I think if all you want is a Unix, you're better off with Mac, or at least you would have been before the Apple Silicon transition broke Windows support, and Valve stopped supporting Proton on Mac, and CrossOver still doesn't support Unreal Engine, etc.

Stuff like games and proprietary drivers is what keeps people on Windows, I think. Either that, or just a distate for the Mac's design language / user experience, which is also completely fair.

Back in 2016 or so, I had a triple-boot on my MacBook Pro:

- macOS for daily driving, and most development

- Windows for Windows-specific development, gaming, and proprietary drivers or IDEs (Texas Instruments programmers; Samsung / OnePlus flashing; some other embedded tooling)

- Arch Linux for Linux-specific development, usually involving the GPU, which I couldn't get to work in a VM; and also just for fun

These days I simply cannot do most of those things with Mac hardware. I can't even run Asahi yet, because M4 Max.

I play World of Warcraft on my M1 Mac, and my wife plays it on her M4. It's native on Apple Silicon and runs like a dream. So, much like Linux, gaming on a Mac is totally possible depending on which games you want to play. We only play World of Warcraft and were able to dump our Windows machines completely.

The selection of games for macOS is tiny compared to Windows, and even Linux now due to proton. For example Paradox games used to have decent support with macOS, but now Europa Universalis V is Windows only (but works with proton) so I can't currently play it.

I still think, no matter how strategically advantageous, it was a very sad day when Valve discontinued Proton for macOS.

That's great that you play a game that has a Mac port! I play at least TerraTech Worlds, Volcanoids, Space Engineers, Stationeers, BeamNG.drive, Avorion, Deep Rock Galactic, Dishonored, Cogmind, Pacific Drive, Risk of Rain 2, Just Cause 3/4, Scrap Mechanic ... all of which don't/won't have Mac ports and many of which won't run in CrossOver. Recently I've been getting into ARC Raiders too which definitely won't ever have a Mac port. But it's great that you don't have that problem.

I also played Baldur's Gate 3!

I have my fair share of games that run on Mac too, for example I was really happy to learn about No Man's Sky on Mac because I was really into that for a while. It's just not very common, so I simply can't play most games without keeping a Windows desktop around.

>I think people who do this think that people who use Windows perceive that the Mac experience is smoother, and may have some sort of Mac envy.

There's an irony in this due to this:

>b) WSL-based, VSCode-using devs who are one step away from just using Linux. These are the folk who fifteen years ago would have been using what was then still OSX. But these folk don't use Windows as Windows: they use it as a semi-Unix.

The people still doing the "hurr durr wind0ze suxx" routine are the ones stuck 15 years in the past. Modern Windows is an entirely different and vastly more capable beast and it still runs huge swathes of the enterprise world.

The best technologists I know don't really care all that much which desktop platform you stick them on anymore since most of what they really need is either available everywhere or running on a backend that isn't their desktop anyway.

> Modern Windows is an entirely different and vastly more capable beast and it still runs huge swathes of the enterprise world.

Okay, but what does it actually do that Linux doesn't? What's the selling point, why should I make the switch from Linux to Windows?

For one, it can run Raycast. There are launchers on Linux that implement a small fraction of Raycast's functionality, but entire categories of abilities are only possible in Raycast, like CRUD operations on Jira tickets, using AI to interact with your Notion workspace without having to pay Notion 20 USD per month, and directly interacting with other remote APIs with just a few keystrokes.

Okay, but why would I want that?

I don't want any AI at all, and I have turned down incredibly well-paid jobs because it would involve using Jira.

c) Those of us who've been using Linux for a decade, but are forced to use Windows in our day job because of MS Office/Proprietary VPN client that only runs on Windows/other program that doesn't run well on Linux.

> Proprietary VPN client that only runs on Windows

Out of curiosity, which one? I haven’t encountered a single-platform VPN client in years. Even Microsoft’s built in VPN client is just standards-compliant and interoperable IKEv2.

Forgot the name but at my last job the Linux client was something like "use this exact in-house patched .deb of $software in version X on Ubuntu Y/Z" - and that's all that worked, nothing else.

Kinda indistinguishable from "only runs on windows"

Watchguard with SAML login. I've read that one can use OpenVPN when logging with username and password, but it doesn't work with SAML.