Pretty sure it's an option if you have an external monitor attached. If not, why would you close your laptop if not to turn it off?

I sometimes find it more convenient to carry a laptop to the meeting room or to a separate teleconferencing space (or even to the couch at home) with the lid closed.

Especially if I'm also carrying something in my other hand.

And what is the problem with doing that? The system comes back up when you reopen the lid nearly instantly anyways?

This assumes that you don't have stuff you would rather leave running in the background. Like compiling, or keeping an ssh session alive.

I at least sometimes see coworkers walking around with open laptops, which looks inconcenient. I am sure they have their reason for not closing the lid.

It does, but it still requires unlocking the session on resume, which is a minor inconvenience if you're just moving to a neighbouring room with a coffee cup in your other hand. Slightly more importantly, sometimes it's also convenient to keep network connections open, e.g. for ssh sessions.

Those aren't really problems, but it can be a minor matter of convenience, and I've set both my work and personal laptops to not suspend when the lid is closed.

I'm not saying that's in any way a better idea than keeping the typical default, and I have absolutely no opinion on what anybody else should do.

FWIW, I also don't care whether macOS gives an option for not triggering sleep when closing the lid, which was the original matter. But I don't agree that there's no reason to close the lid except for suspending.

>I do have hardware accelerated video playback on Firefox on Linux.

How much time did you have to spend fiddling with your config to get it working? Does it work reliably? Last I checked, it wasn't even possible with an NVIDIA card.

>Having said that I prefer no suspend on closing the lid, and AFAIK that's not an option on MacOS.

Yes it is.

> How much time did you have to spend fiddling with your config to get it working? Does it work reliably? Last I checked, it wasn't even possible with an NVIDIA card

Max an hour. It's an Intel GPU on a cheapo netbook (hence the need to make it as efficient as possible). Arch wiki is quite decent for this kind of stuff.

I don't know about NVIDIA, I didn't own one since a long time.