Linux support. MacOS is a desktop first gui based operating system. Linux on the other hand is a server first cli/terminal based operating system. Everything server related is designed to on linux first and foremost and may or may not incidentally also run on MacOS.
macOS is explicitly designed to not be a server, and the consumer hardware it runs on is also designed that way. Apple even discontinued the Server tools that you could buy on the App Store that used to be called Mac OS X Server.
If you want to run Linux server apps, you should run Linux. Because Apple hardware and macOS isn't giving you any advantages over a generic piece of hardware running a Linux distribution. The hardware costs more and is less upgradable than off-the-shelf hardware.
Servers should not run desktop environments because they are a waste of resources and widen the attack surface due to having more components installed and running.
And even if you want a desktop environment for your Linux server, Linux most certainly has a wide selection of mature stable desktop environments.
If you need to do development work or just achieve the goal of running Linux applications on a Mac, that can be easily done via virtual machines, containers, etc.
If they work on a BSD they should work okay on macOS. (Not because macOS is exactly like FreeBSD, just that it means the project has been tested cross-platform.)
This isn't the market for MacMinis though. Why are people on this forum so bad at understanding market segmentation? Apple made an incredible desktop machine that happens to work pretty damn well as a server if you poke around.
This machine is for people at home to for editing video. It's great in the field for production where it goes from pelican case to hotel desk to folding table to pelican case to cargo hold to storage.
Have you ever thought that maybe people understand "market segmentation", but at the same time, they'd like to know how broad a range of computing options one would have on these general purpose computers, with price tags in the many-hundreds to thousands range?
Sure, but to complain that a Mac, which, come on, at this point is a known quantity for 20 years, doesn't run Linux is just looking to complain. If you want more options there's endless x86 choices, and if you want ARM then demand better from other manufacturers as well. Apple showed its possible, why doesn't Dell come out with something comparable? I'm not a fanboy, I run systems of all stripes, but Macs aren't designed to be servers (even though they operate perfectly well as one) and people need to stop complaining that they aren't.
In the past, Apple sold at least four generations of the Mac mini that included models literally branded as server models. Continued interest in using more recent models as servers is quite reasonable.
I run full multiple Ubuntu desktop VMs on Parallels on a M1 MacBook Air. You can use Docker for server installs, sure, but QEMU also works great on Macs and with Rosetta you can even get pretty damn close to native x86 execution speeds.
they run through virtualization which is clunky to interface with across boundaries and introduces overhead. I also don't think it has any hardware acceleration for things that would benefit from using the gpu.