Hi all, thanks in advance for indulging a complete newbie! I’d like to try Linux on an 11-year-old MacBook Pro (gifted by a relative), but I don’t know where to start. What distribution would you recommend based on my background?
-Coming from the Mac world; haven’t used a PC/Windows since before the pandemic. I’d prefer something that feels similar to MacOS.
-Not a techie. I’ve forgotten everything (everything!) I ever learned about command line because I never ended up needing to use it, and I haven’t had to debug anything in a long time.
-What I’ll be using it for: accessing the internet, various kinds of creative projects that I’ll probably try making with FOSS software (something I’ve only recently started to look into), and making another attempt at learning programming (my interest will probably peter out before I get anywhere with it, though, because that’s what happened the last two times). Probably won’t be gaming. I’d prefer having the option to use mainstream office software in case anything happens to my current computer, but I don’t actually expect anything to happen to it in the next few years, so that’s just a nice-to-have.
-Priorities: works on old Mac hardware, good for privacy, decent software availability, not buggy, ability to avoid generative AI (i.e., no repeat of Apple installing the Image Playground app on my computer along with a software update, without the ability to remove it.)
It seems like a lot of people recommend Ubuntu or Linux Mint to beginners, but I’m seeing some people complaining that Ubuntu is has spyware(?) and forces things users don’t want, and it seems like Linux Mint is usually recommended to people coming from Windows, so IDK if either of those make sense for me. Advice/recommendations appreciated!
By old Mac hardware I assume you mean x86-64 Intel Macs? Pretty much any modern distro should work on that.
If you are in general ok with tinkering a bit with your computer, I’d recommend Arch derivatives like EndeavourOS or CachyOS, these come with full GUI installers and software availability on Arch is one of the widest around.
Arch is rolling release, though, meaning each package gets updated as soon as a new version is available, rarely it leads to things breaking.
If you want something more stable, Fedora is a great choice, too.
As you mentioned yourself, Mint also exists. It’s packages are usually on the older side, but the distro itself is trying to be this “gateway drug of Linux”.
The feel of the system is mostly determined not by your distribution, though, but rather by your desktop environment. As far as I know, GNOME is the most “Mac-like” out of popular ones. KDE is “Windows done right”, and there are a lot of other options, but you’ll mostly have to try them out yourself until you find something you like.
This is a fantastic comment!
To add to this I would start towards Fedora as it’s stable but also fresh, and as lots of people have been saying try Gnome as your desktop environment.
Interesting, what do you mean by “fresh”?
Some distributions like Debian get releases once per year or two, people tend to joke around that those are “stale” rather than “stable”. Fedora lives somewhere in between, you get more testing than on Arch, but less than on the likes of Debian. Usual Fedora release cycle is once in half a year.
Oh, OK. Once in half a year sounds just fine, I don’t think I’d actually want it to be more often than that. I do like stability. Thanks!
Also, notably but perhaps not obviously, stable releases still get security patches, just not feature changes.
Don’t think you don’t need updates when updates means five different things.Yeah, I’ll definitely want the security patches on whatever timeline. I just don’t want other kinds of updates frequently.
Then you’ll be in a good place. With many long-term support releases, you only need to upgrade every 4-5 years and it’s often a relatively painless process.
Also companies like Red Hat offer some enterprise services to individuals (i.e. not for business purposes) and you might get the extended support, which can be up to twelve years in some circumstances.
Yeah, it’s an Intel Mac. Intel Core i5, which appears to be in that x86-64 range if I’m understanding correctly.
I think I’d prefer stability over rolling release. One of the things I’ve really appreciated about Apple’s stuff is not having to deal with zillions of updates, like I did with my last PC. I’m not sure what you consider to be tinkering “a bit” with a computer, but I haven’t had to do that in a long time, and I suspect I’ll be happiest keeping that to a minimum (at least for now). So based on this, I’ll look at Fedora and Mint.
Thank you for all of this info!
x86 is the instruction set, 64 is for 64-bit extension of that instruction set. It’s also known as AMD64 to make it even more confusing. All Intel Core processors starting from Core 2 are using that architecture, as far as I remember.
By “tinkering a bit” I meant sometimes digging up a package in the archives and rolling it back. I used Arch daily for around 2 years and had to do it once. You can also avoid it by keeping tabs on what the community says, broken packages cause quite a bit of fuss.
Release schedule is a trade off, if you are updating weekly, it’ll usually take less than 5 minutes to download all the packages that got updated within that week. The rarer you update, the more time each update takes.
But it’s all ultimately a matter of preference, just wing something up and try to use it for a couple of days. If it’s not to your taste, scrap it and try something else, it’s rare to end up with a setup you like right from the get go.
If it’s just rolling back a package once in two years, that doesn’t sound so bad. I don’t see myself downloading updates once a week, though. I’d rather have fewer updates, especially if they’re well-tested and I can set things up so they happen overnight while I’m sleeping.
I really like knowing that I won’t be stuck with whatever setup I start with. Thank you!
I use aurora os but would actually recommens bazzite.gg for you. Both are inmutable fedora distros (first one uses KDE, second one Gnome.) and are based on the great rpm-ostree as system package manager ,that gives you: full stability, security, plus the benefits of having fresh updates. Rollbacks are a breeze. Most applications you would install there are via either flathub.org or brew.sh …
You can put Zorin on it and use the Mac theme it has to make it more familiar.
Zorin looks nice too! Thanks.
I can recommend Zorin as well, it has been very beginner-friendly.
I’d recommend avoiding apple products like the plague.
I’m on a 15 year old Mac, fedora works great. I can’t remember what magical fuckery I did to get wifi drivers working though. I recommend having an Ethernet cable or wifi dongle while you try to get it setup.
I use kde as a DE, with a macos theme installed (check the settings).
Be prepared for problems with the Broadcom WiFi card and drivers.
Yeah, I’m realizing that might be unavoidable. I’m still hoping I can get Linux Mint or Zorin working without messing around with that (one person said they didn’t have to do any of that when installing those on similar Macs, but others did - maybe this changed at some point when Mint/Zorin was updated?), but we’ll see. Not looking forward to figuring that out, but it might be worth it. Thanks!
For starters if you are dual booting with Mac OSX you’ll need to use rEFInd Boot Manager. This is something you’ll usually be asked to select at install, so don’t sweat this part too much.
When you mention wanting a Mac like experience, I’d recommend going with Gnome Desktop. That’s going to have a familiar look and feel to you.
There is a custom flavor of Gnome called Cosmic by System76. It was designed for their distro Pop!_OS and has been very popular. Cosmic basically came about by System76 not being happy with how Gnome did some things that didn’t fit their needs.
Most distros (versions of Linux) will allow you to install whatever DE (Desktop Environment) you want.
As you mentioned Linux Mint comes up a lot, which ships with Cinnamon DE which is based on GNOME 3, but modified to look a little more traditional in the Windows sense of things. There is also an alternate version of Mint that ships with a custom version of MATE, a DE that is based on Gnome 2, but that may feel a bit dated to you.
Distros to consider:
Fedora - very well maintained and stable distro.
Offers Gnome (or other desktop environment of choice)
Offers Atomic options. Atomic or immutable distros are a newer thing that basically ensures there’s always a path to roll back on in case something gets messed up. There’s a bit to read here about all the benefits of this, but worth looking into.
Fedora Silverblue ships with Gnome and is atomic
Fedora Cosmic ships with Cosmic and is atomic
Pop!_OS by System76 is pretty popular and easy to get running. Popular with people looking for gaming, tho I know you mentioned you’re not doing that. Ships with Cosmic Desktop. Definitely worth a look into.
Thanks for all of this! Yeah, I’m not sure whether I’ll need to dual boot or not since this won’t be my main work computer, but I’ll keep that in mind.
Everyone seems to be recommending Gnome. I’ll check out Cosmic too. At first glance, it looks pretty cool, but I don’t totally know what I’m looking for yet since I haven’t really had to look at desktop environment choices before.
re Fedora - very well maintained and stable sounds excellent! I’m assuming this applies to both Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Cosmic? Might look into Pop!_OS as well, if it’s popular I’m guessing I could find resources to troubleshoot anything that goes wrong.
I’m curious about Atomic options. That sounds like a great option for someone who’s kinda worried about screwing things up, especially if I really do get into programming this time and fall into the rabbit hole of fiddling with computer things. I’ll definitely read up on that.
What I’d recommend is getting a couple USB drives, download the distros you’re thinking of trying, boot into them, and just click around a bit to see how they feel. It’ll give you a chance to try out the desktop environments, like Gnome and Cosmic and see if you like them or not.
Little harder to compare the actual distro part without using it first and trying to set them up or do something with them like installing programs and updating. Unless you can spin up a virtual machine to try them out, but that might be harder for some if you don’t have the resources for it.
Fedora will be Fedora regardless of which backend you choose so it’ll have the same familiar commands, feel, and stability. Where the atomic versions of Fedora will differ is in how they handle updates and system changes.
Pop_OS! is based on Ubuntu, so where you were hearing about the popularity and ease of use of Ubuntu, you’ll find a similar feel with Pop, but with a lot of quality of life improvements. It’s got support for Nvidia drivers built in, which is big, and a lot of the bloat you were concerned about with Ubuntu has been stripped out. Since it’s based on Ubuntu you have access to everything that’s available to that widely supported platform.
Regarding Atomic updates, and immutable distros, it’s something to consider for sure if you aren’t confident, but there are some slight downsides (depending on your point of view) you should look at as well.
Since Atomic Updates keep copies of previous configs, you might see slightly more storage use.
Immutable distros focuses on making sure you can’t break things, and it does that by restricting access to system critical folders. That can be a very good thing, but it could also mean that there could be a time you run into trouble trying to change something you don’t have access to. This is just a hypothetical as I don’t know how you use your computer tho. It’s a trade off. You know how people joke about how Windows won’t let you delete a simple file, but Linux won’t blink if you tell it to delete critical folders provided you run the right command with permissions? Yeah, that’s kind of what immutables are stopping.
Here’s a couple articles you can read that go into Atomic Updates and Immutable Distros.
One distro you’ll hear come up a lot when talking about Atomic and Immutable is NixOS. It’s considered to be the best at what it does when it comes to those two features. But as I don’t know enough about it I can’t recommend it confidently. I will say tho that I’m probably going to take the plunge and flip over to it sometime in the near future. I’ve heard enough great things about it I’ve gotten interested in trying it out.
Last thing to note is when considering a new distro, another thing might help make you make a choice is to check out the wikis. Good documentation on how to do different things can make a world of difference to your experience with the OS. For example, I really love the CachyOS wiki because it just walks you through every step of setting it up and makes a number of solid recommendations for things you might want to change or enable. When something isn’t in their wiki, there’s the ever extensive Arch Wiki as well, tho the language in it goes up a couple steps so it wouldn’t be where I’d send a new user. For that matter I wouldn’t recommend an arch distro for a new user. While CachyOS is great, rolling releases probably isn’t what you want based on your use case.
Hope this helps!
Thank you so much for explaining all of this!
Yeah, I think I will try out at least a couple distros on USBs or maybe a virtual machine. I think I still have at least one USB lying around somewhere in my closet… don’t remember if it has enough space, but maybe.
Based on those articles and your explanations, I’m certainly going to want to explore immutable and atomic at some point, although maybe not right away since it sounds like there’s more I’d need to learn. Both of those qualities sound fantastic to me. I think I’ll be fine with a little more storage use, and I highly doubt I’ll want to change anything about critical folders anytime soon. I’d like to avoid broken installations and myself accidentally doing really stupid things.
Yeah, I’ll look at the documentation available before I install any OS. Thank you!
My recommendation given where you are coming from would probably be something like elementary OS. https://elementary.io/
It has some differences in it’s workflow though, and if you don’t find that appealing I see that many others have already recommended distributions with Gnome such as Fedora.
Thanks! What kinds of workflow differences? And do you think I’ll have to mess with the wifi card and drivers to get it to work? I’m seeing some people talking about that with other operating systems.
I recall it using some different design philosophies behind managing windows than I was familiar with, I’d honestly just recommend trying it out in a live USB or a vm so you can see for yourself. It uses a desktop called Pantheon that they make specifically for elementary OS. Specifically, the X button on the window is in the top left, maximize is in the top right, and there’s no minimize button.
Wifi card drivers can be an issue, that you should be able to see in the live USB before you try installing though. It’s not a matter of any specific distribution and more whether or not your wifi card has working drivers.
Oh, OK. It seems very weird to not have a minimize button in elementary OS, unless the maximize button is also a minimize button. I wouldn’t want to have to close a window and reopen it every time I wanted to downsize it. I’d probably end up resizing windows manually instead of maximizing them.
Thank you so much! That makes a lot more sense.
LibreOffice is generally a fine alternative to MS Office. I do collaborative writing with the MS world, and rarely run into any issues - mostly related to Track Changes. It’s installed with the ‘full desktop’ version of most distros.
Python is part of every distro and a good place to start programming.
yeah, haven’t tried LibreOffice but it seems like a good way to go! I do worry about Track Changes having issues (that’s been an important function for me in the past), but I’m not planning to use this computer for work right now, so that’s not a dealbreaker.
Whichever distro you end up choosing, consider one which makes use of the Gnome desktop environment - the current version of gnome is very similar to the Mac OS desktop layout so it could help your transition.
Awesome, I’ll do that!
side note: I love that it’s called Gnome. Other people have garden gnomes, but I will have a computer Gnome
Blasphemy! KDE is the superior desktop environment!!!
In all seriousness, I would recommend testing out either with a live USB before installing, that way you van ply around and see which desktop environment works best for you.
I was waiting for this comment =] I’m a KDE user as well, Plasma is amazing but it can take quite a bit of configuration to get things looking and feeling perfect. This could easily turn off someone new to Linux.
I think OP is going to have their hands full switching to a new OS as it is. Gnome looks and feels like OSX right away, and their design philosophy aims to minimize time spent tweaking in order to maximize productivity. Once OP is used to the typical Linux workflows and gets curious about how to improve things further, they will find out about what KDE has to offer.
I am a programmer and have a little server that runs Debian. On my desktop PC I run Linux Mint and I absolutely love it. It just works. In 2026 there is no good reason to got with Ubuntu anymore.
“It just works…” oh, man. You’re giving me deja vu from when I first tried a Mac. This is the #1 reason I’ve stuck with Macs until now, outside of when my pre-pandemic work/school required me to use a PC. OK, sold. Definitely going to be looking at Linux Mint!
The only thing i’ll add is that Distro (stuff like Ubuntu and Mint) is far less important to your overall linux experience than desktop environment (stuff like KDE Plasma and Gnome) I’d do a little more research on your own about these choices before coming to a conclusion, but the opinion of a former Windows user who has only used Mac a few times in passing is that Gnome feels a lot more like Mac than Windows. Fedora is a good, fairly user friendly Distro that supports Gnome
OK, good to know! Yeah, it seems like a lot of people are recommending the Gnome desktop environment. I’ll look into Fedora for the distro.
Probably your best bet for something similar in vein to MacOS would be any distro that ships with GNOME. Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed all either ship explicitly with GNOME or have them as options within their live installers.
If you know which model and spec your Macbook is, I could give better compatibility insights. In short, the Broadcom chips used for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth in the 2014-2015 Macbooks used to be quite problematic for many Linux distros, but I do believe the in-tree
bcm43xxdriver in the kernel should handle them well enough nowadays. Depending on exact year and spec, your Macbook may come with an NVidia GPU, which will require additional post-installation steps to install the proprietary drivers on many distros. As it isn’t the primary display device on those models, there shouldn’t be too many issues in getting the cards to function and render offloading to work.Ubuntu discourse
Ubuntu is not really spyware as people may claim it to be. The main spyware claim comes from two sources: the 14 year old once-integration for Amazon services that Ubuntu shipped around the 12.10 point release and that Ubuntu does utilize more telemetry than other distros.
Often though, it’s not a recommended distro anymore for many reasons. One primary one is that Ubuntu used to be seen as user-friendly and had a lot of community forum posts to document how to use it. Nowadays, most major distros have caught up and surpassed Ubuntu in usability and reliability, and Ubuntu’s once-positive of forum posts largely tend to clog up being able to find useful information when a problem does occur because of how out-of-date many of those forum posts that still show up in search results are.
Another big reason is Ubuntu is not recommended is Canonical’s (the company the makes Ubuntu) makes regular missteps and often falls on the wrong side of development for progress of the Linux desktop. See Unity desktop, Mir, Upstart, and the current misstep of Snaps. Canonical has also additionally put less effort into keeping that once-polished experience the Ubuntu desktop had and moved a lot of their effort into their server offerings. There have been relatively recent Ubuntu LTS desktop releases that have shipped with some baffling and often showstopping bugs that should have been release blockers. It’s to a point where the QC of releases is often worse than what is found on 6-month point release and even many rolling release distros to where many don’t recommend Ubuntu anymore.
2014-2015 Macbooks are/were problematic? Uh oh. The computer I’d be using is an early 2015 Macbook Pro Retina, 13". A1502.
Thanks for all the Ubuntu info! Yeah, that’s not as concerning as I’d thought, but it still doesn’t sound like the best choice for me. Based on a lot of the other comments here, I’ll probably end up going with Fedora or Mint.
Adding to compatibility notes, it does seem that with the 2015 A1502’s there won’t be anything major in poor compatibility, beside the webcam not working out of the box. Found someone who documented their experience heavily tuning their Fedora install on their 2015 A1502. The author kitted out their Mac with a new SSD and better Wi-Fi card, which is worth mentioning. Some of the information is straight up helpful for even a standard A1502. Common stuff like installing the RPMFusion libva driver, EasyEffects equalizer presets, TLP are generally good ideas.
Mbpfan is also a good idea, but it looks like the package got dropped on 44 from a missing maintainer. May be recommended to install 43 for now if going with Fedora. I pulled the package source and built it on my computer, and it seems to work. Unfortunately I don’t have an actual Macbook to test it on.
I’ll see about getting a COPR repo for it available soon, so that the package can be easily tested.I have a Copr repo available (jrgd/mbpfan) for unofficial packages on Fedora 44.
Some stuff, like disabling mitigations, throttled, and installing the FacetimeHD drivers are not stuff I’d really recommend. You can still go with any of these noting the caveats listed for each tweak. The FacetimeHD drivers are required for getting the webcam to work, so going through the hassle of getting those drivers to behave or just not having a built-in webcam is a choice to make.
Thanks for looking into this and finding that Github documentation! All of this stuff still sounds complicated to me, but I’m probably going to have to do some learning and kitting up anyway. It turns out that this computer’s battery is toast because it sat in a closet for years, and my relative never recharged it in all that time. I might as well look into a new Wi-Fi card and maybe a new SSD as well, if I’m going to be fixing this thing up with new parts anyway. Might have to wait a bit longer than I thought to get started, though. I don’t know what anything else you mentioned in this post is, but I can learn. I’ll probably try to figure out the Facetime HD drivers eventually.
I have run a few different distros on 2015 macbook pros. Debian works really well but you might have to fuss to get camera working and be careful with your display settings. Zorin and Mint run best on first install and Zorin is definitely the most mac-like with a clean design and lots of interface consistency, and it feels quite lightweight.
Ubuntu works fine but it’s Ubuntu. Fedora had some minor driver hassles too but otherwise is nice to use.
Given the age and capabilities of a 2015 MBP I put Zorin on the 8 GB one and Debian for a server on the 16GB (I have two). Ultimately reverted the 16GB to macOS 13 (via OCLP) due to not liking battery management for a server. I feel (but have no stats) that none of the linuxes were as good at power and battery management as macOS on those machines. Probably firmware obscurities or something. None are as good at the trackpad either, but you get used to it.
Thanks! Did you have to do anything to get wifi, fans, or the webcam working on the 2015 Macbook Pros running Zorin or Mint? Some other people have mentioned having to work around that on various distros.
Nope, zorin and mint were pretty much ready to go.
Wonderful! Thank you so much. I will probably try one of those two first then.
I have a 2016 mac with a touch bar and I’ve been dual booting Linux mint. Wifi, sound and the touch bar do not work, at least out of the box. May not be a good first time Linux experience if things don’t just work well. Just giving you fore warning I would maintain a dual boot til you find something stable.
Alternatively Dells and thinkpads are well supported with Linux, they may not have the specs that the mac has but everything works and can be gotten used on Amazon for a couple hundred dollars.
Good luck with your Linux journey.
Oh no, I was half-convinced I should start with Linux Mint based on other comments, but if the wifi and sound don’t work on a 2016 Mac, I imagine that would be true for a 2015 one too. F that. You said that was a problem out of the box - does that mean you were able to get the wifi and sound working consistently later on, after all?
I don’t want to invest in new hardware right now, but I might look into Dell next time I need new hardware if I end up liking Linux.
If you don’t have the touch bar then it’s a different generation. Do your research or try it out. You should be able to boot a live USB at minimum. Trying not to discourage you but give you some realistic expectations.
kde desktop, which you can install or select as an install on nearly Linux distro as your gui. It has themes that you can use to basically mimic apple’s feel. For hardware, framework laptops have great Linux support. I have a Dell and some things like fingerprint sensors took some tinkering to get working.
Mint would probably be a good starter distro, but since you’ve got an intel mac (I assume) there should be a decent number of choices out there. Having used both Mint and MacOS, I would say you probably won’t have very much trouble with the interface. Plus if you get stuck, everything should be pretty well documented so getting help should be relatively easy most of the time.
If you want something more Mac-like go with the Gnome destkop when Mint asks during setup, but personally I like Cinnamon on Mint.
Thanks! Yeah, I think it’s hilarious that I’ll have more options on this older Mac than I’d have on my current/newer Mac, which doesn’t have an Intel chip. Usually it’s the other way around, isn’t it?
Based on most of the comments here, I’m probably going to end up with Gnome, but I’ll check out Cinnamon too.
also: Cinnamon on Mint sounds like a delicious tea recipe. Why do all of the Linux things have such fun names? Cinnamon, Gnome, Fedora… maybe this is just a natural result of Linux having the penguin logo
I installed Fedora 44 on a 14-year-old iMac, and I couldn’t be happier
Awesome! That’s very promising. It looks like a lot of other people are recommending Fedora, too. I’ll definitely check it out!
@butWhatIfiCan @homes I have used Debian distres like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, PopOS osv. I have try tonuse Arch, Slackware,Suse, Open Suse - You name it - i have tryed The most Distros. Now i only use Fedora KDE!
Personally, I like gnome 50 myself, but I’m not using as a desktop. I’m currently using that 14-year-old iMac as a server, so my needs from the desktop experience are very very minimal.
I also really liked popos until cosmic. Not only do I not really like cosmic all that much, it clearly still and it’s beta days, and not really ready for mainstream use.
I also like fedora because it’s very very tidy under the hood compared to Debian based distros. Esp dnf vs apt.
Oh, OK. Very different use case!
If you’re at the level of knowing all this stuff and also running your own server, and you’re finding PopOS Cosmic to be still in its beta days, then it’s probably not for someone like me. I don’t really know what dnf vs. apt means yet (still just trying to wrap my head around what a package manager does). A lot of people keep recommending Gnome, though, so I’ll probably still try that and maybe Fedora.
For someone just starting out, Fedora 44 Workstation with GNOME provides a slick, simple interface that’s very Mac-like out of the box. I highly recommend it for you as a starting distro
Awesome, thanks! Do you think I’ll have to mess with the wifi card or drivers to get things like the wifi, audio, and/or webcam to work?
I don’t think so. everything worked for me out-of-the-box except for having trouble with the display-- my internal display burned out many years ago, so I had to get it to use an external display as the primary display through a trick of screen mirroring-- but that shouldn’t be an issue for you.
there was a weird bug with the latest AMD drivers and the particular card I have in my iMac, but yours is newer than mine, so I doubt you’ll have an issue. my solution was just to version-lock the driver to the version that was on the LiveUSB (which was pretty simple), and it worked fine from there.
best of luck!
