Apple

I’m a huge fan of both Apple and Linux but what finally helped me to understand the difference was using something closer to UNIX, in my case FreeBSD.

Why? Because I’d always heard that modern macOS is based on UNIX (even partially on old FreeBSD) but the difference between UNIX and Linux never “clicked” until I explored UNIX on its own.

Modern macOS sets its default shell these days to zsh but I believe still ships an old bash. Actually, a lot of the userland utilities are going to be old and out of date. You’ll notice quirks with them (compared to Linux) that often comes from its background in UNIX.

Personally I use a TON of packages from Linux that have been ported to macOS via Homebrew as do many developers (like me) and users.

All this is to say that under the shiny proprietary Apple GUI there is some familiarity with Linux but at the cost of more UNIX-like behavior (albeit unique even among UNIXes).

I was a long time Linux user that switched to Mac, and it was pretty simple. Using homebrew as a package manager makes things remarkably similar to Linux. Like the other commenter said, the biggest hurdle was getting used to cmd+{key} instead of ctrl+{key}.

I've got an M1 with 24gb of ram and it works great.

I mean if you like using Linux buy something like a Thinkpad and put your favorite flavor of Linux on it.

But if you do want to try Mac, there’s a lot more similarity between Mac and Linux than either and Windows.

The biggest pain point with my Mac is the cmd+c/v/x short cuts. Its a difference in muscle memory which is a little annoying initially, but does become second nature.

I don't quite get the expense argument for windows, realistically its rolled into the price of the device regardless of what you running anyway. And macs are usually a lot more expensive.

I have been using Linux on desktop and Mac on laptops for over twenty years now! I initially bought a refurbished white iBook G4 in 2005 while I was using Gentoo on my desktop.

I spend the vast majority of my time in a terminal and a browser.

As others have said, the difference in Command and Control buttons will take a little getting used to and will be especially frustrating if you have an external keyboard that you use for both desktop and laptop. But it’s not really that bad.

As a heavy terminal user, I like having the different buttons for different things! You keep your dirty GUI functions to your own Command button and let me keep Control doing what it does. As an example, you can use common terminal keyboard shortcuts (readline shortcuts; Ctrl-a to go to the beginning of a line, for example) in many places on OS X because of the difference between Ctrl and Cmd.

I have found MacOS to work quite well as a laptop operating system, personally!

just fyi. osx was influenced gui wise by nextstep so gnustep is an implementation. Also its based on freebsd so the command line is very much like freebsd just with kinda more (full disclosure I last used osx terminal a lot in the early 20teens so it may have diverged further). I have not advice just thought I would thrown out where osx came from.

If you're going to get an m1 air and expect to run mac os with latest updates, you are going to have a bad time. I suspect it will be very slow.