We've used them for work and for play, for software development and video editing and graphic design and media consumption. I gave her an M1 air this holiday season! We've had pros, airs, and iMacs in four or five different colors occupying our living spaces for fifteen or twenty years now. Between the two of us, and between home and work, we've bought or used probably 25-30 of these over the years. Interactive performance is much better, the docker-based workflows everyone's using are so much faster when they're native, and there's no mismatch between Darwin's BSD userland and the Ubuntu/CentOS you're probably using in prod. Reliability aside - and I realize that everyone values ergonomic factors differently - Linux is just a better choice in every regard for me and the kind of work that I do. I have to restart it once or twice a week. It's not uncommon to see uptimes on my ThinkPads measured in months. (Always right before a videoconference! I missed fifteen minutes of a call last week scrambling to fetch another device because the audio subsystem died and the Mac decided it had to install updates for a half hour when it rebooted.) I see people in this thread complaining that Linux distros are unreliable, but my Linux machines don't do things like beachball for 20s at a time or have complete audio system crashes requiring reboot twice a week. I did all my dev work on MacBooks between 2007-2013, but my experience this year has completely vindicated my decision to ditch the Mac at home and at work back then.

I begged them to give me a ThinkPad with Linux instead, and it's been a litany of problems in the three months I've been using it.

Midnight commander mac m1