This design seems to cement the trend at Apple to position their products as consumer appliances, not platforms useful for development.
The problem is, there's nothing else out there. Everything is going to shit in one way or another. Windows is now a disaster, Linux was always a disaster in terms of user experience and isn't improving.
Mac OS was the last bastion of somewhat good, thoughtful design, user experience and attention to detail and now they've gone to shit too.
Curious: what have you tried? People who use "Linux" as a catch-all in terms of UX usually have only tried a single distribution with a single desktop environment.
Yup. You've just described a disaster. How many permutations of <hundreds of distros> x <dozens of DMs> must a user try before finding a good UX?
Because there are at least four BSDs, Mac therefore isn't good.
Do you see how ridiculous applying that logic to any operating system is?
Linux isn't a disaster. It's a kernel. There are Linux distributions with great user interfaces and great UX, developed by people who are great at it. There are also distributions that aren't.
Could you name some? No sarcasm, actually interested!
In terms of defaults:
I've heard really good things about Solus, and its use of AppArmor seems really cool. Never touched its package manager, so I won't recommend it, but it might be worth checking out. Its desktop environment is really snappy and has an interesting design philosophy.
Elementary is really cool as a boutique distribution; I don't personally feel any urge to use it seriously (I dislike apt as a package manager), but I always keep its live environment on a flash drive, because it works without any setup on basically anything I throw it at, painlessly, and without error. It's got a cool indie app store full of curated Elementary-centric free software, and overall just feels great. Using it, you'll probably notice a few areas that it clones Mac on, and a few that feel delightfully different.
Clear Linux (Intel's desktop distribution) is pretty popular right now because of how simple it is & how Intel seems to be going to great lengths to optimize it and make it a serious contender, but I don't like its desktop environment (vanilla GNOME 3 as far as I'm aware) all that much.
ChromiumOS is probably the best-designed desktop operating system on the planet right now technically, and I say that as a person who really hates Google. UI-wise it's so-so, but UX-wise it's really something special.
But more interesting are desktop environments in general, since they can be used with any variant of Linux you feel the urge to use. There's an exception there, though, in that Elementary's DE and Deepin's DE tend to not work so well or nicely on platforms that aren't Elementary or Deepin.
There are modern environments:
Plasma has hands-down the best UX of any sort of desktop operating system assuming you've got an Android smartphone; you say you're coming from Apple's environment, so imagine the interop between your Mac and your iPhone, but going both ways instead of just Mac -> iPhone. Texting, handling calls, taking advantage of the computing resources of connected devices, using your phone as an extra trackpad, notifications, unlocking your PC, painless file-sharing, pretty much anything you'd like. There are a bunch of distributions that ship with Plasma by default.
Solus's Budgie is kind of neat in that it takes the main benefit of GNOME 3 (ecosystem) with far fewer downsides.
There are also retro environments, if those are your thing. There's a pretty much perfect NeXTSTEP clone (including the programming environment, not just the UI), amiwm is still pretty interesting, there are clones of basically every UNIX UI under the sun, so on.
I'm not the best person to answer your question, because for the most part I don't go out of my way to use new desktop environments and distributions, and nothing above is my first choice. (In terms of window management, I usually stick with 9wm & E just because I have ridiculous ADHD and 9wm forces me to focus while E allows me to tile painlessly if I ever need it. I use three distributions overall, none of which are very popular at the moment, pretty much solely because I'm really picky with package managers & design philosophies.) That's a "me" issue rather than a Linux issue, though.
It sounds like the finding right combination of DE and package management solution plays a big role here. I don't remember much of my experience with Gentoo's package manager in the early 2000's other than finding it generally did its job (if a bit slowly)... Experience with package managers on Mac (brew, macports) hasn't been great so I'm eager to play around with modern ones on Linux. Same goes for the DE actually: stock, out-of-the-box, macOS is essentially unusable for me until I get my customization (scroll, trackpad, KeyboardMaestro) done exactly right, I can't imagine this not being better on Linux, if anything for the ability to switch among the various DE's.
I'm starting to contemplate this (fully untested) strategy: trying out a few distros and installing the one I like best on VMWare Fusion and then try to use it as much as possible, falling back to macOS if I get stuck or I'm short on time but gradually replacing Mac-specific stuff as I find suitable replacements.. TextMate, the masterpiece of Allan Odgaard (author of the article being discussed here) probably going to be the toughest one. If I'm successful, I should eventually be able to let Linux 'out of the box' and run it on real hardware..
PS: amiwm! This is going to be a must. I do miss the Amiga, a fair bit..
xbps
apk (terrible interface; wonderful technically)
pacman (wonderful interface; so-so technically; dislike the distro that uses it because of technical choices)
InstallPackage (GoboLinux is kind of cheating, because InstallPackage isn't a "real" package manager, but that's kind of the point)
I love TextMate, too! Something you might find nice is how easy it is to run Mac in a VM on Linux; there are scripts that manage the entire thing for you, and it's pretty painless (and so fast; I was surprised). Useful if you have a few packages you can't find replacements for.
You mention Apple Music elsewhere, which you might be interested to know has an Android client and a web client, and you can probably get a native client on Linux, though I'm not immediately aware of one.
That would be excellent! I like the idea of swapping host and guest with this VM strategy, sort of evolutionary platform switching.
https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM
Really, really fast, and fairly painless.