For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.
I looked at some Asahi Linux videos and it always shows KDE and the interface is Windows like (or what I call Windows like). I never liked that and that is single biggest reason I never tried KDE. I know it's Linux and KDE and GNOME can pretty much made to look like each other (i.e their default look and feel). Is it trivial on Asahi Linux or needs a lot of tweaking?
Something like what ElementaryOS would look like - look/feel/UX wise ElementaryOS has been my gold standard sine it released and the last I checked it still felt that way. But since anything other than what Asahi Linux installs and support by default, i.e. Fedora Remix, is neither recommended nor fares well on Mac so I don't think I can use ElementaryOS (which is essentially Ubuntu LTS) really. Even Asahi Linux team recommends KDE.
Also - can one access certain Mac folders in Asahi (e.g. ~/Pictures)? And is it even recommended, if it's possible (Security wise)?
(I have been exploring/searching on Asahi and I am gearing up to use it on my M1 MacBook Pro - will be using/trying Linux desktop after more than a decade)
You cannot access any of your Mac folders in Asahi. Your Mac partitions are invisible until you reboot into MacOS.
Some potential workarounds:
1. Use Syncthing to sync your Pictures folder on both operating systems to an external Mac. This of course duplicates the contents of the folder on your Mac/Asahi SSD, which is wasteful.
[Note: Dropbox does not work on Asahi Linux because it only barely works on x86 Linux and it has never worked on Arm Linux.]
2. Use an external USB or SD drive for files you want to share. Needs to be formatted in something both OSes can read/write (e.g. not APFS).
3. Use Paragon's $40 extFS which lets MacOS read and write to your Linux partition. Supposedly; I haven't tried it. This only solves half your problem: It gives MacOS access to your Linux files but not the reverse.
https://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/
What's really needed is a way to mount APFS partitions from Linux, and I plan to DDG that as soon as I finish typing this...
UPDATE: APFS FUSE seems to be recommended, although it only provides read access to your APFS partition.
https://github.com/sgan81/apfs-fuse
4. Make a brand new partition on your drive for shared files, and format it exFAT. MacOS can read/write exFAT natively and Linux can usually be made to do so, although I haven't tried it yet on Asahi. This seems to me like the most promising option if you don't want to depend on an external drive.