I like my M2 Mac, it's great hardware-wise. I thought hard about Linux laptops and decided for the Mac. In a lot of ways it feels like linux on a slick piece of hardware with good commercial support.

Coming from linux I miss the freedom though. That maybe sounds kinda stilted or melodramatic or something but I don't mean anything ideological. I just mean it annoyed me, for example, to find out that a stock market app was installed and I couldn't just get rid of it easily. I looked into it but it involved a whole series of things that I decided just wasn't worth it. But it's still there. Is it a big deal? No, but then again why should I not be able to remove a stocks app?

I also miss KDE which has been my favorite GUI of everything I've used.

Basically I just miss being able to take things off I don't want there, and put on things I do. Seems like something simple to me.

I don't regret buying my Mac and would do it again. I sort of feel like a good combination is Mac on laptop and linux on a desktop/workstation/server. But if for some reason Asahi went away I'm not sure I'd buy another Mac. I haven't used Asahi linux, but it's like an insurance or canary or test case or something. It's this thing in the back of my mind that doesn't really affect me day to day but is always there.

When I was thinking about linux laptops, I was leaning toward an HP developer laptop or Framework, or Starlabs I think? I mention it only because I'm not sure if your XPS experiences would transfer always.

If it makes a difference, I continue to use linux in various capacities, especially for work, so I don't feel like it's gone away entirely in my life. I might feel differently or stronger or something if I wasn't using linux at all anymore.

Thanks. I too enjoy the freedom, I thought I could uninstall iTunes but apparently it's not only impossible but it autostarts every time I click "play" media button on my earbuds and this behavior also cannot be easily disabled. There's an app "NoTunes" that works around it but it also randomly doesn't work. I hope there won't be many stupid limitations like this

Honestly I am struggling to think of what I am missing.

zsh + homebrew are the first installs. Other than that, I don't really miss anything.

I bought a Mac after an Ubuntu update broke my Nvidia install on a Dell notebook and I spent the better part of 2 days trying to fix it.

I guess homebrew isn't going anywhere tho? For me it's the biggest downgrade from Linux pkg management. I'm used to it now, just annoys me from time to time

As much as I love my experience with Homebrew, it is not easy to maintain it so understandably the project tends to only support the latest few OS versions.

This can be problematic for older laptops.

Linux on the other hand tends to work better, even for older computers.

The Homebrew project is also said to be insecure, and have a tendency to be a bit authoritative, as in ignoring criticisms, but thats another story.

zsh has been the default shell for quite a while on macOS