I agree linux is just as bad, but at least I can fix it!

I for sure see the appeal. Even if macOS desktop were open source, though, I doubt I'd do much about my complaints. For my use cases, I don't want to turn OS maintenance into a hobby, and whatever complaints I might have aren't big enough to go to the trouble to begin with.

Bespoke user land does have its temptations, though. Maybe I'll finally get off my butt and load up a distro on that old 2012 MBP that doesn't get macOS updates anymore.

AI is a beast at figuring out the internals I picked up oh-my-pi from one of the posts on this site, it's cake compared to what it was even just a year ago.