Ubuntu's Unity was a lot more macOS-like with the default global menu bar, then they gave up on it :(
Gnome doesn't even have a menu bar anymore, preferring apps use a single hamburger menu.
I always figured that whole branch of design came out of dealing with mobile limitations, with some amount of side benefit from more screen space to do useless but flashy things to make the boss/client happy.
Why would you ever go that route for a general purpose desktop?
It does sometimes seem like they are designing to impress other designers at talks and conferences, rather than to make users happy. But I respect anyone who develops open source end-user software. To say it is thankless is quite an understatement.
Yes, it is, and I respect them too. I just wish UIs would be considered finished once the major UX and implementation bugs were fixed. The reason I won't touch eithet Gnome or KDE is that there have been so many reimplementations of their UI that I simply don't want to learn them again. And again. And again. Especially as they bring nothing new to the table, just more "flashiness".
As someone who has used KDE 3, 4 5 I would say the only really big change was 3 -> 4 and many aspects of it have been refined/improved. I think if you plunked someone down who had only used KDE 4, released in 2008, in front of the current version in 2021 they would require minimal learning to catch up.
Growth requires change and if you don't have a billion dollars up front you do this iteratively in small pieces by necessity.
Yeah I recently switched from macOS to a Gnome-using variant of Linux (Pop!_OS 21.04, which overall I really like and recommend if you are of the "I want to do my specific work and not tinker with my OS much" mindset like I am) and this design choice blew my mind.
I'm OK with a global menu bar, or app-window menu bar, but hiding everything behind a stupid hamburger thing on a desktop computer?
Weird choice IMO. I'm just living with it, though, since I don't really want to fuck around with my system itself.
Vanilla GNOME3 looks and feels a lot like it was designed for tablets as the primary target, keyboard users as the secondary and mouse users only as the third.
Ubuntu Unity did not - it was great for classic desktop usage with Mac-like (most importantly, not a mediocre attempt to mimic but even better than the original in some aspects) UX + advanced supports for keyboard lovers + keeping the mobile in mind.
IMHO late years Unity was the best Linux UI yet. If only they would add Pop_OS!-like tiling + some more little Mac goodies only experienced Mac users know it would be perfect. And I absolutely can not say the same about GNOME3 although I actually want a GNOME3 tablet.
It was designed for touchscreens and desktops; a so called convergent interface. For example HUD, which allowed you to search any menu option (ref: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD#Overview), and its Dash, a desktop search utility, were clearly keyboard-oriented. The bigger icons that launcher and dash had were probably made that way for touchscreens.
