There are excellent suggestions in this thread. However, I want you to change your mindset. What you’re asking is like “I don’t want to drive my car. I’m sick of 4 wheelers. I want to ride this new thing called a motorbike. What are some good motorbikes? It should have AC and the safety and comfort of my previous car. Also are there any 4 seater bikes which is family friendly?”
When you are shifting from one platform, please be prepared to make some changes in the way you normally operate. You can’t magically expect the new platform to be perfect when you have a decade of experience in the previous platform.
at this point a lot of people who don't like Snaps just ditched Ubuntu for something else like Linux Mint or Debian
otherwise you will be constantly fight against your distro maintainers with every upgrade
I’m afraid Ubuntu has always been like that. For me it all started with core settings binaries being able to run only if X was running too and not including make tools in base installation in the times when not everyone had internet access
Don’t know. The AUR is a big reason I use Arch. Obviously there’s PPAs/OBS or whatever but they’re not implemented nearly as well, I don’t need to go searching for new repos with the AUR or messing with repo priorities (fun times on Suse…) since everything is in the one place and there’s procedures for taking over orphaned packages. I use about twenty or so packages from it, many of them not packaged for any other distro. Personally not interested in using Flatpak since two package management systems is not my idea of KISS. Poor man’s AUR imo :).
I hate how weird the focus on arch installation is. I got attacked on reddit for calling endeavour arch. Like, I used that shitty method of installation in 1997, it’s tedious and there are better ways now.
Yeah people definitely go overboard with that. I think the only real problem is that Arch-based distros might be using other repositories and not be completely sync’d with Arch itself so then users will go to Arch support forums or communities with problems that don’t affect vanilla arch. But I’ve never really cared when people using derivatives claim they’re on an Arch system.
Installing isn’t even as big of an undertaking these days too, so it’s less of an achievement then people would like to think. Last time I did a clean install on my laptop I just ran the ‘arch-install’ script included on the vanilla ISO and it was super easy, lets you choose where you want it installed, pick from a list of desktop environments, and you pick between alternatives for other common packages then you’re good to go without having to do much manual work during the install itself.
Crunchbang was the distro that taught me Linux. I needed a *nix style build system for a programming class, and #! looked cool so I went with it. It was a magic moment when I learned how to install software from source.
Sorry, not here to answer your question, just reminiscing. I hope the project is OK.
For under $300, I would go for a used Thinkpad. I got a T460s for a few hundred bucks that runs linux wonderfully (jesus was the pre-installed Windows slow though). Linux usually runs much better than Windows on old low-end hardware. That 2015 MacBook has an Intel processor, so I would try Linux on that first as it might be more powerful than what you can afford to buy.
Kali is not an OS you would want to use for your main desktop, if you need those security tools you can run them in a virtual machine / live usb. I see you’ve tried to base your distro choice off of what you intend to do in school, which I think is a mistake. Choose your distro based off of the merits of the distro itself, as once you get past the package manager and release cycle, you can get the same experience on any distribution.
Before choosing a distro I would make sure you know the answer to these questions (in terms of what you want):
Stable or rolling release model?
Package manager (apt, dnf, pacman, zypper, etc.)
and these about your desktop environment:
What desktop environment (or standalone window manager) do you want to use?
Do I want to use Wayland or X11 as a display server? Does it matter to me which I use?
Does your distro have a spin preinstalled with your desktop environment of choice?
^ Also, if you are unsure about what some of this means, feel free to ask.
Thanks for the detailed response! I think I’ll take the advice that some others and that you’ve mentioned also. I have an extra USB drive laying around so I’m going to try and install Linux and run it through a VM on my Mac first. If all runs well, then great! If not, I’ll look into the Thinkpad.
I actually am unsure of what numbers 2,4, and 5 mean in your response. I’m coming from a non-tech field, but have a huge interest and am trying to build up my knowledge on all of the technical terms especially when it comes to Linux.
No problem! About the USB drive, running it in a VM would not tell you anything about how it will run on the Macbook itself. I would recommend booting into the usb in a ‘live environment’. Essentially, you boot into the linux operating system off of the usb and are able to play around and use it in a non-persistent environment. You simply plug in the usb and select it as your boot device. If you decide you like it and it works well, installing should be as easy and following the steps in the installer. The reason running a VM wouldn’t tell you anything is that VMs are virtualizated, meaning they don’t directly run off of your computers hardware. The drivers used for virtual machines are their own unique virtualization drivers, so for these reasons running linux VMs is separate from linux compatibility on bare metal.
Here is an explanation of those questions:
This is less important when choosing your first distro, but some users have varying preferences on package managers. The package manager is responsible for installing and updating everything on your system (everything; applications, libraries, and the kernel) that has been installed via the package manager. Some package managers are distro-agnostic and are installed alongside your distro’s package manager, like Nix or Guix, although you don’t really have to worry about these. The package manager is baked into the distro you used and cannot be changed, and some distros have the same package manager. For an example of a preference, dnf (Fedora’s package manager) commands are much more verbose than pacman (Arch’s package manager) commands.
To show what I mean, here’s the command for installing a package with each:
dnf install <package>
pacman -S <package>
Some find the letter arguments of pacman more confusing.
An example of a preference I’ve observed is that I prefer dnf’s search results over apt’s (Debian’s package manager), although apt search is much faster than dnf’s. Little things like these don’t make a huge difference, but the package manager is something you will interact with a lot, so watching a quick video or guide on a distro’s package manager can’t hurt.
A display server is responsible for displaying your graphical environment. If you have your laptop open and you’re looking at a few windows, the display server is responsible for the placement, size, and content of the windows. Everything graphic on a linux system is handled by the display server. You have chosen to get into linux in the middle of a sort of transition period from the older X11 display server to the newer Wayland display server. Wayland is newer, more secure, and overall snappier / less screen-tear-ey. X11 is older and not receiving development, but is tried and tested, much better for accessibility needs than Wayland, and more “self-contained” (i.e X11 is not just one program, it contains many programs to make interacting with the graphic environment easy and consistent. Wayland leaves these integrations in the hand of each “compositor”)
Desktop environments and window managers will either:
Support Wayland and X11
Support only X11 (Many X11 only examples have forks that support Wayland)
Support only Wayland
As for your applications, some may or may not support running on Wayland natively, which is a non-issue as the program XWayland will automatically run X11 only programs through X11 on your Wayland desktop.
TL;DR on the display server section here: One day you will have to use Wayland, but today is not that day. If Wayland covers all the functionality you need, and you do not use NVIDIA (Wayland on NVIDIA is not in a good state currently), I would go with that. If accessibility or easy software compatibility is your aim, go X11.
This one is easy, let’s say you’ve decided you 100% want to use the Cinnamon desktop environment. Linux Mint has three spins (All that ‘spin’ means is a version of the distro with that desktop environment pre-installed): Cinnamon, MATE, and XFCE, however not all distros offer a Cinnamon spin. If you wanted to use a distro that does not offer a spin of the desktop environment you’d like, download the ‘minimal’ iso for that distro. Some distros call this iso a different name or might only offer a ‘server’ iso that fulfills the same purpose, but basically you’ll boot into a tty (terminal prompt) and you can simply install the desktop environment you want via the package manager.
Wow! Thank you for the detailed information. I had some issues trying to install Linux on my Mac so I ended up buying a t480 and I installed Pop! OS on it. Everything at the moment is running smoothly and I’m currently still setting up programs on it that I believe I will be using in my cyber security journey. Thanks again for the detailed explanation, I have a lot to learn!
No problem! Pop! is a great distro, and if you end up really loving it you could go for a System76 laptop at some point in the future, because S76 makes Pop! it integrates really nicely with their laptops.
Because you left such a good answer I have a question related to number 4. Any idea how KDE Plasma is working with Wayland these days? I’ve been to their showstopper page from time to time but haven’t really asked the question to anyone who may have tried it recently.
I use it both in my work machine and home desktop. It’s generally fine and just works on my home box (AMD graphics). The work machine has a HiDPI 4k panel which I’ve set to 200% scaling - that, along with nVidia graphics has a few issues (especially with Java and electron based apps), but it’s been getting better in the few months I’ve had it, e.g. the latest Firefox fixed some scaling issues.
although why you would not want the latest stable version of an app for example is beyond me, like, it’s a stable version, you should want the new features
Because most developers don’t follow Torvalds’ first rule of kernel development: “We don’t cause regressions”. They’re completely fine releasing so-called newer stable versions that are less usable than the earlier ones - removing features, demanding more of the system, letting known bugs to slip through because they assume user case (“it’s fine~”).
And, contrariwise to the guy in the video plenty, plenty users know this: that the latest “stable” version might cause a regression. But they usually don’t have time and/or knowledge to check every single new version of every single piece of software that they might use. So it would be great if there was someone or a group doing this for them, while taking into account that the difference between “this shit is broken!”, “this shit is usable but worse” and “this is actually better” is subjective and depends on user case. Right?
Well. That’s what a distributor does. This is a critical role of distributions that the video does not address - they sort and trial software versions for the users, based on user case.
because they depend on all the versions of libraries that you would not be able to install on the distro because they would break your system or conflict with a newer version
If library developers did what the kernel devs did, this would not be a problem. So while the video guy is addressing a real problem, he’s being unable to pinpoint where the problem lies in; it is not in the distros, but upstream.
duplication, storage, etc.
Is the increased amount of storage necessary a real problem in 2023? I’m not sure given that storage has become dirty cheap even for users, and the cost is usually spread out among the distro maintainers.
Regarding developers releasing multiple versions: usually the ones doing this are the distro maintainers.
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