Why not a Linux distro with i3wm, instead? What could possibly hold you back from upgrading?

I've yet to find anything comparable feature-wise on Linux - and they all come with the huge downside of having to roll your own cohesive settings widget ecosystem for basic everyday things like WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. I run Cosmic Epoch on my old Macbook which is better, but again, feature-wise, it's just not comparable for serious work.

Thanks for your reply, but as a Linux user for over 20 years, all I take away from your post is that you haven't really tried, probably because the variety of distros vastly exceeds the two classic options of mac vs windows.

I understand the "roll your own" argument very well. In my time, I've experienced quite the variety of configs and dotfiles, but I'm not young anymore so I've settled with using Regolith which is an opinionated set of tools, including my favourite i3wm, on top of Ubuntu, and I simply use defaults for the most things.

Anyway, it's much easier to use Linux as a daily driver than it's ever been. The choice of distro is simply which package manager to use, and everything else just works, as long as it's in the package manager's inventory.

I haven't compiled my own computer's kernel in 6 years (but I still cross compile for rpi and other IoT), and I haven't used my dotfiles in 3 years, just defaults.

> Thanks for your reply, but as a Linux user for over 20 years, all I take away from your post is that you haven't really tried, probably because the variety of distros vastly exceeds the two classic options of mac vs windows.

A very big and very incorrect assumption. This reads like you asked the initial question without any actual curiosity behind it.

Thank you for the details!

> having to roll your own cohesive settings widget ecosystem

What gets you that on windows? The builtin stuff is far from cohesive.

I just run NixOS, but that feels like a respectable answer.