I mean the reason to buy Apple is the Software and hardware combination. Why would you install Linux on a Mac when pretty much every other cheaper laptop is more suitable for that?
Locking down the bootloader against the laptop owner's wishes is an attempt to de facto usurp the owner's basic property rights. Apple is not the owner of he laptop; they have no right to mandate how their product is used after the first sale.
Apple is forced to keep things as stable as possible since new OsX drivers are their problem.
You could also test every OS on the same hardware, which is the only use we had for OsX after setup tasks.
Fortunately, per above fact checker, disabling secure boot allows Linux installs.
I hope that someone works with Apple to sign some Linux distro(s), recognized by secure boot.
I deeply appreciate Apple's efforts to locking down their gear. But would still like the option of installing known good Linux, xBSD, Haiku, etc.
Admittedly I stopped looking into it and just shelfed the laptop until requesting a saner one.
But more to the point. Even if you didn’t know about that option you gave up because you didn’t want to sign up for a free account?
* run containers natively
* customize / swap out the window manager/display manager
* run kvm virtual machines
* desktop fractional scaling
Not needing to pay the licensing fees for vmware, parallells
Not needing to use a buggier hypervisor/manager such as virtualbox
Leverage qemu and all of it's benefits at full speed, such as emulating ARM devices
So you’re okay with paying at least $800 for the cheapest Mac that Apple sells, but my development Mac would at least be $1100 - $2000, but you don’t want to spend $79 on Parallel Fusion?
There is also the integrated Hypervisor.framework that seems to be gaining traction and I fully welcome that! But it's still not kvm: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor