Part of using GNOME (at least to me) is expanding on the interface and building a personal experience through extensions.

Cover-flow when and-tabbing? Extension. Dynamic opacity of top bar? Extension. Wiggly-wobbly effects when dragging or minimising/maximising windows? Extension. Installing custom themes? Guess what, that’s an extension too!

I think you understand where this is going.

In terms of polish (looking sharp), GNOME is the best on linux, still it can look much better in terms of eye candy if you add extensions. I think I have like 50+ extensions myself.

I’m still unsure if you mean sharp as in clear, crisp high resolution / not pixelated / not blurry or “better” design / ui(x).

If the first check (fractional) scaling settings / font anti aliasing / smoothing options (I don’t use Gnome so don’t know where), if the latter, one is a small team of probably underpaid devs (Gnome), the other one of the wealthiest companies in the world (Apple) so I’d sure hope Apple’s UI is “better” than Gnome’s (though looking at Windows it doesn’t seem like having money equals good design, lol).

yes, i get it. it's sort of a thing that my brain can't describe either, but want to hear someone go about it continuously to get it better.