> One of the big features Macs have for me is that I can call customer service any time of day and they can work through any serious issue I have with my Mac
This is something else that often gets left out in these discussions. For better or worse, Apple offers an ecosystem/platform, and the support to go along with it.
Suppose you do make a Linux laptop work for your daily driver. You're still left out in the cold if you have an iPhone/iWatch/iPad.
The tight integration that's offered, along with the ubiquitous(and very useful) iCloud is something that Linux just doesn't have.
And yes, I am aware of the various flavors of self-hosted solutions, the dangers of lock-in etc...
If I've already been fighting to make my laptop functional for work, I don't want to start the same battle again for my hobbies too.
The practical implications of what it means to the end user is that companies/entities that write any GUI-enabled software for Linux are forced to make decisions about what(if any) OS they'll support.
And just like that, we've waded into "cracking open the window manager" just to figure out what's going on.
End-user Linux has definitely improved in the last few years.
It offers a lot of attractive features for what I imagine to be the typical HN demographic.
That being said, it's still got rough spots that OSX doesn't. It works great when it works, but when it doesn't....
Font rendering, display/compositor fragmentation etc...
Inb4 the anecdotal "well it works for me I just had to download the xf86 font library and compile with a legacy glibc version..." crew comes in with a thousand and one rebuttals. Problems like that are still a suboptimal user experience, no matter how you slice it.
I'd definitely consider a Linux daily driver for some of my work, but there are things that are just going to be less painful on Apple.