I also think dnf is a more powerful and easier package manager than apt.
To anyone reading this - dnf is much slower than apt, on the flip side.
When Ubuntu 22.04 was released, I switched to Fedora for good. They get a GNOME distro right.
What we really want is design stability. We do want improvements but we don't want wholesale conceptual changes in our desktop environments every few years.
Although tech savvy, I opted for Linux Mint because it was the most reliable distro out there that required minimal babysitting.
Then I switched to Pop OS for OOTB NVIDIA GPU support, and it has been working seamlessly.
I might get a Mac in the future. But Windows is out of consideration.
Linux experience is seamless for me (apart from some fan issues).
I use opensnitch and eventually found the appropriate blocking rule for every time a snap is launched or appimage from some random mount path for the process.
Not sure what's wrong with using the established package management system instead of reinventing the wheel to distribute an app on your own binary system that you control - why?!?!
Rock solid. Fast.
Pop!_OS. Its Ubuntu at its core, but somehow is better.
It took me a bit to get over not having MS Office, but honestly as a development box, it works much better.
Tried Windows 11, and despite really wanting to like it, it left an impression of utterly unbelievable level of unpolished and unfinished mess, with basic features missing (primarily taskbar related) and still, after all these years, just being a skin over ever-present (and still there) Win95-era dialogs. I understand Windows 8 keeping the old Control Panel and having a weird and weak replacement with a new skin for it in parallel, but come on, we've had Win 10 for years and Win 11 still hasn't moved a bit from that same crap?
Switched to Manjaro (Arch-based distro), and KDE Plasma, spent a couple of days tinkering and customizing and have never been happier with my quick, light, rock-solid, completely customizable and fancy environment, that served me impeccably for 1.5 years until I was too tempted with MBP 14. It is a great device hardware-wise, but Mac OS has been a definite leap back, and I would pay hundreds of dollars to be able to put my Linux on MBP with everything working.
I think most of that stuff is from Win7, not Win95.
If you want to pay for Linux on Mac, the Asahi project could always use some support: https://asahilinux.org/support/
Windows: Windows 11 is a mixed bag with some better design and some worse. Currently, it's a bit of a step backwards. Windows 10 is pretty ok though.
Ubuntu: I wouldn't say Ubuntu is in a better place now with Gnome than it was 5 years ago. It works well, but it doesn't have the cool factor that Unity did and is missing a lot of its features. Ubuntu Unity exists, but it's a little buggy and not as polished as back in the 16.04 days. You could always go KDE Plasma (or MATE if you're old school).
There's the rabbit hole of other Linux distributions, my favorite alternative being Arch. But depends on your tolerance for tweaking.