Factor in an energy cost savings as part of the TCO. A M4 Mini will save considerable energy over any comparable machine.

“Right. You’re in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People’s Front.”

OK first, way to telegraph your crusty age: it hasn’t been OSX for YEARS. macOS 10 was a long running release but we are on macOS 15 now, soon to be 16, though the name convention is switching to years instead of sequential version. If you have a machine still running OSX, yes by all means put ZorinOS or LMDE on it.

Second, I translated your comment as “I don’t know how to use it so it sux”.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Homebrew, plus some VMs, and you get the best of all platforms in one computer.

This used to be particularly awesome when macOS was intel based, as now running an intel based machine image on apple’s ARM architecture is awkward by comparison, but hopefully that will resolve somewhat soon.