I went from Linux to a Mac for work years ago. Install home brew on day one and the experience overall will be much better.

The terminal on the Mac is surprisingly good. I felt right at home with it very quickly. Xcode comes with cli tooling to build software without a lot of messing with it and finding library dlls (looking at you, windows)

The window placement philosophy takes some getting used to (see yabai for a viable tiling window solution though) and the key modifiers will frustrate you (though I eventually ended up liking cmd a lot).

Overall though I feel like Mac gets a lot of hate where it’s not deserved. I still hate their business model, and my personal laptop is Linux for that reason, but the product itself is fine.

The best way to describe the Mac upcharges for memory is “just save more and deal with it”. The company is ruthless, we all know it.

At the very least, this current generation of Macs are top of their class in performance, even beating out some desktop configurations (it’s not like it was 6-10 years ago). Remember, windows laptops under 1000$ are far less performant and efficient than the MacBook Air.

At the very least, macOS has zero ads. I’ve never once been nagged about iCloud/Apple intelligence/upgrading my machine. It’s well worth it in my opinion to have a machine that has kept this implicit promise to me for almost 2 decades now.

I’m a Mac/Linux person. I enjoy it — you can keep almost all of the Unix/Posix CLI stuff that you like in both places, and Mac OS is IMO less enshittified than Windows in general.

What is the app?

Macs are good machines. The company that makes them is unabashedly cutthroat, Machiavellian, and heartless, unfortunately.

A lot of devs I know use Macs, but they get their company/clients to pay for them, so I don't know if that's much of an endorsement.

You can easily feel right at home on a Mac with console, homebrew, tiling WM etc. You can find scripts for plenty of things on GitHub.

Before I switched to framework 13, my old MacBook looked and felt like old gnome (with the two taskbars) mixed with i3.

The hardware is good, specially those M* chips, one downside is that with certain languages the keyboard shortcuts are not the same, specially for coding, characters like {[|}] are sometimes annoying to find compared to Linux/Windows keyboard.

An Operating System is a tool. Would you be annoyed because you had to use a hex key on a bolt with a hex socket, when what you really like using is a robertson drive? If the work you are doing is dependent on a particular OS choice, then use that OS and get over yourself.

That said, if this is for work and you want to avoid the crapware in Windows 11, talk with your IT team. By default, Recall is removed on commercially managed devices. I'm not 100% sure, and can't be arsed to look it up at the moment, but this likely refers to devices managed via Intune. Assuming your IT team isn't stuck in the 90's, they are probably doing this already. Telemetry can also be mostly disabled via Group Policy, and many IT organizations will already be doing this. Or, as you have arrived at, use a Mac and disable the telemetry.

On the other side of that coin, if you expect privacy on a work owned device, I have bad news for you. More and more organizations are using Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) products on all endpoint devices. Yes, this includes Mac and Linux devices. So, your organization is watching you browse porn on your work device. If you are doing something and you don't want someone watching over your shoulder, don't use a work device. Keep your work device for work and your personal device for everything else.

What’s the application and can you run it in a windows virtual machine?

Get a cheap desktop and run Windows on it. Remote Desktop into that machine to run your app.

You can use TwinGate or Tailscale to access your desktop from anywhere.

The M-series MacBook Pros are very good machines, even though they cost a lot of money. The performance/price ratio was a lot worse for the Intel-macs, but that has shifted. I would probably get one of those if I were you - you're likely not going to have to switch computers as often that way and have a more competent machine for a longer time that way.

(Not entirely legal) get ahold of a Windows Enterprise key (not Pro or Home). No ads and you can turn off all the features completely like recall and telemetry. The only reason Windows is around so much is they try their best not to piss off enterprise customers by making everything configurable. Pro and Home users end up being the ones getting the short end.

• Windows vm within linux
• Wine/bottles

I was/am in a similar boat. Linux is my preferred OS, hate Windows, but I needed an OS that has good support for professional reasons.

My problem is that I hate the MacOS UX.

• The global menu is tiresome and inconsisently layed out between apps.
• Interacting with windows is annoying because you need to first click to focus them before you can interact with them.
• The dock is also super confusing for little reason. Even when you close all windows of an app, the app remains open on the dock until you manually quit it.
• Mouse support is also terrible. MacOS is clearly only designed for touch surfaces. Scrolling with a mouse has an acceleration curve. It takes multiple scrolls to count as a complete scroll in games like Minecraft (there's option to fix this in Minecraft). There's an app called Mos that fixes this, but this also breaks the fix in Minecraft. But at least the app lets you specify overrides for each app to re-fix the issue.
• Almost none of the preinstalled apps can be removed or even hidden

Ask work for a windows VM image/key. Alternatively have you tried running the windows application in wine/proton?

I’m assuming you already tried to get the work application to run on Linux via Wine or Proton? I know Valve has been putting a lot of R&D effort into Proton for their Steam Deck, trying to improve compatibility.

If you’ve got time to wait, put a flag on slick deals dot com for Mac airs and if you see specs you like grab it. I got an m2 24gb 2tb for 1500$US. If it’s a refurb make sure it’s got AppleCare