As an avid apple disliker, they really got a lot of things right with 10.x, with snow leopard hitting it out of the park. Everything from them around that era was slick. If I wasn’t a poor college kid running a 5 year old eBay Thinkpad I would have been sucked into their oppressive ecosystem in a heartbeat.
If you don’t need a laptop, I’ve been having a blast with using mini/micro/tiny business PCs off of eBay. I’ve had zero issues installing Debian on them, and they’re designed to be easy to maintain by IT departments, so Wi-Fi, storage, RAM, and even CPUs are all replaceable. They are mobile CPUs, so if you need the heavy lifting of desktop CPUs, you’d probably need to go with a larger form factor.
Did you do the nextcloudpi install?