this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Linux

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I'm newly retired, and I wanna go all in. Starting place? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by UniversalMonk@sh.itjust.works to c/linux@sh.itjust.works
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Hey everyone, right now, I’m mostly Mac-based. I also have an older PC, a Raspberry Pi, micro PC and a mac laptop.

Now that I’m retired and have more time on my hands, I really want to dive deep into Linux and break away from the monopoly.

I’ll definitely do my own research, but there’s so much information out there—it feels like drinking from a firehose. It’s overwhelming!

Do you have any tips or websites to help me get started, step by step? I know I’ll make plenty of mistakes along the way (that’s how ya learn), but I’d appreciate any advice you can share. Thanks!

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[–] Maiq@lemy.lol 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

Coming from the Mac world transitioning might be a bit easier as you already have some experience with how the filesystem is setup. Root and users home folder.

I know its a bit intimidating at first glance but installing is really not that hard. The first step is choosing your distro. I think mint is a great starter distro. One thing that you might not like is the default windows close, maximize, minimize buttons are on the right. Not sure how easy it is to change it back to the left anymore. Below is a link that should get you started with mint.

https://www.linuxmint.com/documentation.php

Or you like your close, maximize, minimize buttons on the left I'd recommend using KDE as everything is very customizable. You could use kubuntu which is KDE + Ubuntu, just like mint is based on Ubuntu but with the cinnamon desktop enviroment.

However I defiantly recommend using KDE fedora spin.

https://fedoraproject.org/spins/

All three of these choices have great documentation and communities, relatively easy to install. They should have almost all the software you will need from their repositories as well.

The basic steps are

  1. Download your distro of choice.

  2. Create your installation medium. There are programs that can help you do this but I don't know the best one for Mac. I did do a quick search and grabbed this link: https://superuser.com/questions/63654/how-do-i-burn-an-iso-on-a-usb-drive-on-mac-os-x#226148

If you are familiar with the terminal the dd command can easily write the image to USB. Be careful with the dd command and make sure you are writing to the USB drive and not any other drive as it is not very forgiving if you make a mistake. There is an example in the link above.

This is the hardest part, burning the iso to USB.

3: now you have to boot from USB. here you will have to get into your bios. Most computers use an F-key, you can probably search boot from bios + your computer model to get the right key.

Then look for a setting in there to boot from external drive and boot from your USB.

4: here you will be greeted by either the installer itself or a live desktop environment depending on what you picked. If you choose a live iso you can test drive the distro before you install it to your computer.

5: follow the install steps, you can refer to the disteo you have chosen documentation if you have any questions. Or post back on lemmy and someone will come along and help you out I'm sure.

That's about it. Pretty easy. Sounds worse than it is!