There are a few low-hanging improvements (updates almost never require you to restart). But it's a lot of tiny things that add up, some of which are hard to put into words. If I had to pick one thing that encompassed a lot of them, it would be that when I use Mac I feel like I'm adjusting my work-style to what Apple thinks it should be. In other words, my Linux setup now feels like it's a professional tool, and the Mac I use for work feels like a consumer-grade OS that happens to have work tools bundled on it.

This is hard to put into words. If I'm an artist, my tools are very, very focused and robust. I might have specific pens and brushes that I know the feel of very well. They're not flashy and they don't have advertisements written on them, and they don't change their properties behind my back. Everything about them is designed to help me draw. If I'm a musician, I spend a lot of money to buy an instrument, and I get to know it very well. I have particular brands of reeds that are consistent that I'm likely preparing or sanding myself. I know my instrument so well that I can tell you which notes trend slightly flat or sharp, and after a while adjusting to that becomes instinctive.

So if I'm a professional programmer, I likewise want a computing environment that I understand completely and can service myself, and that is very customized to my own preferences. It's no different from any other professional field -- the point of the computer is to help me get work done, everything else is secondary.

You'll get different answers if you ask someone why Linux makes them productive, because the benefit of Linux is that it adapts to you. For me, personally, the biggest upgrades to my productivity have been:

1. Switching to Linux in general

2. Switching to Emacs/Spacemacs (Emacs works best on Linux)

3. Switching to Arch as my main distro (which is hard to do unless you already know Linux)

4. Most recently, switching to EXWM as a window manager (which is a lot easier to do on Arch)

Each step of this process has been me getting rid of things that distract me from work, and each step has built on the last. Switching to Linux gives me a setup that is much more customizable and stable, switching to Emacs gives me an editor that is very tightly integrated into the host operating system, switching to Arch allows me to have a very minimal setup (its easier to debug because there's less going on), and switching to EXWM allows me to focus the entire setup on work.

On the other hand, I have an old Surface Pro 3 that's running Manjaro/Gnome that I use for drawing. It's a very different setup from my main computer, because I use it for different things. Again, my computer should adapt to my workflow, not the other way around. The Surface setup is actually interesting, because it suffers from driver issues (unreliable Wifi, bad suspend support). And yet I'm still more productive on it than I was on Windows. I think people underestimate how much time and energy can get lost to distractions, surprise updates, stuff like that. Specialized devices are really stinking good for getting stuff done.

But everyone is different. I know people that get frustrated by the initial setup times or needing to dig more into the OS internals, and I get that -- it's reasonable. For me, once I got past that I found Linux to be really stable, because it doesn't change until you tell it to. Linux is the only OS I'll set up for someone who's not tech-savy, because putting in more work up front means I won't need to do as much regular maintenance.