macOS runs on the Mach/xnu micro kernel and is pretty successful with it.
Apparently there have been attempts to make a free OS based on Apple’s kernel, but wikipedia mostly talks about them in the past tense. Too bad, it would’ve been good to have such an option.
Pure Darwin ist still around.
I tried out a Darwin distribution a few years ago. It was a BSD with some apple flavor. None of the GUI was included, not all drivers, firmware, etc.
The community is tiny. There was also little incentive to try and fix things or add features, because upstream Apple ignored it pretty much. Grabbing the sources and compiling them into an operating system has little documentation from Apple.
Mac OS X used to install XQuartz, a hardware accelerated Xorg/X11 server by default in the 2000s, but dropped it at some point.
Even back when OpenDarwin and such were around, people would rather install YellowDog Linux that supported PowerPC Macs.
I think at some point the old NeXtStep/OpenStep folks left Apple and the new engineers didn’t understand Unix or think it’s important.
Then make a better alternative. You obviously “haven’t drunk the koolaid”.
“Write the code I want, free of charge, in your own time. I demand it. Recognition for your efforts? Nah, I won’t even know of you, but if anything ever goes wrong, I will find your repo and complain about how Microslop did it better with hundreds of engineers!”
That’s what you sound like. If you don’t contribute code, money, documentation, detailed bug reports, community guidance, moderating, etc., then IMO, that opinion is worthless.
Devs aren’t your code monkeys, shackled to computers to do your bidding. A lot of thankless, unpaid time went into writing most of opensource code out there. To sit there and demand options is, to me, appallingly ignorant behaviour.
I contributed money, translations and properly filed bug reports to various open-source projects. But I don’t think people who don’t shouldn’t speak out. Being unhappy with a certain change signals the direction for the devs to make their code better.
Besides, KDE is no hobby project; it’s a nonprofit with full-time workers on a wage. Nonprofits are always kept to a high standard of accountability, and are resilient enough to turn negative feedback into directions for growth. It is in part this feedback that led it to develop the best DE out there.