I jumped from DOS in the mid 90s to Solaris to Linux in about 2001. BEen on it since. I got my first personal laptop in 2004 or so (IBM thinkpad T42). Then went through 2 X series laptops and am currently on an X1 carbon.

I consulted for a company for 2.5 years where I used a mac.

Maybe it's just me but I found the mac ecosystem very crummy. On Debian, when I wanted postgres, I did an apt-get and got it sort of like Trinity in the matrix asking for helicopter pilot skills. With the mac, I installed it using brew. That didn't work so there was an app for it and that had its own quirks. I put it down to my lack of familiarity with the system. I would have invested time to get familiar with it but, and this is my second point, Linux was did "just work" for 95% of what I wanted. All the annoying things about sound drivers, wifi cards, usb, fonts, video etc. from the 90s were not problems anymore. There were a few things that I needed to get running but they weren't deal killers. Definitely not as rough as what I had with postgres on the mac.

Hardware wise, I agree with the OP, I don't think think anything comes close to Apple's offering at that price point. The reason I stay away from it is because of the software. I much prefer Linux. There are also tangential points like working on the exact OS and machine where I'm going to actually deploy/debug production apps on is useful. This is alleviated to some extent by using a Linux VM on a mac if that's what you do.