They're going from Microsoft to... Linux. From bad to worse. Just use macOS and get on with your life.
To me, Windows has been the best experience with gaming (yes, including the stupid bullshit anti-cheat software that shouldn’t exist in the way it does, the devs making it truly only support Windows), the desktop experience has been tolerable, especially with PowerToys and FancyZones in particular and that one registry change to restore classic context menu. Still feels like fighting against the OS but passable.
Linux has been the best experience for regular computing and software development, especially since a lot of the software I deploy runs in Docker containers, so getting more or less the same user land is nicer than subtle Windows incompatibilities (e.g. bind mount permissions, line endings, crap like that). Also package managers are just nice and some desktops out there are really good for daily driving (personally I like Cinnamon, but KDE and XFCE and others all have their place).
Apple stuff has been the best in regards to the hardware integration and coherence (e.g. the experience of using a MacBook or iPhone and everything working without any driver issues on other OSes), having a pretty polished desktop experience, but also super weird things such as no proper AA on generic external monitors (e.g. 1080p), limited hardware ports, oddly locked down ecosystem and odd support choices (e.g. the dance you gotta do to install development apps, the PWA situation) and just weird choices in regards to keyboard layout and how the mouse feels compared to both of the other OSes. Okay development, not great gaming situation, worse than Linux at this point.
I like my iPhone (reduced Liquid Glass transparency) and MacBook Air (great for notes or travel), but daily drive either Windows or Linux. Tried FreeBSD for one of my servers too but hardware support wasn’t wide enough, not sure what the desktop situation there is like.
Hardware support is plenty wide enough. Just buy the hardware that supports FreeBSD and that's most of it. Same with the desktop and I've run servers and desktops for 25 years using easily found, common, name brand hardware that runs FreeBSD.
It’s like when you want Docker on MacOS. Helpful people will say that you should just use colima. Yeah it works perfectly well… until you want to open udp ports (this was the case half a year ago). All 3 OSes are like that, just the flavor is different.
If you know how to find “reject all” on all cookie banners, Windows will be easier for you.
If you know networking and pf, then MacOS will be easier for you.
If you know how to debug driver bugs, Linux will be easier for you (and fun as hell imho)
Anyway, if you don’t want to do much more than internet browsing/video playing/basic gaming/basic coding, it simply doesn’t matter. // I would still say that the default network/firewall settings for MacOS is sketchy as hell however
I've been unable to login after filling my disk before, I wouldn't call the system bricked because I was able to fix it by mounting the disk on another computer and freeing up space, but I wouldn't quibble over the term either.
I remember it had a particular fondness for deleting old kernel versions, failing to install the new kernel, and thus bricking the system on boot. Alternatively, uninstalling the entire WM because one package had a conflict.
At any rate, sorry you had such a frustrating experience.