I bought one in ~2014 - when I picked it up at the Apple store, the representative told me it was the first time he'd ever seen someone buy one (apparently he'd worked there for several years).

I exclusively use Linux distros on it now - hopefully they make it easy to do that on the new machines.

While I don’t doubt that the MacPro was a low volume machine, I doubt that most people buying one were buying it from a physical Apple Store where customization was limited.

It's impossible to install Linux to the preinstalled SSD on any recent Mac, though on this one you can at least add your own additional storage and it probably won't be too hard to get Linux booting off that. Aside from the SSD the hardware seems to be pretty normal stuff that already has Linux drivers.

Though I don't see why anyone would want to pay the rather large price premium of this machine if they're not running MacOS on it.

Looks more like a fun weekend project[1] than an impossible task. At least for my mid 2017 MBP. I’ve always had issues with WiFi cards doing a hackintoshes or Linux on macs.

[1]https://gist.github.com/roadrunner2/1289542a748d9a104e7baec6...

The T2 chip that makes installing Linux to the internal SSD impossible was introduced in the 2018 models.

May I ask why do you buy Mac of you're working exclusively on Linux?

It was for work at the time, they had iPhone apps in their portfolio