These are all just anecdotes. From you, OP, and me...

> Been running Xfce since 2004 with no stability issues whatsoever.

I ran Linux (and was a _fierce_ OSS fanatic) from ~2002 to 2012. I've been a mac user since 2012. I moved around, using LXDE, Xfce, Gnome, KDE, no DE at all (openbox...)... I used Ubuntu, Mint, Gentoo, ADIOS, Crunchbang, Fedora...

Linux DEs were solid, but they never felt sufficiently polished. When I first touched a Mac, everything just felt better -- drag and drop worked like a charm, and the visual queues and feedback were amazing. Often we'd realize that some things also worked in Linux, but they just weren't visually advertised as such -- cursors wouldn't change, things wouldn't slightly fade. It looked like a jumbled mess with no coherent design team behind it.

> Oof, I guess you never got a Mac during 2016-2020 or so. They've been gradually declining in build quality. I owned Mac laptops continually from 2005 until 2019, and they've been going downhill pretty much the entire way, especially since 2012 or so.

The quality of apple laptops has indeed been far from stellar in recent years, but I'm pretty happy with my 16' beefed-out Macbook Pro. It is undeniable, though, as you say, that they have been going downhill. Nevertheless, going downhill from where they were still means they're quite close to the highest peak you can find, IMO.

> > More [actually good] software supports macOS. It's just a fact.
>
> That's pretty much the definition of an opinion, not a fact.

Agreed, it is a matter of opinion. For what it's worth, if we exclude games (most of which I can play perfectly fine in a VM in parallels anyway), in my opinion, indeed more actually good software supports macOS. There are very very very few things I miss from my linux days, and I heavily customized everything I had.

> It really isn't. The problem is that everyone already has a laptop when they decide they want to switch, and then get frustrated when their existing laptop doesn't work well with Linux. These days there are quite a few laptops that work perfectly or near-perfectly with Linux, and they're not hard to find.

I completely disagree with the sentiment of this paragraph. While, yes, many laptops work flawlessly, and you may actually be able to google them somewhat quickly, the experience of finding a linux compatible machine that one wants to use and fits their needs is still a perilous road of doubt and uncertainty. This is a consequence of the many different choices one has, because while we can find reports that someone's favourite distro ran on a particular laptop at version X, we might not want that distro, or that particular version, and things instantly go south. Finding linux-compatible hardware and having to "jump into it with our money" is an extremely risky and stressful move -- one which can leave anyone with buyer's remorse pretty quickly if anything fails to work properly. Worse, "failing to work properly" can be as innocuous as "feeling that the laptop is running out of battery too fast" or "is running too hot". While all of these things definitely also happen on a Macbook, it is much easier to simply know that the hardware will be supported, much like we know that most games built for a console are sure to work on that console. If money is not an issue, and if there are no particularly clunky software requirements or vendor-lock-in issues (these are big ifs, I know), then buying a Mac is by far the easiest decision, because it lifts weights off of your mind, and puts them in Apple's hands -- to make sure that things work.

Many of my friends run Linux, some of them as a daily driver. Some of these people are among the smartest I've ever known with computers, and some even make hundreds of thousands of dollars in the IT world, be it in cybersecurity fields or other such areas -- yet, most of them, too, do not really know which laptop to buy when upgrading, ever. They choose Linux _in spite of this_, but they most definitely see this as an annoyance and problem. Linux has to work everywhere and, so, it is only natural that there are pieces of hardware where it doesn't work -- or it works poorly. I would expect nothing less.

> That's a fair opinion, but I've found my experience to be the opposite. Every time I go back to macOS, I get frustrated with the inflexibility of it all. I get that it's a pain to feel like you have to customize everything to get something usable for you, but macOS goes too far in the opposite direction for me: Apple just does not give me enough knobs to turn to make me feel comfortable in their environment.

I can perfectly understand this sentiment. I don't really feel like there are things I can't configure on my mac, but I can recognize that I had more configurability on the Linux side of things. I used to be the guy who had dozens of scripts and wrappers for everything, and the one crazy guy who got pulseaudio to play along with ALSA before it actually worked, all while getting the latest games to run on Wine with custom patches made for them. My computers always looked "slick" to other people, and I used to have this amazing feeling of having tailored it all to myself. Then, at some point in my life, I realized I was spending more time adjusting my configurations than actually doing stuff with them. Ever since circumstances led me to a Mac, I've never looked back. I've migrated data from my first Mac all the way to the latest always through Time Machine, and it feels magical.

I'm a big fan of Linux. I think it's an incredible achievement. I'm not the OSS fanatic sending e-mails to RMS that I used to be, but I still feel the OSS cause deeply. I also think linux on the desktop is much more usable today than it was before (when I used it). It certainly fits the needs of many people. To me, though, the mac strikes a perfect balance for everything I do in my life. It literally just works. Everything just works. I airplay to my TV and it works. I migrate it with time machine across the span of 10 years and it works. I upgrade it and everything (mostly) works. Things don't change _too_ much in between updates. Stability has its ups and downs. Apple's decisions sometimes might leave one a bit infuriated (cough cough 32 bit support), but I've never been this happy with a computer as I am with the mac. In fact, even though I have theoretically less to configure, my mac feels like it's "more configured to me" than my Linux machines, because things just work like I want them to. It's like my mental model of a computer is better represented by the mac. Whenever I touch Linux and have to use it for a couple of days or in a VM, things are always out of place (this also happens a bit with Windows, but Windows feels coherent and I can instantly tell that after a couple of days I'd get used to it). Drag and drop doesn't do what it should. Things don't respond for no reason. Work is being done but no loading icon is present, leading me to do double-clicks and other shenanigans. I'm sure the right combination of tools and software for me is out there in the Linux world -- and the hardware too (I love the macbook trackpads -- they're actually the original reason why I started thinking of moving to the mac) --, but I have more to do with my life than keep tinkering with linux nowadays to make it work with me. I do that with my raspberry pis, as a fun thing.

I have nothing against people running Linux on the desktop. The more, the better -- maybe one day I'll come back. I never thought I'd use a Mac -- I despised them -- and yet, here I am, 10 years later.