I love and develop for Linux, but I use a Mac. I understand people’s complaints about macs, but in no way have I bought it for any kind of signaling. Most people don’t know I use a Mac, except my family.
I used to be a windows person, and had the same opinion about macs as you, but now I exclusively buy macs for myself and my family bc I am the family’s IT support team. And guess what? The amount of time and headaches it saved me over the years can’t be understated. It would not have been possible with Linux.
My mother can drag and drop an app into applications folder but even that is a stretch. She however can easily open the App Store and click buy, using the same UX as on her phone. Guess how many things are intuitive to her across her ipad, iPhone and Mac, that she almost never has to call me for anything.
I have my family on a family sharing plan with my card on it (I have terrible things to tell Apple about the fact that I have no granular control abt who or how much people can spend there) , but the fact that they are able to get what they need to be productive without having to research the many different ways an application is installed, or how it’s impossible to uninstall or to handle all those MSIs or whatever the windows installers do now, or virus scanning everything under the sun (and let me not forget about the mcaffee and avg and avast licenses and adware from companies that are supposed to be legitimate and give you peace of mind)…is priceless (I know, sounds like an Apple ad, but it’s true).
More, the integration with the outside world, how people can record voice, take notes, photos and have these things readily available everywhere. The finder app, and how I don’t need 100 different apps to view things I download from the web or get from an external source. Again, priceless.
You can geolocate, disable, brick your stolen hardware, no extra software, apps or cost. Super useful, I forgot my laptop in a cab once at an airport, my mother had hers stolen. Both are confirmed bricked. Maybe other brands/OSes have this now, but I have no time to find out.
Back to my family, how they can subscribe to things like scribd, audio books, udemy, and a bunch of other things without having to go through all the marketing pages and double speak of these services online and be able to cancel immediately if they need, gives them a lot of power and I’m glad they can get what they need when they need and move on with their lives. My mother is a lawyer, she should not spend her time fighting an OS.
Linux would be better than windows, but it has failure modes that require admin level terminal skills to solve. I use Linux server, but I have no need for the desktop atm.
Finally, maybe today is different or I never looked hard enough, but it used to be that to get a Linux laptop, I’d need to get a windows laptop and dual boot or wipe it and install Linux.
I may have time for this with servers (that’s my work), and I may have had time for this when I was in college, but I most certainly do not have time for this now.
Maybe if it were as easy to just walk into a store or get online and buy a Linux laptop back then, I might have gone Linux desktop rather than Mac.
In my mind, windows is hell, Linux is expert level, Mac is for everyone.
This is not an answer for this post, I would also like to get the answer and maybe I’ll try that.