MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

I am using Ubuntu 20.04 on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen2 and you would be surprised how "normal" it feels as a development machine. Sure there some little annoyances, the touchpad behaves a little worse than on windows, sound is a little worse. But the most important things, Keyboard and Screen are excellent. The system in general does not feel like the horror stories that people keep telling about linux on desktop(notebook). Now that WSL2 is getting Cuda even windows looks workable. Their new terminal app is amazing. After a decade of Mac notebooks it was quite liberating and I would not switch back even if the flaws in macOS would be fixed. It is for sure the nicest of the big 3 operating systems but for development work Ubuntu is hard to beat for me. YMMV but it won't hurt to look around you what else is there.

Seconded. I used to work on a Mac laptop for years, then started using a beefy Linux desktop tower on the side for some work that benefited from higher hardware resources. A few months later I realized that I had slowly grown into doing all my work on Linux, even when I didn't need the hardware, mostly because i3 and apt were so much better than the Mac equivalents, and that I was only opening my Mac laptop to walk into meetings. After realizing that I ditched the Mac laptop for a Linux laptop and haven't looked back.

I still use a Mac at home for entertainment (I'm typing this comment on one), and I have to say it works much better used that way. I don't have to worry anymore about random Mac OS upgrades breaking functionality that Apple doesn't care about because it's not part of their vanilla out-of-the-Apple-Store experience, but is vital to me as a developer such as 3rd party window management, dock improvements, keyboard tweaks, or not delaying every new execution by phoning home (LMAO).