Building a _new_ hackintosh is easy, and requires very little messing around if you follow sensible guidelines. It generally gets messy after a few years and several OS updates. There are generally less users on forums with the same hardward specs, asking less questions. Apple drop support for things, and recommended methods to install/update change enough to become painful.

I just upgraded my hackintosh from El Capitan to Catalina. It wasn't all fun, but wasn't too bad either. I'll probably get another couple of years trouble free with this OS, so it was worth it. After that I'll switch to Linux or Windows for my main system, though.

Building a new Linux box is easy, too. If you can pick and choose amongst compatible hardware, there's no messing around at all to get a performant and updateable system.

I can see how someone in a particular field, such as video editing, might prefer certain macOS apps. For general software development, though, a Linux machine feels like a much safer bet.

>has to mess around more with Hackintosh than with a Linux installation

As someone who lived with an Ubuntu installation for 5 years up until 10.10 and then with Arch for arount 4 years - you statement about linux being an easy thing to handle is correct as long as you are fine with a distro like ubuntu and don't want to change much.

As soon as you embrace something more hacky or at least more bleeding edge - you are in the world full of unexpected surprises. Any major update can cause you hours of problems because distro devs decided to switch from somethingX to somethingY and you had to prepare your installation before updating but alas, you rarely read the fron page of https://www.archlinux.org and now you have to rollback and do everything right.

Not a too common scenario but not an uncommon one too.

Not to metion that for the most part linux remains a second-class citizen to software devs, so you won't see much of a general purpose software of the same quality macOS has to offer. Which is a problem if you are going to use the machine for something other then software development.

Windows with WSL is pretty nice. I still prefer MacOS but mostly for convenience with interfacing with my other personal devices.

My experience with Linux is that if your hardware setup deviates even slightly from the majority you’re going to have trouble getting things working right. This is especially true when it comes to GPUs (dual screens on dual GPUs for instance causes trouble with both Nvidia and AMD). There’s also distro specific weirdness like how the Ubuntu will screw with your boot partitions on every disk in your machine (fixable but annoying).

With a hackintosh, as long as you’re using supported chipsets, cards, etc the larger overall configuration of your machine doesn’t really matter much — it’ll just work. Point in case, macOS handles the aforementioned dual monitor dual GPU setup without so much as a hiccup both on AMD (and if you drop back to High Sierra) Nvidia. It’s paradoxical, but hackintoshed macOS is often better at smoothing over differences between machines than Linux is.