> serious question: what is the practical difference between MacOS and Linux?

For a daily driver? Poor UI experience on MacOS. On Linux usually one of Mate, Plasma, WindowMaker, XFCE or Gnome will have the Window behaviour (snapping, tiling, maximising, switching) I want.

All of the Linux options have file-selection dialogs that don't suck. All of the Linux distros I have used for a daily driver have better software than brew.

MacOS kernel certainly has some nice surprises (compressed memory is impressive), it doesn't ever crash and it sleeps and wakes correctly.

OTOH, all the non-kernel software is, frankly, crap. They're unintuitive, hard to use and limited in variety.