What I like about macs is first and foremost good and stable hardware. But last time I tried MacOS (around 2017) - I gave it up after two weeks 
So what I'd like to hear is opinions of someone who's been using Linux for awhile, and then transitioned to mac, and managed to stay on a mac. Anything to be aware of in terms of software, usability, etc etc? Things that you kind of take for granted in Linux world that are a pain in mac? Well, anyone who can share some opinions on switching to a mac is welcome to do so.

Thanks!

Background:

I'm familiar with macOS so I don't feel like I am going in blind.  For many years I was a sysadmin and managed a bunch of Macs, even though I never used one as a "daily driver" myself.  That's been a while ago now, though, and I have not spent any serious time with an "Apple Silicon" Mac before now.

Following up on the Linux thread, I figured that I would start this one and just sort of write about things that I've run into, positives and negatives.  Maybe it will help out anyone else who is considering a similar transition.

First impressions — positive.

• Setup is super easy, as you'd expect.  But, it did offer to transfer data off of a Windows PC and I did not try using that function to see how well it works.
• The mini-LED display is easily the best laptop display that I have ever seen.  Super bright, good colors, deep blacks.  (Though I will mention that I've never used an OLED laptop display.)
• I poked around "Settings" and mostly was able to set it up to behave how I want, with some exceptions mentioned below.  I did find the Settings app to be a bit odd, with stuff not being in the place that I would expect or hidden behind secondary menus that you have to press a button to access.
• The battery life, holy cow.  I'm not used to a system with an "all day" battery.  I spent the better part of an hour sitting on the couch, detached from an outlet, and figured out how to install VMware Fusion, build a Windows-on-ARM ISO, and install it.  I was not being especially careful with regards to battery life and had the display brightness turned up pretty high, but when I was done, the battery was still reporting 94% capacity.  (So, I do have a local Windows VM set up now.)  It seems like it could last through a workday on battery power.  At this very moment I am on my work PC but SSH'ed into the Mac, which has been sitting unplugged with the lid shut for over an hour (not sleeping), and it is reporting 100% capacity with 20 hours of life remaining.  We'll see if this holds up over time or if the battery starts draining "more quickly" as it gets lower.
• I haven't heard even a whisper from the system fan yet (except while running Cinebench), and yet the system is cool to the touch.  (My Precision 7770 would definitely be warm, even if it had just been sitting idle with the fans running at low speed, and I never felt comfortable running it with the lid shut because the display panel would get hot.)
• I got a Cinebench score of just under 15,000 (multi-core ten minutes), which is in line with what I got on the Precision 7770 before tweaking.  The fan was only barely audible during this test so I wonder if there is some "kick it into high performance" setting that I haven't found yet.  Unlike with the Precision, the score went up slightly as the ten minutes went on rather than down, so it doesn't seem to be hitting a short-term throttle limit.
• I've been using brew install --cask (app name) from the terminal to install a lot of things.  This should give a "Linux package manager" type experience for keeping stuff up to date.  Homebrew has tons of packages, for full commercial apps in addition to UNIX-y command line tools.
• I do have an iPhone so I am enjoying the integrated experience with messages, photos, maps, and even weather settings and content being just "the same" on both devices.

First impressions — negative.

• Plugging in wired headphones, I noticed a sort of "hum" or "low buzz" noise in the background.  It did not matter if the headphones were connected by 3.5mm or USB-C, so at first I thought that the headphones were at fault, but further testing indicated that it was definitely the MacBook.  The buzz would stop if I touched my hand to the chassis, or if I disconnected the power cable and ran on battery power.  Grounding issue!  As it turns out, this is a common MacBook issue.  They shipped the system with a two-prong power adapter that does not include a ground connection.  You can swap out the end bit with a cable that includes the ground connection, which "should" take care of this issue (...if they offer one for whatever outlet type you have in your region — I saw someone post that the UK version of this cable does include the grounding pin on the outlet side, but it is not actually connected to anything on the power brick side).  I am picking one up today, so we will see.
• Apple is stubborn about the way that they want the system to work in some ways.  For example, the system automatically goes to "sleep" shortly after it hits whatever idle threshold you have set for the display to power off.  There is an option to disable this behavior when on AC power, but no option to disable automatic sleep on battery power (without also disabling automatic power off of the display, which I do want).  I had to install a third-party tool to have system stay awake "forever" on battery power.  (.......If the battery can last all day, why not?  I might leave the laptop unplugged somewhere in my house and want to access a file from my work laptop, or from my phone.)
  • ...At least "sleep" actually works well, something I never had success with under Linux.
• They also stubbornly adjust the display brightness down when I connect or disconnect from AC power.  It will not remember what I had set for either state.  This despite disabling all of the "automatic brightness" / "dim brightness on battery" toggles that I could find in Settings.  I should be able to work around this with a background shell script.  (...Really used to doing this sort of thing from Linux...)
• Similarly, I had to fight with the "scroll direction".  There are two toggles in the Settings UI to reverse scrolling for the touchpad and for the mouse, but it is the same toggle (flipping one also flips the other).  So if you want scrolling to work one way on the touchpad and the other way on the mouse, you can't do that.  This was also solved with a third-party app which inverts the mouse scroll wheel.
• There is potential for some funny backlight issues with the mini-LED display's different dimming zones.  I noticed it most clearly when observing the mouse cursor over a completely black background.  You can see a "glow" around the cursor as its zone is lit up but not the surrounding zones.
• Microsoft problem — I installed Microsoft Office using the installer from their web site and all of the Office apps crashed immediately on launch.  Couldn't figure out how to get past that.  I uninstalled it and installed the versions of the apps pulled from the App Store instead.  Those seem to work fine.

Haven't tried any games yet.  I'm not planning to mess with the "Apple Game Porting Toolkit" until Sonoma releases in the fall.  I'm hoping that some third-party tooling around it matures (looks like they are working on support in Heroic Games Launcher for example).  There's enough stuff that I can run native or in an emulator to keep me happy until then.

So, for an SCP client.  I use WinSCP on Windows, and it's awesome.  I've started using muCommander on my work Mac and it's okay.  Not as intuitive for selecting multiple files, and seems to need an extra click if you switch to it from another program, but functional for the basic "drag files from one folder to a remote one" task.  Are there better ones I'm not aware of?  Free is ideal but a low cost is not necessarily a dealbreaker, a subscription probably is.  Must be easy for a non-technical person to use for uploading files to a server.

For a JSON editor, similar case, I've shown my side project partner JSON in Notepad++ and he said that's fine and easy enough to understand, but what's a good program for it on Mac?  I know VSCode exists on Mac and that's the best option I know of now, but is there anything more text-editor-y than IDE-light-y?  Preferably with syntax validation, I know missing commas are going to be the bane of our existence if that functionality doesn't exist.

Got to have the ecosystem.  I hate to say it!  ha ha.  I will be trying macos asap!