> You might not be impressed much with my environment—I pretty much just copied the acme colors—but some people have put a lot of work into making their setups look sexy.
> I wish this post touched on some deeper reasons that the author was "disenchanted" with Apple.
It's mainly the feeling of ownership. Apple's apparently increasing hostility toward third-party upgrade-and-repair shops (see the whole "right to repair" issue) forces owners of their machines to use their support exclusively. I'd prefer to have more options for upgrading my hardware than buying a new machine. These decisions make sense for Apple but not for me. Maybe it's because they're still small but Purism hasn't set me up for this sort of antagonistic relationship.
There's also the increased sense of creativity with Linux. It feels a little bit like working with Legos. Because "unix philosophy" and such that other commenters feel are trivial wastes of time, I'm free to make the machine behave as I wish. And I like that.
Of course there are also superficial things. I don't like notifications that force a behavior, like being forced to opening System Preferences because the only button on the notification is "View". But it's also more than that.
> Having dabbled in tiling window managers, terminal music players, and many other /r/unixporn memes
I mean, if you want to demean things you don't like as "memes", that's your prerogative. But I don't use a tiling window manager or terminal music player to impress people. I use them because I like them---they're fast, the mental models make sense, they expose me to new/unfamiliar concepts, and I can customize them to suit me.
> Many of the things mentioned here (e.g., tiling WMs, emacs _REALLY?_) are not mutually exclusive with macOS.
True. I've been using emacs (yeah, really) on macOS for a decade. No complaints there.
> I wonder if the author has realized that rebranded ODM hardware (Librem and System76) and a modern Macbook are unfortunately not in remotely the same league.
The Librem 13 is easily the best-feeling laptop I've ever used.
The Purism forums show there's some variability but my experience has been great. The Librem 13 is the best-feeling laptop I've ever used. It's sturdy (unlike a Macbook Air) but thinner and lighter than my 10-year-old Macbook. It's in a very satisfying middle ground. The keys are great and the trackpad, though not quite as nice as Apple's, is very good.
My one complaint is with the color. Smudges definitely appear pretty quickly. On the other hand, I'm less likely to type with gross fingers now and I wipe down my machine more often (maybe a couple times a month), which isn't necessarily a bad thing.