It’s not just look and feel, it’s approach to various things, like how GNOME shares the iPadOS tendency to cut advanced features instead of putting them in a less prominent position. The menu bars of Mac apps are full of such functions that under GNOME simply wouldn’t be implemented because they don’t fit in a toolbar or hamburger menu. There are several aspects of out of the box customization that are more like iPadOS than macOS too, which is why the GNOME settings app has less than half the settings that the macOS settings app does.
If GNOME wants a touch friendly mode that’s fine, but they’re doing the Microsoft Windows 8 thing and forgetting that there’s a ton of desktop PCs that will never have touch as well as plenty of touch-capable laptops where that capability is unused or even flat out disabled. The least they could do is provide a “traditional desktop” toggle in settings to restore more sane padding values that don’t burn 20% of my non-touch 12” ThinkPad’s limited screen space for no good reason.
> The least they could do is provide a “traditional desktop” toggle in settings to restore more sane padding values that don’t burn 20% of my non-touch 12” ThinkPad’s limited screen space for no good reason.
The thing is that Gnome has numerous desktop environment alternatives and nobody is stuck with it. Linux desktop environments are free to be opinionated because they know that their users can just use something else. You can even install Gnome and KDE at the same time and switch between if that's really your thing.
Gnome doesn't limit you to installing applications that are in Gnome's own design system. You say "The menu bars of Mac apps are full of such functions that under GNOME simply wouldn’t be implemented because they don’t fit in a toolbar or hamburger menu" but that's not really how it works on Linux. The desktop environment is just the desktop environment, it's essentially separate from everything else.
When we are talking about "Gnome apps" we are really only talking about ~30 core apps that are included with the OS. Many/most/all of them you could even uninstall entirely and replace with something else.
Gnome choosing to have a small settings pane is a deliberate choice to keep things simple for their desktop environment's intended audience, but it is not a deliberate choice to limit functionality or freedom (installing apps from third parties, changing your browser engine, compiling code on your own system, etc).
Even if that’s true, the stock GNOME apps and third party GTK3/4 apps (which tend to follow GNOME design philosophy) work more smoothly under GNOME than those built with Qt or other frameworks, and so deviating makes for a materially worse experience.
And yes you can switch between multiple installed DEs and I have done so in the past, but that makes for a messy experience with many redundant apps that the user must clean up themselves. It’s a lot nicer to have just one installed.
Shrug, I run Gnome apps in KDE all the time. They run smoothly for me. I’m sure the inverse is perfectly fine as well.
I certainly don’t expect most users to switch between desktop environments but there are so many of them that complaining about one is a waste of breath.
Qt apps under GNOME aren’t great thanks to the client side declaration drama with the GNOME team. In short, the GNOME team believes that programs should be responsible for drawing their own titlebars/chrome (as opposed to windows being provided standard chrome for “free”), and so Qt apps have to draw a simplistic makeshift titlebar which doesn’t match anything when running under GNOME.
> The least they could do is provide a “traditional desktop” toggle in settings to restore more sane padding values that don’t burn 20% of my non-touch 12” ThinkPad’s limited screen space for no good reason.
This is a kind of "responsiveness" that should be implemented in GTK+ 4 and libadwaita (dynamically changing padding/size values within the theme depending on active input devices, with mouse supporting smaller sizes than touch-only input), not so much GNOME itself. Windows does it already, so it's a realistic possibility.
If GNOME wants a touch friendly mode that’s fine, but they’re doing the Microsoft Windows 8 thing and forgetting that there’s a ton of desktop PCs that will never have touch as well as plenty of touch-capable laptops where that capability is unused or even flat out disabled. The least they could do is provide a “traditional desktop” toggle in settings to restore more sane padding values that don’t burn 20% of my non-touch 12” ThinkPad’s limited screen space for no good reason.