1) I'll agree that WSL2 is excellent, but the native "unix" environment of macos has meant that I haven't had very many issues doing work that ultimately runs on linux natively from a mac.
2) This makes no sense to me. I've run docker on my mac with zero issues, except that the move to apple silicon has caused some disruption for cases where I build and push images locally (99% is done via CI/CD, but there are always exceptions) and I have to specify linux/amd64, which with some tooling is actually quite painful.
3) Yeah, powertools is nice.
4) This is absolutely true. The most recent macos announcement does add some better native window management, but all I really want is to be able to plug in my external monitors and have macos not switch them around half the time. It's frustrating as this used to work until around 2012 or so, and then just broke and was never fixed.
5) I've run into windows updates reverting settings or replacing defaults that point to third parties. To be fair, macos has sometimes done this, too. In particular it used to re-enable siri after every OS point release.
6) The ads are there and (with effort) can be removed. But it's the principle. Some product manager thought that this is a good idea - the good idea being something that's good for microsoft and not the user. This way of thinking can and does lead to rot by a thousand cuts. What's next enabling location tracking for the advertisers, thus making my laptops battery slightly worse? - google did this with android. This way of thinking has been killing google.
7) Most of this is repeating point 4 which I agree with, but its filesystem is just a posix filesystem. Mind you the finder has it's strengths and weaknesses - it took awhile to get used to, but it's never really gotten in my way. Calling macos third class for linux development is just plain incorrect. One of the main reasons MacOS took off when it did is because so many developers moved to it because they could use the same "unix/linux" tools more natively than windows, but didn't have to deal with linux on the desktop. Web developers in particular could easily run apache/php/etc as well as various design tools from Adobe or whoever. I've not seen too many complaints with most languages on it, but I could see more niche ones like Haskell being painful.
> I could provide other reasons but essentially it is way better for me and my use case than alternatives.
This is what ultimately matters. :-)
> Unless I'm using a laptop, there I prefer MacOS for hardware.
Hilariously for me, the one thing that's more painful than anything else when using windows is the poor quality of the bloody trackpads, even on more expensive/premium hardware (I haven't bought a windows laptop since before covid, so maybe this is better now?). Though a close second is having to deal with various pop-ups (from both windows and other software/utilities) that seem to vie for my attention.