I’m on board that we need to become independent from big tech. As someone who is fond of the Mac user experience, from choosing hardware to how you navigate through apps, I need a guide to make the switch.
Depending on how all-in on the Apple you are, there will be a few main sticking points for you.
1: Gestures If you use a trackpad, you’re going to have to adjust to a more limited set of gesture commands. The same with button mapping on a mouse. You’ll almost certainly need to learn new ways to move around your desktops.
2: PDFs Preview is a godsend to Mac users. Preview does everything bar editing PDFs. You will no longer have Preview. You’ll need to find three or four applications that replicate its features. And all of them will feel a bit lacking in comparison.
3: Apple Music Apple don’t believe in Linux, so if you use AM and wish to continue listening to lossless on your computer, you’re going to have to either use WinBoat to run a Windows VM into which you can install AM, or you’re going to need to use Waydroid in order to run the Android version of the AM app. Neither is great, but both (mostly) work.
But ultimately it is worth it. I use my Mac much less than I used to, and my iPad almost not at all now.
This is really useful. I don’t use Apple Music, but the gestures and preview do sound like something to get used to. Why is there no third party preview? Seems like a pretty basic program to have.
I’m not from mac land, so I don’t know how much Preview does. I’ll comment on how its done in PC land.
- PDF’s have been handled by web browsers for a while now. Firefox will open and offer basic editing capabilities. Comes pre-installed on most distros.
- Images are handled by the DE’s default image previewer which usually has rudimentary editing capabilities. Installed by default.
Or you can get other apps that handle PDF’s and images.
Switching to linux means switching to other applications. You aren’t getting Preview and you aren’t getting Safari. You get other software that does the same things.
Some very good advice here already so I’ll be brief.
Here are some random things that spring to mind as being of note as someone who hasn’t switched exactly, but has used Macs since 1995 and uses Linux alongside macOS.
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Gnome will be the most familiar on day 1, BUT. It’s amazing how quickly that won’t matter anymore when you’re learning what’s what. I started on Gnome and avoided KDE Plasma, which everyone said was more like Windows - and still ended up liking KDE Plasma the most. Both aesthetically and in tens of how easy it is to adjust anything that might not be quite right.
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Avoid XFCE if you have a high resolution display, and you’re installing Linux on an old Mac. Customising XFCE to scale things correctly on a high resolution is stuff you just don’t want to be messing with as a new Linux user.
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Avoid X11 and use Wayland (which will be fine if you use KDE or Gnome). X11 was very confusing to me as a Mac user, as certain changes require a reboot. As above, this is just an extra level of complexity you don’t need if you’re used to Macs. On Wayland if you change the visual scale of the interface or cursor size, it just changes then and there. On X11 you’ll be wondering why certain things don’t seem to be changing…
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On macOS you install apps generally by drag and drop. On Linux, whilst this isn’t actually true when you know what you’re doing, it’s as if you only have the App Store. It might have different names on different distros or DEs, but fundamentally you’re going to have a single repository that all your apps and updates are coming from.
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Firefox has a hidden menu bar and you have to push alt to bring it up.
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Apart from swapping ctrl and cmd many keyboard commands will be familiar.
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It’s ultimately up to you how familiar you want to get with the terminal. Some distros you could genuinely ignore its existence. Others would expect you to use it at times and not supply certain GUI tools for certain things.
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People are probably right that Linux Mint is that best place to start. You almost certainly will want to switch just to see what else is out there at some point, it’s just how things go. I use KDE Plasma on Debian now. But there’s nothing Mint is lacking or doesn’t have. Ultimately the only reason I’m not still using Mint is because of wanting to use Plasma, which is doable on Mint if anyone wanted to, but not officially supported.
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For someone coming from Mac you might find Pop OS more familiar.
Ignore people telling you you have to use GNOME. Use whatever looks good to you. I actually have a KDE Plasma desktop with a Mac-like layout. The DE doesn’t matter much though.
The Mac themes on KDE are pretty great, and so is the customizability. KDE makes things very easy to tweak until you like it. GNOME does not.
I will say that Gnome will act like you expect out of the box, but it’ll only ever do that. KDE can act like whatever you want, and you can customize it to fit what you want easily. Luckily, like you said, it doesn’t matter. You can install a new one and run either/both.
I went from Mac to Linux and use Plasma because I really can’t get on with GNOME. People go on like its 1:1 to macOS, but it really isn’t. GNOME feels so much more restrictive to me.
Fully agree that the DE doesn’t matter much. I’ve used KDE and XFCE the most over the years, and cinnamon, gnome, and even enlightenment a bit over the years. I was never a big fan of gnome, however I recently got a 2in1 laptop, and after a few days of tinkering… I think gnome is a bit better for that kind of interaction than than the others.
There are things to like and dislike with all of them I’d say.
Assuming you don’t know anything about Linux desktop or server:
- Be patient.
- Software on Linux is mostly installed through package managers, so you don’t search the web for an installer, you search the web if you need to figure out what software you want to install (alternativeto.net is a good place to start if you already know a similar software), then you install it through your package manager. Some applications won’t be in your distro’s repository, you may want to try installing a flatpak, on KDE you use Discover for that, on GNOME you use GNOME Software. As a last resort you can use AppImages, those are downloaded from the web, ideally from the developer’s GitHub or whatever.
- Linux has excellent hardware support but it’s a good idea to do a web search when you’re buying new hardware, especially peripherals; manufacturers often don’t write drivers for Linux, so the community has to pick up the slack, usually it’s no problem, but sometimes it is.
- Linux users can be very opinionated… Think with your own head, only you truly understand your needs.
- The terminal can be scary but it’s very useful. Once you’re settled in, try to learn a bit about it.
- Conditional on the previous point: if you have more than one computer, learning ssh can be very useful to control one from the other, exchange small files, etc.
- ssh and rsync especially are excellent for transferring files safely and without errors, but they’re encrypted, so they have overhead. File shares on Linux are mostly NFS, which is complicated and not widespread, or Samba (SMB/CIFS), which is Microsoft’s protocol reimplemented, this one is easier and usually integrated in DEs, but it has caveats sometimes, so maybe try to set one up before you need it, it’s not fun to deal with in a hurry.
- Most DEs have system managers to check resource usage and processes (programs), but most people prefer to use terminal utilities like
htop, or more recently, the snazzybtop, they can be installed through your package manager.
Linux doesn’t have drive letters
MacOS is largely compatible with FreeBSD under the hood, with some minor path differences, so…
What’s different between Mac OS and Linux besides Apple’s cloud walled garden? You can bash your way through both file systems. Windows is the outlier.
privacy.
apple has proven time and time again that they’ll cave to the american government at any an all oppurtunities while doing theater to pretend to protect its users.
I grew up using macos, still use it on my work laptop, and use elementary os on my home machine. For the most part, it’s great. I like
- The intuitive UX and the clean, consistent and beautiful UI
- Good default apps and settings
- Flatpak out of the box, no snap bullshit.
- Generally you can get away with quite a bit without resorting to the terminal
Unfortuntalely, there are a few big issues with it, mostly due to the small number of developers
- Updating the OS to a new major version (that they release every 1-2 years) is a hassle, there is no direct way to do distro-update like on ubuntu for example
- The mail and calendar apps don’t support Oauth, and by now, google doesn’t seem to support password+IMAP anymore. So no google calendar or mail integration. Also a hassle to set up anything that uses Oauth by default.
If those aren’t dealbreakers, I can recommend eos. But do check out the other options as well.
I landed on KDE and I don’t worry about it matching my Mac desktop, though you certainly could. The thing I miss most is the Finder, oddly. There’s not much in Linux world that gives Miller columns, unfortunately.
I’ll mention that if you like your Mac keyboard, or just want to keep using the familiar shortcuts, check out Toshy. It remaps the keys so that command still does what you expect it to do.
I think you just have to make the jump and install a distro on your computer while accepting that it’s not because you don’t like the first distro that all of them are the same.
Once the first step is done and your old OS isn’t around anymore, you’ll be forced to find something suited to your needs.
Do you plan on installing Linux on your Mac? If it’s Intel based it’s easy, but if it’s an M model your choices are more restricted…
You should probably start by listing the programs you need. Everything else such as gaming/customization is distro specific.
For a nice experience I would start with elementary OS or Linux mint.
The first will please your aesthetic from the get go.
I hear a lot of people say stuff like that “start with”. But is it so easy to switch of you picked one? Like don’t you have to get all your files in an external drive and delete a full computer before you can reinstall a different disto?
The thing is, when you reach that point, you’ll be doing that because you want to. The reason it’s “starts with” is because your desire to try that next distro now that you get the fundamentals will be greater than your distain for doing a backup and wipe.
This is as much of an assurance as it is a warning.
If you seek that kind of advice don’t better don’t format your drive with all of your data. Try installing distro of your choice on some old hardware you have and use it occasionally and understand if linux in general and specific distro in particular is what you want.
Many distros you don’t even have to do anything but install packages to switch desktop environments, which are really what people are recommending when they’re trying to say what is similar to mac
Ok so what I understand is that the disto has more to do with compatibilities, optimization and updates whole desktop environment is more the UX and user experience?
Yeah the DE is your desktop, launcher, window manager, setting manager etc. So Gnome, KDE Plasma, mutter, etc. It is what most people will notice.
The distro is basically a package manager and assembly of packages. So if you were to use ubuntu for instance, there is a default DE, but you’ll notice there are a bunch of “flavors” available. These are mostly different desktop environments and default applications, but all of the stuff in any of them are in the package lists and available to install regardless of flavor.
The main differences between distros are
- release cadence
- fixed. They release a major update on a regular schedule and only backport bug fixes and security patches
- rolling. One package set that every installation always updates to latest
- package management
- some are able to manage packages purely by GUI and some you must use the command line (or if you can use GUI at some point you might have to fall back because it doesn’t have first class support)
- release cadence
You would have to do that, yes. In all likelihood, you’ll be fine with just picking a distro. As the Señor says, elementary has a Mac-like aesthetic.
I have no experience with that distro myself, but I’d imagine that it allows running a live environment directly from the USB, that will let you test it without installing so you can see if everything that you need to work will work, and also whether you actually like it (running a live environment from a USB will be slower than if you had it installed, so don’t base your “liking it” off of that).
It’s not so much just an aesthetic, you can make KDE and even GNOME look much more like MacOS than eOS will and KDE can even to an extent act like Finder (GNOME not so much, they’re too ideologically different)
But Pantheon is designed to act like Finder. (whilst trying to not infringe on Apple’s designs) It’s the closest thing functionally to the modern Finder outside OpenSTEP.
don’t you have to get all your files in an external drive and delete a full computer before you can reinstall a different disto?
Note that you can have a separate partition for the
/homedirectory, under which your user directory is located. Then you could wipe just the system partition and install a new distro there, keeping/homeas it is. But this requires some basic knowledge of partitions and a little attention during setup. In any case, having a backup is always recommended, especially when dealing with operations that can delete all your data.Yes. But you don’t have to switch.
People say “start” with simpler distros because if you go past just using it as-is, and grow to understand linux closer to the system level, you’ll likely eventually end up preferring something more complex.
There’s little point to starting at the deep end, like arch, since you don’t know whether you’ll end up staying in the shallow yet after you stop needing to have your feet on the bottom. Either way, it’s the start. It can also be the end, but that is unknowable.
For a start you would have a bootable pen drive, just to take a look around. If a certain distro doesn’t suit you, don’t install it. After installation, the hurdles get bigger, just as you say.
The two mentioned distros are already tailored towards easy use, but there are many ways to skin the cat. The distributions work with different desktop managers, each with different philosophies. On some distro you can choose or change the distro afterwards (and potentially break your system).
Take the popular cachyOS. It’s most useable desktop manager is KDE, but it has support for a several others (17). Some better, some worse.
Here a little short on youtube showing some desktop manager und Debian 13
as a mac & linux user since 2002 and i had a time machine to do it all over again but correctly this time; i would go with a linux first vendor like system76 or tuxedo or any other vendor that uses 100% open source hard/software. (ie coreboot/libreboot).
linux can work on almost all hardware (including mac) but you’re mileage is going to vary a lot and only the linux first vendors can give you an experience that rivals mac and windows.
Thank you for saying this. I wonder which vendor is best value for money.
you should also know that it’s a double edged sword if you go with linux first vendors because you’ll likely never learn from resolving your own technical difficulties that arise as a result of hardware that is not 100% linux compatible.
i learned so much from putting linux on my windows & mac hardware; that it enabled me tow work on linux professionally for the last 21 years. switching to linux first hardware 5-ish years ago made my knowledge of people facing issues atrophy, so i bought windows first hardware to re-acquaint myself.
real mice have more than 2 buttons.
To add to all the other answers about what to use and whatnot: try a few distros and desktops out by putting them on a flash drive and booting from the flash drive (this is the same process for typical installations)
Distro, or who the linux based OS is built, updated, and distributed by, mostly matters long term, but something that will keep working and be stable (in the colloquial sense, not technical sense like for servers), and that has a friendly and welcoming community, are definitely things to look for. Mint and ubuntu both have stellar reputations in both of these regards, though many folks (including me) have issues with decisions being made by the ubuntu folks these days. Fedora is pretty stable but has less of a big community with support for new people, and manjaro has a lot of newer users and is built around serving newer linux users, but the project is sometimes run in an awkward way that can cause issues if you’re not choosing to manage your packages with intentionality (thats what I hear anyway). Debian is rock solid, and I dont know much about the community, but the versions of software available in the repos may be old unless you’re installing a flatpak
Keep in mind, not all distros will support every desktop, so you may find your chosen desktop isnt available on the distro you find most interesting. You can theoretically install whatever desktop on whatever distro, but as a new user I dont reccomend doing this.
Definitely try out a few different desktops. “Desktop environments” are bundles of software that make up the desktop graphical user interface, and will make a big difference in the look and feel, and general user experience that you have on linux. There are a bunch of options- the two biggest projects are GNOME and Kde plasma. Gnome has a reputation for being more mac-like out of the box and has very specific workflows and usage patterns, and kde, more windows like and flexible to what the user wants. But both are customizable. Kde has lots of built in settings and options, gnome offers very few, but supports user made extensions that change the desktops look and behavior. Give both a try and try out the customizations for each (play with kde settings, see if you can make it more what you want. Install some gnome extensions, see what the options look like). Cinnamon is another desktop thats very windows-like but has a great user experience. Xfce is a well run project but predominantly aimed at being lightweight so it runs well on older hardware, you’re less likely to be in its target demographic
From a Linux beginner: I switched from mac with 0 knowledge of Linux. Did some searching, found Ubuntu Budgie, haven’t switched since. I bring it up cuz I was specifically looking for something that looked Mac similar, and it came up. It’s not as Mac as I originally thought, but I find it pretty approachable so I figured I’d share.
I think some more advanced users have issues with Ubuntu, I’ll leave them to comment. There may also be better options for Mac feel, perhaps those mentioned. For me, this was Mac enough I haven’t switched away and I haven’t gone back. Happy searching! :)
