For the past few days, for the first time, I’ve seriously tried MacOS and I became distinctly aware that anyone who calls Gnome similar to MacOS has never used MacOS.

If you’re just looking at screenshots, Gnome and MacOS do bear a resemblance. Gnome’s Dash looks similar to the Dock; Gnome’s app launcher looks similar to Launchpad; Gnome’s top panel looks similar to the menu bar.

But actually using each desktop, the UX, design philosophy, idealogy, and feel is miles apart. I think the four biggest differences are

  1. No menu bar
  2. Minimizing distractions, so no dock
  3. Interacting with windows is closer to Windows and KDE (fullscreening windows keeps them in same workspace, can interact with a window’s content without first clicking to focus it)
  4. Managing open apps is closer to Windows and KDE (apps actually close when you hit “x”, with few exceptions, only open apps and favorited apps are in the dash)
  • tedzards509
    2·
    1 month ago

    For me, the similarity is not primarily from the looks but from:

    1. The opinionated “GNOME”- or “Apple”-Way to do things
    2. The focus on using workspaces (Although Apple forces you more to use them than GNOME does)
    3. The focus on design before features (I feel like this is more of a GNOME thing but it aligns with the philosophy Apple tries to exhibit about itself)

    Then alongside that, I also get that MacOS vibes from more minor things, like GTK or Apple AppKit (?) providing one unified design language across almost all apps, as well as the touchpad gestures.