If fluid simulations are included in your definition of serious work, then you can't do serious work on any machine with less than at least 128 GB of RAM, probably more, be it Windows, Linux or Mac. Your SSD will be killed by excessive writes no matter the OS or what specific hardware you've chosen. You can probably get enough RAM on some of the highest end Macs to not have to swap to disk for fluid simulation of any decent size, although I haven't looked into that. 128+ GB of RAM is a big ask no matter your platform.