To me, Big Sur's design is very clearly taking its aesthetics -- for better or worse (maybe better and worse) -- from iOS: minimizing "chrome" as much as possib

To me, Big Sur's design is very clearly taking its aesthetics -- for better or worse (maybe better and worse) -- from iOS: minimizing "chrome" as much as possible to the point of making title bars vanish when it's deemed feasible, reducing buttons to flat single-color icons, and so on. Your screenshots of GNOME 3 look more like Catalina than Big Sur to me, honestly; the buttons still look like, well, buttons; the title/toolbar goes all the way across (unlike Big Sur but like Catalina), the buttons are grouped (unlike Big Sur but like Catalina), etc. I don't think anyone would say design exists in a vacuum, nor that the open source community has no ideas that Apple or other companies would consider -- I mean, look at CUPS and KHTML! But open source has, well, not historically been great with its desktop UX design. The best free software interfaces that I see tend to take pretty direct cues from (hopefully well-designed!) commercial counterparts; more often than not deviations from those established norms make things worse rather than better.