Hey everyone, right now, I’m mostly Mac-based. I also have an older PC, a Raspberry Pi, micro PC and a mac laptop.
Now that I’m retired and have more time on my hands, I really want to dive deep into Linux and break away from the monopoly.
I’ll definitely do my own research, but there’s so much information out there—it feels like drinking from a firehose. It’s overwhelming!
Do you have any tips or websites to help me get started, step by step? I know I’ll make plenty of mistakes along the way (that’s how ya learn), but I’d appreciate any advice you can share. Thanks!
Qubes: all in
VMs for everything, you can run different distros for each app. A big learning curve but your all in!
Things you will learn at the same time
- hypervisor
- xen
- Linux
- app, deb, flatpak, every package manger you can think of
Thank you!
I honestly endorse the cult of thinkpads, get an old t-series or some other cheap model. They have excellent driver compatability and access to tinker with the hardware. If you want to build it out to be a behemoth with an i7-i9 with like 16gb and a small boot drive but a massive spinning rust drive that’s doable. But it’s also a good light machine, say you keep it on 8gb and a 256 or whatever stock is… that’s still a good machine.
I’m currently running an ancient windows 7 era Dell machine and it works great its just showing it’s age in physical condition and thermals. Unfortunately it is a tank of laptop when it comes to lugging it around (especially compared to a modern thin& light). but even that still has enough horsepower as a 2ng Gen core i3 with 8gb and a 1tb spinning rust drive, for some light stuff like ,music playing and writing.
You might think about tossing ubuntu with lxqt or sway on the MacBook. Just be sure you have a way to get internet set up most the wifi cards in MacBook don’t work out of the box.
Thank you!
Idk, just install it? Since you’re a Mac person, it’ll probably be easier to install on a non-Mac device, so from what you listed, I’d recommend either the micro PC (not sure what that is? AMD mini PC or something?) or the old PC.
For distro, I recommend Linux Mint or Fedora. They’re both easy to install, have large communities, and largely do what you want out of the box. You’ll need a USB drive, and then just follow instructions to “burn” an ISO (that you’ll get from the Linux distro website) to the USB drive, boot from it (probably mash F11 or Delete to get to the boot menu as the PC boots), and follow the instructions to install. Make sure you’re okay losing all data on the PC before installing, because it will replace everything.
After that, learn whatever strikes your fancy.
Good luck! Feel free to post back if you get stuck.
Thanks. I was getting the impression that Mint may be the first one to try. Looks like that’s spot on, so I’m going for it. I’ll def keep everyone updated. Thank you!
Well, if you actually want to invest some time in learning, Arch is great for that, while also being awesome distro. Some say that you should NEVER use it for your first time with Linux, but I disagree. You should never use it if you have short attention span and unable to read, but if that’s not the case, you’re good to go.
My recommendation is to not try to learn everything at once. Burn archiso on USB stick, boot into it, use
archinstallto get in set up easily, and then search ArchWiki for topics of your interest, for instance the installer won’t install printing support, but if you google “archwiki printing” the very first result you get is CUPS page with basically all that you need to get printing up and running.During the installation there might be some choices that aren’t entirely clear. For example which graphics drivers to use - it depends on your hardware, if you’re on Intel or AMD graphics, simply select “all open-source” and for nvidia there different choices. If you get to choose option for audio, Pipewire is the best choice. For profile choose desktop and select the one you want. If you don’t know, I highly recommend KDE Plasma, but you might also like GNOME if MacOS is your thing. For networking use NetworkManager for easy integration with your desktop.
I also recommend installing Flatpak and use it as primary source for installing apps, rather than defaulting to system packages.
It might take more effort with Arch to get something functional, but it is more rewarding as you can get exactly the setup you want and can learn a lot.
