There are multiple third party GUIs for apt. None of them provide the App Store type experience and ones that do aren’t exactly great or easy to use.
I never said to recompile everything, just specific things. You don’t need to rebuild your kernel, libc, compiler, and so on to compile Chromium.
Snap is not the same as macOS apps. But macOS apps are self-contained statically linked apps most of which don’t hook into centralized updating services. Yet macOS is more usable than Ubuntu (I say this as someone who desperately wishes the reverse was true). macOS apps have more in common with snap apps than with dynamically linked .deb packages.
I'm not even sure what you mean by app store experience honestly. The google play store is such a worthless piece of garbage with a garbage search experience that I have to use googles web search, which actually works, to find software to install via google play.
Conversely I have used a variety of app store interfaces on various linux distros that were quite usable and pleasant with search functions that actually worked.
Here for example is a relatively recent video showing installing software via the Linux Mint Software GUI
I never said to recompile everything, just specific things. You don’t need to rebuild your kernel, libc, compiler, and so on to compile Chromium.
Snap is not the same as macOS apps. But macOS apps are self-contained statically linked apps most of which don’t hook into centralized updating services. Yet macOS is more usable than Ubuntu (I say this as someone who desperately wishes the reverse was true). macOS apps have more in common with snap apps than with dynamically linked .deb packages.