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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: February 10th, 2025
  • HexagonSun@lemmy.ziptoLinux@lemmy.ml•Do you use Arch btw? Best Arch distro?English
    2·
    4 days ago

    For the reasons I switched to Debian see my other reply.

    I use the computer for:

    • Learning and understanding Linux, in the broader sense. It’s a “spare” computer and over the past 3 years I’ve installed Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Gnome, Pop! OS, Spiral Linux, G4OS, Linux Mint, LMDE, Spiral Linux, Debian, EndeavourOS, Fedora, Garuda… and I’ve failed to install (wouldn’t boot to live USB, or wouldn’t boot after installation) many more, including Void, PikaOS, MX Linux, OpenSUSE, and probably a few others…
    • Playing old games. I’ve got a steam deck, but for things like Return To Castle Wolfenstein and the Settlers II you just need a mouse and keyboard. Lutris has been awesome.

    If you have a 15” Retina MBP, it’s been a huge pain in the ass, and multiple distros just stopped working after updates, often not long after installation. But also it’s been a good learning experience for the very same same reason. To work well in 2026 it needs the Nvidia graphics disabling - but the NVRAM defaults that Mac to Nvidia at startup for Linux, so even that bit isn’t straightforward! If you simply blacklist Nvidia it won’t boot.

    I also bought a USB WiFi adapter as the Broadcom card doesn’t work initially on most distros, and can’t support WPA3 even when it does work.

  • HexagonSun@lemmy.ziptoLinux@lemmy.ml•Do you use Arch btw? Best Arch distro?English
    2·
    4 days ago

    Yes, at this stage. Although before now I’ve installed a few different things over the last couple of years as a learning experience also.

    It’s not my main computer, but one I replaced. This freed me up to have a computer with no music or photos or anything on it, so I could test different distros and DEs and troubleshoot stuff without having any concerns about losing anything if I made a mistake or just erased and started over.

    I’d never actually used Linux before 2023, much more familiar now.

  • HexagonSun@lemmy.ziptoLinux@lemmy.ml•Do you use Arch btw? Best Arch distro?English
    4·
    4 days ago

    Endeavour worked totally fine, no issues whatsoever… or no issue where Debian does better at least.

    My 2 main reasons were:

    1. Ignorance over the point at which hardware components become so old and deprecated that bleeding edge updates might just break something one day. Couldn’t find a definitive answer, but I knew if Debian 13 works fine now it should still be working fine in 2 years. That Mac has outdated Intel/Nvidia graphics that have always been problematic on Linux, and many distros won’t even boot the live USB on it, so it felt like if any computer was ever going to spontaneously have a post-update issue it would probably be that one.

    2. Trying the give my ageing hardware the easiest ride in its senior years. The SSD is still original and approaching 14 years of pretty heavy use, so I thought to have it surviving as long as possible an OS that might only give 0-300MB of updates in a week would be a safer bet than an OS that would have many many more gigabytes of updates over a longer period of time.

  • HexagonSun@lemmy.ziptoLinux@lemmy.ml•Advice for a Mac user switching to Linux?English
    61·
    13 days ago

    Some very good advice here already so I’ll be brief.

    Here are some random things that spring to mind as being of note as someone who hasn’t switched exactly, but has used Macs since 1995 and uses Linux alongside macOS.

    • Gnome will be the most familiar on day 1, BUT. It’s amazing how quickly that won’t matter anymore when you’re learning what’s what. I started on Gnome and avoided KDE Plasma, which everyone said was more like Windows - and still ended up liking KDE Plasma the most. Both aesthetically and in terms of how easy it is to adjust anything that might not be quite right.

    • Avoid XFCE if you have a high resolution display, and you’re installing Linux on an old Mac. Customising XFCE to scale things correctly for high resolution is stuff you just don’t want to be messing with as a new Linux user.

    • Avoid X11 and use Wayland (which will be fine if you use KDE or Gnome). X11 was very confusing to me as a Mac user, as certain changes require a reboot. As above, this is just an extra level of complexity you don’t need if you’re used to Macs. On Wayland if you change the visual scale of the interface or cursor size, it just changes then and there. On X11 you’ll be wondering why certain things don’t seem to be changing…

    • On macOS you install apps generally by drag and drop. On Linux, whilst this isn’t actually true when you know what you’re doing, it’s as if you only have the App Store. It might have different names on different distros or DEs, but fundamentally you’re going to have a single repository that all your apps and updates are coming from.

    • Firefox has a hidden menu bar and you have to push alt to bring it up.

    • Apart from swapping ctrl and cmd many keyboard commands will be familiar.

    • It’s ultimately up to you how familiar you want to get with the terminal. Some distros you could genuinely ignore its existence. Others would expect you to use it at times and not supply certain GUI tools for certain things.

    • People are probably right that Linux Mint is the best place to start. You almost certainly will want to switch just to see what else is out there at some point, it’s just how things go. I use KDE Plasma on Debian now. But there’s nothing Mint is lacking or doesn’t have. Ultimately the only reason I’m not still using Mint is because of wanting to use Plasma, which is doable on Mint if anyone wanted to, but not officially supported.