Since at the very least the release of Dell XPS 13 we can have “just-works” machines that run Linux.
Uh. No. I love Linux, use it every day, but you need to know what you’re doing.
I’ve worked with devs who refused to run docker on their machines because they said they battery got destroyed
How much power a docker container uses depends on the container. Obviously if the container pegs all eight CPU cores at 100% utilisation then yeah - battery life is going to suck. But with commonplace server side software running in the container I’m able to keep docker running all the time on my Mac and get about 18 hours on battery… and that’s with a battery quite a bit smaller (therefore lighter) than the battery in the XPS-13.
Unless you work with iOS development there is no real, practical advantage
I have done iOS development in the past, but these days all of the software I write is for Linux. I think a Mac is the best way to develop Linux software - the Mac window manager is so much better than Gnome or KDE and it has really nice integration with other hardware (for example I’m typing this on a keyboard connected to my desktop Mac, but have the browser window open on a screen connected to my laptop Mac… you can do that on Linux, but it’s just two clicks to enable it on a Mac and requires installing/configuring/troubleshooting third party software on Linux)
I have Linux installed on my Mac - and it works perfectly… if it was better I would be using it.