[sph]

macOS is a great system to watch videos, collect photos, take notes and do casual and very common multimedia tasks. It is excellent and unrivalled at that. But for engineering and power users it becomes more restrictive the more your mastery and requirements increase.

Linux is pretty crap at multimedia. But for computing, tinkering and pushing your hardware to its full capacity it is absolutely the best.

Windows is average, and that's not to disparage it, au contraire. It's decent at multimedia, not as much as macOS and decent at tinkering, but not as much as Linux.

[awilfox]

"Casual" is relative: digiKam choked on my 55K photo library where Lightroom Classic works fine. Adobe XD's only libre competitor that I knew of was Pencil, which died three years ago after Mozilla killed off XUL and they tried to convert to Node/Electron. And don't even get me started on the libre alternatives to InDesign. (Three years and counting since the last stable Scribus, despite nine beta releases.) I wanted so badly to do production work on Linux. I really, really did.

Engineering… depends on your definition. My preferred dev environments, CLion and Qt Creator, work fine on Mac as well. I'll agree that CAD has suffered since Autodesk went insane and FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, and the like work much better on Linux. On the science end, I find OsiriX Lite to be a much better experience than Kradview, and that's assuming you build all the KDE 4 libraries to even make Kradview work at all.