Hi all, thanks in advance for indulging a complete newbie! I'd like to try Linux on an 11-year-old MacBook Pro (gifted by a relative), but I don't know where to start. What distribution would you recommend based on my background?
-Coming from the Mac world; haven't used a PC/Windows since before the pandemic. I'd prefer something that feels similar to MacOS.
-Not a techie. I've forgotten everything (everything!) I ever learned about command line because I never ended up needing to use it, and I haven't had to debug anything in a long time.
-What I'll be using it for: accessing the internet, various kinds of creative projects that I'll probably try making with FOSS software (something I've only recently started to look into), and making another attempt at learning programming (my interest will probably peter out before I get anywhere with it, though, because that's what happened the last two times). Probably won't be gaming. I'd prefer having the option to use mainstream office software in case anything happens to my current computer, but I don't actually expect anything to happen to it in the next few years, so that's just a nice-to-have.
-Priorities: works on old Mac hardware, good for privacy, decent software availability, not buggy, ability to avoid generative AI (i.e., no repeat of Apple installing the Image Playground app on my computer along with a software update, without the ability to remove it.)
It seems like a lot of people recommend Ubuntu or Linux Mint to beginners, but I'm seeing some people complaining that Ubuntu is has spyware(?) and forces things users don't want, and it seems like Linux Mint is usually recommended to people coming from Windows, so IDK if either of those make sense for me. Advice/recommendations appreciated!
Thanks for all of this! Yeah, I'm not sure whether I'll need to dual boot or not since this won't be my main work computer, but I'll keep that in mind.
Everyone seems to be recommending Gnome. I'll check out Cosmic too. At first glance, it looks pretty cool, but I don't totally know what I'm looking for yet since I haven't really had to look at desktop environment choices before.
re Fedora - very well maintained and stable sounds excellent! I'm assuming this applies to both Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Cosmic? Might look into Pop!_OS as well, if it's popular I'm guessing I could find resources to troubleshoot anything that goes wrong.
I'm curious about Atomic options. That sounds like a great option for someone who's kinda worried about screwing things up, especially if I really do get into programming this time and fall into the rabbit hole of fiddling with computer things. I'll definitely read up on that.
What I’d recommend is getting a couple USB drives, download the distros you’re thinking of trying, boot into them, and just click around a bit to see how they feel. It’ll give you a chance to try out the desktop environments, like Gnome and Cosmic and see if you like them or not.
Little harder to compare the actual distro part without using it first and trying to set them up or do something with them like installing programs and updating. Unless you can spin up a virtual machine to try them out, but that might be harder for some if you don’t have the resources for it.
Fedora will be Fedora regardless of which backend you choose so it’ll have the same familiar commands, feel, and stability. Where the atomic versions of Fedora will differ is in how they handle updates and system changes.
Pop_OS! is based on Ubuntu, so where you were hearing about the popularity and ease of use of Ubuntu, you’ll find a similar feel with Pop, but with a lot of quality of life improvements. It’s got support for Nvidia drivers built in, which is big, and a lot of the bloat you were concerned about with Ubuntu has been stripped out. Since it’s based on Ubuntu you have access to everything that’s available to that widely supported platform.
Regarding Atomic updates, and immutable distros, it’s something to consider for sure if you aren’t confident, but there are some slight downsides (depending on your point of view) you should look at as well.
Since Atomic Updates keep copies of previous configs, you might see slightly more storage use.
Immutable distros focuses on making sure you can’t break things, and it does that by restricting access to system critical folders. That can be a very good thing, but it could also mean that there could be a time you run into trouble trying to change something you don’t have access to. This is just a hypothetical as I don’t know how you use your computer tho. It’s a trade off. You know how people joke about how Windows won’t let you delete a simple file, but Linux won’t blink if you tell it to delete critical folders provided you run the right command with permissions? Yeah, that’s kind of what immutables are stopping.
Here’s a couple articles you can read that go into Atomic Updates and Immutable Distros.
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One distro you’ll hear come up a lot when talking about Atomic and Immutable is NixOS. It’s considered to be the best at what it does when it comes to those two features. But as I don’t know enough about it I can’t recommend it confidently. I will say tho that I’m probably going to take the plunge and flip over to it sometime in the near future. I’ve heard enough great things about it I’ve gotten interested in trying it out.
Last thing to note is when considering a new distro, another thing might help make you make a choice is to check out the wikis. Good documentation on how to do different things can make a world of difference to your experience with the OS. For example, I really love the CachyOS wiki because it just walks you through every step of setting it up and makes a number of solid recommendations for things you might want to change or enable. When something isn’t in their wiki, there’s the ever extensive Arch Wiki as well, tho the language in it goes up a couple steps so it wouldn’t be where I’d send a new user. For that matter I wouldn’t recommend an arch distro for a new user. While CachyOS is great, rolling releases probably isn’t what you want based on your use case.
Hope this helps!
Thank you so much for explaining all of this!
Yeah, I think I will try out at least a couple distros on USBs or maybe a virtual machine. I think I still have at least one USB lying around somewhere in my closet... don't remember if it has enough space, but maybe.
Based on those articles and your explanations, I'm certainly going to want to explore immutable and atomic at some point, although maybe not right away since it sounds like there's more I'd need to learn. Both of those qualities sound fantastic to me. I think I'll be fine with a little more storage use, and I highly doubt I'll want to change anything about critical folders anytime soon. I'd like to avoid broken installations and myself accidentally doing really stupid things.
Yeah, I'll look at the documentation available before I install any OS. Thank you!