Although I may be misremembering or may have been misled by an ambiguous message. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222 lists it as being a security update but "This update has no published CVE entries." (emphasis mine) implying some nasty but embargoed security issue.
Today you have to run Linux to control your computer yourself.
On M1: Still in progress. Linux boots but the kinks have to be worked out. Not production quality yet.
Oh, cool! I have one of the last Macbook pros with an Intel chip, so it sounds like I'm probably in the "secure boot" category.
Does the trackpad work well?
To control your operating system. Your hardware will still have shit like IME and whatnot.
In capitalist America you freely choose to let a small number of corporations sell you computers which control you.
There's a big difference! (In theory, at least.)
I think it is likely that 11.5.2 fixes a large vulnerability and they will only disclose more information once most people have updated to 11.5.2. And/or they are still preparing updates for Mojave/Catalina.
I am the on the more technical side, making me the help desk for friends and family. For the vast majority of people, the safest and easiest thing to hand them is a chromebook. If they want more capability or better hardware, then they will step up into OS X or windows.
They don’t care about the UX until they have to care about the UX because it’s not working the way it was intended. Then they want to fix it back to the way it was (unhide icons or the task bar). They don’t grasp how computers should work, and while I’ve tried explaining, it just doesn’t take. So they remember how to get to email by clicking icons.
99% of people for casual use would just be confused if you dropped them into a command line. There’s a reason things weren’t as popular before we made advances like we have today.
So - for the vast majority of users - an upgrade is an annoyance and downtime that is there during the 10-30 minutes a day they may need the machine (not the 10-30 minutes they are taking a break from the machine). They don’t understand, and don’t care about, the security updates.
Apple and Microsoft and Samsung and Google have no obligation to you, an edge customer, to create a lot more opportunities to screw things up for the vast majority of users who would just get confused. They have no obligation to enable users to perform illegal activity on their hardware. And they can put whatever they want to in the user agreement for their hardware and software. Your option as a consumer is to not buy it. You can complain about it, but that ship has sailed, as the vast majority of users don’t even understand the complaint and the potential implication.
But no. If you want a UX that’s fully configurable and secure and has privacy protections in place and places emphasis on security over convenience, a private, cloud focused, company like Google or Microsoft or Apple is not the right tree to be barking up.
I would say this though - the machine you run it on matters. The hardware matters. Some hardware runs great, other hardware will give you problems. This is due to driver support either being good or bad, not Linux itself, but the distinction is meaningless for the user.
Use a thinkpad, with Pop OS, to get you started. It will just work.