Macintosh why do I loathe thee

Okay, I suppose Apple deserves credit for making their filesystem UTF-8. They even deserve credit for storing strings in normalized form. Why do they store NFD though? And how do I make this play nicely with any Linux system? Or am I supposed to want NFD on Linux too? Why wouldn't I want NFC? And how do I tell CIFS not to screw everything up when it runs into this?