Good for you, OP. Glad to hear it's working out, too.
I've been thinking about the same. Last year I bought an M4 Pro MacBook Pro to replace an "obsolesced" 2015 13" Intel i5 MBP, and the experience has been a demonstration of the whole "wherever you go, there you are" parable--by which I mean, nice as the M4 Pro MPB is, the leap in raw "results" or "productivity" or quality of my "output" over what I was kicking out of the 2015 MPB isn't huge.
I don't write that as a proud, defiant luddite--I'm as surprised as anyone by it. I bought the M4 Pro MPB because it offered advancements that sounded significantly and practically useful to me. I'm an avid photographer and digital artist, so the "XDR" screen and its reference calibration modes sounded terrific. Moreover, Apple's marketing around the unified architecture and the overall efficiency of "M" silicon reads like a declaration of substantial, practical quality-of-life improvement in every app I touch, from Capture One to Photoshop to Clip Studio Paint to Ableton Live to Visual Studio Code. (And on my 2015 MPB, I was a also notch or two back from the latest development on most of these apps--so I anticipated picking up a big boost boost just in advancing to latest-and-greatest software.) And of course, I'm open to the latest trends in generative AI, custom vibe-coded software, and agentic workflows; having powerful and efficient compute at my fingertips seemed like an important step into a future I'm curious about.
Welp.
A year into my shiny Apple Silicon future, I keep bumping against an illuminating truth: my creative interests and ideas hadn't really come close to crashing the limits of what my 10-year-old Intel MPB had on offer. The M4 Pro MPB's promised quality-of-life improvements weren't lies--they exist--but they prove more subtle than expected in day-to-day work and they certainly aren't non-negotiables for the results I'm delivering. One case in point: the 2015 MBP's screen turns out to have been already more capable than my photographic screen and print work ever needed it to be, and it was well-calibrated from the factory; so the M4 MPB's "XDR" screen and its "reference" capabilities don't ultimately don't help me (if anything, they add a complication: the "XDR" capability "blooms" even in SDR highlights and gets in the way of print preparation--so I'm now constantly dancing among native, DCI-P3, and sRGB reference modes). The M4 pro silicon itself is obviously much, *much* faster than 2015's mid-grade Intel Core i5--I feel the legit "snap" everywhere--but a glance at the MacOS activity monitor shows an appalling portion of that processing power and memory diverted to "Liquid Glass" UI fluff-animation and surveillance telemetry, both for third-party apps (Geezus H Christ, Adobe creative cloud!) and the full "onslaught" of iCloud tie-ins Apple now foists over MacOS.
Stepping back, I just shake my head at how base and thirsty the whole tech-computing slice of the economic pie has become, at how much energy and talent and design divert into the scrambling, suctioning, and selling of my attentions. For me the grand summary of all this might be in my M4 MBP hardware's ridiculous resistance to being turned off! Just like an iPhone. If you power it down (by software menu only--the real-estate formerly occupied by a hardware power button is now a "lock" button), literally ANY interaction with the hardware pops it back to life. Open the lid when it's off? It's on! Touch any key or the trackpad while it's off and open? Hello Meg! I'm on again! Turn it off and plug it in? BOOM! We're back! I'm on, I'm here again! Gimme gimme gimme your attentions, Meg!!! The 2015 MPB seems so deeply quaint by comparison--if you turned it off it stayed off until you hit the power button, ONLY the power button, again.
That 2015 Macbook Pro still works superbly, by the way. I had the battery replaced a few years back; it looks new. But Apple halts it at MacOS 12 Monterey. What to do with it in 2026? I've always been curious about open source, so I figured what the hell, why not try a Linux distro on it and just see what's what. I did an hour's worth of reading on popular options and picked System76's Pop_OS riff on Ubuntu / Debian.
TL;DR: reader, the 2015 MPB is BACK, relevant, and a monumental living indictment of contemporary big-tech going nowhere fast.
Linux installation took 20 minutes, including the download. Everything worked perfectly out of the box, no tweaks / no terminal dives / no notes. Performance is SNAPPY--we're talking about a middling Broadwell Core i5, integrated graphics, and 8GB ram, here--which tells you exactly how much raw nonsense weight MacOS is hauling around these days.
And the apps? I can't believe how capable and refined they are--remember, in many cases we're talking about hobby software engineered by a handful of generous people in their free time--and it's oh-so-close to what you get from all-the-talent-money-can-buy at Apple and Adobe. What impresses me most, I think, is that the apps aren't at all "knock-offs" of "brand-name" stuff--many have their own original and interesting perspectives. Darktable reinvents the RAW photo-processing workflow around an entirely different perceptual philosophy. Krita has a more advanced and expressive brush engine than Photoshop.
All the frontier AI capability is right there, too, if you want it. You can spool up VS Code and let your vibing agents rip; the access is no different than if you're doing it on the latest apple silicon machine.
Is it enough to get me to flip the platform switch? Maybe? I'll keep experimenting and see where curiosity takes me. I like
@robertosh 's suggestion above that the "switch" doesn't have to be "one-off" break, but rather can be a kind of slow slide from one platform to the other as experience accumulates and new workflows develop. But even in these early days of experimenting, I can't deny an overwhelming feeling I'll summarize this way: the more I use MacOS and Linux side-by-side, the more I feel like MacOS is built for Apple's enrichment, while Linux is built for mine.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
