop attribute is a very long-winded affair.

Isn’t this mostly a Gnome problem? Gnome isn’t the only DE

No, it's not mostly a Gnome problem. The default KDE theme, Breeze, is equally tablet-quality, and unless you want to fiddle with old QtCurve (which is nowhere near as space-efficient as macOS anyway) you're largely stuck with Qt's Fusion, which is itself barely tolerable.

As for Gnome applications, it's not a Gnome problem, it's a GTK problem, that affects all GTK applications, regardless of what DE they run under, and all GTK-based DEs, like XFCE.

> Top menu with reasonable use of available space

Top menu does sound like a reasonable compromise until one has to switch between the bottom left corner of the screen and the menu in the top left enough times. I'm all for efficient use of vertical space - I am one of those who still remove the top tab bar and use tree-style-tabs, but in practice I think there is a reason why most of the world allows the menu to follow the thing it is linked to.

Also note that these menus doesn't add up on other systems either. I only "waste" space for one menu line on my Linux or Windows applications too.

> snap/flatpack/Docker

Meanwhile on Mac I still have to use AppZapper.

> A feeling that the desktop/Finder and UX is evolving and respecting habits rather than being restarted with every release

You are probably comparing to Gnome and Unity here I guess, not KDE 5 or Windows?

> State of the art commercial apps for media production rather than 90s apps struggling for compatibility as devs turn to new playgrounds

This varies with job description I think. In my field one of the reasons why I still hesitate to get a Mac next month - despite its many advantages - is the fact that so many open source programs I use looked ugly on Mac last I checked and some weren't available at all. Meanwhile on Linux I can just ap-get them or in Windows I can apt-get them in WSL and run them, GUI and all inside Windows. That is kind of magic!

> Top menu does sound like a reasonable compromise until one has to switch between the bottom left corner of the screen and the menu in the top left enough times.

A top menu was reasonable for the original 9” Macintosh display of 512×342 pixels. (The original Macintosh could not even multi-task, and the visual components of the operating system were not designed for multiple programs at once.) The top menu was always close enough, and famously used Fitts’s law to its advantage. The NeXT system (17” display, 1120×832 pixels) realized that something even closer to the mouse pointer is wherever the mouse pointer happens to be right now, and added a right mouse button to the NeXT mouse; this button was completely dedicated to showing the menu, and was not used for “right-clicking” anything.

Funny, I've had consistently worse performance and battery life (due to worse performance) on macos / mbp than my lg gram running linux.