hah I feel your pain, buddy. But I also understand why Apple does what they do. It is usually because both options will have people yell at them, but one will have less people yell at them so they pick that one. For example: As to the OS updates. Well, yes, there is code to detect is the machine is too old and so the OS is disabled. This is obvious and Apple themselves admit it. But this is because if you try to run it on the old hardware it will be so painfully slow people will whine and complain. I ran a computer business for years, and you wouldn't believe the calls I would get. It was relatively common after windows 95 came out, for example, for people still running 386 computers to try to install it, fail, force it on, find it was unusably slow, and yell at me about it demanding money back, demanding I somehow magically make it work, demanding I deliver Bill Gate's head to them, etc. It was tiring.

But anyway, I was on Linux for many years on my personal computers. I use Apple these days just because I have no time to troubleshoot when problems arise, but I love Linux and can't recommend it enough. I always built it myself using Gentoo, but these days the easiest one may be Ubuntu. You can get a boot image from their website and run it without installing it just to see what you think.