Yeah, I don’t know where their hate is coming from. I use cifs-utils to mount smb volumes on linux DAILY and it works perfectly on every popular distro. Maybe they were being sarcastic? Trolling? Meh, I’m shrugging it off…

As someone running Debian on an old MacBook Pro from 2012, MacBooks are not Linux first. You can run it on all but the newest M-series, but be warned you’re likely to encounter some broadcom driver issues with the wifi/bluetooth. They can be fixed, then they may break again with some random kernel update. It’s not a fire and forget solution.

Have you looked at Framework yet? Linux friendly, designed to be upgradeable and user-repairable. Definitely plan to buy a Framework for my next laptop (ideally once ram/storage prices stabilize)

It’s been happening on the latest macOS as well. I just quit and relaunch the app to fix it; but yeah, it’s annoying.

fairphones can also run LineageOS if you want to go a step further and remove gapps. for the really bold, you can run postmarketOS on fairphone 4 or 5 to remove android entirely. there are sacrifices in android functionality, but with serious gains by way of Linux desktop to counter those.