Yep, GNOME’s closest proprietary analogue is iPadOS, not macOS. GNOME omits all sorts of little power user features in comparison and takes the whole minimalism thing much further than macOS ever did (often too far IMHO).
This applies to Pantheon too, even if it’s prettier. There unfortunately isn’t a Mac-like DE.
Unity was till 2017, it states. Hmm, what does Ubuntu use now? It’s not the Gnome I use on Fedora. I don’t like (and use) Ubuntu, so I was under impression that it uses Unity to this day.
Ubuntu uses Gnome as the default install, however it has official "flavours" that you can choose from, such as KDE (the Kubuntu flavour), Unity, and others.
They stopped using Unity years ago, but it came back recently as a flavour. You can throw it into a VM and see how it is if you're exploring.
>Gnome's future looks even more Phone/Tablet oriented [link]
Well, that looks very opinionated to me. And I have an impression that opinion is from someone quite far from being competent on UI matters. I see it — the background kill switch — as a great simplification and I use it all the time. I absolutely hate the mess of background apps in tray, be it macOS or Windows. Here, it’s way simpler.
I disagree, macOS has both a system tray and a global menu, a totally foreign concept for Gnome
Gnome wants to be a touch-screen/tablet OS, and it shows with their design choices
Unity 7.0 from canonical was closer to macOS
Apple has 4 distinct OS and UX for their different form factors (watch, phone, tablet, desktop)
Gnome's future looks even more Phone/Tablet oriented: https://linuxiac.com/gnome-background-apps/
I quit the gnome ecosystem when Canonical announced killing Unity, that was my perfect Desktop Environment, it was perfect, it's sad..