Nice story! I didn't know Mac OS X is now called Mac OS. I wanted to work at RedHat too, but I progressively gave up with their corona virus vaccination requirements displayed on their job offerings.

What did you dislike with Archlinux? It has been my main OS since 2015 I think, never went back to another. Initially the big advantage of Archlinux was to configure everything in one file, like in Freebsd. However it is not the case anymore with systemd. Yet, it is a minimal install, with AUR packages, a good wiki, rolling-release system. For the others I installed Manjaro and more recently Endeavouros.

That being said, my Linux story is at first on a PowerPC macbook, I wanted to install Linux because a friend at the university was using it on his PC, with KDE 3.5 or something at the time. Beautiful desktop, icons, etc. So I tried on PowerPC, at the time struggled with YouTube videos because of flash player compatibilities. I struggled with plenty of other things like xorg, the keyboard, etc, but thanks to these struggles I learned a lot during this time. Then stopped using macbooks because I was always inexplicably pushed to touch something I was not supposed to in the OS, like change a setting here and there, etc. In the end I wanted to work for a time as a sysadmin but at least in Japan it can be boring and/or painful (people working with night shifts) so I gave up there too. I chose the path of least resistance which is the software industry. In my case I use Asus PCs so I can recommend it, however sometimes I found even for a high price point, Asus uses realtek chips (in my experience, realtek = poor Linux support) so depending on the batch it can be a bad pick. For machine learning since there is a gaming series Asus can be good for compatible laptops with Linux.