I’m a long time Windows user who has experience with WSL. Last year, I needed a laptop for university, and out of laziness, opted for a Macbook since, although they’re expensive as hell, are reasonably reliable.

Since using the mac, I’ve absolutely fallen in love with it over Windows. Note that I refer to the non-iOS specific aspects. After not touching my desktop for several months, I now see that I absolutely hate Windows even more. I would like to move my desktop to a Linux system some time in the future. However, my education is limited, and so I’m here to ask for help.

Currently, I’m a student in Mathematics and Computer Science. But outside that, I am, for the most part, a programmer. I rarely game, but I would like the option for the rare occasion that I have the time to do so.

I’ve grown comfortably with the command line, through my in-depth knowledge of lower level knowledge is limited. So, I feel I’m comfortable enough to extend the possible domain of my options.

I would love to hear recommendations and suggestions. I’m also open to other options such as NixOS, but that would require some research to learn more, which is fine. I’m not doing this soon.

If you could provide any links and resources that I can follow to continue learning, especially if relevant to your suggestions, I would be deeply appreciative!

My Mac is the most Linux-like thing I’ve used for so long, and it’s been so, so much easier to work with compared to Windows (I hate Windows PATH limitations so much).

Thanks, all ❤ 🐧

  • eight_byte@feddit.de
    5·
    7 months ago

    The Mac hardware does limit the choice of distributions a bit. Besides that I can highly recommend Debian 12 as a rock solid base system with Nix as package manager to get latest and greatest software. Actually the nice thing is that you can use Nix package manager on any Linux distribution.

      • eight_byte@feddit.de
        4·
        7 months ago

        I am not an Arch-user, but I would say so. At least Nix itself claims that their unstable channel is the largest and most up-to-date package repository currently followed by AUR. So yes, I think you can have best of both worlds - a rock solid base system with the newest software via Nix. It even gets better with Home Manager.

        • Shareni@programming.dev
          2·
          7 months ago

          I’m running MX + nix unstable, and it’s pretty great. Although it’s got some annoying parts like nixGL, it’s nothing compared to simply updating your systyem and it failing to boot.