I daily drive NixOS on a gaming PC and work laptop, works great for both and haven’t encountered that password issue you mentioned
ElementaryOS, mint and pop are good starter ones and elementary looks a lot like Mac’s interface
For desktop environments the ones I know well that have the top bar, GNOME has one by default but don’t think it’s very configurable, Pantheon looks a lot like the Mac UI and I think you can technically edit the html behind it? KDE is definitely the one people use for maximum customisability and you can create a top bar with that pretty easily
As for capabilities, most distros will do most things, they’re all pretty much the same under the hood and all run the same software depending on package manager
Package managers generally come with the distro and I think that’s usually the thing that makes people’s minds. I’ve not used brew but most package managers will be something like
Snap (most distros): “snap install firefox” Apt (Ubuntu based distros): “apt-get install firefox” Pacman (arch based distros): “pacman -S firefox”
Apologies if I got any details/syntax for any of this wrong am doing this off the top of my head and am rather tired