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.

You misunderstood my comment. I NEVER said that the old Trek was subtle. Your whole reply is hinging on that point, which is not true. I said that they made the focus of an episode to EXPLORE ethical issues, while on new trek, they take them for granted and then they go on to have a formal adventure.

As both a trekie and a leftie, I must say that the conservatives who complain about modern Trek are not 100% wrong. Yes, Trek was always about social justice, but the episodes were about exploring why something was right or ethical. The new Trek takes this for granted, while half the population is not in agreement, or in a state of confusion. Instead of showing WHY something is good and just and explore it within an episode, they just present it as fact, and then they go off to some random adventure. This rubs off badly half the population. Yes, you can go all out and say that it’s the conservatives’ fault, and it is, but the reality is, the delivery HAS changed. New trek is not the same as old trek.

The Orville was a much more old trek-style show, and people universally loved it more than the new trek, despite being progressive.

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

No, it won’t update itself. This is just to try if the problem improves.

Don’t run snaps. Download the .appimage/tarball of firefox and/or chrome .deb file, and try with that. The snap packages have weird restrictions that could create problems with other apps. Another thing to try is try another DE that allows more than 1 hw accelerated app at a time, the fastest to install and without conflicting with your kde, is xfce (use X11).

see the other reply on this

reinstalling grub is not so easy though, you need to know what you’re doing to fix this. It’s not an easy fix for a new user, because you will be running grub from a third party installation, not your normal Mint.

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.

I have found the gtk theming to be extremely confusing. It’s too complicated IMHO, or I’m missing something. I wanted to make the titlebar/window manager bar darker (with white text maybe) on this theme https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/115201547347227741 and I couldn’t figure out how to ONLY change the titlebar. I want the various elements (e.g. window bar, menu bar, icon bar etc) to have slightly different colors you see, so I can differentiate what’s what. I can’t use dark themes because I can’t see where the boundaries are of each window/thing. My eyes just can’t differentiate dark theme elements. It’s a mystery to me how people can use these themes. :o)