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Doesn’t it cost 99/year to have a special apple account that lets you develop for iOS?

Only to put things on the App Store.

We also had prc-tools, a free GCC based toolchain. I used it to build a tweaked version of pssh and some other stuff. It was a lot more straightforward than modern Android or iOS development.

https://prc-tools.sourceforge.net/

XCode is free? Where can I download it for my Linux PC?

XCode is not free, just like macOS is not free; you just pay for them when you (over)pay for your mac hardware.

Then Linux isn’t free either, since you have to buy hardware to run it on.

Where do I download Linux binaries on Mac?

Docker