@_elena i have an old intel MacBook with a battery that needs changing. Going to be following your adventures.

One aspect that I find is easily glossed over is the look and feel of the various distros. Some people don’t care, tastes vary, but for people (like me) who are (overly) sensitive to design, it’s something that I would factor in as a priority. Couldn’t use a system that makes my eyes bleed 😅

@_elena For what it's worth, the difficulty of installing and using Arch is somewhat exaggerated. It does require more effort than many other distros, but it's not rocket science either. And IMO after you've gone through that process once, you are generally way better prepared to troubleshoot your system, because now you know how the individual parts actually go together.

@_elena unless you're more familiar with Debian-like distros, for stable machines I always reccomend #mageia (mageia.org) which is sort of a user-friendly European fedora

@_elena +1 for fedora. i was a distro-hopper for a long time and a lot have their strengths, but fedora is just solid, compatible and a joy to use.

@_elena
Pick Mint and you'll have an easy time.

Pick Arch as an early distro and you can't complaint when it fails. Also the forums are quite antagonistic to questions from new people.

@_elena I runt Mint from t2linux.org on Macbook Air 2018 and Macbook Pro 2020 or 2019 (don’t remember - last Pro with Intel CPU anyways). Works flawlessly. Only issue would be you have to manually delete old kernels before they fill your boot drive - but it’s a 3 minute task with 3 or 4 terminal commands. And I guess will be resolved with december Mint update. Also sleep/wake not (always) work so I just don’t use it. Everything else is fast/clean/reaponsive/„just works” no problem experience.

@_elena I’ve personally started with Ubuntu at first but then of course (because of peer pressure) I moved to Arch Linux and I’ve been using that for years since then… it’s light since it comes with a minimal amount of packages

Installing Arch Linux is rather easy if you use the archinstall script: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall (but of course you’d need to get some things working first like connecting to Wi-Fi for example [or you can skip the internet connection setup using Ethernet])

@_elena Debian!

@_elena #NetBSD, the #noAI solution

@_elena I can only say, as a non-nerd: I changed to Linux Mint before Xmas, and so far I cope, more than that: I´m happy! But please, it shouldn´t be even an inch more complicated to keep me happy.

@_elena Linux Mint just works on my 2013 MacBook Pro. I had to load a driver to get the WiFi to work but it was right there on the USB installer distribution. Veronica Explains has a video on how to install it.

@_elena I've been running Zorin OS on my Asus laptop for a while now, and am a big fan (not that any Linux distro is flawless, there were a couple of driver hurdles) - the Zorin forums are also well trafficked and full of answers if you get stuck.

@_elena

You started a distribution war 😱.

My advice is to first try distributions with a "live USB" memory stick :
- it is a good test for hardware compatibility ;
- you can evaluate if the interface and its management are ok for you.

The best distribution is the one you master.

@_elena Mint is very usable - one of the younger folks at our maker meetup installed that on a laptop as his first distro. Arch may be more than what you need (and is very bleeding edge). Decisions decisions! 🤓