It is possible to over-think things.
Early UNIX was tailored to a proprietary hardware platform offered by each vendor. The hardware was tightly controlled. The software was highly optimized to the proprietary hardware. The tight control of hardware/software generated a high performance system with few bugs.
Linux tries to be Windows and UNIX. The hardware platform is massively broad and not controlled. The OS source is open source. Instead of one hardware/one OS, you have a plethora of hardware configs and a plethora of tailored configurations (distros) seeking to please everyone. Sometimes you are blessed with both a good hardware and good distro pairing, but it's a crap shoot.
Apple is patterned more like early UNIX. They tightly control the hardware platform and create a highly optimized UNIX OS with a pretty UI.
Isn’t this a problem that “docker containers” are supposed to solve?
You can create a virtualizable “container” that gets a task done, and all the funky linux choice and special linux config and extra library installation is localized to the container.
A server farm set up to run containers has computers with their “bare-metal” Linux properly set up to run Docker or whatever virtualization solution is called for. Docker / Kubernetes (container orchestration system ) simply fires up a particular container, that container’s Linux setup oddities are essentially quarantined, it processes data, and then gets shut down.
That’s my understanding, at least.
I met Linus online in the early 1990’s. We ported everything from SCO to Linux. At one point we put Linux on a stack of floppy drives and sent it to some guys to look at that were running their stuff on some commercial version of Unix. Maybe I built one of the first “Distros”, lol.
Linux has been great. We had one Slack server running in a corner for years we never touched. I don’t think it was cycled for 3-4 years and it was running DPT drives arrays under load all the time.
Ping.
I mostly love my Linux Mint 20 distro. I see no reason to upgrade to whatever the current version is. It just works (mostly). The only problem I run into is some of the video and photo editing software I like, doesn’t work in Linux which is really stupid but it is what it is so I have a dual boot machine with Winblows10 on the other drive. A separate drive. I have a 3rd drive that is formatted to be able to be read by Win10 and Linux so that’s where I put files I want to mess with after booting into Winblows.
Other than some kind memory leak that developed when using Firefox which requires me to close FF, this Linux machine can stay running for a month or two between reboots sometimes. It’s that stable.
I hate when I boot into winblows and it wants to update all kinds of stuff or verify this or that. A real time waster. I wish I could just turn all that stuff off permanently.
Mac/Apple is okay. No complaints but I never took a shine to it. Too proprietary. The iPhones are nice and stable too. Then again so is Android on the Samsung phones I’ve had. Great cameras and the OS just works.