Macintosh PCs have been designed from the very beginning of the brand for maximum usability. After Steve Jobs' departure from Apple and return from NeXT, he began re-engineering the Mac. The Darwin operating system was based on NeXT, Apple pieces, and primarily BSD Unix, although some disagree if that particular Unix was "real" UNIX. Apple did have a separate server product line, but it was eventually absorbed into the desktop product line with server administration capability, still available for a small price from the Apple Store.
It is obvious that macOS is tightly wound as a reliable desktop product, needing very little in the way of administrative involvement compared to Windows, Linux, BSD, RISC-v and other operating systems. Linux is capable of running world-class supercomputers such as Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (RedHat Enterprise), many thousands of web server storage installations and switching equipment, home file servers (my current Ubuntu 20.04 Server minimum distribution,) and my various Linux distributions that I play with and test on my Windows 10 laptop's virtual machine (VirtualBox) installation. I have 3 to 5 installed at any given time on VirtualBox, along with Windows XP for compatibility with some ham radio stuff. What can be said as applies to Linux is generally applicable to FreeBSD (both have strong similarity to UNIX), and FreeBSD has a good niche in home NAS units. From time to time, I dedicate a standalone Linux installation (I like Linux Mint on the desktop) to a spare desktop or laptop. This four year old Windows 10 laptop is destined for Linux at Windows 10 EOL in 2025. Some people run VirtualBox on their Linux distro's desktop, with old or new Windows-whatever either sandboxed and isolated or free to run on the internet inside.
With reference to amateur radio applications on Linux, it is easier to develop those applications from a software engineering standpoint. The detail required from underlying structure is more evident in Linux. The code editors, languages and compilers are built in or available. The Linux operating system is open source; Windows and macOS are very closed source. In Linux, every process, every piece to run system code is available from source, including the kernel. Some distros, like Debian, champion all free code, while most support non-free contributing applications. There are some exceptions: At the heart of the boot code required for Raspberry Pi OS to run the SBC's hardware, there is a closed-source binary blob; some people don't like that for some reasons.
While Mac devotees are typically described as "happy" and very "loyal" (compared to Windows users), Linux folks are described sometimes as "smug", but they mostly consider themselves as "free" and "innovative". Sort of like amateur radio aficionados do.
Ted, KX4OM
