Which one is better? macOS, Windows, or Linux

Of course it's Linux.

Linux winning yes

@Wabz
wow, such a good reasoning

@TotallyNotWabz
that's also such a good reasoning

@Darkn didnt read the question at all, sorry ill answer with good reasoning

1. you control everything

2. free and open source

3. not macos

4. unix based/unix clone

@Bogie i agree with you

@Darkn well its not macos

You cant justify which operating system is just better. You have to specify what for.

Windows is better for gaming, macOS is better for productivity and programming, Linux is good for both programming and ethical hacking

Windows and MacOS are both proprietary operating systems. This means they are produced commercially with specific features that target specific audience groups. They have their potential features locked down by Microsoft and Apple to prevent exploiting and they are built to directly compete with eachother. Both of them have an initial cost and both of them have features which are incompatible with eachother.

Linux is an operating system which is completely open source under the GNU General Public License. This means the source code is publically available and anyone may modify or redistribute it as long as their modified code is also made public under the same license. It has infinite potential as it is contributed to by a community rather than an organisation with a specific target goal and it is not a sole distribution. Linux has many distributions which are made to acheive many different goals. Some for user friendliness, some for cross compatibility (porting of Windows and MacOS features) and some specifically for the exploiting which Microsoft and Apple specifically disallow.

Linux and MacOS are both based on a very old system called Unix. This means many of their features already work together, however it is easier to get Linux software working on Mac rather than Mac software working on Linux as Apple uses many measures to ensure that their ecosystem is kept intact. Due to this Unix base, parts of MacOS are open source, but the hardware security Apple implements makes it very difficult for the source to be useful. Microsoft has a proprietary base called MSDOS (MicroSoft Dirty Operating System) which lead to the NT Kernel modern Windows OS uses today, however because many features of Windows required some level of compatibility with Linux and Mac, Microsoft was lead to implementing many open source solutions in Windows. This means parts of the Windows OS are also open source and this allows Wine, Mono and LibreOffice/OpenOffice to exist without legal issues, allowing MacOS and Linux to adopt many features which are meant to be exclusive to Windows. 

With this knowledge in mind, using your own priorities you can start to make a decision personally which OS is best for you, but in terms of usability, potential, options and features, Linux is the way to go. One other topic in OS debate which I will mention before I end this post is optimisations. All operating systems run on a Kernel (the base of the operating system). In most cases the Linux kernel is generally left the same across distributions (however there are variants). Each kernel and each operating system based on a kernel is optimised differently, allowing different tasks to be completed more efficiently, faster and sometimes with better results. For example, MacOS has the fastest MIDI controller API (making devices such as the Launchpad and MIDI Keyboard operate much more smoothly on MacOS) and very fast UI response, Windows has the best APIs for graphics rendering (DirectX, DirectStorage, Direct3D, etc) and Linux has the best APIs and features related to internet adapters (addressing monitor mode, fast scanning, etc).

Once again, depending on what your circumstances and requirements are, different operating systems and different versions or distributions suit you differently. No operating system is the best for everything or everyone, and remember a feature called "Virtualization" which is supported by almost all operating systems, allows you to run operating systems and their features inside eachother, removing the requirement to make a hard choice for which one you should install on your device.

@Ducxy
I agree a lot about what you just said, so yeah it's basically just preference.

@JJH4X0R
You sure know how to write a god damn essay in like 10 minutes.
But you do have a VERY good reasoning on which one sooooooo... k.

@JJH4X0R well thats going to be quite a long thing to reply to

1st paragraph: you are correct

2nd paragraph: you are correct, however there's a debate about if linux is an operating system or not. I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/LInux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

3rd paragraph: macos is not based on unix, it just used a minimal amount of BSD tools to make it POSIX compliant. this makes it technically unix based but almost no unix-like code is in macos. linux (or GNU) is kind of a rewrite of the unix coreutils and stuff, you could call it a unix clone. yes, part of macos is open source, but they arent forced to, the parts that are open source werent open sourced because they use GPL code as far as im aware, they open source it because they want to. i might be wrong on that one tho. also, many things in wine and things like that were reversed engineered from windows, however, it's not illegal as long as you dont directly copy code.

4th paragraph: ok

5th paragraph: ok

actually wabz, apple did build macOS off of unix

@Ducxy they only took small parts from bsd to make it posix compliant, its technically posix so you could call it unix but most of the code was written by apple, a very small part only is unix, even windows has BSD code for a few things. you could call it unix but its an exageration compared to linux, bsd, and other operating systems like that