Start with Mint, it’s the one that probably you’d be happier with if you’re a new user.

I bought a d-link usb wifi for $7. It worked fine on Linux.

Try a newer distro, in case the bluetooth stack on Mint from 2024 is too old. Maybe the latest ubuntu, and see if that works (try the live cd, no need to install). If not, try Fedora, which is different enough to possibly implement things a bit differently. If that doesn’t work either, you’re probably out of luck. The asha protocol has bugs on linux. Basically, Linux is great for common hardware, not so good for uncommon one.

I’ve installed that, doesn’t really make a difference. I’m not interested in skin deep changes, but in how the program works mostly internally.

I’m missing the ability to adding shadows, and to change each color individually in HSL, as in the Secondary color tool in PS. Gimp 3 manages that stuff better. Not 100%, but it works fine enough for my needs. I have more trouble with Krita on these features. So for me, Krita is not the answer to edit my traditional painting scans.

I’ve used Linux since 1998 (red hat), along BeOS. But I went back to Windows because XP was rather good, Linux was becoming good too slowly, and BeOS was dead. Still kept my Linux partitions though, while my laptop was now running MacOSX. After a few years, with 7, Windows became even better, so I moved to it full time, including in laptops. In the 2010s I tried Linux a couple of times again, but it was having these small bug things that was breaking the overall good experience. It just wasn’t ready for the desktop, sorry. My laptops became once again MacOSX, while I was doing photoshop cleanup for my traditional paintings with Windows 10. Then, in 2022, I retried Linux, and it was finally ready for how I always wanted it to be. The overall experience was good. Linux came to 100% usability for me just this year, with the release of Gimp 3, which allowed adjustment layers.

Basically, I have a baseline standard of how well I expect OSes to work on the desktop. I want the number of bad surprises to a minimum. I’m too old for tinkering, I want things to work. For Linux, this came true only in the last few years. So now I’m switched to it on all my computers. I only kept one macbook air with macos, all the other older mac intel ones are now running linux too. My main OS is Debian-Testing, while on laptops I run Mint. I have no Windows PC anymore at all.

I have 4 Apple laptops running Linux, so I have some experience with it all.

The Macbook Air 2011 has wifi driver bugs, on large downloads/updates you will experience crashes (complete lockups). This happens with either of the two drivers available for it (foss linux and broadcomm). I suggest you get a tiny usb wifi for it for $6. You blacklist the internal driver first.

For the 2008 macbook, consider if it has 4 gb of ram or not. If yes, use linux, if not, have it as a toy. Maybe install something Q4OS (with trinity DE), or even Haiku. I personally don’t use Linux on less than 4 GB of RAM. Yes, it loads fine on lite distros, but the moment you want to do some web browsing, you’ll hit the swap, which destroys the drive. 4 GB RAM is my minimum. Also, the fact that it doesn’t have EFI, it will work best with Q4OS (which is Debian based), and Haiku.

For the 2013 one, I’d suggest Linux Mint, it works great. You might, or might not require a usb wifi too. On some newer macbooks the wifi works without crashes during usage, but it doesn’t let the machine wake up properly you see. So all that stuff need to be tested by you.

On the 2015+ macbooks, the webcam doesn’t work usually (the third party driver doesn’t work properly either).

I never had problems, particularly with a popular package like Chromium, and I’m even using Debian-Testing, which is supposed to be unstable. You’re definitely fiddling enough with your system to get Debian to get into DLL hell.

I personally use an extension to have the top bar hide when i maximize an app. I can’t stand the wasted space either.

You can install anything you want via their flatpak app, which is pre-setup (unlike ubuntustudio that does come with media apps, but doesn’t have an easy way to get flatpaks going – it only has snaps).

The biggest advantage of ubuntu studio is their special pipewire setup, included in a package called ubuntustudio-pipewire-something. This can be installed by any distro that uses Ubuntu’s repositories, e.g. Mint, Zorin etc. As for the apps included, they’re easily installed manually. So you can go with Mint for a first distro.

I own 3 Macbook Airs, running Linux. The solution was simple: buy a $6 TP-Link wifi usb stick, which is tiny, and it solved all my problems (same for BT). I used to have crashing problems with the linux AND the official broadcomm wifi driver, or the laptop wouldn’t wake up from sleep etc. I just blacklisted all that, and I use the tp-link one. Sure, it eats away 1 usb port, but it’s no biggie. No more crashes, or not waking up properly.

Top reads available memory more correctly than htop imho.

Did you see this? https://askubuntu.com/questions/1425270/sony-bluetooth-headphones-connecting-but-as-an-unknown-device-with-no-option-t

Look at my reply here, where I explained the FOSS apps, their pros and cons: https://lemmy.ml/post/36874236/21366132

Maybe you have a bad burning image? Try re-downloading it and burning it with Balena Etcher.

Erm, no, it doesn’t. Plasma requires over 1.2 GB of RAM on a clean boot. It’s a much more complex DE.

I’d suggest EndeavourOS with XFce (removing the endeavouros addons after installation to save ram). I can make it boot at 460 MB of RAM. Hyprland uses about 900 MB. Might be of interest with just 4 GB of RAM. For example, on Omarchy, which uses arch/hyprland, it uses about 900 mb of ram, but it’s super slow with btrfs and some changes they’ve made. So on an old PC, XFce might be your friend. XFce can be themed really well, here are my attempts:

macos: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114009689446895521

macos classic: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114875117360852977

win11: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114874435763184758

beos: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114751365408638345

Linux Mint’s boot option will eventually get over-written by Windows’ updates. You will lose the ability to load Mint, be it in a week’s time, in a month’s time, or a year’s time, but be sure, it will happen.

The correct way to run Mint alongside Windows is to install Mint on a usb stick (non-live). Here’s how:

1. Get TWO usb sticks. One to hold the bootable live iso (16 GB minimum), and one to install to (64 GB minimum).
2. Go to BIOS and DISABLE the internal SSD that has Windows in it. At least DELL & Thinkpad laptops’ BIOSes can do this. This is important, otherwise Mint has a bug during installation where it always installs the bootloader on the internal SSD, EVEN if you explicitly tell it to do it on its own USB stick or partition. So it’s best for Mint to not be able to see temporarily the internal SSD.
3. Boot with the burned usb stick, and install Mint on the other usb stick. You can select automatic installation, or you can do it manually: create a 1 GB fat32 /boot partition (make sure you give it the boot flag), 4 GB swap partition, and the rest / (root).
4. Boot after installation with the newly installed usb (remove the installation usb) to make sure mint works well. Check webcam too, not just audio/wifi/bluetooth.
5. Re-enable the internal SSD again.
6. You can now boot on the installed usb during boot time by pressing f12, and selecting the usb stick instead of Windows.

Note: You can choose to install Mint on a separate SSD if this is not a laptop, or an external SSD with enclosure. These will last more than a usb stick (the rewrites destroy the usb stick within a year or two in my experience). But it’s a good first start and it works overall well. I have done it that way 3 times so far, for laptops where we couldn’t change the emmc/ssd/hdd (in one of the laptops the ssd controller was dead, the other one had a bad emmc, and the other one was old and the usb stick was actually faster than the hard drive), so we installed on usb sticks.

You essentially have 3 options with open source audio apps (there are some good closed source options too, like the great Reaper, Tracktion Waveform, and BitWig Studio, but I will focus on foss solutions here):

• Ardour. This is the premier foss app. In fact, a fork of it is closed source used by a big audio manufacturer. So it’s the best tested foss audio software out there. It can do both midi and recording sessions, but it’s best for recording stuff. However, the new version, expected by end of this year, will have major midi updates that probably will put it on top of the king of midi in foss:

• LMMS. Best for Midi. If you’re doing electronic music through and through, this works great. The only downside it has it does not support vst3 plugins (soon enough, this can become an issue, even if you say that you don’t care about plugins). You can still get vst3 support by loading them via the Clara plugin (basically, it acts as a plugin for other plugins), but that can be unstable. Make sure you download the latest daily appimage, because the stable version is too old.

• QTractor. This one is an odd one out. It’s a bit hard to get it going (it requires external synths and some patchwork to connect audio devices), but it is very powerful and I’d say, a more sane UI when editing. It comes with no plugins at all, but it supports all plugin standards for linux. Basically, this one requires more setup, but once you set it up, it gets going easier.

Alternatively, if you’re actually interested only in rec. audio editing (basically cutting, pasting etc), simple stuff, there’s Audacity.

If you’re using Ubuntu or Linux Mint, Zorin, PopOS, install the ubuntustudio package for pipewire (can’t remember how it’s called you need to search for it). It sets up pipewire audio correctly, so more plugins/apps work out of the box (without it, for example, Bitwig studio doesn’t even make a peep…).