Leaving Linux
I've been a pretty die hard Linux user for the past decade or so, it was a huge part of my identity. Owning a shitty beaten up thinkpad and budget Android device was a source of pride. I vowed I'd never become a corporate Apple shill and pay a fortune for their overpriced devices.
Using Linux was fun, it was cool, installing programs via the terminal made fifteen year old me feel like a hacker. Back in school I'd buy physical Linux magazines with actual disks ISOs in them, this quickly graduated into an addiction trying out different flavours of Linux via bootable USBs. For a good period of my life I don't think I had same Linux install on my personal machines for longer than three months. If there's a Linux distribution, a desktop environment or window manager out there, I've probably used it.
Yet now, at a time there Linux on the desktop seems to be exploding in popularity I've done the complete opposite, and I've gone all in on the Apple ecosystem buying an iPhone and Macbook at the same time.
I'm Tired Boss
I'm 30 this year, and computers don't have the same level of whimsy and excitement as they once had. When I was young everything was new and interesting, it felt like there was so much experimentation and innovation. Today the various desktop environments seem to have largely converged, sharing the same flat design language and icon styles. Customisation seems to have completely fallen by the wayside in favour of a more curated experience controlled by the desktop environment.
You can still install other distributions or environments, but nothing really feels distinct anymore. These days everyone is just using the same five electron apps installed via flatpack anyway. So a desktop environment with an bespoke suite of apps (text editor, video player, file manager etc), seem less and less important anyway.
Hardware
I purchased a blue Macbook Neo and I've been incredibly impressed. It looks great and (compared to previous devices I've owned) feels super premium Strangely it's marketed as a budget / entry-level device targeted at students, which I think does the device a disservice. Single threaded performance is faster than my $WORK M1 macbook and it's comfortably handled the majority of stuff I've thrown at it.
MacOS
I'd already been using MacOS day to day for the last ~5 years at $WORK so I'm already very familiar with the desktop. I'm not going to pretend like I'm the biggest fan (just look how bad this looks). Things like finder still suck, and stage manager seems like a complete mess, but in general things do just work.
Using MacOS means I can finally rid myself of the Windows installation I kept exclusively to use NeuralDSP to play guitar. Another bonus is I finally get to try out MacVim (which I'm using to write this post).