Looking to dip my toes into Linux for the first time. I have a 2016 Intel MacBook Pro with pretty solid specs collecting dust right now that I think I’m going to use. Research so far has indicated to me that the two best options for me are likely Mint or Elementary OS. Does anyone have any insight? Also open to other OS’s. I would consider myself decently tech savvy but I am not a programmer or anything. Comfortable dipping into the terminal when the need arises and all that.
I think mint and pop are generally the distros people recommend over Ubuntu nowadays
Documentation for Ubuntu generally works for anything Ubuntu based and they're specifically designed for newbies coming from Windows
That said they're coming from Mac so elementary might be better
They never said they were coming from Mac. You are correct in regards to Mint and pop_OS! tho, I just think the recommending of other Ubuntu based or even other based distros nowadays is just so "political". Canonical isn't the darling it once was but it's still a good distros to cut teeth on especially because you can easily hope to another spin for a new DE and still be on "Ubuntu".
One of the things that makes Linux so great is the freedom of choice and the shear amount of options available so we can all use a distro from a person/community/company that shares in our values/ideals that we can then go on to tell everyone that they should be running it lol.
I've had numerous issues running Ubuntu and any Ubuntu based distros on my laptop, that's why I personally dislike it
The fact that they're starting to make questionable decisions around snap is just extra reason imo
Also op didn't say they were coming from Mac but did say they were planning to put Linux on one they already have, think it's a safe guess that they might be used to macos
Laptops are always iffy when running Linux, so many proprietary things in them but I am surprised you had so much trouble with an Ubuntu based distro.
I'm not used to MacOS myself but I did have a MacBook and I currently have an iMac running Lubuntu. Multiple environments makes things interesting lol.
I think the reason I ran into problems was mainly Nvidia drivers to be fair
I had issues with them to on a laptop I had and built in webcam.
Out of all the distro hopping I've found NixOS is the most solid. That said, my built in microphone sounds atrocious for some reason on nix
I've been wanting to give Nix a try but I can't find a use case for it's best feature. The list is long of distros to try (Clear, Garuda, rhino, and so on) but I really do need to give Nix a go.
It's quite good as an all rounder really, I'm using it on my gaming pc, laptop and raspberry pi for some self hosting stuff currently, all of which use a modular config file so I've got the same installed programs, hotkeys, user profile etc whatever machine I'm using