Tried for half the weekend to get elementary to work, it just refused to install for reasons unknown.
Gone with Mint for now.
I like the hardware (an old Intel MacBook Air) and didn’t want it to go to waste.
I’ll see how I get on with this desktop. Went feet first straight to bare metal because I couldn’t be bothered with dual boot. It was too much faff. Would value any insight from others who’ve found a lovely distro/DE combo with these tiny machines.
Making my first moves away from proprietary software. Thanks largely to being inspired by you delightful folk.
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Oh also, I do not own any tights. I can ‘borrow’ my wife’s if it’s the law or something.
Lolwut ? Tights ?
They’re probably referring to the !unixsocks@lemmy.blahaj.zone community/meme.
Ah yes that’s it.
I’ve been a linux user just shy of 30years (slackware ftw) and terminally online since before that (anyone still know what a BBS is ?) and I have never heard of this.
You lot are weird lol.
Is it leggings then. I’ve seen people do this with soft toys and a spectacular range of stripy tights/leggings. Perhaps in another community. 😂
Usually, its thigh high socks but we’ll accept tights or leggings as well. Also yes, it is the law.
I shall leave it to the court of public opinion.
I think that’s arch linux, not mint. But if you’re interested in continuing down this path, you may need to soon.
In my limited understanding (beyond the ‘Arch btw’ memes), Arch is an OS that’s quite fully featured, suited to veteran/power users, because it has regular updates/highly mutable. It has its own repo too by the looks of it?
Is that correct?
Arch is an OS that’s quite fully featured
Not entirely sure what you mean with that.
suited to veteran/power users
The gist is that Arch pretty much comes with little to no defaults. So, you are literally put into the position to make all the important decisions. Which, as you might have imagined already, basically requires you to be pretty knowledgeable on Linux in the first place. Thus making it mostly unsuitable for new users. Though, I won’t dismiss a special breed of newb that somehow manages to rawdog it quite ‘successfully’.
because it has regular updates
We refer to its release cycle as rolling release. Which basically alludes to the absence of a point release.
The version of Linux Mint you were on is 21.2 and you’ll soon be on 22.3. After some time, you’ll be on 23.x etc. These are referred to as point releases. So, whenever a new point release update hits, you’ll receive a couple of months’ worth of updates. And between two consecutive point releases, you’ll receive little to no updates. So, basically, Linux Mint deliberately chooses to hold updates of. By doing so, it ensures you’ll only receive updates that have undergone thorough testing.
Arch, on the other hand, has a much leaner testing phase. Heck, as pointed out earlier, it doesn’t even wait for a certain moment to reach before it outputs an update. Instead, after the packages have had some testing, it pushes the updates out for its users to receive it. As such, you’ll receive constant updates. And you’re somewhat expected to at least perform daily updates. By doing so, it ensures you’ll always have access to the latest and greatest.
Note that Arch is not the only rolling release distro. But, out of the ‘Big 3’[1], it’s the only one that is rolling release by default.
Its release cycle does indirectly contribute to Arch being less newbie-friendly. Basically, any update comes with the risk of causing breakage. On Debian, this risk is partly mitigated by the infrequency of updates and by pushing out very well-tested updates to begin with. On Arch, you just have to deal with it every once in a while.
Note, however, that it’s most often your fault and not Arch’s. Secondly, after dealing with this a couple of times, you’d have acquired some excellent skills in troubleshooting.
highly mutable
Traditional distros are basically equally mutable. So, Arch doesn’t (necessarily) outdo e.g. Debian or Fedora in this regard.
It has its own repo too by the looks of it?
It does. But that’s a thing with independent distros. Linux Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu. Which, itself is a derivative of Debian. Debian, however, is independent. Similarly, Arch isn’t derived from anything else; hence, it’s an independent distro.
The list of independent distros isn’t huge or anything, but I suppose there are at least a couple of dozens of 'm.
As for the own repository part, both pkgs.org and repology.org feature some resources on that.
The others being Debian and Fedora*. ↩︎
you’re somewhat expected to at least perform daily updates.
As an Arch user of a decade by now, I tell you all, you most certainly do not need to update every day, I repeat, you do not need to update every day. That is absolutely not necessary, and will cause much undue stress. I would not recommend that at all. I update maybe once a week. And I find that to be quite consuming as it is.
Thanks for the elaboration!
The reply was already becoming quite long, so I deliberately chose to cut some corners here and there. I was hoping that the “somewhat” qualifier would do the heavy-lifting 😜.
This is a hugely informative reply thank you!
It has been my pleasure :) . Thanks for the kind words!
On Debian, this risk is partly mitigated by the infrequency of updates and by pushing out very well-tested updates to begin with. On Arch, you just have to deal with it every once in a while.
… not if you just postpone updating to the same schedule as Debian, lol. By spacing your updates out, you reduce the risk of catching breaking changes in just the same manner as Debian. Although Debian probably has more rigorous human testing as part of its release strategy, granted.
At any rate, I haven’t had Arch break on me due to an update in all of the years I’ve used it. Over a decade by now. And I update very regularly.
not if you just postpone updating to the same schedule as Debian, lol.
LOL, indeed.
About the breaking part, kudos to you for doing a great job at maintaining Arch. But I assume/think[1] most people don’t enjoy ‘babysitting’[2] their OS 😅.
Please feel free to push back on this. ↩︎
This term isn’t meant derogatory or anything. But it’s what comes up to me whenever I see how involved this is. By contrast, I actually do apply daily updates on my semi-rolling daily driver. But I never have to give it any thought. Heck, it even happens automatically. ↩︎
Though, I won’t dismiss a special breed of newb that somehow manages to rawdog it quite ‘successfully’.
I see people using the term “rawdogging” a lot and I don’t think they actually know what it means. 🫣
I used it in this sense. But yeah, I admit it’s not the traditional dictionary meaning. Unsure if it would be right to qualify it as a semantic change, though.
They are referring to the unixsocks community. lol
Stripped socks are not a requirement. They are a bonus, though (if you have the legs for them! ;-P ).
Nice job getting your system going! The full plunge is good to do as dual-booting just keeps you anchored in the past. I will admit, I keep images of my old OSes and run them as a VM if needed. Helps to go back and look at history or saved passwords, etc. I have Mint on several systems, but am changing to CachyOS on my desktop gamer for its better gaming posture. Mint is perfectly fine for most anything. You just need to tweak it to suit your scenario. Mint does also have a nice advantage of being widely used and therefore having greater search results when troubleshooting.
For Apple hardware, lots of folks use Asahi Linux. You might give that a look.
You can also take a peek at https://distrowatch.com/ to see what distros are popular and/or of interest to you.
I like to run different distros to keep myself fresh. I currently run Fedora, EndeavourOS, Solus, Mint, PopOS, CachyOS and Debian. These are on laptops, VMs and desktops (both large and mini systems).
Welcome and best of luck!
Important to note OP is using an old Intel Mac, so Asahi, concerned with new Apple M Series SoCs, will not work
Oh, gotcha. Thanks. Was not aware as I’ve never ponied up the dough for those. So will any distro work on the older Intel Macs? Is there a preferred one? Looks like Mint worked fine for them, so maybe that.
Pretty much, some of the very specific Apple hardware stuff like trackpad niceties might not be fully supported, but asahi hasn’t focused on those much either, their focus is mostly just compiling everything for Apple ARM and making sure boot and graphics work
Sending you greetings (and a welcome) from another old laptop tha has been given new life through Mint! Mine is more of a Win7 piece, even if it was quite strong at the time… Now it’s scary fast, and working well!
Glad you’ve got something up and running that you’re happy with, but FYI 21.2 is fairly dated. It came out in 2023. It’s still supported, but the expiration date is next year (instead of in 2029 like the current version, 22.3). If you’re running it because you had problems with a later release, fair enough, but if you were unaware that it’s not the latest version, you might want to upgrade and see if the newer version works well on your system before settling in.
Cheers!
Ok that’s good to know. Thanks.
Is it better to upgrade incrementally or can you skip straight to latest?
You could jump to the latest but it’s a hastle if something goes wrong. I would just do a clean install since you don’t have much installed.
I’m not certain, but personally, I’d try taking a system snapshot with Timeshift and then upgrade to the latest – unless Update Manager suggests otherwise.
Thanks. Appreciated. Am assuming backup the home folder also.
I’ll be using it as a general browser / social/Lemmy machine but also for just learning Linux, structure, CLI and getting familiar with distros/DEs. Maybe a bit of dabbling in development.
assuming backup the home folder also
If you’ve put anything significant in there, yeah, it’s not a bad idea to backup your stuff. Timeshift doesn’t usually backup the home folder; it usually takes daily/weekly/monthly snapshots of system folders.
I’ll be using it as a general browser / social/Lemmy machine but also for just learning Linux, structure, CLI and getting familiar with distros/DEs. Maybe a bit of dabbling in development.
Mint should do pretty well for your use case, at least as far as learning the Debian side of the family goes. The main drawback to Mint is that it’s not bleeding edge – which is also sometimes a strength. For old hardware, it’s generally pretty good; for new hardware, I’ve had issues because of things like the kernel being too old and not having the drivers I needed. There are ways around that though like using the OEM/HWE kernel releases – which is what I ended up doing when I put a modern GPU into my ~10 year old desktop.
If you really like Elementory you can try to install Pantheon on top of mint
I’m using MX Linux (KDE) on an Early 2015 Macbook Air with a replaced battery. It’s my backup/travel laptop, but so far I like it quite a bit. No dual boot for me either. Nothing officially supported by the machine is getting updates, and even the newest OSX you can cram on there only has a year or so left, IIRC.
Thanks, I’ll look into MX. I wanted to try Endeavour because the KDE looked appealing, but when booting from the live iso, the kb, trackpad, wifi weren’t working.
The only thing I had to do with Mint was install the Broadcom wifi driver.
I haven’t tried the webcam, but everything else, including WiFi, worked out of the box for me. The KDE version uses modern Plasma and is not a distro that moves hell and high water to get something working on a potato, but overall it is designed with middle-old machines like these in mind.
I’m sure a million other distros will work as well or better, but I do like MX, and it made me smile to see a child of the Mepis LiveCDs I used 20 years ago is still around.
Welcome to the club!
Quick question, tho: in what way is it ‘mini’?
Is there no desktop environment? Or is this a terminal window maximized full screen with a planet wallpaper?
Fullscreen transparent terminal. Planet wallpaper. DE is Cinnamon.
Btw, is there a TUI start menu like tool, with favorites and so on?
Or even better, a whole status bar at the top/bottom, with time, battery, maybe even launched background processes listed you can bring to front?
No reason that we can’t have some Desktop metaphor niceties on shell too, no?
