The issue with Apple's unix environment is that it comes with BSD tools. A lot of functionality that you'd expect to work doesn't end up working, which can be frustrating. You have to go through some pretty annoying steps [1], which are more involved than the steps required to get a Linux environment on Windows [2].

1: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-repla... 2: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

The zcat that comes with macOS works fine.

Learning how to use the BSD tools is not that hard.

Also, you mean GNU environment I guess, not Linux environment.