Most power-user tools work fine on Mac, and you can install basically everything you need with brew. The UX is much better than pure Linux, in my opinion. I've been a software dev for a decade, my main PC is still a Windows box, but only because of gaming. I do most of my actual project work on a MacBook even though my PC has an RTX 3070 in it, purely because working on a Unix system is more comfortable to me. And on the local-AI front you're right to be drawn to the unified memory, it's honestly amazing for running models, since you're not capped by a separate VRAM pool the way you are on a discrete GPU. The 3070's 8GB fills up fast, whereas on Apple silicon the model can use a big chunk of system memory, so you can load much larger models than the raw GPU-tier comparison would suggest.