I did run a Hackintosh back in 2015. I bought all the 100% compatible hardware, ran all the updates and firmwares from tonymacx86, etc. And even went through a couple painful upgrade cycles, until the M-chips came out....
Now, I just want a Arch-based custom dev machine, and in the era of vibe-coding self-indulgent vanity software, I can more than make up for the flows and tools I had on my mac that won't work on Linux, which isn't much.
Not only they are more powerful than comparable Apple hardware at the same hardware price point[0], they have more ports without funny dongles, and I get to use the winning combo of server and desktop OSes in market share, and industry APIs.
Yes there are more powerful Apple laptops available when money is no question, but I don't live in that world, nor am I getting into debt unless there is no way around it.
Allow me to doubt. Results vary between specific scenarios (gaming or other GPU intensive tasks being an obvious example), but the raw performance of Apple silicon for the price is unmatched.
I was kind of forced onto a mac as it was the only thing that had decent-enough support or I could buy an identical new one and restore a backup on, without having to use something grey market
Nowadays, every time I open my work Mac, the only thing I can muster is "at least it's not Windows." And the only reason I even use one for work is that the unified memory does come in handy for compute.
What to set up?
A local business that interacts with real humans and serves a purpose in the community.
Not the answer you are looking for but this is perfectionism at play. Use anything you like well enough and seek out the task to solve instead. These are tools, you can sharpen them to work better but cutting is the task not just sharpening all the time.
I have also counterintuitivly found Arch Linux (a rolling release distro) way more stable than Ubuntu LTS. Things like sleep works, and any bugs are small and fixed quickly, bug reports are followed up on within a couple of days. With Ubuntu bug reports go without any replies from the maintainers, and maybe it will be fixed by happenstance by the next release.
Remember the 10% market share in the 1990s did not cover all the related jobs across the planet.
And now with the demise of the workstation market, some studios have switched to Windows based workstations for their audio, graphics and visual effects gear instead of dealing with thunderbolt spaghetti.
In 1991 Apple then launched QuickTime and FireWire was codified as a standard by 1995. They literally defined the software and firmware which made digital editing possible on a workstation in the 90s.
Adobe Premiere was architected around Quicktime. Avid alone held an estimated 80%+ market share in the professional broadcast, TV, and film industry and was exclusively Apple until mid-95. That's not in the US, that's Globally.
Apple then launched Final Cut and ended up capturing 49% of the U.S. professional editing market by the mid-2000s.
Here's a fun read and personal chronology
https://www.cined.com/apple-at-50-the-company-that-made-me-a...
"Throughout the early 1990s, virtually all nonlinear editing happened on Macintosh"
Macintosh NuBus computers (the early PPC stuff running System 7.5 onwards) took over completely from TimeLine WaveFrame as Pro Tools established istself in film audio and foley work. Think Toy Story onwards, or anything in Skywalker Sound from the mid 90s.
I'm kidding of course. Really looking forward to the days of the liberated mac hardware though!
But... why?
Like, Windows is a pile of dung, Windows 11 follows the general consumer Windows trend of "decent, braindead, decent, braindead" that we saw ever since Windows 98 (decent), ME (braindead), XP (decent), Vista (braindead), 7 (decent), 8 (braindead), 10 (decent), 11 (goddamn fucking braindead). And this time unfortunately I do not see Microsoft ever backing down.
Mainstream Linux, hardware compatibility questions aside, is nowhere near macOS in terms of functionality and usability, and completely off the charts in terms of UI polish.
"Linux on mainstream desktops" will only be a thing when someone shows up and invests like half a billion euros into UI and UX designers into the most common pieces of software - and yeets GNOME in the dustbin.