In my experience, Intel Macs have always been that way. Every one I had was uncomfortably hot. My work Intel MBP’s fans would runs constantly, because everything would send its CPU through the roof. I always felt like I had to treat them with kid gloves to avoid the CPU running away on me. Webex meetings and screen sharing would always spike my CPU and make everything unusable. I’d have to stop sharing to actually do what I was trying to show someone. All this was before Apple Silicon even released, when Intel was the preferred chip. It was garbage.

This never happens anymore with the M1 Pro MBPs I have. I’ve never heard the fan spin up on my work MBP. I have heard it on my personal one, but I was actually pushing it, it wasn’t a random runaway process doing it, as was common on Intel.

I’d take a modern MacBook Air over the highest spec’d Intel Mac Apple ever made.

As long as you use proprietary OSes, do not ever update past what has come with the hardware(reinstall back to it if needed). That's why there are still machines using windows xp still in use today. That's where you will get the fastest/best experience.

If your mac came with Catalina(10.15.1), stay there and run that mf into the ground. Never shut it down(you don't know if it will start back up if you do) and never update. No, you don't need the latest version of the proprietary system. It's only getting worse as time goes by and you don't have any way to modify it to improve it.

> I have a macbook pro, 32G ram, lightning fast nvme drive. There is NO REASON to upgrade the hardware.

That is not what Apple wants to hear. They only want to hear the sound of the money. You either come to accept that, or you stop buying their products. It doesn't matter what you want or what you think, only what Apple wants.

As you said: with Fedora, it ran well and it probably isn't even as good as it could be unless optimized specifically for that hardware(Gentoo, or some BSD distro).

When the time comes and you need software that no longer has support for Catalina, then it's time to buy the newest mac that is "optimized" for the lastest version of the proprietary OS.

Otherwise, use the lastest version of the software that still works or try finding something else.

I have installed Linux Mint with KDE on an iMac 2015, 16GB RAM. Runs great. The only thing that requires a convoluted script to run because <reasons> is bluetooth. Everything else worked out of the box, apparently.

Tahoe seems to have slowed down the OS a bit but I don't think it is as extreme as you're seeing here. I don't have any intel chips to test with myself but personally I'd try running some benchmarks both CPU and GPU to see if your scores match up with other people running your hardware. After that maybe check to see if you're throwing errors in your console. Maybe it'll lead to a hint.

It seems like a bad bug somewhere rather than a purposeful event

I have (and still use) a 2019 mbp and it has had CPU thermal throttling issues since very early after I bought it new. Intel macs from that year were notorious for thermal throttling.

> There is NO REASON to upgrade the hardware.

> Just for context: prior to upgrading my mac would average around 74°c

If you refuse to use lighter-weight software, then yeah, it's time to upgrade your hardware. An average of 74°c means that you have ~20°c of headroom before hitting the Intel chip's junction temp and shutting off the hardware (or causing permanent damage). Your laptop should be idling much cooler even if it's one of those godawful Intel i9 16" models that runs hotter than Satan's jacuzzi.

Eventually MacOS will switch away from ACPI/UEFI power/temp management to use their custom devicetree drivers. Even the hacky Opencore workarounds won't fix the experience on your laptop, it will likely only be worse-supported from here on out. Backend architecture like libdispatch has probably already begun this process on Tahoe.

You've either got to downgrade macOS, get a new laptop or switch to an Intel-friendly OS. I'll leave the choice up to you.