Yes, the only differences are the urls you use when cloning, and the website UI for merge requests and similar. Git is an open source program, github, forgejoe, gitlab, gogs and similar are only managementsoftware for hosting git repositories online.

Probably, so I would guess the core audience to be businesses or schools who need a few hundred a year, but had no need for the computational power of more expensive models.

I would sugest debian, it has the same “just works”-feel to it, and the gnome desktop environment shares some design philosophy with macos. The main downside is that it is often a couple of years behind on software updates. Is this is a dealbreaker, I recommend mint for all, fedora when you need redhat-only software and debian-sid if you feel adventurous.

All that said, if you have a good mac currently, it has the same UNIX-benefits as linux. Using “homebrew” as a package manager and “better touch tool” for the desktop tweaks solves most problems, this is what I do. You may of course want to run linux only software, if this is you then double check if you also need an x86-64 cpu (as opposed to arm) before reinstalling.

I think this will be required to get full score on the safety test in Europe soon, so hopefully it can bleed into the global car market in a few years.