[deafpolygon]

> someone new to professional programming, or someone that's looking to learn, also needs to buy a new laptop (for a totally unrelated reason), and asks you for a recommendation based on their need to use the laptop for programming/development.

Short answer: Whatever platform you're already comfortable with.

Longer answer: It depends on the software you wish to develop. Most of the time, it hardly matters unless you're targeting a specific platform that have hardware restrictions. I can develop on Linux/macOS/Windows all equally terribly (I'm not a great developer) - I haven't really found the OS to be the bottleneck.

Web development? Any platform you're comfortable with. Most tools are cross-platform, and docker/containerization is a solved problem.

Mac/iOS software? Apple hardware is ideal for this (not because of the hardware, but that's the only place you get _supported_ by Apple on).

dotnet? Anywhere. But _better_ on Windows these days.

Android? Anywhere. Just bring plenty of RAM.