Hardware IDK that's up to you. A nice Thinkpad rarely disappoints. Usually one of the best choices. Or Dell XPS, HP Spectre, something else that matches your taste. OS: there plenty of really slick ones. At the very least try Fedora Linux with the Gnome desktop. You could be surprised.

The problem of a prison often is not, that it is insecure. The problem is rather that you do not get out and therefore have a lack of freedom. MacOS lacks the freedom to tweak the system. Since it is all closed source a user has no other opportunity, but to trust apple in making it private and secure. When you are not ok, with a decision of some settings, the look of the desktop or whatever, one has no real solution to change this. With the use of software I just really do not know. Maby as you say, one can also install software from Github to mac without problem. I assume you know this better than I know. But in the essence. I think it is the lack of changing the system however you want to, since the code is not open to look at it, to change it, to compile it and distribute it to other people.

I used Fedora with Gnome many times, it's quite nice actually. I recall a major pain was something related to how moving files from/to the Desktop works (the UX there is broken) and this is a great example @freemymind 🇨🇭 of something that I would've liked to change but is not possible, even in an open system. It would take months to research, understand, recompile, etc - let's be real no one has time for this. There are plenty other "glitches" like these. MacOS on the other hand is (and feels) solid AF. As for hardware, I will not buy any non-ARM ever again (my latest laptop with a powerful Intel processor is still slow and noisy compared to a Mac). I tried Asahi Linux (on Fedora too) which is fast and silent, but lacks important features like connecting an external display.

I totally agree, that most tweaks do not come without investment. Freedom is rarely for those who search commodity. These are rather contrary concepts. But I personally really like about opensource projects, that they usually converge towards compatibility, privacy and security, while lacking features. Proprietary solutions on the other side are focused on delivering many features, making everything easy to use, while the business model usually incentivizes them to sell valuable user data, make very useful features as incompatible as possible with competitors and to divest security to stay competitive without wasting unnecessary resources in it. This is why I feel so much better using opensource software wherever possible. Maby they lack features, maby not everything works fine. But at least it is highly probable that with enough developers working on a project, that telemetry is minimized to a bare minimum or even eliminated. And when it is not, people make it transparent. So with open source I am very likely to install what I want to install. And with closed source I can only trust the developers, they built the product with best intentions. Proof can never be deilvered until the opposite is shown to the public.