By “just works” if you mean seamless installation, boot and device recognition, it has to do with the wide range of hardware Linux has to support with less investment per piece of hardware. But for a decade or more it has been doable to get similar experience if you can buy specific hardware (like building your desktop or buying a prev gen Thinkpad) and pick a widely used distro. Of course, I have to say the out of box experience of Apple products might be the highest bar for general purpose computing there is at the moment.

… But if you are including daily casual and professional use, in my experience macOS has been considerably buggier than Linux. Upgrade to M1 caused sooo many headaches with the software I use, but even before this macOS has been getting buggier and buggier every month. Not a single week goes by without having issues with

- Apps like Chrome and Slack bugging out. They can’t find my camera and mic devices, their UI rendering gets corrupted with weird green matrix like artifacts, crashes…

- Bluetooth headphones made by Apple (Beats Flex) keep disconnecting every 15 seconds in a loop (fine with iphone, broken with Pro Max macbook). One day it almost deafened me because somehow Zoom was able to boost volume 10x beyond system maximum, caused me ear pain for more than a day.

- Good luck trying to set up a multi user system with Homebrew and stuff. Everything expects admin access, and even with two admin users you constantly have to fix permissions and switch users to install software. Did I mention everything you try to install and use wants admin access? You get bombarded by admin login prompts as even the most useless piece of software tries to auto-update itself multiple times every week, and sometimes breaking more than itself as it overwrites the wrong folder because of some buggy install script.

- Docker runs like crap. I thought it was bad on my Intel MacBook, I but it is horrible on M1. Surprise surprise, intel emulation is slower no matter how much people claim emulated intel on m1 is faster.

Funny thing is, after upgrading to M1 my main speed gain has not been because of faster hardware, and instead it was moving more work to EC2 instances in the cloud due to not being able to do my work on M1. I might as well “upgraded” to a chromebook.

- Every macOS upgrade breaks apps I rely on, from utilities installed by homebrew to Emacs or chat apps.

- Every time I plug in a screen, or a usb hub with peripherals, the whole thing goes nuts. I then have to start a dance where I spend five minutes turning devices on and off, unplugging cables just to get all of my monitor, keyboard, mouse, mic and cam working at the same time. It often drops at least one of them every time I get back to my desk. Restarts usually fix it (never had to restart a computer so much to fix issues).

- Many "magic" things that "just work" such as Handoff, wireless connection between macbook and iphone, some icloud features are only working 50% of the time. When it doesn't, there's no path to troubleshooting, maybe if you restart your computer, log out of icloud and back in or something it will get fixed.

I can keep going, but overall I am appalled by all the paper cuts of this supposedly premium hardware and software that cost an arm and a leg.