> I think macOS is nice if you use it exactly the way that Apple wants you to use it

Do you have an example? Apart from a few small opinionated decisions, I find Macos to mostly get out of my way.

Of course it lacks the customization that Linux offers, and there are a few UX issues with the DE (switching desktop animations, window management, etc), but for a software dev, being UNIX is pretty good and opens lots of opportunities.

Compared to Windows which is actively hostile towards its users, it's night and day

I don't have any major things to complain about, but I think those small opinionated things just build up rather heavily for me over time. There's a lot of little third party fixes for various things, but often Apple will break those third party fixes with new MacOS releases, and once you upgrade a computer you're not allowed to downgrade which is legitimately infuriating if it breaks something you rely on.

I think I recall something back in 2019 where the Catalina update also broke my favoured programming language because of some notorization change or something, and the process to approve improperly notorized apps was somehow broken, but I don't remember what exactly it was. That was around the time I switched to Linux, but my memory is fuzzy.

And yes, I agree I'd much rather use MacOS than Windows any day. I think I would be fine on a MacOS machine other than for gaming, where Linux and Windows are just way way way ahead in terms of compatibility and performance.

But given the choice between MacOS and Linux, I just feel more comfortable and more respected on Linux than MacOS, both in terms of customization, and general ideology.

Call me paranoid, but I really do believe that Apple wishes to lock down MacOS just as much as iOS is locked down, they just haven't found a way to do it yet that wouldn't cause a massive loss of users.