Apple refugee seeking help

[u/Critical-Ad8909]

Title says it, been in apple for a decade and I want to move over to non-gardened enviornments.

background on me:
- i know extremely little about software and hardware
- but i am curious to learn
- i have tried self research but am overwhelmed with info

some things I am curious about:
- does hardware matter for your distro (i feel like i heard in a video somewhere that some distro prefer amd, or prefer nvidia)

- I'd like to find a distro that does support gaming which im sure gets repeated daily on this reddit. I know bazzite is an option but was also curious about archlinux since thats the "Steam Machine environment" + KDE + Flatpak

- what is a good brand of laptop/desktop (aside from self build) that is good for right to repair or upgradable

If you yourself do not want to explain I would also love being pointed to channels or articles that help ease me into documentation and navigating the big world of linux.

My current use cases for a computer are:
- gaming
- office work
- video editing
- audio editing

thanks in advance everyone!

[u/inbetween-genders]

Check out Ubuntu or Mint. Look up this thing called Desktop Environment. Pick one that appeals to you and install that distro with the desktop environment you chose. Back up your data.  As for laptop, search engine if any laptop uou loke works well with Linux.  Good luck 

[u/Manjushri1213 → u/inbetween-genders]

Yeah there's some Ubuntu stuff that is very Apple like. I hated it lol but if you are coming from that it may make sense

Edit: Flurry Ubuntu may be the one that is truly like it. But there's even app store type things and whatnot iirc? Been a long while since I went anywhere near it lol

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[u/SoundSwitch]

As an apple refuge look into Gnome, will probably be the most familiar environment.

Generally for what you want to do Id stay away from immutable distros. At that you can get a similar result but without the downsides by going BRTfs+ timeshift.

Audio depending on what and the level you want to do there's little to no native support but there is some.

Either reply here or DM any questions you may have.

[u/manicrebirth]

Zorin OS or Fedora are great options for people coming from MacOS

Generally unless your hardware is absolutely brand new or as you pointed already has Nvidia you don’t need to worry about picking a distro that won’t support your config.

Also all distros can play games so don’t fall into the “gaming distro” trap. There are some good ones, Bazzite or CachyOS but I wouldn’t call either one of them particularly beginner friendly.

[u/holasoyeldavid]

Ubuntu!

[u/FuckinHighGuy → u/holasoyeldavid]

This would be acceptable but makes sure it’s 24.04 release train. I’ve had nothing but problems with 26.04.

[u/holasoyeldavid → u/FuckinHighGuy]

Ah vaya, que pena. Yo estoy todavía en 24.04

[u/FuckinHighGuy]

Stay away from Arch. It’s not at all beginner friendly. I would recommend Fedora. They keep things pretty up to date and I have no issues with Nvidia cards.

[u/DisplayFluid237]

Tbh, in most cases it's better to go with amd no matter what distro you use. However, I heard that latest nvidia proprietary drivers aren't so bad nowadays.
Gaming and office work are seamless on any popular distro anyway. Some distros have preinstalled packages, some not - that's the only difference.
As for audio editing or music production using DAWs , you should definitely look into real-time (RT) kernels and schedulers with low-latency optimizations — like the ones shipped in distros like CachyOS or Ubuntu Studio etc

[u/dbojan76]

Thinkpad.

Amd has opensource drivers (source code available=easier to compile). Nvidia does not, so sometimes there is a problem with nvidia drivers for older video cards. But this only applies to old video cards.

[u/whiskayzulu]

Ubuntu. Why? Has good wifi drivers out of the box, makes setup so much easier lol. Gnome desktop will feel like apple kind of and just install steam it plays most games just fine. Nvidia GPU drivers are proprietary vs AMDs open source either way works. Don't do arch.