I’m on board that we need to become independent from big tech. As someone who is fond of the Mac user experience, from choosing hardware to how you navigate through apps, I need a guide to make the switch.
Try and avoid the XY problem. I.e. “how do I do X with Y?”
You’re coming from macOS and a lot of idiomatic things will be different. Find the idiomatic ways to do (whatever) on the distribution your using.
Also, have fun, be reckless, ruin the system, reinstall try again…
Just would be nice to avoid the pain of spending weeks setting everything up only to find out later that someone essential for me doesn’t work. I guess just part of the process
Just do it. Put something like Linux Mint on your Mac. It’ll work fine. And it’s free.
Or maybe Fedora : Gnome might feel more familiar for a Mac user.
as a mac & linux user since 2002 and i had a time machine to do it all over again but correctly this time; i would go with a linux first vendor like system76 or tuxedo or any other vendor that uses 100% open source hard/software. (ie coreboot/libreboot).
linux can work on almost all hardware (including mac) but you’re mileage is going to vary a lot and only the linux first vendors can give you an experience that rivals mac and windows.
Thank you for saying this. I wonder which vendor is best value for money.
you should also know that it’s a double edged sword if you go with linux first vendors because you’ll likely never learn from resolving your own technical difficulties that arise as a result of hardware that is not 100% linux compatible.
i learned so much from putting linux on my windows & mac hardware; that it enabled me tow work on linux professionally for the last 21 years. switching to linux first hardware 5-ish years ago made my knowledge of people facing issues atrophy, so i bought windows first hardware to re-acquaint myself.
What’s different between Mac OS and Linux besides Apple’s cloud walled garden? You can bash your way through both file systems. Windows is the outlier.
privacy.
apple has proven time and time again that they’ll cave to the american government at any an all oppurtunities while doing theater to pretend to protect its users.
Appreciate what you are doing. You made the right choice
dude, you need to narrow your query way, waaay down. are you ditching the mac and getting a PC? are you gonna rock them side by side until you transition? desktop? gaming? laptop? converting an existing macbook to linux? which one? intel? pre-T2, post? which wifi? what’s your daily software stack you depend on?
all the listed things are possible, some easier, some less so, but, respectfully, nobody’s gonna write up an all-cases guide for your lazy ass. so, hop to it, state your use case and ping back.
I’ve gotten a lot of useful advice! I wasn’t looking for a write up, but an existing guide out there. I’m happy with everything people have written.
a bunch of that is wrong; people here read “what’s the best thing for this” as “what do you use” and treat it as rooting for a team. I’d still urge you to write up a more detailed post, but you do you.
That is one of the things I learned. It’s hard to know what I need without knowing what I could need. Sometimes you don’t know what you use until it’s missing.
Gnome Desktop will be the most familiar UI and workflow for you. Other than that, just take note of your existing software stack, and check to see which will also have Linux builds to install.
Really depends on what is considered nice about MacOS. Just had a new on-boarding with someone who really liked their Mac keybindings and it seems getting those dialed in is nicer (easier? better?) on KDE. I’d also generally gravitate towards Gnome for Mac users though.
As a piece of advice for OP: Accept the use of keybindings over the touchpad. Mac has done a great job and I have not seen a Linux laptop/distro combination that nails it. Search for the pain-points after switching and ask about it (kindly) on a community like this.
You must be using some junk touchpads then. I have two that work just as they would on a Mac. No issues.
Even the gestures? Mac’s gesturing system for the UI and all native and most non native apps is why I stay with it.
Nah, the precision Apple touchpads had 10 years ago still is unmatched today by Windows or Linux, but I’m afraid that’s not a software issue
Please explain how “Windows” and “Linux” manufactured these touchpads?
Dying to know
Dude, dial down the hostility
What hostility? Are QUESTIONS hostile now?
Jesus, we’re all so cooked…
For keybinds, there is the project Toshy which redirects keys to emulate Mac bindings. It has some issues but works pretty well in my experience
For someone coming from Mac you might find Pop OS more familiar.
I grew up using macos, still use it on my work laptop, and use elementary os on my home machine. For the most part, it’s great. I like
- The intuitive UX and the clean, consistent and beautiful UI
- Good default apps and settings
- Flatpak out of the box, no snap bullshit.
- Generally you can get away with quite a bit without resorting to the terminal
Unfortuntalely, there are a few big issues with it, mostly due to the small number of developers
- Updating the OS to a new major version (that they release every 1-2 years) is a hassle, there is no direct way to do distro-update like on ubuntu for example
- The mail and calendar apps don’t support Oauth, and by now, google doesn’t seem to support password+IMAP anymore. So no google calendar or mail integration. Also a hassle to set up anything that uses Oauth by default.
If those aren’t dealbreakers, I can recommend eos. But do check out the other options as well.
To add to all the other answers about what to use and whatnot: try a few distros and desktops out by putting them on a flash drive and booting from the flash drive (this is the same process for typical installations)
Distro, or who the linux based OS is built, updated, and distributed by, mostly matters long term, but something that will keep working and be stable (in the colloquial sense, not technical sense like for servers), and that has a friendly and welcoming community, are definitely things to look for. Mint and ubuntu both have stellar reputations in both of these regards, though many folks (including me) have issues with decisions being made by the ubuntu folks these days. Fedora is pretty stable but has less of a big community with support for new people, and manjaro has a lot of newer users and is built around serving newer linux users, but the project is sometimes run in an awkward way that can cause issues if you’re not choosing to manage your packages with intentionality (thats what I hear anyway). Debian is rock solid, and I dont know much about the community, but the versions of software available in the repos may be old unless you’re installing a flatpak
Keep in mind, not all distros will support every desktop, so you may find your chosen desktop isnt available on the distro you find most interesting. You can theoretically install whatever desktop on whatever distro, but as a new user I dont reccomend doing this.
Definitely try out a few different desktops. “Desktop environments” are bundles of software that make up the desktop graphical user interface, and will make a big difference in the look and feel, and general user experience that you have on linux. There are a bunch of options- the two biggest projects are GNOME and Kde plasma. Gnome has a reputation for being more mac-like out of the box and has very specific workflows and usage patterns, and kde, more windows like and flexible to what the user wants. But both are customizable. Kde has lots of built in settings and options, gnome offers very few, but supports user made extensions that change the desktops look and behavior. Give both a try and try out the customizations for each (play with kde settings, see if you can make it more what you want. Install some gnome extensions, see what the options look like). Cinnamon is another desktop thats very windows-like but has a great user experience. Xfce is a well run project but predominantly aimed at being lightweight so it runs well on older hardware, you’re less likely to be in its target demographic
Try Gnome. It looks like MacOS.
Also, try yabai, sketchybar and skhd on your Mac. And try poking around in the Mac terminal, since MacOS is Unix-like (it’s even Unix certified, in fact), just like Linux.
They share a few small visual elements, like a top panel and “dock”, but using them are completely different experiences.
MacOS is in reality closer to KDE than Gnome. That being said, almost every Linux desktop environment and Windows are closer to each other than MacOS. MacOS is quirky in comparison to all of them.
Ignore people telling you you have to use GNOME. Use whatever looks good to you. I actually have a KDE Plasma desktop with a Mac-like layout. The DE doesn’t matter much though.
I will say that Gnome will act like you expect out of the box, but it’ll only ever do that. KDE can act like whatever you want, and you can customize it to fit what you want easily. Luckily, like you said, it doesn’t matter. You can install a new one and run either/both.
Fully agree that the DE doesn’t matter much. I’ve used KDE and XFCE the most over the years, and cinnamon, gnome, and even enlightenment a bit over the years. I was never a big fan of gnome, however I recently got a 2in1 laptop, and after a few days of tinkering… I think gnome is a bit better for that kind of interaction than than the others.
There are things to like and dislike with all of them I’d say.
The Mac themes on KDE are pretty great, and so is the customizability. KDE makes things very easy to tweak until you like it. GNOME does not.
I went from Mac to Linux and use Plasma because I really can’t get on with GNOME. People go on like its 1:1 to macOS, but it really isn’t. GNOME feels so much more restrictive to me.
There are a lot of differences and a lot of similarities between the operating systems here. It will take you time to get used to no matter what you do. Start by swapping your apps on your existing Mac, trade out any apps that you know won’t work on Linux with apps that do. That way, you spend some time in your existing environment with the new apps you’re going to need going forward.
Next, make sure to test out your peripherals in a live environment. Does everything you use with your computer work correctly? If not, find out why. See if you can mitigate it, or if you’ll need to replace stuff.
Finally, be willing to experiment. I know others in this thread will recommend various desktop environments and distributions to you. Try many of them. GNOME is good and simple out of the box, feels kinda mac-like, but if you want to completely replicate the functionality of macOS, KDE Plasma has more options for that like global menus and the file management app (Dolphin) is incredibly extensible and customizable.
Try to have fun with it, and don’t give up. It takes time to learn a new way of working, and you will likely have frustrations along the way, but ultimately the goal is to learn and figure out what works best for your needs.
This is really good advice thank you! Someone mentioned using a usb to test. How can I test? It seems like quite a hassle to set it all up just to find out it’s not my thing.
Here’s a quick how to from Learn Linux TVWait a minute. Are you wanting to get a different computer? Or boot Linux on your Mac?
Look into a distro that you might like, and find a “live usb” of it, often it is the installation media itself. How it works is basically it is a linux already installed on a disk image you transfer to the usb, and tell the computer to boot from it. Instructions on all this usually comes with the live usb media. Then you usually get a “try it out” or “install” option, or it just leaves you at a pre-configured desktop. Click around, install stuff, browse the web, get a feel for it.
Assuming you don’t know anything about Linux desktop or server:
- Be patient.
- Software on Linux is mostly installed through package managers, so you don’t search the web for an installer, you search the web if you need to figure out what software you want to install (alternativeto.net is a good place to start if you already know a similar software), then you install it through your package manager. Some applications won’t be in your distro’s repository, you may want to try installing a flatpak, on KDE you use Discover for that, on GNOME you use GNOME Software. As a last resort you can use AppImages, those are downloaded from the web, ideally from the developer’s GitHub or whatever.
- Linux has excellent hardware support but it’s a good idea to do a web search when you’re buying new hardware, especially peripherals; manufacturers often don’t write drivers for Linux, so the community has to pick up the slack, usually it’s no problem, but sometimes it is.
- Linux users can be very opinionated… Think with your own head, only you truly understand your needs.
- The terminal can be scary but it’s very useful. Once you’re settled in, try to learn a bit about it.
- Conditional on the previous point: if you have more than one computer, learning ssh can be very useful to control one from the other, exchange small files, etc.
- ssh and rsync especially are excellent for transferring files safely and without errors, but they’re encrypted, so they have overhead. File shares on Linux are mostly NFS, which is complicated and not widespread, or Samba (SMB/CIFS), which is Microsoft’s protocol reimplemented, this one is easier and usually integrated in DEs, but it has caveats sometimes, so maybe try to set one up before you need it, it’s not fun to deal with in a hurry.
- Most DEs have system managers to check resource usage and processes (programs), but most people prefer to use terminal utilities like
htop, or more recently, the snazzybtop, they can be installed through your package manager.
Linux doesn’t have drive letters
MacOS is largely compatible with FreeBSD under the hood, with some minor path differences, so…
For a nice experience I would start with elementary OS or Linux mint.
The first will please your aesthetic from the get go.
I hear a lot of people say stuff like that “start with”. But is it so easy to switch of you picked one? Like don’t you have to get all your files in an external drive and delete a full computer before you can reinstall a different disto?
don’t you have to get all your files in an external drive and delete a full computer before you can reinstall a different disto?
Note that you can have a separate partition for the
/homedirectory, under which your user directory is located. Then you could wipe just the system partition and install a new distro there, keeping/homeas it is. But this requires some basic knowledge of partitions and a little attention during setup. In any case, having a backup is always recommended, especially when dealing with operations that can delete all your data.For a start you would have a bootable pen drive, just to take a look around. If a certain distro doesn’t suit you, don’t install it. After installation, the hurdles get bigger, just as you say.
The two mentioned distros are already tailored towards easy use, but there are many ways to skin the cat. The distributions work with different desktop managers, each with different philosophies. On some distro you can choose or change the distro afterwards (and potentially break your system).
Take the popular cachyOS. It’s most useable desktop manager is KDE, but it has support for a several others (17). Some better, some worse.
Here a little short on youtube showing some desktop manager und Debian 13
You would have to do that, yes. In all likelihood, you’ll be fine with just picking a distro. As the Señor says, elementary has a Mac-like aesthetic.
I have no experience with that distro myself, but I’d imagine that it allows running a live environment directly from the USB, that will let you test it without installing so you can see if everything that you need to work will work, and also whether you actually like it (running a live environment from a USB will be slower than if you had it installed, so don’t base your “liking it” off of that).
It’s not so much just an aesthetic, you can make KDE and even GNOME look much more like MacOS than eOS will and KDE can even to an extent act like Finder (GNOME not so much, they’re too ideologically different)
But Pantheon is designed to act like Finder. (whilst trying to not infringe on Apple’s designs) It’s the closest thing functionally to the modern Finder outside OpenSTEP.
The thing is, when you reach that point, you’ll be doing that because you want to. The reason it’s “starts with” is because your desire to try that next distro now that you get the fundamentals will be greater than your distain for doing a backup and wipe.
This is as much of an assurance as it is a warning.
Yes. But you don’t have to switch.
People say “start” with simpler distros because if you go past just using it as-is, and grow to understand linux closer to the system level, you’ll likely eventually end up preferring something more complex.
There’s little point to starting at the deep end, like arch, since you don’t know whether you’ll end up staying in the shallow yet after you stop needing to have your feet on the bottom. Either way, it’s the start. It can also be the end, but that is unknowable.
If you seek that kind of advice don’t better don’t format your drive with all of your data. Try installing distro of your choice on some old hardware you have and use it occasionally and understand if linux in general and specific distro in particular is what you want.
Many distros you don’t even have to do anything but install packages to switch desktop environments, which are really what people are recommending when they’re trying to say what is similar to mac
Ok so what I understand is that the disto has more to do with compatibilities, optimization and updates whole desktop environment is more the UX and user experience?
Yeah the DE is your desktop, launcher, window manager, setting manager etc. So Gnome, KDE Plasma, mutter, etc. It is what most people will notice.
The distro is basically a package manager and assembly of packages. So if you were to use ubuntu for instance, there is a default DE, but you’ll notice there are a bunch of “flavors” available. These are mostly different desktop environments and default applications, but all of the stuff in any of them are in the package lists and available to install regardless of flavor.
The main differences between distros are
- release cadence
- fixed. They release a major update on a regular schedule and only backport bug fixes and security patches
- rolling. One package set that every installation always updates to latest
- package management
- some are able to manage packages purely by GUI and some you must use the command line (or if you can use GUI at some point you might have to fall back because it doesn’t have first class support)
- release cadence
