@_elena
In the end it's a philosophical question:
Do you you want a system that you have to conform to and that hides from you what you don't seem to need at the time or do you want to gain an understanding of your system, so you can learn how to properly do things your way?
First one is the Big Tech/Linux Mint-approach, the second one is the Arch way.

Also: If it comes down to Mint or Fedora, have some self-respect and do yourself a favor, get Fedora.

@_elena Re edit: Make that Debian or Fedora.

@_elena Arch if you want to learn how operating systems are built, but less useful as a work flow platform. Debian is likely best pick if you want rock solid and fully functional and don't want to get fed up with your choice in a few year's time and want the same tools on laptop, desktop and server.

@_elena Mint is easy to start!! Move on Mint!! Arch is for people who wants to know every single of code what is of own Os.. You should to be a skilled person.. ok with tutorial online you can install it easily right now, we can also try to have a help with Chat-gpt or Claude. Hahaha.

@_elena debian ;)

interested in thoughts?

normally this starts a huge flamewar and doesnt help you to decide.

@_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 have a Macbook air with mint on it.
It's great, but...
Two issues I have found...
1)WiFi is a problem until you get it installed and can install the correct drivers.
I use a USB WiFi dongle that is supported during the install.
2)If you close the lid whilst it is running it borks the system, and you need to use an odd multi key combo to recover.
I disable sleep on lid close to avoid this.

Hope that's of some help.

@_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!