You've completely ignored this: "I mean, sure, if you like customizing things and "padding your desktop", knock yourself out. The last thing I want to do on my machine is spending any time doing that."
I have other things in my life than fiddling with arcane configs.
> If coreutils and a package manager are "miniscule parts" of a programmers workflow, I'd sure like to see someone program on a Mac without them.
Yes. Here you assume that everyone is like you and has the same workflows and desires from a desktop like you. Nope, not everyone.
For the past 7 to 8 years brew has served me as a good-enough package manager. It's not perfect, but no package manager is.
No idea what your gripe with coreutils is. All of these [1] exist and work just fine out of the box.
So yes. Those are incredibly minuscule parts of a programmer's workflow. I've yet to remember any pain points concerning these two in the past 10 years of working on anything from backend in Erlang, Java, C#, Python, Go to frontend in Javascript and Typescript [2].
Granted, one thing you might not want to do is do C/C++ development on a Mac. I don't know the details, a friend of mine does embedded development, and needs a Linux machine for that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GNU_Core_Utilities_com...
[2] Well. Two or three times in these 10 years I needed a version that wasn't immediately available in brew, so I had to find out how to install the specific version I required. Installing also involved brew. Installing arcane versions isn't a better experience in Linux either. And LTS versions of Linux can rarely properly install new versions of required packages, much less arcane ones.
It's only fighting if it wasn't designed for it in the first place, which isn't true. Linux (and the software designed for it) will always be modular. Once you have your desktop however you like it, you can backup your dotfiles and call it a days work. Bare git repos do the job almost perfectly.
> You listed package manager, coreutils, and VPN. That.... That is a minuscule part of a programmer's workflow.
If coreutils and a package manager are "miniscule parts" of a programmers workflow, I'd sure like to see someone program on a Mac without them.