Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I'm now dual-booting Ubuntu/Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15".
What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are very similar to the problems with 2019-era Linux. External monitors are a particular pain point for me. I've got an HDPI laptop and I want to plug into an old non-HDPI era monitor. Doesn't work. Spend the next 10 hours poking around forums, trying weird XWindows options, installing Wayland, etc. Still doesn't work. Eventually, give up.
Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs.
I'm not saying that the grass isn't greener on the other side. Macs are regressing, but the grass isn't greener on either side. Let's stop pretending otherwise.
I was linux-only from 2002 to about 2009, on laptops, when I switched to Mac. I just set up a linux desktop for kicks the last couple of weeks, and it doesn't seem to me to be any better than it was a decade ago.
* No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff)
* To make an icon on the favorites bar in gnome, you have to edit a .desktop text file! Madness. I mean, I'm a programmer, so I'm capable of it, but it's seriously annoying
* modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent
* searching for help usually yields results that are half a decade or more old, and it's very difficult to figure out if it's current advice or not
* installing a gnome-shell extension was way more difficult than it should be
* brew isn't the best, but on linux I need to use both brew _and_ apt because you can't reliably get anything approaching up-to-date software with apt
I remain reasonably happy with it, but Mac is still so far ahead of it in terms of usability it's wild.
Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world. It's explicitly designed to be boring and not very customizable so that delicate users don't get scared.
I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you can directly bind.
You don't need to go scary tiling WM, Xfce probably works well, it's been years since I last used it.
If apt is out of date that's probably because you're using a stable rather than rolling release distro.
All of this requires some research and tinkering. If you're me, you prefer research to being told what to do.
I tend to feel like there’s already enough roadblocks in the way to get things done. I used to tinker around with my OSs but now I want them out of the way to a large extent.
Unfortunately no-one provides what I consider to be a sane default.
I'm fairly happy with what I have. I add the odd alias to my dotfiles and a few things I pick up but for the most part I've had my config for half a decade or so now.
By contrast I could never figure out how to like, get Windows to fuck off with the telemetry ads bullshit. It always felt like I would disable it and then behind my back some randoservice would enable it again or install an update that brings back OneDrive or some madness.
The best bit about my Linux setup is that it's all just files. Home folder, few flat text files with the odd bit of json, we're home.