Hi all, thanks in advance for indulging a complete newbie! I’d like to try Linux on an 11-year-old MacBook Pro (gifted by a relative), but I don’t know where to start. What distribution would you recommend based on my background?
-Coming from the Mac world; haven’t used a PC/Windows since before the pandemic. I’d prefer something that feels similar to MacOS.
-Not a techie. I’ve forgotten everything (everything!) I ever learned about command line because I never ended up needing to use it, and I haven’t had to debug anything in a long time.
-What I’ll be using it for: accessing the internet, various kinds of creative projects that I’ll probably try making with FOSS software (something I’ve only recently started to look into), and making another attempt at learning programming (my interest will probably peter out before I get anywhere with it, though, because that’s what happened the last two times). Probably won’t be gaming. I’d prefer having the option to use mainstream office software in case anything happens to my current computer, but I don’t actually expect anything to happen to it in the next few years, so that’s just a nice-to-have.
-Priorities: works on old Mac hardware, good for privacy, decent software availability, not buggy, ability to avoid generative AI (i.e., no repeat of Apple installing the Image Playground app on my computer along with a software update, without the ability to remove it.)
It seems like a lot of people recommend Ubuntu or Linux Mint to beginners, but I’m seeing some people complaining that Ubuntu is has spyware(?) and forces things users don’t want, and it seems like Linux Mint is usually recommended to people coming from Windows, so IDK if either of those make sense for me. Advice/recommendations appreciated!
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I am a programmer and have a little server that runs Debian. On my desktop PC I run Linux Mint and I absolutely love it. It just works. In 2026 there is no good reason to got with Ubuntu anymore.
“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!
I have a 2016 mac with a touch bar and I’ve been dual booting Linux mint. Wifi, sound and the touch bar do not work, at least out of the box. May not be a good first time Linux experience if things don’t just work well. Just giving you fore warning I would maintain a dual boot til you find something stable.
Alternatively Dells and thinkpads are well supported with Linux, they may not have the specs that the mac has but everything works and can be gotten used on Amazon for a couple hundred dollars.
Good luck with your Linux journey.
Oh no, I was half-convinced I should start with Linux Mint based on other comments, but if the wifi and sound don’t work on a 2016 Mac, I imagine that would be true for a 2015 one too. F that. You said that was a problem out of the box - does that mean you were able to get the wifi and sound working consistently later on, after all?
I don’t want to invest in new hardware right now, but I might look into Dell next time I need new hardware if I end up liking Linux.
Mint with Gnome
For starters if you are dual booting with Mac OSX you’ll need to use rEFInd Boot Manager. This is something you’ll usually be asked to select at install, so don’t sweat this part too much.
When you mention wanting a Mac like experience, I’d recommend going with Gnome Desktop. That’s going to have a familiar look and feel to you.
There is a custom flavor of Gnome called Cosmic by System76. It was designed for their distro Pop!_OS and has been very popular. Cosmic basically came about by System76 not being happy with how Gnome did some things that didn’t fit their needs.
Most distros (versions of Linux) will allow you to install whatever DE (Desktop Environment) you want.
As you mentioned Linux Mint comes up a lot, which ships with Cinnamon DE which is based on GNOME 3, but modified to look a little more traditional in the Windows sense of things. There is also an alternate version of Mint that ships with a custom version of MATE, a DE that is based on Gnome 2, but that may feel a bit dated to you.
Distros to consider:
Fedora - very well maintained and stable distro.
Offers Gnome (or other desktop environment of choice)
Offers Atomic options. Atomic or immutable distros are a newer thing that basically ensures there’s always a path to roll back on in case something gets messed up. There’s a bit to read here about all the benefits of this, but worth looking into.
Fedora Silverblue ships with Gnome and is atomic
Fedora Cosmic ships with Cosmic and is atomic
Pop!_OS by System76 is pretty popular and easy to get running. Popular with people looking for gaming, tho I know you mentioned you’re not doing that. Ships with Cosmic Desktop. Definitely worth a look into.
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.
By old Mac hardware I assume you mean x86-64 Intel Macs? Pretty much any modern distro should work on that.
If you are in general ok with tinkering a bit with your computer, I’d recommend Arch derivatives like EndeavourOS or CachyOS, these come with full GUI installers and software availability on Arch is one of the widest around.
Arch is rolling release, though, meaning each package gets updated as soon as a new version is available, rarely it leads to things breaking.
If you want something more stable, Fedora is a great choice, too.
As you mentioned yourself, Mint also exists. It’s packages are usually on the older side, but the distro itself is trying to be this “gateway drug of Linux”.
The feel of the system is mostly determined not by your distribution, though, but rather by your desktop environment. As far as I know, GNOME is the most “Mac-like” out of popular ones. KDE is “Windows done right”, and there are a lot of other options, but you’ll mostly have to try them out yourself until you find something you like.
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!
x86 is the instruction set, 64 is for 64-bit extension of that instruction set. It’s also known as AMD64 to make it even more confusing. All Intel Core processors starting from Core 2 are using that architecture, as far as I remember.
By “tinkering a bit” I meant sometimes digging up a package in the archives and rolling it back. I used Arch daily for around 2 years and had to do it once. You can also avoid it by keeping tabs on what the community says, broken packages cause quite a bit of fuss.
Release schedule is a trade off, if you are updating weekly, it’ll usually take less than 5 minutes to download all the packages that got updated within that week. The rarer you update, the more time each update takes.
But it’s all ultimately a matter of preference, just wing something up and try to use it for a couple of days. If it’s not to your taste, scrap it and try something else, it’s rare to end up with a setup you like right from the get go.
This is a fantastic comment!
To add to this I would start towards Fedora as it’s stable but also fresh, and as lots of people have been saying try Gnome as your desktop environment.
Interesting, what do you mean by “fresh”?
Some distributions like Debian get releases once per year or two, people tend to joke around that those are “stale” rather than “stable”. Fedora lives somewhere in between, you get more testing than on Arch, but less than on the likes of Debian. Usual Fedora release cycle is once in half a year.
Whichever distro you end up choosing, consider one which makes use of the Gnome desktop environment - the current version of gnome is very similar to the Mac OS desktop layout so it could help your transition.
Awesome, I’ll do that!
side note: I love that it’s called Gnome. Other people have garden gnomes, but I will have a computer Gnome
LibreOffice is generally a fine alternative to MS Office. I do collaborative writing with the MS world, and rarely run into any issues - mostly related to Track Changes. It’s installed with the ‘full desktop’ version of most distros.
Python is part of every distro and a good place to start programming.
yeah, haven’t tried LibreOffice but it seems like a good way to go! I do worry about Track Changes having issues (that’s been an important function for me in the past), but I’m not planning to use this computer for work right now, so that’s not a dealbreaker.
Mint would probably be a good starter distro, but since you’ve got an intel mac (I assume) there should be a decent number of choices out there. Having used both Mint and MacOS, I would say you probably won’t have very much trouble with the interface. Plus if you get stuck, everything should be pretty well documented so getting help should be relatively easy most of the time.
If you want something more Mac-like go with the Gnome destkop when Mint asks during setup, but personally I like Cinnamon on Mint.
Thanks! Yeah, I think it’s hilarious that I’ll have more options on this older Mac than I’d have on my current/newer Mac, which doesn’t have an Intel chip. Usually it’s the other way around, isn’t it?
Based on most of the comments here, I’m probably going to end up with Gnome, but I’ll check out Cinnamon too.
also: Cinnamon on Mint sounds like a delicious tea recipe. Why do all of the Linux things have such fun names? Cinnamon, Gnome, Fedora… maybe this is just a natural result of Linux having the penguin logo
The only thing i’ll add is that Distro (stuff like Ubuntu and Mint) is far less important to your overall linux experience than desktop environment (stuff like KDE Plasma and Gnome) I’d do a little more research on your own about these choices before coming to a conclusion, but the opinion of a former Windows user who has only used Mac a few times in passing is that Gnome feels a lot more like Mac than Windows. Fedora is a good, fairly user friendly Distro that supports Gnome
OK, good to know! Yeah, it seems like a lot of people are recommending the Gnome desktop environment. I’ll look into Fedora for the distro.
I installed Fedora 44 on a 14-year-old iMac, and I couldn’t be happier
Awesome! That’s very promising. It looks like a lot of other people are recommending Fedora, too. I’ll definitely check it out!
@butWhatIfiCan @homes I have used Debian distres like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, PopOS osv. I have try tonuse Arch, Slackware,Suse, Open Suse - You name it - i have tryed The most Distros. Now i only use Fedora KDE!
Personally, I like gnome 50 myself, but I’m not using as a desktop. I’m currently using that 14-year-old iMac as a server, so my needs from the desktop experience are very very minimal.
I also really liked popos until cosmic. Not only do I not really like cosmic all that much, it clearly still and it’s beta days, and not really ready for mainstream use.
I also like fedora because it’s very very tidy under the hood compared to Debian based distros. Esp dnf vs apt.
I’ve never tried it but it looks like ElementaryOS checks a lot of those boxes
Interesting! Looks a lot like MacOS, maybe a slightly older and simpler version, which isn’t necessarily bad.
Probably your best bet for something similar in vein to MacOS would be any distro that ships with GNOME. Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed all either ship explicitly with GNOME or have them as options within their live installers.
If you know which model and spec your Macbook is, I could give better compatibility insights. In short, the Broadcom chips used for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth in the 2014-2015 Macbooks used to be quite problematic for many Linux distros, but I do believe the in-tree
bcm43xxdriver in the kernel should handle them well enough nowadays. Depending on exact year and spec, your Macbook may come with an NVidia GPU, which will require additional post-installation steps to install the proprietary drivers on many distros. As it isn’t the primary display device on those models, there shouldn’t be too many issues in getting the cards to function and render offloading to work.Ubuntu discourse
Ubuntu is not really spyware as people may claim it to be. The main spyware claim comes from two sources: the 14 year old once-integration for Amazon services that Ubuntu shipped around the 12.10 point release and that Ubuntu does utilize more telemetry than other distros.
Often though, it’s not a recommended distro anymore for many reasons. One primary one is that Ubuntu used to be seen as user-friendly and had a lot of community forum posts to document how to use it. Nowadays, most major distros have caught up and surpassed Ubuntu in usability and reliability, and Ubuntu’s once-positive of forum posts largely tend to clog up being able to find useful information when a problem does occur because of how out-of-date many of those forum posts that still show up in search results are.
Another big reason is Ubuntu is not recommended is Canonical’s (the company the makes Ubuntu) makes regular missteps and often falls on the wrong side of development for progress of the Linux desktop. See Unity desktop, Mir, Upstart, and the current misstep of Snaps. Canonical has also additionally put less effort into keeping that once-polished experience the Ubuntu desktop had and moved a lot of their effort into their server offerings. There have been relatively recent Ubuntu LTS desktop releases that have shipped with some baffling and often showstopping bugs that should have been release blockers. It’s to a point where the QC of releases is often worse than what is found on 6-month point release and even many rolling release distros to where many don’t recommend Ubuntu anymore.
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.
Asahi Linux is for Apple silicon macs only, and as their macbook is 11 years old it can’t be an apple silicon version.
Looks like it has either an i5 or i7, depending on the specific A1502 version they picked up, meaning there’s a lot more distro’s they can run!
Just brings a tear to my eye knowing someone else is starting on their Linux journey 🥲
Linux distribution doesn’t have a huge bearing on UI, except that most distros come with a particular DE (desktop environment) pre-installed. However, you can install any DE of your choice after installing the OS, and switch between DEs at ease without reinstalling the OS.
GNOME’s defaults are quite visually similar to macOS in terms of layout. I’m sure KDE Plasma (the other big Linux DE) can be modded to look like macOS too, but by default it more resembles the Windows desktop. I’d say go for Linux Mint and then install GNOME (look up stuff like “linux mint how to install gnome”). Both Linux Mint and GNOME are widely used and “beginner-friendly”, so if you run into any problems, it shouldn’t be hard to find answers either by searching things up or posting on forums if you can’t find any solutions already online.
Yeah, I really like the idea of something with a large userbase. I’d definitely be relying on support from forums if anything went wrong, as I don’t really know anyone who uses Linux. Thank you!
It’s nice that you can switch DE’s easily with Linux. Makes it a lot less intimidating to choose one!
I hear good things about Zorin
