I run linux mostly because I want to be able to use the machine in whatever way I like. MacOS is designed around "You use it this way", and tries to keep you away from the warts by kind-of enforcing that position.

One of the most ridiculous examples of "You must do it our way" is the inability to remap mouse buttons (or even support buttons on a mouse with more than left, right and scroll.) MacOS would rather you use gestures on the magic mouse (that thing is an ergonomic nightmare). To be able to support extra buttons, you have to pay for software from the app store, e.g. USB Overdrive.

Homebrew has been pretty great for me. You can install desktop apps with brew cask, dump your current app install state with brew bundle and then reinstall it all with one command on a new machine. You can even manage mac store apps with brew bundle with the `mas` app. It has been pretty central in my dotfiles script.

Consider using a VM, and using either Windows or OS X as graphical user interface. You can then easily SSH into the VM, and do most of the development there. If you run a samba (or nfs) server on the VM, you can even easily use e.g. VS Code. Add an X server and you can run (albeit not very fast) run graphical programs (e.g. and IDE) as well.

And what would be the upside to that?

Sure, HW would work better, but I don't want to update two OSes instead of one.

And the only thing I am really missing on Linux is Adobe Creation Suite. GIMP and Inkscape are not nearly adequate (although they are for a better price). And there is literally nothing like Flash, for a simple animation.

Which introduces issues on other sides ...

I've found apt-get compared to homebrew close to useless, it has rapidly outdated packages that have been modified and "fixed" in various ways by maintainers. It also does not properly separate two completely different concerns:

1. Provide a updates for a base installation, the details of which you essentially don't want care about (working drivers, recent kernel version, recent version of wayland/x11 etc.)

2. Provide a repository of curated, versioned and up-to-date software development dependencies

Apt-get does an adequate job at 1., although I have more than once broken my base installation because the binary graphics driver broke after an update, but not so much at 2.

Homebrew is good because you can completely mess up your installation and not effect the base system at all and it is a good starting point to get reasonably up to date development packages. It also offers a much smoother user experience than most package managers.

YMMV. For me, I got angry that there were many parallel ways of updating and getting software on Mac.

Some elevated Apple apps are updated via System Update. Some are updated via Mac App Store. Some are updating themselves when they feel like it. Some are updated via brew, or via macports.

But I am not gonna argue much or anything, I grew out of my teens and I no longer want to tell other people that my OS is the best :) it's not, I definitely wouldn't give Linux to my mom (at this state).

It does provide this via PPAs

Being a current Linux and former macOS user, I actually miss Homebrew sometimes. It's much easier to get recent versions of software and also easier to set up your own repository (tap).

This is one of the reasons why Arch is so popular, AUR + a client has a very similar feeling to Homebrew.

Huh. Didn't know. Perhaps I should take a look at Arch more seriously :)