Debian.
@wildbus8979 @ChunkMcHorkle +1 for Debian. I ran Debian with XFCE for a number of years on a 2009 standard white MacBook, without any problems…
I’ll give it a try. Thank you!
it akways comes back to a single root. :)
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Xfce is very light
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If XFCE feels too heavy (it probably won’t), you can try LXDE. I think XFCE is a good place to start though.
I have a similar vintage Air, 4GB. I run Debian+i3, though that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Machine feels quick, except for bloated websites.
ETA: In case you’re not familiar, i3wm is a lightweight, tiling window manager that is very keyboard-driven. I love it, and you might too! But it takes a little getting used to and definitely isn’t a Windows-esque experience.
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I recommend Mint as it’s overall a fantastic distro. Better than the majority. And it’s not just for beginners. It’s full blown Linux so it can do anything.
They have an XFCE version so try that too, as well as the MATE version. All 3 desktops are quite light.
I wouldn’t recommend Ubuntu and it’s flavours simply because they have Snaps so deeply embedded now it will spoil your experience.
MX-Linux is also a great distro and quite light. Antix is even lighter and maintained by the same team as MX.
Opensuse is always a great choice, and their KDE implementation is quite good. So if you want KDE try opensuse Leap. (Don’t use tumbleweed on a Mac because the proprietary drivers for Mac tend to break with frequent updates).
I’m running Mint on my 2012 Mini and it works great. Tried a few others but I find Mint the best.
Fedora Xfce is also great on old HW, and have SELINUX if you are paranoid with security.
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No, I don’t think so, as Red Hat only source revenue is RHEL and cloud, not fedora. And RHEL still open source, just you can’t get the builded binary from red hat, but you can build it yourself, as open source means the code is available for public, and it’s available for public, and most of the codes are in CentOS stream, https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/src
And most of the Enterprise linux downstream could inspect and use rhel code, just the binary and how to build is restricted, it’s still adhere with the GPL/LGPL in my opinion
Thanks for taking the time to explain the differences a bit, it’s very much appreciated. I’d heard about the Snapstore thing and also Red Hat’s decision regarding RHEL; while I don’t understand it all yet I do think closed-source defeats the whole purpose of Linux (and why I’m getting off Windows) so yeah, I’m with you on that.
So far, with Mint I haven’t had any problems running Cinnamon at all (decided to try the heaviest DE first) but I will probably still end up trying Kfce as the DE on Debian, for example. It was actually shocking how well Mint runs on 4GB of RAM, lol.
But I have plenty of time and plenty of USB sticks, and I will try all the feasible distros mentioned, taking notes along the way. Thank you again for the suggestions!
save some usbs write cycles and use ventoy:
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weve all been there. enjoy and have fun.
edit: lovely that you can enjoy this together.
my SO always asks me why Im working when I come home from work…
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I indeed did not knew that.
And actually I would not have thought that this would affect ventoy.
but now we know.
is there also a different procedure to write bootable media for macbooms?
edit: thanks for digging and replying. some will for sure appreciate your post in the future. good luck anyway. have you found yet a suitable distro?
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Pretty much anything with XFCE, LXDE/LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE, a window manager like Sway or i3, or probably some others I’m forgetting, will work just fine. GNOME and KDE are the most popular but the slowest, and from what I remember, Deepin, Budgie, and Pantheon are somewhat slow.
I’m mainly using Budgie lately, and its quite fast, even on older hardware. I would say it feels faster than cinnamon (and much more pleasant to work with imo), but unfortunately it’s very unstable.
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I’m glad you’ve liked it, and I hope it runs nicely from HDD.
If you decide to keep Budgie I highly recommend the window shuffler extension that helps with arranging windows.
Ooh, I just did this! Mid 2010 white MacBook, Core 2 Duo P8600, 2GB, spinning rust HDD.
*Strongly recommend switching to SSD. I also added an 8GB stick (so 9GB total, hah) but my hunch is that even the SSD alone would have made this machine much more enjoyable.
I ultimately decided on MX Linux, although with systemd as init so that logind could handle lid and power button events. The default power manager (XFCE?) would result in a black screen upon resuming otherwise. MX Linux also worked the best for me in terms of optimizing for battery life.
PeppermintOS was my second place but also had the black-screen on resume.
I also tried various flavors of Mint but felt that Peppermint and MX were ever-so-slightly leaner in terms of features I actually use and battery life.
Avoid Void Linux. On my system the trackpad only worked in one direction.
I was not able to get the nVidia card to work with proprietary drivers. It’s so old that it requires legacy drivers (340) and I just ran out of patience. Nouveau or bust.
I am currently using it for casual web browsing and YouTube. It handles YouTube pretty well although I’m still searching for a native frontend that allows me to login to my YouTube account so I get all my subscriptions and stuff.
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SSD: Best Buy (US electronics store) still had some SATA SSDs in stock, so I didn’t need an adapter. This is what I got: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/pny-cs900-500gb-internal-ssd-sata/6385542.p?skuId=6385542
Take advantage of the fact that you can make Live USBs of the distros as you decide what you’re looking for.
For me, I found AntiX a little too barebones for me. But your mileage will vary.
I will have to give Mint another go sometime!
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By the way, I also picked up the RAM from Best Buy: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/pny-8gb-1600-mhz-ddr3-sodimm-laptop-memory-green/4680400.p?skuId=4680400&ref=E10C18R004_OrderConfirmation&loc=BODY&CampaignID=NES_OrderConfirmation&eut=3450571981
You can probably find an equivalent for cheaper if you go through another reseller.
I always used Xubuntu or Linux Mint Xfce. Both have access to the Ubuntu package repository and are easy to use and install.
Peppermint OS
I just looked it up, sounds promising. I will definitely add that to the list, thank you!
Linux Lite, and Xubuntu also work too! You’re welcome!