it’s not about difficulty.

it’s about building useful intuition to guide your curiosity the next time an eyebrow goes up.

bsd is used in prod only slightly more than macos.

Nah it is. When something "just works" you don't learn much about how. When your graphics card driver shits itself, you learn something getting it working again. Console text editor at the minimum!

It's not "misery is good for you" but having to solve random problems is an opportunity for learning the guts you otherwise don't get.

Linux on a laptop used to fill this niche nicely. Does it still?

does still. run alpine for increased difficulty.

running a mainstream distro & desktop env on a thinkpad t480s is significantly easier, more efficient and less fragile than any windows laptop I've ever used, seen or heard of. Less signficantly so but still easier than any apple laptop I've used. Genuinely so. YMMV.

the primary difficulty isn’t supposed to be the os, but the software you’re building. though os difficulties will always come up, depending on workload.

being on linux means you gain intuition debugging locally. whatever you might be debugging.

to sum up my point: linux. never not be running it.

to your point, linux is a better experience now than before. this is for great good, not a cause to search for a more brittle os and distro.

at eod, os isn’t that cool. software is cool.

Using an operating system you have to tinker with to get working right, and even fix when it breaks means you learn a lot about the low level of what an operating system is, and how this one does it. That information translates to being useful writing and fixing other software. The point is this, if you're a student, consider using something unusual that is more brittle. Maybe a sweet spot is running mainstream linux on your mainstream laptop (Lenovo T-series is one of the right answers there, dell is the wrong answer) and have a project using a pine rock64 SBC running linux to drive your tv screen or similar? Something that you want to use, that breaks at random in random places that you then have to investigate to work out how to fix.

You really learn something keeping brittle systems functional. Linux laptops with nvidia gfx cards definitely used to qualify in ways a t480s really doesn't nowadays.

When fixing things that break, strace, gdb, perf, ftrace, BPF, write or fix a kernel device driver, understand what the OS and compiler don't do for you, what they often will do for you that maybe you don't want them to.

my current brittle setup is postmarketos on oneplus 6t. definitely kind of works. the rest of my setups are non-brittle.

you may be right. i’m not sure i would recommend someone to pursue a brittle setup, but it might be more educational.