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.
TL;Dr elementary will give you what you want if you like Mac’s interface. Depending on the complexity of the thing you’re doing you won’t need to dip into the terminal too much
Elementary was my favourite out of all of em until I moved to NixOS so I’d recommend that especially coming from Mac
Realistically distro doesn’t really matter that much with a few exceptions (arch, NixOS, qubes all do something different) the thing you’ll want to pay more attention to is desktop environment
Main 3 imo are GNOME (looks kinda like android, everything is setup sensibly but not much customisation) KDE (looks like windows 10 out of the box and functions in a similar way, very customisable) XFCE (looks kinda like windows XP/7, one of the most lightweight ones)
Elementary uses a modified version of gnome (I believe) called Pantheon
Pop uses their own spin on gnome though they’re currently writing their own
Mint uses their own DE called Cinnanon
Ubuntu and fedora I believe both use gnome by default but can also be installed with others
I’ve had numerous issues running Ubuntu and any Ubuntu based distros on my laptop, that’s why I personally dislike it
The fact that they’re starting to make questionable decisions around snap is just extra reason imo
Also op didn’t say they were coming from Mac but did say they were planning to put Linux on one they already have, think it’s a safe guess that they might be used to macos
It’s quite good as an all rounder really, I’m using it on my gaming pc, laptop and raspberry pi for some self hosting stuff currently, all of which use a modular config file so I’ve got the same installed programs, hotkeys, user profile etc whatever machine I’m using
Absolutely same with the actual hardware thing you can’t get a good feel for an os on a VM
Nix package manager and home manager runs on any distro and even Mac so you can use a home manager config cross machine
There are other benefits though like the fact that you can configure services, system components and other software with like 2 lines of code most the time and it just works