I know it’s popular with professionals and scientists, and of course there’s MacOS, but I don’t know why. What makes it better or more preferable than something like Windows?
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There is a few terminology moments that people frequently confuse.
Unix is practially dead right now. You might think of Linux, which was kind of an open-source experiment to make compatible OS and it eventually replaced paid Unix OSes. UNIX is practically dead in 2023.
Then there is POSIX, which is a standard how to make OS so software would be compatible. All OSes (Linux, MacOS and Windows) are kind of POSIX-compatible, but in practice there is enough quirks and bugs in each of them, so people never wrote “POSIX software”, only “Linux software” or “BSD software”. Microsoft decided to drop their POSIX layer a few years ago as it was impractical to maintain. It’s still alive in theory, but in practice people write targeting specific OSes, even when they think they don’t.
With that out of the way, why would you prefer one OS over another?
For once, it’s software that you need to use. It’s where Windows is kind of a king, but MacOS has a few exclusives as well, especially in graphics design.
Then there is price. Linux is free. Windows is not. That’s one of the big reasons why a lot of servers use Linux, as you pay only for hardware when you need to scale.
Then there is “religion” – Linux is “free” as in you can build and modify it yourself, you have full access to kernel source code, and to a lot of drivers. This is partially a lie, as some hardware requires closed-source drivers and some software (e.g. Steam) is closed-source, but the spirit is there. With outher OSes you download a black box of code and you have no legal or very complex practical way of tinkering with out outside of what developer allowed you to do.
Then there are personal preferences, and we’re entering very opinionated territory here – as people will just throw you their preferences and threat them as absolute truth.
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