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Finally got my mini Mint sorted.
(thelemmy.club)
Tried for half the weekend to get elementary to work, it just refused to install for reasons unknown.
Gone with Mint for now.
I like the hardware (an old Intel MacBook Air) and didn’t want it to go to waste.
I’ll see how I get on with this desktop. Went feet first straight to bare metal because I couldn’t be bothered with dual boot. It was too much faff. Would value any insight from others who’ve found a lovely distro/DE combo with these tiny machines.
Making my first moves away from proprietary software. Thanks largely to being inspired by you delightful folk.
Stripped socks are not a requirement. They are a bonus, though (if you have the legs for them! ;-P ).
Nice job getting your system going! The full plunge is good to do as dual-booting just keeps you anchored in the past. I will admit, I keep images of my old OSes and run them as a VM if needed. Helps to go back and look at history or saved passwords, etc. I have Mint on several systems, but am changing to CachyOS on my desktop gamer for its better gaming posture. Mint is perfectly fine for most anything. You just need to tweak it to suit your scenario. Mint does also have a nice advantage of being widely used and therefore having greater search results when troubleshooting.
For Apple hardware, lots of folks use Asahi Linux. You might give that a look.
You can also take a peek at https://distrowatch.com/ to see what distros are popular and/or of interest to you.
I like to run different distros to keep myself fresh. I currently run Fedora, EndeavourOS, Solus, Mint, PopOS, CachyOS and Debian. These are on laptops, VMs and desktops (both large and mini systems).
Welcome and best of luck!
Important to note OP is using an old Intel Mac, so Asahi, concerned with new Apple M Series SoCs, will not work
Oh, gotcha. Thanks. Was not aware as I’ve never ponied up the dough for those. So will any distro work on the older Intel Macs? Is there a preferred one? Looks like Mint worked fine for them, so maybe that.
Pretty much, some of the very specific Apple hardware stuff like trackpad niceties might not be fully supported, but asahi hasn’t focused on those much either, their focus is mostly just compiling everything for Apple ARM and making sure boot and graphics work