don’t.

If you wanna learn then buy a cheap used laptop and a pixel and fuck around on those until you figure out what you actually want to do. Don’t “switch”. You’ll be unhappy.

You may not hear this from others, but I would NOT switch your phone OS and desktop OS at the same time. Assuming you live a digital life there is just TOO MUCH to have to deal with while dealing with tbe hassle of things that don’t make sense, or require you to stop what you’re doing and google the answer.

I love /e/OS and would absolutely recommend it, but there are just shortcomings that slow me down all the time (are you OK with the play store compatibility suddenly stopping and you cant download apps - do you wait and see if it starts working after a few minutes? reboot your phone? Log out and back into your google account? Switch to/from anonymous? This happens more than I think folks would readily admit and the solution is just different each time)

Once you are up and running fot a few weeks with whatever change you want to make first then sure go for the other one.

Best of luck!

1. a diestro change typically implies a reinstall. It’s “easy”, but you start from zero again. I don’t do it because it’s a fucking hassle.

2. Mac’s are special. It’s way harder than with generic computers, I suggest that you research it, there’s a specific distro for Mac computers.

3. the one that supports Mac’s best if you want to have a good time. If you are up for buying a new computer, Fedora is fine. You mentioned EndeavourOS I reckon, I have that one and it’s fine, although maybe harder for a newbie? I’d say no but I’m not gonna make any effort in giving you support if you have issues so, yeah.

4. phone Linux is not so advanced, and I’m not up to date so let’s see if others answer.

5. if you are planning on buying new devices, I’d suggest doing that because apple device support is not the best on the open source sphere. Maybe you could go with the Mac’’ Linux distro thing, but having a dedicated laptop/desktop is probably best.

But given how the ram prices have bloated, giving it a try with your devices first might not be the worst idea, and if you have issues you always can buy new devices.

Finally, no idea which brands of devices are best, I built my desktop from parts. For laptops, I know framework and tuxedo exist, with tuxedo working for Linux specifically, and system76 also sells their laptops with their distro (popOS, Ubuntu derivate, which is a debian derivate).

Another thing you might have skipped, desktop environments. If the distro is how your computer works under the hood, desktop environments are how it looks over the hood. For a newbie the main ones are Gnome and KDE, although given that KDE is customisable by default I’d recommend you that, so that you can then tweak it safely. There’s more specialised DEs, but I wouldn’t recommend them to you because you’ll already have enough to deal with with having a new OS and all that. Try to ease your landing as much as possible.

Good luck!

The “multiple distros thing” is often the most confusing aspect of the Linux ecosystem. But don’t sweat it too much - they’re more similar than different. Generally speaking you can do all the same things with most any distro.

The most user-facing differences are in the installer, default UI settings, and how applications are installed. A lot of it is simply preference.

All of the ones you mentioned are “fine”.

But if you want to “distro hop” (something that I consider to be a mostly pointless activity) then you need a way to preserve your home directory between installs. It’s where all of your settings are kept. The two ways of doing that are typically a) have a backup somewhere (recommended regardless) and b) put /home on a separate disk partition (more advanced - easily Googleable though).

I suggest you don’t pull the trigger on everything just yet, or else you’ll get burnt out. Desktop environments aren’t dependent on the distro, just find some environments that look like mac os or the ones that you can configure to look and feel like mac os and use them on the distros that you want to try.

If you’re on an M-series chip, Apple silicon as opposed to the older intel based Macs, your only viable option is Asahi Linux, which is specifically made to run on Apple silicon. If you would like to try this out, I have no promises that you won’t brick your machine. I highly recommend you watch some tutorials and read some documentation about the Asahi install process to see if it is something you’re willing to attempt.

So, the other poster is correct. You need a new non-Apple device if you intend to use Linux freely like the rest of us.

There’s good news though. Linux runs wonderfully on older hardware. Depending on what level of gaming you intend to do, you could get a decent used gaming laptop with a discrete GPU, or even a Thinkpad with integrated graphics for fairly cheap. Carefully consider your hardware choices based on your needs. If you take this route, the world is your oyster, and I highly recommend doing some distro-hopping in your first year.

Linux mint is a great place to start. As far as I am aware the only proprietary software involved is multimedia codecs and Nvidia drivers, but you would want those on any distribution, because the user experience without them is severely lacking.

Fedora is great, but it won’t install the multimedia codecs for you like Linux mint will. You’ll need to start learning how to use the terminal straight away. I consider Fedora to be an intermediate level distribution, unlike Linux Mint or Ubuntu which are very beginner friendly. Fortunately there are plenty of step by step guides and support forum posts to help you through things if you’re willing to do the work.

Arch based distros like CachyOS, EndeavourOS and the like, will challenge you. But that challenge will teach you a lot. I would say after getting comfortable in something like Linux Mint after a few months, give EndeavourOS a try if you want to develop your knowledge.

That brings me to an important point. Back up your files. With either a secondary SSD, or an external HDD/SSD, literally drag and drop the files you can’t bear to lose. Linux is very easy to wipe and reinstall, and hopping from distro to distro until you find your home can be a lot of fun, but having a safe backup so that you can do so without any worry of losing data, is extremely important.

Back up whatever data you want physically on your computer before doing anything. While still using your Mac os, take an external drive you are okay to wipe clean, then reformat it to an .ExFat file type (so both computers can read the drive easily)

I haven’t experimented too much with different distros, but I would say Ubuntu has a Macintosh feel to it to me. Linux mint is what I use for my gaming PC, and it works fine, but between Ubuntu’s and Mint’s terminals, I like Ubuntu’s way more. It’s a bit pedantic, but I just prefer it that way

• +1 for ventoy - easy way to explore the look and feel of different options before committing. You can boot from the drive without a full install and then reboot to run another image.

• didn’t see it mentioned but Asahi Linux is a project for running Linux on supported mac hardware. Could keep your Mac hardware running for you for a long while.

• 2 cents on distros: cachyOS with KDE desktop is a pretty snappy and easy entry point with a lot of fun development happening currently. As others noted, it’s all personal preference tho.

Foci on YouTube has been making some pretty informative videos about switching to Linux, from the perspective of a (former) Mac user.

All the options you listed are downstream from a company. Fedora is from red hat, mint is a fork of Ubuntu, open suse is from… Suse? I can’t remember. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but figured I’d mention it.

Any distro you choose can look however you want. This is something I didn’t understand at first. Your version of Linux lives below the desktop environment. You can install (almost) whatever desktop environment you want on top of your version. Then you can tweak your desktop however you want. Some distros come pre-tweaked but don’t pick a distro on looks alone.

So really your deciding between 3 base Linux distros. Most “distros” are just the base system with some choice drivers and software to help you get going. A few of them are tweaking at the kernel level. You can do the raw version of any of the base Linux versions if you prefer to control and limit any software on your system.

Debian - updates slowly but stable, focus on testing before stable releases. You might miss new Linux features but unless you’re running the latest hardware you probably won’t know the difference. Distros based on Debian: Ubuntu, mint, popos, elementary os (looks like macos!), a hundred other ones.

Arch - updates rapidly with the risk of something not working. If you want bleeding edge features or every drop of performance choose an Arch distro. Just know that you MIGHT need to help it along. I don’t think arch distros being difficult is as true as it once was. There are some excellent distros out there making arch accessible and easy for the masses. Notable distros based on arch: endeavor, cachyos (my personal favorite right now), omarchy

Fedora: kind of a mix giving you fairly up to date software with a stable system. Honestly it’s probably the best place for a newbie to start. It’s not perfect though and you’ll want to read up on install if you have a Nvidia card. Fedora based distros: nobara, bazzite, but most people just use vanilla fedora.

deleted by creator