Sorry, but at best, this is just your personal experience. At worst, this is a damned lie. I don't mean to attack you, but I do mean to vehemently attack this sentiment. I feel I have to because this perspective is pushed so often with little push back from the other side...and believing it lead to my own personal detriment.
I recently bought a macbook after being a gnome 3 user for a few years. I had heard the anecodotes: many linux users, even some high profile ones like Miguel deGuza, had switched to mac, claiming that it was unix but with a better user experience, without the mess...cleaner, put together, smoother, etc, etc.
What a lie. Yes, some things are as smooth as they were on gnome 3, but the differences are to be very honest, not that significant. Gnome 3's window management, short cuts, everything was orders of magnitude better than mac os x. An interesting comparison, I've been using mac os x for 8 months, and it still feels like a kludge, I've adapted to it, rather than embracing it. For Gnome 3, I adapted to it within 2 months, and after that, I could use nothing else because of how fluid it is. Finally, workspaces on gnome 3 make me feel organized. On this macbook? My windows feels like a constant mess, and I still haven't figured it out. Again, it's not familiarity! Gnome 3 was weird at first but I fell in love after the initial hurdle. For this thing, if this is an initial hurdle, I still haven't found the valley after almost a year!
Oh, and the "it's unix", what a lie! I don't care if it's "unix(tm)", either I am so steeped in gnu-isms that I can't live without them, or the commandline on mac is so inferior it's not even funny. So yes, those "linux users" will tell you it's still unix, they won't tell you can't run gdb without signing it[0], they won't tell you that half of the super easy commands you find online will not be available because either the available versions are so old or they are bsd stuff. I was once open minded to using bsd but after having to suffer on apple garbage for a year I think I'll avoid BSD for the most part. Moreover, brew sucks, so bad. "Package management" (ie., dealing with conflicts between brew and the defaults that you'll sometimes have to fix manually) is just like the gui, pretty on the surface, but tending toward mess when you need control.
It was such a falsehood, to the point I either feel whoever bewitched me into thinking mac would be a "prettier" linux were either not the type of people I should have been listening to either way, or they were deliberately shills or something. Of course the latter is ridiculous, so I'll go with the well known maxim here[1] and pick the former.
Mac does one thing well, typefaces, although that's probably just the retina screen.
[0] http://andresabino.com/2015/04/14/codesign-gdb-on-mac-os-x-y...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor