Sweet, this will help (hopefully this will also help when I come around to taking a formal operating systems course). Sorry for the noob question but I should really migrate over to a Linux-based computer if I would like to work with operating systems extensively, right? If so, any recommendations in regard to computers? Right now for all my software needs I use Mac OS.

I haven't done much myself, but I think a lot of people working on hobby operating systems use emulators or virtual machines to make development easier. Qemu and VirtualBox are popular and both run on macOS.

If you want to hack on your main operating system, then yeah, you'll probably want to switch to Linux, but I wouldn't do that yet.

You're right, good call.

I think you should be able to get away with using macOS. Most tools you’ll need are for Unix systems anyway.

If you were on Windows, that would be a different story.