This design seems to cement the trend at Apple to position their products as consumer appliances, not platforms useful for development.
The problem is, there's nothing else out there. Everything is going to shit in one way or another. Windows is now a disaster, Linux was always a disaster in terms of user experience and isn't improving.
Mac OS was the last bastion of somewhat good, thoughtful design, user experience and attention to detail and now they've gone to shit too.
I would recommend: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS
if you want: nice experience out of the box
I would recommend: Arch, Gentoo, Debian Net inst, Void
if you want a base system and install things you want on top of it
The (hopelessly unscientific) test plan was:
Challenge 1 - write live system ISO to USB drive and boot it on my 2015 MacBook Air (which, though old, still counts as exotic, I guess.)
Challenge 2 - make sure display, network, trackpad and keyboard (+ intl. layout) work correctly. Be able to SFTP to my Mac
Challenge 3 - with little to no docs reading (how is the package manager invoked from CLI?), use the terminal to set up the right environment for a couple of relatively portable hobby projects I've been recently working on (on Mac), compile and test them. This includes, among other things, installing clang or g++, SDL2, Wine (to run an ancient ARM assembler) and finding a usable GBA emulator.
Limitations:
A: 8GB RAM. More ambitious stuff (KVM macOS, VisualStudio Code) will have to wait for an actual install.
B: Deliberately avoiding exposure to the docs is silly but I thought
such an approach would give me an indication as to whether
there exists a distro that uhm, "thinks like me".
Results:
Challenge 1: unremarkable. All worked right off the bat except for Void, which made it as far as showing the mouse pointer but then froze.
Challenge 2: well, boring ;) All distros were pretty much ready to use and required minimal tweaking. With the tweaking part ranging from effortless (Mint) to minor headscratching (Neon). Not sure whether /etc/X11/XF86Config still exists but I did not miss editing it today.
Challange 3: more interesting:
Neon: all worked as expected except some trial and error required to get Wine working: wine32 was required but it wasn't getting installed by default, apparently. (Not a whole lot easier on Mac anyway, with separate downloads & installs for Wine and XQuartz)
Ubuntu: I failed as apt refused to acknowledge the existence of the packages I needed. This is weird as I believe Neon relies on the same package database. Though undoubtedly my fault, not reading the manual, it is perhaps a bit interesting that I could not readily find my way around the problem.
Fedora: everything worked except for Wine, as the live system ran out memory (disk space) on installing it. Not a big deal, everything else worked very well. Aside: I'm an avid runner and "DNF" is not the most likeable of names for a program I have to use very frequently! j/k..
Mint: everything worked at take one.
I know this isn't even scratching the surface of the surface but I think for now I'm going to go ahead and play more with Mint and Fedora after installing them on MB Air hardware or MB Pro VMware.... with a mind of getting back to KDE/Neon eventually.
I haven't used Ubuntu much lately but I remember always having to add community repository to get some package I needed. (Also one of the reason I love Arch, a lot of packages there updated more quickly than most distro + the AUR for everything not present in official repo)