> which makes it difficult to learn how to hack

This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It’s true that you can’t rebuild the kernel or os services, or modify the system very much at all so if that is the kind of hacking you want to learn, then you shouldn’t use a Mac.

However, if by ‘learn to hack’ you mean ‘learn to code applications and services’, then Macs are great. You can learn both Apple’s proprietary stuff and all of the significant open source tooling and languages.