[lproven]

Elementary OS does look superficially Apple-like, but on closer inspection, there's no menu bar, which is a core element of the macOS UI. So actually it's more like iPadOS on the desktop: apps generally only have hamburger menus, which personally I do not like at all, and it's limited by its insistence on Flatpak apps for everything. You can of course open a console and use `apt` to install whatever you want, but then the desktop quickly becomes less coherent and harmonious.

It's a good distro and I like it. It's easy, it has good accessibility, and as you say, it looks great. But I tried daily-driving it for a short time and found it too limiting for me. Once I'd manually installed Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome, VLC, LibreOffice, Ferdium, Panwriter, VirtualBox and my other everyday tools, I wasn't using a lot of the distro's own tools any more, and suddenly the ones I was (settings, file manager, app launcher) became limiting.

[probonopd]

Exactly. Design, to us, is also how it works. Not just how it looks. The "feel" part in "look and feel".