IMO the power of Linux distros is the package manager. The ~2.5 hour journey that you described on macOS should take less than a minute on most Linux distros. During my (somewhat brief) time with macOS, brew was a primary source of frustration.
You say that recompiling software is slow and errors during compilation are normal on Linux. I don't find myself compiling software very often. Most things are grabbed as binaries by the package manager. For everything else there's the AUR (which I rarely experience issues with.)
> IMO the power of Linux distros is the package manager. The ~2.5 hour journey that you described on macOS should take less than a minute on most Linux distros.
Unless of course said software is not in your repo, then expect that it will take at least 2.5 hours.
2.5 hours? That sounds like a severe exaggeration. For example, most software in the Arch User Repository installs in a few minutes or less on reasonably modern hardware. In many cases, Linux users also have the option of installing binary packages outside of their repos instead of compiling from source.
> In many cases, Linux users also have the option of installing binary packages outside of their repos instead of compiling from source.
In my experience that's relatively rare. Occasionally they have an AppImage, which is great, maybe a PPA if you're on Ubuntu. but otherwise the best you can do is try to hack some other distro's binary to work. For most niche software I've found that it is only available as source though. Then you get to try and get a working build environment...
You say that recompiling software is slow and errors during compilation are normal on Linux. I don't find myself compiling software very often. Most things are grabbed as binaries by the package manager. For everything else there's the AUR (which I rarely experience issues with.)