Stretching this analogy even further:

With Linux, we have a choice of over 20 different housemaids and lawn-cutting robots, though choosing between them is difficult at first.

Most lawn robots can also sweep patios or shovel snow, so if you move to a different climate you can use the same tools.

And all the robots run Linux as well, so you better start customising those first in case the package maintainer doesn't share your conviction that lawns and carpets are not the same thing in every respect :)

I'd like to have a house set up and ready with a decent selection of pre-configured robots to take care of my needs, with an easy interface to reconfigure them or add some new ones.

Or are we still talking about Linux?

TBH, at this point I think you just described Fedora. I’ve been using it everyday for three years and the total set of customizations I’ve needed to make, outside of my developer stuff, has been...remapping a few keys, really.

The absolute worst, edge-case-est thing I’ve hit: I did have to install a COPR to install (with zero configuration) Bumblebee to be able to completely disable my discrete GPU to save battery life when I was on vacation, and multi-monitor with Bumblebee sucks, so when I got back I uninstalled Bumblebee and Nouveau took back over.

  > Most lawn robots can also sweep patios or shovel
  > snow, so if you move to a different climate you
  > can use the same tools.

I thought that the UNIX was was to one job, well.

The robot's job is to move back & forth the tool it is holding in its arms as it sweeps across the surface it is on. Give it (pipe) a shovel or a mop or a crass cutting thing and there you go.

No, that's some philosophy from 40 years ago regarding the bare-bones UNIX userland (tools like cat, tar, grep, bc, etc).

It never applied to other things, like Emacs, and was never a core tenet for server and GUI applications, or frameworks...

That is the official Unix philosophy, but a glance at just about any man page will suggest that it's never been followed.

Yup. My copy of "sudo" has 23 documented command line switches, 15 documented environment variables that influence various behaviors, plugins(!), and can also use a configuration file for setting up paths, debugging tools, etc. Do one thing well, indeed.

Yes, but the point of Unix is that sweeping leaves and sweeping snow are the same task, when viewed in the right way.

I've spent more time fighting with brew and the third party package manages than I have with issues in Ubuntu.

You might have had some exotic edge cases then because I’ve never run into this situation.

MacOS is unix-y enough to compile your own binaries like a John Siracusa does.

And if you’re a dev the Mac is still a much better platform for getting paid than any other platform (until ElementaryOS takes off...).

I use a number of really cool apps to do things I would get likely for free on Linux like magnet for window management (though that’s gotten a lot better in Catalina).

And... even though the current laptops have terrible keyboards my 2013 MacBook Pro is a bit rough around the edges it’s solid and fast and in my experience none of my pc laptops ever made it that far.

Side note: is there a Linux distribution or desktop environment that does what the Mac does with the scaling. Native res is 1440p but renders at half that to effectively give a 2x sharpen on image quality?

> I use a number of really cool apps to do things I would get likely for free on Linux like magnet for window management

I'm not sure I understand your point here; is the fact that you need to use third-party apps for these things being described as a selling point, or is the argument just that you can still find solutions for things that might initially seem like they're missing?

Keeping with the analogy I’m saying that everything is there and polished and clean and works and if I want to put a spin on things or make things even better I can.

The same can be said for Linux but I find OSX so far more productive for me and the eco system is so nice everything fits nicely with my other idevices

Most Linuxes attempt to detect a HiDPI screen (hi resolution basically) nowadays but you cannot do fractional scaling as easily as you could on a Mac, especially on Wayland. You can only do 2x or 1x.

Latest version of gnome supports fractional scaling

The hotel "because I don't want to do laundry" is the worst choice immaginabile

If you can afford hotel prices to actually live inside a nice one (more than 12 sq meters), you can afford 5 people doing your laundry and other chores at your house