It’s more subjective of a thing than many would like to admit. As someone who’s been working as a dev for a decade and writing code outside of work for twice that, one of the things keeping me away from Linux is that there simply isn’t a true Mac analogue DE.

It's funny how polarizing this is. Seemingly based on whatever system you grew up on, or are most accustomed to.

I find Mac's window management to be something of a joke, and can't imagine why anyone would want to replicate it. I do see the value of the global menu but everything else feels wholly unintuitive to me. I can't stand that cmd+tab takes you to the last app, not the last window, and raises all that apps other windows as well. I literally never want that.

The way Mac window management works, ironically, is that you manage windows as little as possible. You don't even go as far as to maximize or tile most of them. Instead, windows are sized to fit their content and sit where they may, overlapping each other and allowing the most relevant portions of each to peek through, like the digital analogue of a desk with a pile of odd-sized papers. Windows are foregrounded by either clicking a bit that's peeking out or triggering Exposé and choosing a thumbnail.

It's a very different mindset than that of a Windows-like desktop or tiling window manager.

I do all my software development in remote clusters/supercomputers. I’d consider myself a power user. My laptop is for running a terminal, vscode, a browser and the various applications my company requires, e.g. Teams, Slack. So I want reliability, low configuration and maintenance overhead on my part and good battery life. Linux can’t compete on these fronts.

All those pros you list have nothing to do with the desktop environment. Maybe low configuration but you can have that on Linux too.

I totally agree that the hardware and the underlying Unix is decent. Audio on Mac is also way less of a hassle. I am not saying that a power user wouldn't have good reason to chose a Mac, just that the desktop is for me the weakest part of it compared to Linux.

I do the same and I prefer KDE much more than Mac OS X apart from battery part.

Sometimes jumping through random hops to solve things just work on other operating systems is fun (not sarcasm).

hey, i don't know if you've considered it, but this comes across as a pretty unnecessarily-insulting way to state a personal preference.