I’m a long time Windows user who has experience with WSL. Last year, I needed a laptop for university, and out of laziness, opted for a Macbook since, although they’re expensive as hell, are reasonably reliable.

Since using the mac, I’ve absolutely fallen in love with it over Windows. Note that I refer to the non-iOS specific aspects. After not touching my desktop for several months, I now see that I absolutely hate Windows even more. I would like to move my desktop to a Linux system some time in the future. However, my education is limited, and so I’m here to ask for help.

Currently, I’m a student in Mathematics and Computer Science. But outside that, I am, for the most part, a programmer. I rarely game, but I would like the option for the rare occasion that I have the time to do so.

I’ve grown comfortably with the command line, through my in-depth knowledge of lower level knowledge is limited. So, I feel I’m comfortable enough to extend the possible domain of my options.

I would love to hear recommendations and suggestions. I’m also open to other options such as NixOS, but that would require some research to learn more, which is fine. I’m not doing this soon.

If you could provide any links and resources that I can follow to continue learning, especially if relevant to your suggestions, I would be deeply appreciative!

My Mac is the most Linux-like thing I’ve used for so long, and it’s been so, so much easier to work with compared to Windows (I hate Windows PATH limitations so much).

Thanks, all ❤ 🐧

  • Shareni@programming.dev
    0·
    6 months ago

    It’s not clear what device you want to install Linux on.

    If it’s an apple arm you’re pretty much limited to what Asahi is doing (Fedora now afaik).

    If it’s a regular amd64, I’d suggest something more stable like MX, Mint, Suse leap, etc. You can use an alternative package manager to keep what you need fresh, but your base system won’t change for years.

    I’d maybe suggest starting first with nix and home-manager while you’re still on macos. Do note that I haven’t used it on mac, but the idea is for it to be cross platform. You can start adding your packages to the list, and have everything you need immediately when you start using Linux. That’s going to be your best option for programming, but it’s more difficult. This should help you out to get started

    As for gaming, I wouldn’t have high hopes on arm. You can use lutris to run windows games for example, but if your device also needs to emulate a different CPU architecture, it wont be happy. Docker had serious performance issues before they introduced arm base images.