My 2012 MBP has Intel/ Nvidia graphics and every distribution I’ve ever tried has struggled with that, it seems to just be the way of things.
Have it working perfectly now (disabling Nvidia altogether) but involved both an NVRAM tweak and VGA Switcheroo.
Many distros have failed to even boot to the live USB on that Mac.
A C64 is one of the only retro machines I’ve never encountered before in-person. Presume they were less popular in the UK because of the Spectrum.
But I have a default appreciation of it because of my childhood Amiga adoration.
I actually installed Virtual64 on the Mac the other day and was trying to learn some ways to mess around in BASIC. Hoping to get to know the C64 (and Spectrum) better, mainly just for the fun of it.
Well, context is everything. Obviously there’s no single best distro for all use cases.
This is a 13 year old MacBook Pro, with ancient Linux-hating hybrid Nvidia/Intel graphics that needs an NVRAM modification and vga_switcheroo to do things like video acceleration properly.
And not my main computer, just for learning Linux and playing some old games.
So Endeavour worked great, but seemed like ultimately a computer that old is probably best off with stability and minimal updates rather than being bleeding-edge and subjecting it to gigabytes of updates each week.
Yep. I was using Plasma on Mint for a while but the consensus was you’re best off using a DE officially supported by the distro.
Never encountered any issues personally up to that point, but seemed to be the majority opinion when I researched it.
But my most recent switch was from Endeavour, so made much more sense to install Debian 13 than to Install Mint and then immediately switch DE.
Went back to Mint a few times but ultimately I like Plasma over Cinnamon, so Debian it is!
Debian 13 with KDE Plasma has been super nice. Really nice looking straight out the box, zero setup required.
Feel like Ubuntu and Mint have less and less reason to exist with how great Debian is these days.
Some very good advice here already so I’ll be brief.
Here are some random things that spring to mind as being of note as someone who hasn’t switched exactly, but has used Macs since 1995 and uses Linux alongside macOS.
Gnome will be the most familiar on day 1, BUT. It’s amazing how quickly that won’t matter anymore when you’re learning what’s what. I started on Gnome and avoided KDE Plasma, which everyone said was more like Windows - and still ended up liking KDE Plasma the most. Both aesthetically and in terms of how easy it is to adjust anything that might not be quite right.
Avoid XFCE if you have a high resolution display, and you’re installing Linux on an old Mac. Customising XFCE to scale things correctly for high resolution is stuff you just don’t want to be messing with as a new Linux user.
Avoid X11 and use Wayland (which will be fine if you use KDE or Gnome). X11 was very confusing to me as a Mac user, as certain changes require a reboot. As above, this is just an extra level of complexity you don’t need if you’re used to Macs. On Wayland if you change the visual scale of the interface or cursor size, it just changes then and there. On X11 you’ll be wondering why certain things don’t seem to be changing…
On macOS you install apps generally by drag and drop. On Linux, whilst this isn’t actually true when you know what you’re doing, it’s as if you only have the App Store. It might have different names on different distros or DEs, but fundamentally you’re going to have a single repository that all your apps and updates are coming from.
Firefox has a hidden menu bar and you have to push alt to bring it up.
Apart from swapping ctrl and cmd many keyboard commands will be familiar.
It’s ultimately up to you how familiar you want to get with the terminal. Some distros you could genuinely ignore its existence. Others would expect you to use it at times and not supply certain GUI tools for certain things.
People are probably right that Linux Mint is the best place to start. You almost certainly will want to switch just to see what else is out there at some point, it’s just how things go. I use KDE Plasma on Debian now. But there’s nothing Mint is lacking or doesn’t have. Ultimately the only reason I’m not still using Mint is because of wanting to use Plasma, which is doable on Mint if anyone wanted to, but not officially supported.