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I've done the same 2 years ago, after being Linux-only for two decades.

Sure, macOS has its flaws. Sure, GNU command line tools are better than the BSD ones (fight me). Sure, it's not as hackable as a Linux machine.

But I've never been as productive. Everything works, I'm not fighting any hardware issue — Bluetooth? Wifi? Resume from sleep? Hell, I'm even rocking an external GTX 1080 GPU via Thunderbolt 2->3 adapter, and playing 4K games in Bootcamp.

I have a 16GB rMBP 2015, which probably is the last well made MBP, since the newer revisions seem to have so many issues, but I don't see myself going back to a Linux desktop ever again.

To be honest, the only two things I miss that work really well on Linux are Docker, and Wifi packet injection (aircrack-ng & co.)

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Do you have a recommendation for an external GPU enclosure? I have the same model MacBook as you but I've been hesitant to pick one up.

I have an Akitio Node. It's noisy as hell, but fits a full sized GPU and quite hackable - there are some silent fans mods if it bothers you.

There are plenty of gotchas, so make sure you read up on egpu.io and /r/eGPU

But once setup, and when Windows doesn't break everything with an update (happened with the Fall Creators update), works great and performance should be within 90-95% of a desktop setup, provided you're using an external monitor. You can use the internal LCD, but TB2 bandwidth will be the bottleneck in that case, and you'll get a bigger performance hit.

Here's my success post on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/eGPU/comments/77e86g/success_macboo...

Do you have problems with Docker for Mac?

Not really, it works, but there's tons of reports that it's slow, containers run in a VM (obviously) and you need workarounds such as docker-sync.

It makes sense, since Docker relies on the Linux kernel and its VFS interface, which have to be emulated on other OSes.

I have set up a Linux box for Docker work and I actually found Docker for Mac much nicer to work with. The installer and GUI are all really well-made and make it easy to tweak the resources that Docker VMs can utilize.

Meanwhile on Linux, I had to wait for a month or so before the Docker PPA was updated after I'd upgraded to Ubuntu 17.10. (I've since migrated to an LTS-based distro, lesson learned.) I also like to use Kitematic for reading logs, which was annoying to install, and which looks out of place on Linux because it's an Electron app skinned to look like a macOS app.

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