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Linux recommendations for a beginner on a Mac? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 day ago by butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works to c/linux@programming.dev

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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!

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[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I'm on a 15 year old Mac, fedora works great. I can't remember what magical fuckery I did to get wifi drivers working though. I recommend having an Ethernet cable or wifi dongle while you try to get it setup.

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 hours ago

I use kde as a DE, with a macos theme installed (check the settings).

[–] const_void@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Be prepared for problems with the Broadcom WiFi card and drivers.

[–] butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works 2 points 19 hours ago

Yeah, I'm realizing that might be unavoidable. I'm still hoping I can get Linux Mint or Zorin working without messing around with that (one person said they didn't have to do any of that when installing those on similar Macs, but others did - maybe this changed at some point when Mint/Zorin was updated?), but we'll see. Not looking forward to figuring that out, but it might be worth it. Thanks!

[–] Gabadabs@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

My recommendation given where you are coming from would probably be something like elementary OS. https://elementary.io/

It has some differences in it's workflow though, and if you don't find that appealing I see that many others have already recommended distributions with Gnome such as Fedora.

[–] butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks! What kinds of workflow differences? And do you think I'll have to mess with the wifi card and drivers to get it to work? I'm seeing some people talking about that with other operating systems.

[–] Gabadabs@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I recall it using some different design philosophies behind managing windows than I was familiar with, I'd honestly just recommend trying it out in a live USB or a vm so you can see for yourself. It uses a desktop called Pantheon that they make specifically for elementary OS. Specifically, the X button on the window is in the top left, maximize is in the top right, and there's no minimize button.

Wifi card drivers can be an issue, that you should be able to see in the live USB before you try installing though. It's not a matter of any specific distribution and more whether or not your wifi card has working drivers.

[–] butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 hours ago

Oh, OK. It seems very weird to not have a minimize button in elementary OS, unless the maximize button is also a minimize button. I wouldn't want to have to close a window and reopen it every time I wanted to downsize it. I'd probably end up resizing windows manually instead of maximizing them.

Thank you so much! That makes a lot more sense.

[–] TwilightKiddy@programming.dev 20 points 1 day ago (2 children)

By old Mac hardware I assume you mean x86-64 Intel Macs? Pretty much any modern distro should work on that.

If you are in general ok with tinkering a bit with your computer, I'd recommend Arch derivatives like EndeavourOS or CachyOS, these come with full GUI installers and software availability on Arch is one of the widest around.

Arch is rolling release, though, meaning each package gets updated as soon as a new version is available, rarely it leads to things breaking.

If you want something more stable, Fedora is a great choice, too.

As you mentioned yourself, Mint also exists. It's packages are usually on the older side, but the distro itself is trying to be this "gateway drug of Linux".

The feel of the system is mostly determined not by your distribution, though, but rather by your desktop environment. As far as I know, GNOME is the most "Mac-like" out of popular ones. KDE is "Windows done right", and there are a lot of other options, but you'll mostly have to try them out yourself until you find something you like.

[–] Nester@feddit.uk 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is a fantastic comment!

To add to this I would start towards Fedora as it's stable but also fresh, and as lots of people have been saying try Gnome as your desktop environment.

[–] butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Interesting, what do you mean by "fresh"?

[–] TwilightKiddy@programming.dev 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Some distributions like Debian get releases once per year or two, people tend to joke around that those are "stale" rather than "stable". Fedora lives somewhere in between, you get more testing than on Arch, but less than on the likes of Debian. Usual Fedora release cycle is once in half a year.

[–] butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh, OK. Once in half a year sounds just fine, I don't think I'd actually want it to be more often than that. I do like stability. Thanks!

[–] caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Also, notably but perhaps not obviously, stable releases still get security patches, just not feature changes.
Don't think you don't need updates when updates means five different things.

[–] butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah, I'll definitely want the security patches on whatever timeline. I just don't want other kinds of updates frequently.

[–] butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yeah, it's an Intel Mac. Intel Core i5, which appears to be in that x86-64 range if I'm understanding correctly.

I think I'd prefer stability over rolling release. One of the things I've really appreciated about Apple's stuff is not having to deal with zillions of updates, like I did with my last PC. I'm not sure what you consider to be tinkering "a bit" with a computer, but I haven't had to do that in a long time, and I suspect I'll be happiest keeping that to a minimum (at least for now). So based on this, I'll look at Fedora and Mint.

Thank you for all of this info!

[–] j5y7@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You can put Zorin on it and use the Mac theme it has to make it more familiar.

[–] butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Zorin looks nice too! Thanks.

[–] kolmaskommentoija@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 hours ago

I can recommend Zorin as well, it has been very beginner-friendly.

[–] TwilightKiddy@programming.dev 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

x86 is the instruction set, 64 is for 64-bit extension of that instruction set. It's also known as AMD64 to make it even more confusing. All Intel Core processors starting from Core 2 are using that architecture, as far as I remember.

By "tinkering a bit" I meant sometimes digging up a package in the archives and rolling it back. I used Arch daily for around 2 years and had to do it once. You can also avoid it by keeping tabs on what the community says, broken packages cause quite a bit of fuss.

Release schedule is a trade off, if you are updating weekly, it'll usually take less than 5 minutes to download all the packages that got updated within that week. The rarer you update, the more time each update takes.

But it's all ultimately a matter of preference, just wing something up and try to use it for a couple of days. If it's not to your taste, scrap it and try something else, it's rare to end up with a setup you like right from the get go.

[–] butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If it's just rolling back a package once in two years, that doesn't sound so bad. I don't see myself downloading updates once a week, though. I'd rather have fewer updates, especially if they're well-tested and I can set things up so they happen overnight while I'm sleeping.

I really like knowing that I won't be stuck with whatever setup I start with. Thank you!

[–] anzo@programming.dev 1 points 6 hours ago

I use aurora os but would actually recommens bazzite.gg for you. Both are inmutable fedora distros (first one uses KDE, second one Gnome.) and are based on the great rpm-ostree as system package manager ,that gives you: full stability, security, plus the benefits of having fresh updates. Rollbacks are a breeze. Most applications you would install there are via either flathub.org or brew.sh ...

[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

For starters if you are dual booting with Mac OSX you’ll need to use rEFInd Boot Manager. This is something you’ll usually be asked to select at install, so don’t sweat this part too much.

When you mention wanting a Mac like experience, I’d recommend going with Gnome Desktop. That’s going to have a familiar look and feel to you.

There is a custom flavor of Gnome called Cosmic by System76. It was designed for their distro Pop!_OS and has been very popular. Cosmic basically came about by System76 not being happy with how Gnome did some things that didn’t fit their needs.

Most distros (versions of Linux) will allow you to install whatever DE (Desktop Environment) you want.

As you mentioned Linux Mint comes up a lot, which ships with Cinnamon DE which is based on GNOME 3, but modified to look a little more traditional in the Windows sense of things. There is also an alternate version of Mint that ships with a custom version of MATE, a DE that is based on Gnome 2, but that may feel a bit dated to you.

Distros to consider:

Fedora - very well maintained and stable distro.

Offers Gnome (or other desktop environment of choice)

Offers Atomic options. Atomic or immutable distros are a newer thing that basically ensures there’s always a path to roll back on in case something gets messed up. There’s a bit to read here about all the benefits of this, but worth looking into.

Fedora Silverblue ships with Gnome and is atomic

Fedora Cosmic ships with Cosmic and is atomic

Pop!_OS by System76 is pretty popular and easy to get running. Popular with people looking for gaming, tho I know you mentioned you’re not doing that. Ships with Cosmic Desktop. Definitely worth a look into.

[–] butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

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!

[–] butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 hours ago

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!

[–] SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have run a few different distros on 2015 macbook pros. Debian works really well but you might have to fuss to get camera working and be careful with your display settings. Zorin and Mint run best on first install and Zorin is definitely the most mac-like with a clean design and lots of interface consistency, and it feels quite lightweight.

Ubuntu works fine but it’s Ubuntu. Fedora had some minor driver hassles too but otherwise is nice to use.

Given the age and capabilities of a 2015 MBP I put Zorin on the 8 GB one and Debian for a server on the 16GB (I have two). Ultimately reverted the 16GB to macOS 13 (via OCLP) due to not liking battery management for a server. I feel (but have no stats) that none of the linuxes were as good at power and battery management as macOS on those machines. Probably firmware obscurities or something. None are as good at the trackpad either, but you get used to it.

[–] butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thanks! Did you have to do anything to get wifi, fans, or the webcam working on the 2015 Macbook Pros running Zorin or Mint? Some other people have mentioned having to work around that on various distros.

[–] SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Nope, zorin and mint were pretty much ready to go.

[–] butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

Wonderful! Thank you so much. I will probably try one of those two first then.

[–] tburkhol@slrpnk.net 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

LibreOffice is generally a fine alternative to MS Office. I do collaborative writing with the MS world, and rarely run into any issues - mostly related to Track Changes. It's installed with the 'full desktop' version of most distros.

Python is part of every distro and a good place to start programming.

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[–] crusa187@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Whichever distro you end up choosing, consider one which makes use of the Gnome desktop environment - the current version of gnome is very similar to the Mac OS desktop layout so it could help your transition.

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[–] lokalhorst@feddit.org 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I am a programmer and have a little server that runs Debian. On my desktop PC I run Linux Mint and I absolutely love it. It just works. In 2026 there is no good reason to got with Ubuntu anymore.

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[–] Fishcake@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The only thing i’ll add is that Distro (stuff like Ubuntu and Mint) is far less important to your overall linux experience than desktop environment (stuff like KDE Plasma and Gnome) I’d do a little more research on your own about these choices before coming to a conclusion, but the opinion of a former Windows user who has only used Mac a few times in passing is that Gnome feels a lot more like Mac than Windows. Fedora is a good, fairly user friendly Distro that supports Gnome

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[–] jrgd@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Probably your best bet for something similar in vein to MacOS would be any distro that ships with GNOME. Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed all either ship explicitly with GNOME or have them as options within their live installers.

If you know which model and spec your Macbook is, I could give better compatibility insights. In short, the Broadcom chips used for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth in the 2014-2015 Macbooks used to be quite problematic for many Linux distros, but I do believe the in-tree bcm43xx driver in the kernel should handle them well enough nowadays. Depending on exact year and spec, your Macbook may come with an NVidia GPU, which will require additional post-installation steps to install the proprietary drivers on many distros. As it isn't the primary display device on those models, there shouldn't be too many issues in getting the cards to function and render offloading to work.

Ubuntu discourse

Ubuntu is not really spyware as people may claim it to be. The main spyware claim comes from two sources: the 14 year old once-integration for Amazon services that Ubuntu shipped around the 12.10 point release and that Ubuntu does utilize more telemetry than other distros.

Often though, it's not a recommended distro anymore for many reasons. One primary one is that Ubuntu used to be seen as user-friendly and had a lot of community forum posts to document how to use it. Nowadays, most major distros have caught up and surpassed Ubuntu in usability and reliability, and Ubuntu's once-positive of forum posts largely tend to clog up being able to find useful information when a problem does occur because of how out-of-date many of those forum posts that still show up in search results are.

Another big reason is Ubuntu is not recommended is Canonical's (the company the makes Ubuntu) makes regular missteps and often falls on the wrong side of development for progress of the Linux desktop. See Unity desktop, Mir, Upstart, and the current misstep of Snaps. Canonical has also additionally put less effort into keeping that once-polished experience the Ubuntu desktop had and moved a lot of their effort into their server offerings. There have been relatively recent Ubuntu LTS desktop releases that have shipped with some baffling and often showstopping bugs that should have been release blockers. It's to a point where the QC of releases is often worse than what is found on 6-month point release and even many rolling release distros to where many don't recommend Ubuntu anymore.

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[–] epyon22@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I have a 2016 mac with a touch bar and I've been dual booting Linux mint. Wifi, sound and the touch bar do not work, at least out of the box. May not be a good first time Linux experience if things don't just work well. Just giving you fore warning I would maintain a dual boot til you find something stable.

Alternatively Dells and thinkpads are well supported with Linux, they may not have the specs that the mac has but everything works and can be gotten used on Amazon for a couple hundred dollars.

Good luck with your Linux journey.

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