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TL;dr version)
Preface: this post is drenched in sarcasm, because it's directed at those who have it coming. And who are these people? --Answer: anyone and everyone who's ever claimed that any version of Linux is "ready" to replace the MacOS on a Mac (or indeed any OEM OS on any PC). Especially if it came out of the mouth of a distro developer themselves.
A brief, itemized list of aggravated nonsense (this is from a Mac POV, but applies just as easily to Windows machines with a few word-substitutions):
1) The installers.
Stupid ISOs from the CD-rom era that require third-party app flashing to a USB boot device (seeing as most machines don't have an optical-drive anymore). What is it with this garbage? Have any of you paid any attention to MacOS installers or the Disk Utility at all over the last quarter-century? Hey, here's a novel idea: write a launch-file that users can just run! And it'll create a partition, and install into that right on the spot! (Or automatically go through the process of creating a temporary EFI booter that'll do so upon restart, if reasons (see next three below.) --Wouldn't it just be utterly fantastic if we had something like that? Why yes, it would be just lovely. Why aren't you making them that way? Why isn't it literally the first thing that you do? It's as if you're designing a new engine with no thought given as to how your user will manage to put it in their car.
2) SIPiddy-doodah, SIPiddy-day
You must know that most older Macs (of the sort that people are contemplating putting your distro on) have this little "feature" called System Integrity Protection, right? (The more recent ones have Secure Boot, which does the same thing.) --Does your chimp-written installer know how to account for it, or will it breezily plod along until it freezes or crashes without explanation? (Looking at you, Elementary OS, you bloody great heaping waste of time that I'll never get back.) You probably also don't know that Macs have this feature called "zapping PRAM", and if you do it twice in a row, amongst myriad other default-resetting, SIP is re-enabled, and if the particular vintage of machine does not have the Command-R phone-the-Apple-mothership procedure implemented, it's going to be pretty damned difficult to disable SIP again without a Recovery Partition whose Terminal app has the permissions to successfully "csrutil disable".
3) You don't get partitions, those are for closers
The Mac Disk Utility easily creates drive partitions, into which the MacOS can be installed. The installer will even list the partitions for you. It's been, what, fifteen-twenty years it could do that? Longer even? --Why doesn't your distro's installer either create or ask of partitions, let alone install into them? ...because you don't care enough, that's why. You're perfectly comfortable with "Evil Big Tech" squatting over virtually all consumer hardware instead of takin' the fight to the man.
3) Your AWOL Bootloader
Maybe 4% of Mac owners (who have a leg up on the 3% of Windows users aware of BIOS boot keys) know that if they hold down the Option key at startup, they're given a choice of bootable volumes (one of which could be your crappy-on-its-face Linux distro's ugly generic EFI load icon, because you didn't care enough to paint the thing). It's as if you're advertising a new car in the 2020s that requires its users to set the choke and check the floatbowl like a 1940s tractor. Unless it's the only vehicle in the barn
because it ate the other, in which case it'll start right up. --Would it absolutely kill you not to be so lame?
4) Pull your head out of your Broadcom
There's only millions of used Macs out there made between whenever and whenever that have Broadcom network adapters. Do you think their users give a damn if the drivers are proprietary? --What they
will give a damn about is your Linux distro being absolutely useless without working wifi (and most Mac laptops and many PCs haven't had optical-drives or Ethernet ports for a decade, so be prepared for byzantine bluetooth phone-tethering tricks attempting to smuggle drivers onto them). WiFi should have a visible icon on a taskbar by default, whether connected or not. There must be a dozen distros out there whose devs obviously spent countless hours lovingly crafting superb desktop environments mimicking the look-and-feel of the MacOS (staring at you, my lovely Pop! OS, so dolled-up but dysfunctional out-of-box) ...which are nevertheless useless on a Mac because they spent zero hours
rounding up the bloody drivers.
5) Could I please put my favorite crap on the desktop?
Do you know what the heart & soul of a GUI operating-system is? The ability to plaster application and document icons and alias shortcuts all over our desktops and make snow-angels in them to our heart's content. And click them over and over in a dopamine rush. (The look & feel of MacOS Lion is the goal here.) --If your sterile GUI Linux distro doesn't even have a desktop environment and thinks it's just going to run as a pile of tiled windows, please slouch away, as there may be children present. (Suffice also to say that your distro ought find and auto-mount (
as icons) attached storage devices regardless of format type (HFS+, APFS, NTFS, ExFAT, etc) so the user can access his files.
6) Effing Firefox as default
You obviously haven't received the memo detailing that Mozilla isn't a nice company anymore, and
heading downhill fast into full enshattification. (Yeah, it's still better than Safari, but that's damning-with-faint-praise.) If they're not as bad as Microsoft or Apple yet, it's only because they're not as big yet. At least consider Waterfox (for up-to-current Firefox forks) or Basilisk or Chromium-legacy (up-to-current chrome fork) or something else without an S&P500 ticker-symbol. --And would it kill your lazy asses to equip your default browser with uBlock Origin, FB Purity, and Adblocker Ultimate already up and running? I mean, if you really intend to stick it to the man by
throwing a sledge in his face, show me that you mean it.
7) Forking the MacOS
Just imagine how popular your distro would *instantly* become for millions of suffering Mac users
if it actually ran MacOS apps as well as Linux apps? And I mean
all of them, from the 9" B&W era up to silicon, by removing all the restrictions Apple wrote into the code (or maliciously removed from the code qua artificial-obsolescence). --The one thing every Mac user would love is to never again have to see the slashed-circle "No!" icon over their favorite app after Apple scared them into updating the OS. (Reduce your dev team's work-load by removing all of Apple's telemetry-bloat, starting with Spotlight Indexing and MRT, and proceeding from there.)
And then envision your distro running on any platform, not just Mac, and that it also ran Windows apps too. (This is how you stick it to the man at both Apple and Microsoft.)
And make your logo six-colors, to really rub it in how much better you're going to be than these soulless data-harvesting, wallet-hoovering abominations.
