that depends entirely on what your daily activities are.

If you're a web developer and are somewhat competent, you'd be best served with fedora or ubuntu. You're able to fully customize your system, use tiling window managers such as i3wm and can actually use the same daemons as the production system will be using.

If you're a designer that uses the Adobe Suite, there is little difference between osx and windows. both work most of the time and have their own faults and upsites. if you're already in the apple ecosphere, there is little reason to change to windows - as there isn't really anything better there. Nor is there a reason to switch to mac from windows...

If you're a gamer, there really isn't anything but windows -- even today. Its gotten better with Steam, but the performance hit for non-windows systems is brutal.

If you're just an average user that only wants to use facebook, webmail and browse the internet, you'd be best served with a chromebook/chromebox. That literally just works with no manual configuration necessary anywhere. Its just that there is very little you can do on it. (The Android integration is still beta, so that doesn't count)

this list is obviously not exhaustive. I'm just trying to make a point with some examples.

I'm sure being able to fully customise your system is appealing to some, the rest of us just want to get stuff done.

Ps. Web developer since 1994.

Quite.

I want audio and auto-suspend and battery management to just work, to be able to buy peripheries that I know will work.

Also, without wanting to hit the snark too much:

>> If you're a web developer and are somewhat competent, you ... can actually use the same daemons as the production system will be using.

When you become _very_ competent, you'll be running all of those in VMs or Docker or whatever.

It seems i've offended you in some way.

I did not mean to imply that all competent web developers should be using ubuntu or fedora. You can be a very efficient and great programmer without ever using any linux distribution in your life. After all, StackOverflow seems to be quite good at what it does and its run on windows iirc.

Its just that you'll occasionally run into problems. If you're inexperienced with linux distributions you'll have to google their solution, making even a trivial problem such as '$PROGRAM not found' a very painful experience. And you won't really get to utilize the usability improvements from i3wm for example.

so to summarize: you don't need to use linux to be a competent developer. You won't be able to really use linux unless you're already an experienced and competent developer which is open to find new workflows. You could install it and use it, sure, but you'D become another example of why "linux desktop doesn't work"

I just want a Unix-based laptop and I treat apple like a good community-run skin that has really good testing with a small set of hardware. That works for me.

In the rare case that I want to customize something or an developing for someone who wants customization, I’ll virtualization. I’ve been lucky enough (or maybe unfortunate since it’s fun) to not do anything related to hardware for a decade or so.

Been using computers daily for 33 years and have no need for this. I mean, I tried once out of curiosity, but can't see the appeal. Of course, everyone's different and "you do you!" etc :-) Like the grandparent poster, macOS is the "least worst" option for me so far.

Try to install OSX on different hardware combinations (once you get chameleon working) and you will find out that it sucks, maybe even harder than Windows/Linux.

Probably

> Linux and Windows supports a much broader range of hardware combination, obviously the perfect combination and work doesn't exist for them

Yes

> Try to install OSX on different hardware combinations

Why would I do that when I can buy a Mac?

This is neither a moral stance nor a philosophical one, it's a practical one. I want a stable reliable machine to be productive on, and not to irritate me more than is strictly necessary. That's been a Mac for the last 15 years or so. One dud model in that time is not enough to get me playing with XF86config, tweaking the Registry again, or powering off my laptop when I'm done with it.

Maybe to contrast pumped prices for hardware found on other vendors' hardware, costing half or a third of it? (true especially for the entry level MacBooks, which have same hw of a 500€ laptops from Hp or Lenove

> It's OS X that I buy Macs for

As the grand-parent you're replying to notes, it doesn't work so well on non-Apple systems. The hardware is secondary.