I really don't understand why we got rid of it! Why move toward using two letters in place of a single one? Þat's just feaÞerbrained.

Oh, wonderful. Thank you so much for your help!

Thank you so much for explaining all of this!

Yeah, I think I will try out at least a couple distros on USBs or maybe a virtual machine. I think I still have at least one USB lying around somewhere in my closet... don't remember if it has enough space, but maybe.

Based on those articles and your explanations, I'm certainly going to want to explore immutable and atomic at some point, although maybe not right away since it sounds like there's more I'd need to learn. Both of those qualities sound fantastic to me. I think I'll be fine with a little more storage use, and I highly doubt I'll want to change anything about critical folders anytime soon. I'd like to avoid broken installations and myself accidentally doing really stupid things.

Yeah, I'll look at the documentation available before I install any OS. Thank you!

Oh, OK. It seems very weird to not have a minimize button in elementary OS, unless the maximize button is also a minimize button. I wouldn't want to have to close a window and reopen it every time I wanted to downsize it. I'd probably end up resizing windows manually instead of maximizing them.

Thank you so much! That makes a lot more sense.

Yeah, I'm realizing that might be unavoidable. I'm still hoping I can get Linux Mint or Zorin working without messing around with that (one person said they didn't have to do any of that when installing those on similar Macs, but others did - maybe this changed at some point when Mint/Zorin was updated?), but we'll see. Not looking forward to figuring that out, but it might be worth it. Thanks!

Lots of smart people work at Google just about every company. They are not included in senior management.

Awesome, thanks! Do you think I'll have to mess with the wifi card or drivers to get things like the wifi, audio, and/or webcam to work?

Thanks! What kinds of workflow differences? And do you think I'll have to mess with the wifi card and drivers to get it to work? I'm seeing some people talking about that with other operating systems.

Yeah, I'll definitely want the security patches on whatever timeline. I just don't want other kinds of updates frequently.

Yeah, it's an Intel Mac. Intel Core i5, which appears to be in that x86-64 range if I'm understanding correctly.

I think I'd prefer stability over rolling release. One of the things I've really appreciated about Apple's stuff is not having to deal with zillions of updates, like I did with my last PC. I'm not sure what you consider to be tinkering "a bit" with a computer, but I haven't had to do that in a long time, and I suspect I'll be happiest keeping that to a minimum (at least for now). So based on this, I'll look at Fedora and Mint.

Thank you for all of this info!

Thanks for all of this! Yeah, I'm not sure whether I'll need to dual boot or not since this won't be my main work computer, but I'll keep that in mind.

Everyone seems to be recommending Gnome. I'll check out Cosmic too. At first glance, it looks pretty cool, but I don't totally know what I'm looking for yet since I haven't really had to look at desktop environment choices before.

re Fedora - very well maintained and stable sounds excellent! I'm assuming this applies to both Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Cosmic? Might look into Pop!_OS as well, if it's popular I'm guessing I could find resources to troubleshoot anything that goes wrong.

I'm curious about Atomic options. That sounds like a great option for someone who's kinda worried about screwing things up, especially if I really do get into programming this time and fall into the rabbit hole of fiddling with computer things. I'll definitely read up on that.

Oh, OK. Once in half a year sounds just fine, I don't think I'd actually want it to be more often than that. I do like stability. Thanks!

Oh, OK. Very different use case!

If you're at the level of knowing all this stuff and also running your own server, and you're finding PopOS Cosmic to be still in its beta days, then it's probably not for someone like me. I don't really know what dnf vs. apt means yet (still just trying to wrap my head around what a package manager does). A lot of people keep recommending Gnome, though, so I'll probably still try that and maybe Fedora.

Thanks for looking into this and finding that Github documentation! All of this stuff still sounds complicated to me, but I'm probably going to have to do some learning and kitting up anyway. It turns out that this computer's battery is toast because it sat in a closet for years, and my relative never recharged it in all that time. I might as well look into a new Wi-Fi card and maybe a new SSD as well, if I'm going to be fixing this thing up with new parts anyway. Might have to wait a bit longer than I thought to get started, though. I don't know what anything else you mentioned in this post is, but I can learn. I'll probably try to figure out the Facetime HD drivers eventually.

Zorin looks nice too! Thanks.

If it's just rolling back a package once in two years, that doesn't sound so bad. I don't see myself downloading updates once a week, though. I'd rather have fewer updates, especially if they're well-tested and I can set things up so they happen overnight while I'm sleeping.

I really like knowing that I won't be stuck with whatever setup I start with. Thank you!

yeah, this is the part that really worries me. Ads are fine IMO, psychological profiling not so much. I used to hear "if you're not paying, you're the product," but now you're the product even if you are paying.

By the way, are any of the other streaming services better than Spotify for not having your data sold to third parties?

2014-2015 Macbooks are/were problematic? Uh oh. The computer I'd be using is an early 2015 Macbook Pro Retina, 13". A1502.

Thanks for all the Ubuntu info! Yeah, that's not as concerning as I'd thought, but it still doesn't sound like the best choice for me. Based on a lot of the other comments here, I'll probably end up going with Fedora or Mint.

"It just works..." oh, man. You're giving me deja vu from when I first tried a Mac. This is the #1 reason I've stuck with Macs until now, outside of when my pre-pandemic work/school required me to use a PC. OK, sold. Definitely going to be looking at Linux Mint!

Awesome! That's very promising. It looks like a lot of other people are recommending Fedora, too. I'll definitely check it out!