I get the impression gnome3 is loosely a clone of osx, I much prefer a windows-esc desktop. I’ve never tried kde but feel pretty at home with xfce or openbox. YMMV, but if you have the time they’re worth trying if you’re a recent windows refugee.

GNOME is a much closer match for iPadOS than it is macOS due to how far it goes with minimalism, as well as how it approaches power user functionality (where macOS might move it off to the side or put it behind a toggle, GNOME just won’t implement it at all). Extensions can alleviate that to a limited extent, but there are several aspects that can’t be improved upon without forking.