As much as I love the idea of moving to Linux - Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming. I keep looking for an iteration where it makes sense to switch but currently the intel core 3 stuff is at best comparable to M5 base. Strix Halo is much more power hungry and also not that impressive other than having a bunch of cores. Nothing comes close to the pro/max chips in M4 series. And with RAM/storage pricing Apple upgrades are looking reasonably priced (TBD when M5 Pro devices launch).

So I can either get a top tier tool when I upgrade this year or I can buy a subpar device, and the power management is going to likely be even worse on Linux.

I think this mostly only holds if you use local compute in a portable form factor.

Most of my personal development these days is done on my home server - 9995wx, 768GB, rtx 6000 pro blackwell GPU in headless mode. My work development happens in a cloud workstation with 64 cores and 128GB of ram but builds are distributed and I can dial up the box size on demand for heavier development.

I use laptops practically entirely as network client devices. Browser, terminal window, perhaps a VS Code based IDE with a remote connection to my code. Tailscale on my personal laptop to work anywhere.

I'm not limited by local compute, my devices are lightweight, cheap(ish) and replaceable, not an investment.

There is Asahi Linux project for Apple Silicon Macs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahi_Linux

So whatever resources you have, Apple will use them mostly to render 3D glass effects. With Debian (Xfce), I can't speak for other desktop environments, you need roughly three times fewer resources to run the OS itself.