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.
Very much agree. The distro maze has made Linux a very schizophrenic OS akin to multiple personality disorder, coupled by too much free software riddled with bugs that go unpatched and security vulnerabilities that often go ignored. If you are trying to break into Linux as a user, get ready to get ignored or told, arrogantly, by the community to Read the f’ing manual (which usually doesn’t exist in any meaningful detail because coders wanna code, not write docs), and even if you did that, fix or patch whatever feature into the project yourself. There are exceptions,
of course, but they’re rare. Outside purpose built appliances or devops, Linux just ain’t worth the trouble.