If I had time, I'd do the same. I'm in this career because I wondered how these things work in the first place. Just because Windows or macOS are closed systems they're not less interesting. They're harder to understand and, sometimes challenge calls.
Linux is nice, way better when compared to 15 years ago but, it's not perfect. I'm going to buy a new PC in 12 months and I'd need to make some research about hardware compatibility and performance. Especially on the motherboard side. I have to make sure that it contains no funny devices or memory mappings so, I can't use an on-board peripheral until someone writes a quirk just for that.
OTOH, every platform has its nice applications. While Darktable is a very nice photo editor and Digikam is a perfect DAM, CameraBag or OmniGraffle doesn't work on Linux. Similarly, many basic functions of KDE's Dolphin (Protocol support, embedded git, etc.) is not present on mac. Similarly my IDE of choice (Eclipse) wasn't working well on macs until Big Sur.
However, while developing applications, Apple's design decisions and inner workings provide some nice insight and inspiration for better experiences and more sensible defaults.
Using diverse set of platforms is mind opening for me. It's important to understand the trade-offs of every one and, all of them are perfect in their own regard.
However, at the end of the day, I'm a FOSS lover and you can't pry my Linux systems from my cold dead hands. macOS on the other hand is just a nice closed system to develop open source stuff for me.
There are certified/tested Linux computers available from vendors like HP and Dell. Just buy one of them instead of wasting time researching hardware compatibility only for it to break later with no one to complain to. Some links:
HP Linux Hardware Matrix: https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/4AA7-6280ENW.pdf Dell Linux Workstations and Laptops: https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/overview/cp/linuxsystem... Ubuntu Desktop Certified Hardware: https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop Red Hat Certified Workstations (incl. Laptops): https://catalog.redhat.com/hardware/workstations/search
I make staggered updates and these systems are not very receptive for that. I wouldn't want to change my case just to upgrade the motherboard and the CPU. Also, I'm not sure that a small EliteDesk tower can accommodate all my disks (2HDDs plus 2SSDs) neither space, nor power-wise. I also use a PCIe sound card (for sound quality reasons) which needs a PSU connection via floppy connector.
At the end of the day, these systems are very nice as-is, but I need to get them as a package and they're not very flexible. My desktop usage scenario and update path is not very suitable for that.
Last but, not the least; I like to build my own desktop computers.
Even with a recent kernel, it continues to have power management problems, and the intel wifi chipset occasionally just decides to stop working. It's fine, especially given the good price I got, but it's been a hassle, and more than occasionally I wish I'd spent the money on upgrades to the Mac instead.
(And I say this as someone with a libre POWER9 desktop and a pinephone -- I love tinkering and live Linux, but when I'm working for a paycheck I get tired of dealing with Linux's issues)
I've been using Linux exclusively since 2007 and I've never had any motherboard compatibility issues. I think the only thing that may be shaky is wifi, but even that's pretty settled these days now that the hardware is more or less standardized. I'm not doubting your experience, just found that an odd thing to single out.
Some things I have experienced (not all hardware related but, notable and crippling):
- Additional SATA controllers had intermittent connectivity issues with Samsung SpinPoint drives
- Same additional SATA controllers' 2 port models were fine but, same chip's 4 port model was not recognized at all.
- Intel Speedstep was wonky.
- CPUFreqd needed hand tuned scaling profiles for good on-demand scaling.
- Fedora 4 mysteriously tried to redirect all my internal X11 comm via my physical Ethernet card. Needed to add an additional card as a primary network interface to solve desktop latency problems.
- One of my systems was unable to boot any OS installed on the non-GRUB drive. GRUB was unable to fire anything on that disk (regardless of OS brand, model and make)
- My latest system's on board Wi-Fi and BT adapter was unusable for 2 years.
The sound still breaks after every kernel update though as the drivers continue to evolve. I've been running Linux on my desktop for twenty years now, and I couldn't suggest anyone who hasn't to try a Linux on a next-gen motherboard as it is pretty much always a disaster for a year or two.
I got tired of having to figure out what codec incantations I needed to make videos play.
Much of the support was snarky "RTFM" or forum postings from 2007 about different distros.
Every couple years I try it again when people on HN insist it's better now, and within minutes there's a showstopper hardware compatibility issue or something.
I'm scheduled to try it again about a year from now.
Even with all that experience and care picking good laptops, and even after Ubuntu and Xorg autoconfig made the driver situation much better, I found myself having to: Fix kernel graphics driver bugs (spans of random pixels occasionally drawn on the screen due to something extremely subtle deep in the Intel driver), sound driver bugs, and being annoyed that nothing worked right with Nvidia on one of them (neither Nvidia's driver nor Nouveau worked properly), and debugging unreliable suspend.
Now I run Linux in a VM, and that's been perfect for userspace development. On a Mac, the four-finger swipe switches beautifully between Mac and Linux full-screen desktops, as if neither OS is really in charge. It feels more like running Xen, two OSes side by side, with Apple-quality GUI for switching and organising OSes.
Of course, not so good when the Apple device bricks.
The symptoms people are reporting now are very similar to what I saw when upgrading to Catalina - hours stuck on "about a minute remaining", many reboots and with what looked like glitchy display errors and "starting from scratch" progress bars, leading to a worrying feeling it was stuck in a reboot cycle or just bricked. I was immensely relieved when it eventually finished after hours of doing whatever it was doing, as I didn't have a spare working computer (all my old Linux laptops have broken :-/) And that was after leaving it for nearly a year (I installed Catalina this summer), so the problems should have been "ironed out" by then.
I'm really glad I haven't follow the system notification's prompt to update to Big Sur. From the Catalina experience, I suspect I'd be one of the brickage victims, and I can't afford that right now.
If it were always possible to restore from backup (as it generally is with Linux and Windows) that would be fine, I'd take the risk. But when Apple updates go wrong, it can be more serious as you can't necessarily boot at all, even to restore from backup.
Fullscreen the Linux VM, it becomes another desktop. Just swipe into it and continue working.
But I would expect it to work the same for other virtualisation software, because that's what MacOS does for full-screen apps.
It's nice that the swipe gesture is intercepted by the host instead of passed to the guest.
I swipe to full-screen remote desktops too (in this case to access another work laptop on my desk via my main monitor), it's really nice having them all available this way. It's like having a deluxe KVM, which also has a zoom-out thumbnail viewer when needed :-)
It's still called VMware Fusion but is now available in the variants Player and Pro: https://www.vmware.com/se/products/fusion/fusion-evaluation....
Before that it was an issue with different GPU/CUDA binaries causing conflicts and forcing a full reinstall of the system at random times when I was swapping conda envs for different python stacks.
I really really really want to be able to use Linux full time, but I haven't even got to the point of wanting to use something like video conference from a linux install, which I've heard is a nightmare.
That being said, setting up WiFi is a pain, I frequently set up raspberry pis with Ubuntu and just can’t get it right without needing to connect a screen.
With Catalina, my Mac speakers intermittently stopped working though. So it's getting more competitive as Mac gets worse.
> Since I can’t work because I’m waiting for the replacement
There's probably a few tens of thousands of stressed out freelancers right now who can't pay their rent this month because their only machine just got bricked by the Big Sur update (which presents itself via system notifications as if it's an ordinary software update, not a major event), and they are either stuck far from any Apple service waiting for a replacement, or worse, it's out of warranty and they can't afford to buy another machine.
But for a lot of developers, their work literally can only be done on on Apple devices. You can't develop iOS and Mac apps on anything else.
There are a lot of people for whom that is their job, including freelancers.
They could switch to a new domain of business, but that's a large change with many disadvantages. It's not like picking a different laptop just because you fancy a change. E.g. for an iOS developer to switch to being an Android developer, it's not hard to start but there's a lot to learn to be good at it to the same level and bring in the same money.
I would be surprised if my accountant updates to a new version of Excel within 3 days if it coming out, and would be very disappointed if as a result he wasn’t able to prepare my taxes. The situation you described is similar - someone who should know better throwing their old tools before they know for sure the shiny new one will work.
The Big Sur update is notified in the same way. It gives the appearance of being just another big software update.
Unlike Windows, Mac OS updates come out more often, about once a year for major version, and every couple of months for minor version. Despite the marketing fanfare, they are not as big a change as say jumping from Windows 7 to Windows 10.
Ok, maybe you still want to take care with a new OS. Like with Excel three days before filing taxes. (Though when do you expect the accountant to upgrade? They are always doing someone's taxes.)
Maybe you do try it in a VM first, and decide you like it, it works well for you. Some people try new OS versions in a separate partition. You can do that on a Mac, just like on a PC. It seems like it ought to be safe, because you've kept the old installation on as well. Just like on a PC, you can choose which to start up using the built-in boot menu.
Being sensible you take a full system backup first. Usually, with Apple, a backup is pretty good. You can reinstall from a backup provided the system can boot. Macs have a reinstaller built in. By analogy with a PC, it's more like "imaging" a Windows or Linux system, and as if the PC BIOS had built-in tools to restore from a backup image.
Following that analogy, the problem here is that Big Sur nuked the BIOS! It can't even reboot from external media, or the recovery partition. If a Window OS upgrade did that we'd not only be unhappy, we would also be rather surprised that we can't boot an external USB key to recover.
Windows 10 has new major releases every 6 months, changes might be more minor than a typical macOS major release. Windows also gets security patches and bug fixes every month, those are comparable to macOS minor versions.
Updates brick device across many platforms all the times. I've had plenty of PCs break from updates.
That you can even recover from a T2 failure at all without opening it up is quite nice. Perhaps my standards are low.
Most windows and linux machines can be reinstalled with a USB stick. If you don't have that USB stick they can usually be written with any macos, windows or linux machine.
Updates do not usually brick machines. I'm guessing your PCs that broke did not require another PC running the exact same windows version to fix? And I'm guessing that if those PCs were made within the last 5-10 years you could restore from recovery and not need another device?
A few weeks ago, I fired up Adobe Photoshop from their CC platform. No go, something, something about an intel compatibility.
Do online and start googling the error I was getting.
Seems the newest version determined that my quad core Xeon processors didn't support SSE 4.2 or later. A LOT of people were fuming online that in order to run the latest version, they would have to get a new PC or laptop with a new processor that was now required for the newest version.
The current solution for many is to now install an earlier version until they figure out what they want to do. Ironically, I still run a lot of stuff on my old Mac Mini so I found out that I can run the most recent version of Photoshop on there instead.
I haven't checked into the issue for a week or so. I'm still not sure if anybody came up with a solid solution without having to buy new equipment.
I was with you until I looked up when SSE 4.2 was introduced.
SSE 4.2 was introduced in the Nehalem architecture...twelve years ago for desktop processors, ten for xeons. I really don't see anything wrong with Adobe requiring a processor newer than ten years old for software used by and large by creative professionals, people who make money with it.
If you're a creative professional working off a twelve year old computer, you're wasting money just from lost productivity waiting on that system - as well as flushing money down the drain on all the wasted energy running the system, unless you live somewhere electricity is insanely cheap.
A new computer would literally pay for itself in reduced power consumption alone, both idle and loaded wattage. A Ryzen 3600 uses less than half the power of a lot of xeon chips, has a single-core performance 50%+ higher than the very fastest second-gen quad core nehalem, and has two more cores.
Same goes for a modern GPU - everything is GPU accelerated these days, and you can get a several year old Nvidia card that is so power efficient the fans aren't even spinning most of the time.
Then there's the huge performance boost of NVMe.
The list goes on. Dude(tte). Buy a new computer. Or one at least made in the last 5-6 years?
I opened my late 2013 MBP, unplugged the IO board's cable, rebooted, OS finished upgrading. I left it unplugged for now (lost WiFi/BT, HDMI and one USB) not an issue for me, was using TB to displayport and gigabit lan adapter anyways. System works and reboots fine without IO board being plugged in. Ordered a 14$ replacement board from eBay.
Do steps 17 and 18 of this:
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Retina+Disp...
As a freelance developer, my MacBook Pro is my livelihood. It’s dependence, great support and MacOS / Linux CLI was it’s main feature. Now it’s gotten to the point where you’re better off waiting 4 years before buying a new product line so the general public beta tested it long enough.
I’m getting a lot of Microsoft in the 90’s vibes from Apple these days. Anyone else as well?
We need a new razor, something along the lines of "do not attribute to FANG marketing what is better explained by misplaced expectations".
I think you overestimate some professional people's income (especially if it's sporadic) and underestimate their other expenses.
I've known many freelancers who buy a new laptop twice a decade at most. It will be the single most valuable object they own, and may be the result of saving for months and careful consideration of what to buy, intending it to use it for many years.
A spare good laptop "just in case" is not a realistic option for them.
Most of them could buy a second laptop if circumstances arise where it's absolutely necessary, but it would be hardship. So they wouldn't get one just as a "nice to have", a spare laptop lying around doing "nothing". Especially if it's going to be outdated by the time you have some use for it. Events where you need a spare device are quite rare after all.
That might be below "the basic cost" of running a sensible business, but for people on median and/or sporadic incomes it's a significant cost, only worth bearing if and when it becomes necessary.
I don’t mean to belittle anyone’s hardships, the stress of failing in particular. Being a "pro" is not amateur work.
Except for the obvious extreme scenarios, if your business collapses when your laptop fails, I think you are at fault, not Apple.
First, on Apple devices there are more software-induced failure modes than there had been in the past, and many of these failure modes are far more difficult or obscure to recover from. An OS update bricking your system in a way that Time Machine (or a disk image or similar) couldn't recover from was incredibly rare until rather recently.
Second, Apple devices have become so integrated and locked down it's now impossible to use some of the historical strategies to get yourself back up and running faster in the event of an unexpected failure. For example, you can no longer take the drive out of your current device and stick it in a replacement device to continue working. You've gotta make sure you have a perfectly working backup system to do that now, and even that takes waaay more time then the old-school drive swap. We're still not at the point where it's easy to shift your entire life from one machine to the next unless everything you do is cloud-based (which isn't the case for most).
Third, Apple's devices in particular have become harder to repair. They have more proprietary features than they did in the past, and a less friendly attitude towards repair than in the past. Apple don't release detailed documentation or repair manuals on how to e.g. revive the T2 chip, and AFAICT some of the tools needed to diagnose and repair Apple devices are internal only. It's now also impossible for all but an SMD repair shop to replace certain components if they fail because they are now soldered to the logic board. This, combined with the turnaround time for repairs on Apple products being ridiculous, has put even more pressure on people to have more robust backup plans than before, and penalises those without these plans moreso than in the past.
Forth, Apple's devices have become more expensive in the first place - or at least, there are now fewer options for folks to get the machines they need from third parties via upgrades. I typically work in smaller businesses and with freelancers and contractors, and many of these folk used to buy lower end models and upgrade the components over time as their needs improved and components got cheaper.
With soldered storage these days it can also be more difficult to find a suitable machine to buy e.g. used while you wait for your main machine to be repaired. Need a 1TB device? In the past, you could pick up any used machine on the market of approximately the specs you need, and simply swap in aftermarket storage. Now? Well, you're limited to the tiny portion of Macs originally sold with 1TB drives. There may be some way to use an external drive for this, but damned if I can find instructions on how to do so on Apple's website. What I can see however is a disclaimer that Macs with a T2 chip might be more difficult to use external startup disks with. I'm sure I could figure it out eventually, but I'm pretty sure your average freelancer would struggle.
So while ultimately yes, you as a professional can do things to mitigate the circumstances of any single point of failure and should do so where it makes sense, from where I sit this is an increasingly difficult and time consuming process. And all of that extra difficulty has been forced upon its customers by Apple.
Probably because going to these lengths is rare, and people will just service/replace the ocassional problematic machine.
Whereas in Linux land this is much more common, and you're on your own commercial support wise (and with friendly forums to guide you).
What's way more common is random hardware failures, unrelated to the OS. I've never had to deal with apple support and hope I'll never have to, but HP enterprise support isn't frictionless either. A colleague of mine had a swollen battery, which wasn't user replaceable (guess not only Apple has bright ideas). He called up the support, which went relatively fine but in the end he had to send the computer in for repairs for two weeks and was advised to save his data as the machine would be wiped. Luckily removing the SSD was possible and didn't void the warranty...
The next business day, on-site support presumably costs extra. (We have it for servers, but I don't deal with laptops until they're out of warranty.)
It's the effect of:
(1) millions of Macs updating at the same time (fastest OS updates in the industry) vs a smaller number of Linux users scattered upon every distro and updating at random piecemeal intervals (and Windows users fragmented into 2000000 possible configurations and OEMS, with different pain points and issues, that nobody cares for, and is not newsworthy, plus the blame can be dilluted between MS and the PC vendor.).
(2) Apple doing bolder changes with releases than Windows or Linux does (adopting new things faster, custom processors and co-processors and SOCs, whole new languages, new filesystems, etc), so risking more problems.
(3) Apple news sell (few would care for "Asus botched the production run of one of its 200 models"), so they magnify the issues that 1000 or 10,000 people see as if they concern 100,000,000+ users (or half a billion in the case of iOS).
(4) Hackers and tinkerers being angry that they're not pandered by Apple, as if they ever were the target group for Macs, and as if curation and the concept of the walled garden is not central to macOS/iOS (in the positive light: not "I can't get off the garden" but "it's a peaceful garden where I can focus on X things, creeps, crazy people, junkies, etc don't get to screw around -- and yes, this means that to achieve that I can't do any arbitrary thing I might want either").
Around the PPC change, Apple took the grand strategy of backing away from this idea of controlling what their users were able to do with their machines. Now they're moving back to their "we say what our machines are for and if your use case doesn't match then screw you" attitude.
Many of Apple's business decisions of late have been nothing but hostile to the idea of allowing users to do what they want with their devices. As a very long time Mac OS user, this whole idea of a "walled garden" was never central to the Mac, and while Apple have always been a sufferer of NIH syndrome, it seemed in the mid-2000s that they had finally got over this and started playing nice with the rest of the industry. So much for that.
First, this isn't happening to all updates. Second, On a daily basis, Apple stores/support are widely available and with pretty good warranty coverage. Third, the quality of hardware/user experience for the average, non-technical computer user is on a different plane of existence when comparing Apple to non-apple laptops. Screen resolution and the companion software support, battery life, weight, and trackpad are completely unmatched in the non-apple world.
I play games and have used Windows, BSD and Ubuntu as my main drivers at different times over the past 20 years. My Thinkpad is currently on Ubuntu 20.04. My career is IT/Infosec.
I don't even use my laptop most days, but I'm tempted by an M1 air because the UX and value is amazing.
Dell’s XPS line can beat or match Intel MacBook Pros in those regards.
XPS 13 9310 (2020): 1200p (base, touch optional) or 2400p (touch only), 14h11/8h12 video playback, 1.2/1.27 kg, sleeker design [0]
Intel MBP 13 (2020): 1600p (no touch), 10h video playback, 1.4 kg [1]
(Also, OSes are subjective, but macOS has been pretty annoying to me recently.)
[0]: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-13-lapt...
The retina-esque screen is a $400 add-on, touchpad probably isn't as good as apple's, touch gesture support/nav no-idea. Battery life no-idea. For a non-macOS though, it looks pretty good.
In this case, however, my job requires I use the Mac issued to me so y’know, it was in my interest to get it going again while I waited for a replacement.
Exactly. Mac has become windows in this sense. Updates aren’t safe and users must stay a few versions behind.
But in the pre iOSification days a new 10.x version would come out every few years, so the 10.x.1 version would come out a few months later with major bugs ironed out. You waited a few months, and then safely enjoyed 10.x.x updates for another 2-3 years.
With the annual release, your 10.x version comes out every year, the 10.x.1 version a few months later but it’s hardly as well tested, and you’re probably better off waiting for 10.x.2 and then by the time that’s done, Apple is already preparing you for 10.x+1.
My impression is that over the past few years Linux has gotten a bit better at just working out of the box, Mac would be good if you never upgrade the OS (but if you do upgrade, you're rolling the dice on a major disaster) and Windows is pretty much where it was (and still not a great experience for developers). Basically, the 3 platforms seem a lot closer to each other than they used to be.
If the manufacturer can supply a working Linux laptop, that usually means other distros will run without difficulty on it as well.
MacOS is really nice, almost as good as Linux and great for those things like photo shop files or those unfortunate days there is no choice but to use MS office.
The only thing I miss about windows since switching my second machine to MacOS is how angry windows would make me every time I tried to do something on it.
When one of my older Macs became unresponsive due to that Apple network failure problem issue, I spent countless hours running various system cleaner utilities, uninstalling apps, and blindly running obscure terminal commands from Stack Overflow, even though my own initial console log analysis (and instincts) had more-or-less confirmed that it was an issue with trustd network connection timeouts to Apple's own servers.
Fool on me. This coupled with having to get my 2019 Macbook Air keyboard replaced twice (due to sticky keys) has me thinking out loud about moving away from Apple.
Good coverage of the trustd issue: https://tidbits.com/2020/11/13/apple-network-failure-destroy...
No chance I’m rolling my dice with Linux on a laptop. Touchpad support is funky. I run FreeNAS, Linux, and raspberrypi boxes at my house.
I replaced the MBP since the I had to replace the thinnest keyboard in the world, but I had problems with BT, WiFi, crashes, random external monitor glitches, no support for two external monitors via TB 3.0 (look it up, same hardware works under windows!!). Ask my diehard OSX fan coworker that just had to upgrade OSX just to get wifi working at home. I stayed for Windows since my MBP stopped working a week after I got the keyboard replaced and to be honest I really can't bother to move back. Everything just works here.
OSX has left the domain of the power user and has been relegated to into the domain of the consumer user that likes the Apple marketing.
I am monitoring the situation with ARM CPUS closely and that would be a motivation to switch back, but right now it feels my next computer upgrade will be windows based high end laptop. Better OS and better price performance are hard to argue with.
PS: If you're a developer and you're still clinging to OSX, try it - the whole experience is next level (compared to the whole brew ecosystem). Download WSL for windows, get Ubuntu from windows store and use the Windows Terminal to experience native Ubuntu. Hell if you're using VS Code, all you need to do is type "code ." from Ubuntu to open VS Code in Windows and develop in native Linux.
RAM usage due to the Linux VMs might be the issue in your case, I have loads of it.
Win10’s last 2 years of “builds” are very good. It still rots like regular Windows, but I got 3.5 years of heavy use before reinstalling it. Main apps are Unity, Visual Studio 2017, and some hardware design stuff (SOLIDWORKS, KiCad, SEGGER). It feels so liberating to have all my niche apps on the PC without having to virtualize.
User experience on Windows is a little jankier, but the utility of the niche apps makes up for it. I miss AirDrop. If I were to advise Microsoft on one thing: fix the Control Panel situation in Win10. It’s like layers of bad makeup.
Windows also restores much worse than macOS. I miss Time Machine. I purchased a tool called Macrium Reflect which gets me close enough, and actually can restore a bootable system.
I truly want what you say to match my personal experience... but sadly not. Mac has just been superior in every way.
And now with the move to Arm and seeing the benchmarks starting to come out, it seems yet another huge reason to stick with Apple.
Typically with an Apple device, except for the butterfly keyboards, you could be reasonably sure that all the interaction points were at least mostly decent - display, inputs, speakers microphone, charger, system noise (fan and electrical). You could also be sure that the inbuilt feature set such as WiFi, Bluetooth, Thunderbolt, USB (USB3 was a clusterf... on PCs in the early days), even charging would work reasonably reliably.
The other nice thing about Apple's laptops for a long time has been longevity of batteries - Apple were the first manufacturer to move to 500 cycle batteries with the 2008 Unibodies, and then 1000 cycle batteries later on. Additionally, they have pretty good charging algorithms to preserve battery life over the long term - not something that is the case with many other brands.
However, I think Apple have regressed on some of these fronts since 2015 (maybe they'll redeem themselves with the M1). The touchbar and T2 have been notorious for strange issues. The USB-C only setup has been both obnoxious for anyone who ever needs to use a Type A device, and notorious for strange issues such as heat generation when charging from the "wrong" side - a clear step backwards from MagSafe. The quality of their machines has suffered with the butterfly keyboard, flexgate, less robust internals (see Louis Rossmann for more details!), and anaemic cooling (one of the most impressive things about the original retina MBP was the improvement in the cooling system for sustained performance vs the thicker unibody). MacOS itself also declined in quality somewhat obviously since somewhere around Snow Leopard, with mere flashes of brilliance inbetween since then.
At the same time, Windows 10 has improved dramatically and is now solidly Microsoft's best OS since Windows 7, beating even that OS out in many ways. And, while I don't think the PC laptops have caught up, many of them are now within firing range of Apple devices - certainly close enough that in many cases, for the few that actually get all the touchpoints right, they offer an experience that isn't too far away from the best Mac experience I've had.
I've been running big sur on a 2020 iMac during the public beta. I had 4 issues that I raised that were solved:
* SMB wasn't loaded at login, so an SMB volume mapping failed
* Inbuilt VPNs (L2TP over IPSec) didn't work until the last but one before the public release, but wireguard worked
* Minor bug loading a JPG as the avatar for a Contact through Maps for my Home card. I got requests for additional info on this one.
In terms of apps and utilities:
* Bartender needed to be redone and has been
* Karabiner needed changes to replace a kext
* Utilities that add keyboard shortcuts etc needed some permission finangling
* Things like OneDrive and Google Backup and Sync needed disk permissions
* iTerm2 needed to be given full disk access
So all in all, Big Sur as an upgrade over Catalina, was pretty smooth. That was from a move from a laptop running Catalina as a Mojave upgrade via Migration Assistant.
YMMV.