It was only 2 years ago that I replaced my late-2010 unibody MacBook. Add an SSD and 16GB of ram; it will make your machine feel somewhat modern. Officially, they support up to 8GB (I think) of ram, though OWC seems to say otherwise. Dosdude1 has utitlities that can get newer versions of MacOS to run on older hardware. I had Catalina running with no issues on my old MacBook. Though, VMs didn’t like it.
I used mine with legacy patcher but I see that my old Mac can’t handle the new instruction set (AVX2) since it doesn’t support it. I still have my Macbook 2017. But still I miss the days of upgradable Macs.
Agreed! I have only ever used Linux on Chromebooks or rPi (or through VM), so I cannot speak to the ease of use on Macs. I still would choose a Mac over Windows any day.
I bought my 2019 MBP on marketplace a couple of years ago. I didn’t do my research, and found out that the ram and SSD were soldered on, and married to the got dang machine. I like to make things work that shouldn’t, so I was up for a challenge!
Mac is solid. My only complaint is that they require you to install third party programs or use command line for configuring things such as turning off mouse acceleration.
For anything artistic, Mac is the way to go 100%. I'm a Linux person myself, but Mac would be my second choice for software development, as I could at least use a bash-like command line natively.