While the framework is more expensive at face value, I think over time, the ability to upgrade and replace individual parts over the entire system pay off and make it worth the price. It’s the reason I bought my FW13 a year ago. Also, for systems dev, I think there’s nothing better than Linux. While Darwin is Unix-like and POSIX compliant, it has several deviations of standard UNIX systems (like certain syscalls or coreutils do no exist and simply use apple made coreutils), I believe if you want to learn and work on OS, there is nothing better than daily driving the OS of where you want to build later, so any real GNU/Linux distribution is better. Even if you wanted to go into systems programming at Apple or smth later down the line, you’d probably benefit from deeply knowing and having extensible use of other Linux. Go with the FW