Arguably now, with WSL, Windows is closer to the cloud environment than macOS. Its a true Linux kernel running in WSL, no longer a shim over Windows APIs.

Yep. WSL 2 has been great so far. My neovim setup feels almost identical to running Ubuntu natively. I did have some issues with WSL 1, but the latest version is a pleasure to use.

Do you use VimPlug? For me :PlugInstall fails with cannot resolve host github.com

I do use VimPlug. Maybe a firewall issue on your end? I'm using coc.nvim, vim-go, and a number of other plugins that installed and update just fine.

That is just utter pain though. I’ve tried it and I am like NO THANKS! Windows software operates too poorly with Unix software due to different file paths (separators, mounting) and different line endings in text files.

With Mac all your regular Mac software integrates well with the Unix world. XCode is not going to screw up my line endings. I don’t have to keep track of whether I am checking out a file from a Unix or Windows environment.

Your line-ending issue is very easy to fix in git:

`git config --global core.autocrlf true`

That will configure git to checkout files with CRLF endings and change them to plain LF when you commit files.

Eating data is hardly a fix for anything, even if you do it intentionally.

If the cloud is mostly UNIX-like and not actual UNIX, why would using “real UNIX” be better than using, well, what’s in the cloud?

Agree, although I think this is kind of nitpicking, because "UNIX-like" is pretty much the UNIX we have today on any significant scale.

macOS as certified UNIX makes no sense in this argument. it doesn't help anything, as most servers are running Linux.