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Looking to dip my toes into Linux for the first time. I have a 2016 Intel MacBook Pro with pretty solid specs collecting dust right now that I think I’m going to use. Research so far has indicated to

Looking to dip my toes into Linux for the first time. I have a 2016 Intel MacBook Pro with pretty solid specs collecting dust right now that I think I’m going to use. Research so far has indicated to me that the two best options for me are likely Mint or Elementary OS. Does anyone have any insight? Also open to other OS’s. I would consider myself decently tech savvy but I am not a programmer or anything. Comfortable dipping into the terminal when the need arises and all that.

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  • You will get very different opinions here. Important are what you want to do

    • are you okay with only Flatpak apps?
    • do you want a really stable Distro, or more up to date updates? Desktops evolve, but your hardware doesnt need that new kernels etc.
    • do you need a traditional distro for installing loads of stuff to it, or is an immutable Distro "enough"?
    • are you willing to reinstall or unbreak a traditional distro?

    I would recommend Fedora Kinoite. Install the official image or use the Ublue image. They are recent but checked updates, versioned, resettable, etc. With Fedora and lots of other distros you have automatic backups, if an update may break something.

    Its basically the future of Linux, at least for most use cases.

    PS: I literally broke evey other Distro, most of the recommended ones here.

    • While disagreeing, I still upvoted. I think more people should see this suggestion and add their opinion too.

      I'm a huge fan of SB/ uBlue, but I don't know if I would recommend it to a new user.

      For me personally, it's the best distro ever. It's reliable, modern, AND it doesn't break.

      I'm the most talented person ever to break my stuff. I already managed to do that, even on on SB and fixing the kernel panic (+other breakages), which I would have done by reinstalling, was only one reboot and boom, it worked again. I just want to get my tasks done (gaming, etc.) and knowing I never have to spend a weekend reinstalling is godsend.

      BUT, things just work differently, and sometimes more complicated. You never install something traditionally, only per container (e.g. Distrobox or Flatpak), which is extremely uncommon. And, there are still here and there some limitations. For example, you will never install a VPN client, since they want to interact and change the base system, which they can't

      I would recommend something Debian-based, like Mint. If you don't tinker, they also never break. And most guides are for exactly those distros.

      SB is more for either people you KNOW that they will never explore the system (e.g. my mum) and only use their device like a tablet,

      or who are exactly this advanced in their Linux journey that they begin tinkering without knowing what they're doing, breaking their system and not being able to fix it themselves. Or they begin distrohopping.

      I for example always broke any distro somehow "without doing anything wrong". Reinstalling was always easier than fixing for me.

      And I was a huge distrohopper too, which is fixed by now.

      • Yes I also broke lots of distros, (Linux Mint, Kubuntu, KDE Neon, Fedora KDE) and switched away from MXLinux (too old) and Manjaro (bad reputation even though great experience)

        You can install packages normally? I think you got something wrong here.

        Just do rpm-ostree install app or rpm-ostree install /path/to/app.rpm for local RPMs. Like normal actually.

        Yes agree and agree, I broke everything else.

        I disagree with Debian. Apt is horrible, updates are bad. Linux Mint is nice, but the Desktop is still X11 which is now basically unmaintained. You will probably get no real support for X11, and I dont know how long it will take the devs to get XFCE / Cinnamon to Wayland.

        I mean I literally had an issue with the otherwise great MXLinux, where my Nextcloud simply didnt work, because the client was a vew versions too old.

        Debian is all about preinstalling stuff, which is pretty annoying, and thus native packages. Debian with auto updates and only Flatpaks maybe, but like it is, no way.

        • You can install packages normally? I think you got something wrong here.

          Yeah, you can, that's right. But it's absolutely not recommended (except drivers or stuff like that). You only do that when there is absolutely no other way.

          But I'm not that exactly sure on how "bad" it is on rpm-ostree tbh. I've definitively done my research when I switched to Silverblue, and reason for the direct-install-disrecommendation didn't get explained good enough for me. Afaik it is only an additional layer on top of the base, so it is also not OS-changing. Please do me the favor and explain it to me if you can :)

          I disagree with Debian. Apt is horrible, updates are bad.

          I said "Debian based", not plain Debian. I never got warm with it tbh, for deskop I prefer rpm-based distros, I don't even know why. But, like it or not, Ubuntu (and therefore Debian) is just the standard if you google " how to do x on Linux". And a newcomer, who doesn't know the difference between apt and dnf for example, will get into trouble sooner or later.

          • True Ubuntu and debian is standard and to this day many external Devs just provide .deb files or now even snaps XD

            So layering, as far as I understood:

            1. your OS on your PC, every package traced through OSTree as with using Git
            2. an ostree remote, which is not directly a repository but the exact OS they build.
            3. Your PC compares the packages with the packages there and downloads the diffs.
            4. Your PC then builds another image, being exactly the one on their servers

            If you install/layer additional RPMs, after 3. you have an additional step, where rpm-ostree also uses traditional Fedora repos and downloads regular RPMs to your system. You can use any regular Repos, even COPR but you need to add the .repo files manually to /etc/yum.repos.d/. RPMFusion has a fancy way where you layer a package and that handles the updating of the repo files to your current version, really nice.

            So this package is installed along, and as its done through rpm-ostree its very well traced. It will do changes but an rpm-ostree uninstall PACKAGE will completely remove it again. If you are not entirely sure rpm-ostree reset will completely reset your system to be a mirror of the ostree remote.

            If you have a background service, you could reset the system every month or so. Not necessary but this would make extra sure your system directories are not weirdly modified. You would do this through

            rpm-ostree reset --install PACKAGE1 --install PACKAGE2

            Or maybe that doesnt work, not sure, and you need

            rpm-ostree reset && rpm-ostree install PACKAGE1 PACKAGE2

            Here you can also remove added packages like Kwrite or firefox + firefox-langpacks

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