Hey there, this is gonna be a really long rant, so sit down, get a good drink and food, and relax.
I was debating on if I should post this here, or on c/libre, but I think here works better as this is general technology discussion.
Let me just say, Apple is an absolutely deluded and bat shit insane company, but MacOS is something special in my opinion, and I think that Apple themselves are holding it back.
Making the system as a whole proprietary, locked down and forcing people to provide so much information it'd make Facebook blush.
The OS itself works well, but the privacy implications of using MacOS, just like Windows, are absolutely insane to think about.
Apple, with their silicon valley pilled lies, have been preaching MacOS as a perfect, private safe haven for millions of users, but are of course, talking out of their ass.
Apple collects a similar amount of data to Google and Facebook, with MacOS being a victim of those actions.
They do it for one reason and one reason only, money. Apple is a trillion dollar company, crazy to think that they are worth more than the amount of money some countries make.
They've been pulling back a good looking Operating System by making it proprietary and trying to stop people from making a nice old hackintosh system (especially with their new updates), and they've been trying way too hard to stop people from installing third party applications and stores (this is not just an issue on iOS!)
MacOS has a good layout, is simple to use, and has support for so many apps that I WISH Linux would have, but Apple has been putting this Operating System on a proprietary leash, just like they do with iOS, and it has gotta stop.
I would like to imagine a world where MacOS is more like Linux distros, being open source and privacy friendly. It works similarly in so many ways, but Apple has made it so limited and annoying with their malicious, greedy practices, and it's sad to see.
Because of this, MacOS will never compare to Linux in my honest opinion, and I'd recommend people use that over MacOS, especially if you don't have supported hardware.
You can even make your Linux system look like MacOS if you wanna, a simple search will get you to find out how.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post, hope some people agree with me.
Okay, I have multiple things to say in response to this:
I am not saying that MacOS is 100% locking people out from installing Steam, for example. What I am saying is that they are making it unreasonably hard. Windows requires a one click authentication, but on MacOS you've gotta say "yeah I want third party apps" THREE times, and get scary warnings in the process which scare most people away, apple does this to try and get people to use their store and their store only.
I was not saying that apple is a trillion dollar company because they collect data, either, I'm just saying that's a major part of it. We all know about the horrible labor practices that apple participates in, the absolutely ridiculous prices they charge, etc, but a lot of leftists seem to not care about data collection so I thought I'd point it out.
I don't know why a developer would prefer Macs, as I am not a professional. But Linux is still better as a general desktop, imo.
I know maybe 1/5 (professional, employed) devs who prefer MacOS, the rest prefer Linux. In my experience Linux is a far easier / more compatible / stable development experience, for everything from text editing to compilation. I've been using more or less the same setup for 6+ years. With rolling distros like Arch, you don't even need to have some weird yearly upgrade. I think MacOS is really only the best for apple development, because they only offer xcode on macs (last I heard) for some stupid reason.
I'm biased though, I hate everything Apples makes and stands for. Also I haven't touched a Mac since that 2017 butterfly keyboard monstrosity. I personally prefer the Thinkpad X1 Carbon series, thin and light and long lasting ! Mine is going on 8 years ๐ฅณ haven't even replaced the battery yet.
The butterfly keyboard incident
Yeah, I hate everything about Apple too, personally use Arch as my desktop OS (with KDE ofc).
Been using Linux for almost two years now and I love it.