I am doing the opposite. I have been a Mac user since ~2005. My first Mac was actually a Quadra 610, but I was a wee little lad back then. I started my career o

I am doing the opposite. I have been a Mac user since ~2005. My first Mac was actually a Quadra 610, but I was a wee little lad back then. I started my career on a G5 Power Mac with dual 23" cinema displays (studio displays? can't remember what they were called back then). Then the intel Macbook/MBP, etc. I think my favorite mac of all time, or the one I look back most fondly on, was my 2012 Macbook Air. In 2022 my M1 mini started to die due to what I would call SSD abuse. I absolutely punished that box - rode hard, put away wet. The SSD began to show signs of failing. I was doing way too much with it - so I took a spare R720 2U server I had and turned it into my remote dev box. Thanks to VSCode's SSH remote feature - you can hack on a project like it is on your box. My workflow is usually my IDE for coding and then a separate terminal running tmux for interacting with the box. I did this locally at home, with the R720 down in my basement. The cool thing about developing like this is that if you are traveling, the dev-ex is no different. Tailscale or some other VPN and boom your workflow continues to work, albeit with varying amounts of latency. Mosh helps here. 2x CPU's (albeit old Haswell gen), 256GB of ram, 2x NVME mirror with pci-e add-in ... it performed really well as an always-on remote dev machine. Quickly I realized I was kinda outgrowing the R720, though, and so in 2023, I built a beast Linux workstation (Debian 12) with 128GB of memory, 13900k, nvme mirrors, etc and after fine tuning KDE and getting it all dialed in, I started to really enjoy it from a hacker standpoint. Everything for the most part "just worked" including my new Apple Studio Display that I am typing this message on right now. Took a little while for the kernel to catch up but at this point it is working over Thunderbolt, the camera works, speakers work, built-in hub works, etc. I can even do brightness control from my kb. Meanwhile, my mobile dev box has been an M2 air. With the 'all compute is happening on a remote node' the M architecture Air devices are really quite incredible. I am just running an IDE and an iTerm window (with all compute happening on the main host), so battery life is measured in days. I will work at my desk in my office for a while, then pivot to the deck or the couch or a coffee shop and thanks again to ide-over-ssh (I am on Zed now, no more VSCode) and tmux ... everything feels exactly like it does at my desk with zero interruption. It also means I can slam my laptop shut at any given moment to do other things, while software and agents continue in the background. Combine with a 1500VA ups under my desk to mitigate power blips and this is a dream setup. But the more I used KDE and Linux ... the more I started to ask myself if it was time to pivot to a Linux notebook too. The only qualms I had was knowing that no PC will ever beat 1) the battery life and 2) the touchpad performance of a Macbook. Then the Framework 13 Pro was announced. I watched the release announcement and immediately preordered one. I went back and forth about cancelling the preorder many times, thinking to myself that my trusty M2 air was just fine for a 'dumb terminal' type of laptop. But the 120hz display and the desire to dogfood a modern Linux notebook, combined with the fact that the market/prices for RAM etc were skyrocketing and I was locked-in to a good batch 1 price kept me on the preorder. Also ... I have 2 german shepherds and they shed a lot. Hair gets into my macbook keyboard which is very difficult to get out. Removing and cleaning key caps is tedious. The fact that I can replace the entire KB on the Framework (or entire top cover) for like $100 is hugely compelling for me. Combined with their track record to continue supporting and offering upgrades for older gear - it was a no brainer really. Modern Mac notebooks are unfortunately wear items (like brake pads) - at some point you throw them out. The tide might be shifting with the new Neo and its' repair-ability, though. Glad I did. The framework has been really really good. Not gonna lie, Apple still wins on battery life. But I enjoy having a freeipa-domain-joined box that is 100% open source, running all my familiar KDE tweaks, 120hz, etc. The keyboard and trackpad are actually incredible. Keyboard surely beats any notebook I have ever had. So now I am sort of spiraling on Linux toys. I just got a Chuwi Minibook X (https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/05/15/2230 https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/05/15/2230) and its running Fedora, like my Framework Pro, and it's quite fun as well. For less than $300 it has 16GB of memory, 512gb nvme, 4 cores, and a touchscreen display that is quite decent (still fine-tuning the auto rotate stuff, which is fun in and of itself). I can't believe Fedora 44 'just works', with suspend, and wifi, and speakers, and bluetooth, and full disk encryption, .... less than $300! I've been using Linux on servers and for software dev since ~2005 but never felt like "the year of the linux desktop" was really here. That totally changed a few years back and now I am all-in. Still love the Apple ecosystem (and use an iPhone) but very very happy to be driving Linux on all my computers. I even updated my gaming rig (7900XTX) to run CachyOS. With the exception of anti-cheat games like COD or BF6 I have zero qualms. It runs everything else really well. And it doubles as a local AI inference machine thanks again to the beauty of open source and Linux.