And tbh: money is not the issue. I don't like the 'apple tax' but they are comfortable wayyyyyy up in their trees... and macOS / iOS dev env is leverage.

I'm on the same boat. Except I have a chromebox as guinea pig.

I've seen people reporting this transition as a 'surprisingly good experience'. So here's my 2 cents on a 30 minute run (amount of time it takes me to setup a new macbook):

1password: there are options, but omg it just works...

xrandr: I knew things would get hairy when I found myself looking up how to dual monitor + rotate on i3wm

fonts: I don't know what it is, but seems different

I know your experience will vary from distro to distro, but that is exactly the point: it's hard to find that happy place.

I'm sure that sticking to certain distro, under certain hardware, things will go fine. But that at point I ask myself: Sooo... this seems similar to mac ecosystem, why not pay the apple tax and move on?

I don't think 2017 will be the year of linux on the desktop (or any other prophecy along those lines), but for sure it will be 'the year I reconsidered linux on the desktop'.

The Linux experience I saw so far would be enough for me to be productive with some known rough edges that I can either help fix or report.

Worst case scenario I get a macbook pro during the fall update ;)