We’re talking about the UI here, not the binary executable. Finder was extensively reworked in 2001 from the file manager in NeXT to be much closer to the original Finder, and most of the complaints here are about UI decisions taken from the original Finder, released in 1984. That predates Windows (not just Windows Explorer, which is from ten years later), Nautilus (created by Andy Hertzfeld of the original Mac team to be like Finder!), and the Unix variants, even the venerable xfm, which dates from the early 1990s.

The PARC interface (by which I guess you mean the Xerox Star) had significant differences, and I think would confuse any modern computer user far worse than the Finder. The Lisa was closer to the Star but the Mac used a simplified model that just equated files to icons.

Source: I lived through this process and used all of these for actual work at some point. The Finder’s influence on GUI file management was rather like the iPhone’s influence on phone management.

MacOS's current Finder dates from 2001

Arguably it dates from NeXTSTEP so 1989.

was thinking either the framework or xps 14, but have not use their trackpads extensively but both haptic

I'd love to try Asahi some day, but it only supports older hardware up to M3 for now and feature support is rather fragmented: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/. As it's a small and slow moving project, it'd also unfortunately mean living with all the bugs and quirks for a long time if you choose it.

What you could do instead is just set up your favorite Linux distro in an arm64 VM and run it with UTM (a popular qemu wrapper). Works nearly flawlessly! Very usable as a daily development setup. I connect it to an external monitor and keyboard and can't believe it's not a Linux box most of the day. They even got virtualized Vulkan (almost) working now. Switching between VMs and host is trivial and you have proper virgl acceleration in VMs without fighting a lot of nonsense like I had in the past with virt-manager on Linux hardware - if you like to develop in VMs like me, this alone would justify switching from a Linux box to a Mac.

Virtualization costs me ~10-15% in multicore performance - still a bargain considering how far ahead Mac hardware is compared to anything x86. Linux arm64 is very well supported by open source these days. Just proprietary software is often behind e.g. Zoom, Slack are still missing native binaries but you could run them in a browser.

Here's a more detailed experience report (though a bit dated) from another user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42541508 https://blog.disintegrator.dev/posts/dev-virtual-machine/

I can't speak for the person you've asked, but, I have an M5 Macbook Pro and Asahi Linux only recently got support for M3 Macs, and that support is marked WIP on most features: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/

I assume it'll be a couple of years before Asahi is an option for my machine.