Give fedora a try. It has everything you would need from a modern “vanilla” linux distro and no user telemetry tracking.
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Another vote for Fedora. I run it on a 2008 Mac Pro daily just fine. Good luck.
To be fair, Fedora has opt-in telemetry. It's 100% anonymized, though, and helps with development. I always say yes when I'm running a beta (like now).
That having been said, you should always check the privacy policies of any given distro. They tend to all be pretty up front about it (kinda hard to lie about it when anyone can check your source code...).
AFAIK, though, neither Mint nor Elementary collect telemetry by default, although they might have opt-in like Fedora. Both are based on Ubuntu LTS, but they also both scrape out so much stuff that they're devoid of most of the Canonical junk.
No Linux distro "tracks" like Windows, Android, iOS or macOS do. This is nonsense. Fedora may introduce opt-something telemitry that will just help make the Distro better, and via one single setting you can always enable or disable it.
I have full data sharing on KDE and also report lots of bugs.
Pro-tip: set your username as "user" do avoid doxxing yourself uploading debug logs
Mint doesn’t by default, but it is based on Canonical’s Ubuntu which is not the most privacy friendly distro. Depending on how you install your software, some telemetry might go to Canonical.
Honestly, any general purpose distro will do fine. I’d watch a YouTube review of Elementary and Mint and see what you think. I’d also throw in Ubuntu and Fedora, as they run a more modern desktop that might be more interesting to you as a Mac user than Mint, which is Windows-like out of the box.
Keep in mind: choosing a distro is sort of like choosing your first car. It’s fine to have a taste, but don’t let the decision paralyze you, because 90% of learning to drive will be exactly the same regardless of what car you choose. Likewise, 90% of linux will be the same regardless of your distro.
Pick something and use it. Don't listen to any of us (but my suggestion is PopOS)
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
Does your Mac have Touch Bar? If so, you should try using t2linux-provided ISOs. Although 2016 MBP isn't T2 equipped Mac, the Touch Bar driver should be compatible AFAIK.
Cool! That was my concern. A cursory search shown a lot of driver issues for macs, albeit some were rather old.
This is an actually useful recommendation
Mint and Pop OS are fantastic. Both have great support out of the box and lots of help out there on the Internet.
If you're trying to game I would flatly say Pop OS. General computing, both are a tie for me. They just work (as far as Linux goes).
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:
- your OS on your PC, every package traced through OSTree as with using Git
- an ostree remote, which is not directly a repository but the exact OS they build.
- Your PC compares the packages with the packages there and downloads the diffs.
- 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
As someone who got started with Linux using Mint too years ago I think you got a great selection there and I wouldn'tup listen too much to the comments, big oarts of the Linux crowd on Lemmy came from Lemmy and it's toxic and shitty so they will tell you you are wrong no matter what you do or say and recommend terribble things to newcomers! Just flash Mint Cinnamon or Elementary on a USB stick, boot them up and play around with both before you decide which you want to install. I am a Fedora Gnome user myself and as someone who probably values simplicity (mac user) Gnome could be interesting to check out too but it's very different to anything else out there and you already got two great options to try there! :)
It's a fantastic distro to get started, I think the main advantage are various GUI tools for more advanced things that other distros usually require the Terminal for which can be a bit scarry at first. Elementary looks a lot more like MacOS and might be a little more familiar at first while Mint has a fairly similar layout to traditional Windows (7/10), keep in mind that nether of them is a copy tho and you will run into differences. I do think that Mint is the best beginner Distro because of those GUI tools but it can't hurt to try both, almost all Linux distros have live boot to play with them from a USB stick first so you won't have to actually install anything to check them out. In case you go for Mint make sure to pay attention to the welcome screen once you installed it, that guides you through a lot of stuff like configuring automatic backups and the driver manager to download potentialky missing drivers!
The terminal is fantastic once you roughly understand what the commands you execute do but that requires a bit of experience and it's great to have GUI tools for certain things. Modern Linux usually covers everything a normal user should need with GUI tools but there are always edge cases where you have to do something more advanced and I feel like especially those are tough to do in a terminal for new users which is why I appreciate Mint so much! It's been quite a few years since I switched so many things are different by now but I moved back to Windows two times myself from Kubuntu and Manjaro before I discovered Mint so I never get tired to recommend it. Good luck on your journey! ;)
Perhaps Arch Linux? Maybe a bit too much for a toe dip though, I wouldn't know. You'll likely run into driver issues (wifi, audio and apple specific hardware) and Arch ostensibly has the latest drivers. Will happily be corrected though, I've been languishing on Ubuntu and haven't had to fix anything in years.
Arch is not a beginner OS.
OP: give Mint or PoPOS a try or start off directly with Debian stable. As far as driver issues go, make sure to enable the non-free and non-free-firmware for newer Debian versions and you should be okay.
I don't want to be rude, but recommending Arch to a newbie who wants to dip their toe in is just mean. Why not tell them to set up an OpenBSD desktop while they're at it.
And the laptop they're using is from 2015. Why would you need the latest drivers for that?
I am using Linux for 3 years or so now. Even with BTFRS snapshots, no AUR and other things I would not use Arch over Fedora Kinoite. I have no idea how to chroot into anything and suffer from enough daily KDE bugs (bts the KDE components are basically the same version as on Arch).
Chromeos flex?