Fwiw both times I dipped my toes into Linux on some old PC laptops (once mint once Ubuntu) I ran into audio, trackpad, and WiFi driver issues.

Which is exactly why these days I'm mindful to buy hardware from companies (and using components) that don't make it hard to run FLOSS. Neither actively by locking bootloader or such, nor passively by withholding documentation needed to write drivers.

There are options to buy from & support manufacturers who actively help this process. Why would I put my money towards making apples hardware more attractive, when their stance is at best "we don't care but we might change things any second and break this simply because we don't care."

I will probably look for laptops in the foreseeable future, or maybe a new desktop. I never had a laptop before[1]. Which brand or models do you recommend for Linux? And for desktop? Like for CPU is AMD good? What about motherboard? Asus, Gigabyte, MSI?

[1] OK, I do. I have a T-42 with an unknown supervisor password. :( I installed OpenBSD on it ages ago, but locked myself out.

Lenovo ThinkPad or dell for Linux is fine. Lenovo run their QA off of Ubuntu live USBs.

AMD is traditionally better for desktop GPU support but either is fine.

Particular hardware doesn't really matter these days, just check the manufacturer website / reviews. Level1 techs on YouTube cover Linux support well for various mobos.

> Do you seriously trust that not to change?

No, I don't. On the Mac platform, Apple has consistently elected to give users ultimate control. They could have a change of heart some day, but so could Intel, Microsoft, or any other vendor.

The same Apple that continually locks down / harder and harder with each OS release, and makes developers jump through more and more hoops?

As a power user, you can however still jump through all those hoops, even with custom kext's.

I agree that the situation sucks for us, but on the other side - you can give a piece of Apple hardware to a literal child and won't have to deal with either getting it running in the first place (as with anything Linux based) or a persistent rootkit or other malware (which is more common and easy than not on Windows).

Being easily open for power users, hard to exploit for malware and hard for incompetent people to mess up, unfortunately, is a Hard Thing.

This is mostly just Apple fixing the bonkers default security settings of a unix desktop. As devs we're used to the idea that, e.g., any app we run should be able to modify any files that belong to us, regardless of whether we asked it to. But that's actually an insanely lax security model.

It's honestly not hard to disable any security settings that are getting in the way. I run whatever software I like on my Mac, no problems.

People have been talking about how Apple were going to lock down Mac OS "real soon now" for at least a decade. There's no real indication that it's ever going to happen.