[nmstoker]

All seems sensible stuff, the "it just works" can't be overstated.

But the Apple Maps point felt like a stretch - Google Maps is available everywhere. I don't see much to suggest you'd need it as an app, it works great in the browser with hardware accelerated graphics, which it has had for 10+ years.

[awilfox]

I've never had hardware accelerated graphics work correctly, and I don't want to have to use the Google ecosystem – that's an article for another day, probably.

When I was "all-in" on the libre ecosystem, I used a ThinkPad for laptop and Talos for desktop. The ThinkPad had just the Intel iGPU that didn't work right in Firefox, and the Talos had blue lines through everything in OSM because "lol x86 monoculture" meant Firefox's Layers didn't work right on Power.

I had graphics acceleration working in raw Mesa, so if there was a native app, it would have Just Worked – probably on both systems.

[sph]

When did you last use Linux? Because hardware acceleration has been working and default in Firefox for a while, except on NVIDIA, and video acceleration (not required for Google Maps) needed manual tweaking the Firefox config but has been available as well for a while.

The Linux desktop moves at incredible pace. The experience I had 2 years ago was more crude than my desktop in 2022.

[awilfox]

February 2021 as a daily-driver; I still have a VM to this day.