Taking the dive into Linux, any advice before I jump?

Kyptnc7 · August 19, 2018, 3:14am

Hello one and all! I am finally thinking of jumping into installing Linux (Elementary OS) on my iMac. So I was wondering if there is any advice this great community would be able to send my way before I take the plunge. I am a huge Newb when it comes to computers which is why I got a Macintosh.
They’re somewhat user friendly, pretty easy to learn the basics and I grew up with Mac.
Now with how they force update and forcibly slow down your computer and such (not sure if its conspiracy or not) but I’ve had enough and found Linux. I love the idea, and so far watching Leveonetech vids on youtube has helped me decide to do this. I’m pretty nervous about the whole thing. So any help/advice will be greatly appreciated.

Marten · August 19, 2018, 3:18am

Lots of googling but hit tools and set the date to the last year. There is a lot of info out there and it can date.

Elementary is a solid OS.

Goalkeeper · August 19, 2018, 3:21am

Don’t forget to enter the ‘one year Linux challenge’ thread.

And welcome to the community!

Elementary os is a nice looking and easy to use distro, you’ll be in good hands.

Kyptnc7 · August 19, 2018, 3:24am

Thanks guys, I’ll be installing pretty much right now wish me luck

Goalkeeper · August 19, 2018, 3:29am

Good luck bro.

tkoham · August 19, 2018, 3:31am

relevant if you’re having trouble choosing a distro:

Threadripper BUILD. New to Linux. Lots of questions

This one’s a bit of bugbear. None of them are that great

Ubuntu family:
(+) sort of works out of the box some of the time
(+) very large community
(–) fragile outside of basic mainstream use cases
(–) badly documented downstream changes
(–) most in the community aren’t particularly knowledgeable or helpful (matters because upstream documentation is useless on ubuntu, so best effort support is all you really have)

Examples: Ubuntu, Elementary, Mint, KxStudio

Good choice if you want to get up and running without thinking about it, bad choice if you want to learn how linux works instead of how to trick ubuntu into working.

RHEL Family:
(+) documentation is accurate and actually makes sense
(+) They set the standards for most cert and production related practices, so learning their flavors can help with learning ‘employable’ linux
(+) stable and functional (outside of fedora which is essentially free QA for the next RHEL)
(+) Excellent commercial software support in 3d, vfx, CAD, dataviz, etc.
(–) some quirks make it less flexible than community distributions
(–) Their ‘bleeding edge’ releases are breaky, essentially just a testbed for RHEL
(–) less outwardly “user friendly” than ubuntu, CLI necessary much sooner.
(–) Stable versions aren’t the most up to date out of the box, good for workstations and servers, not so much for home desktops

Examples: Centos, ROSA, Fedora, RHEL

Probably the best for “learning linux” in a way that will be useful to you in a work setting, not necessarily the best desktop OS in general

Solus:
(+) Incredibly good user experience out of the box
(+) software up to date
(+) devs hyper focused on improving UX for desktop users, gaming, etc.
(+) ‘just works’ tools that actually just work.
(+) very involved and knowledgeable best effort community support
(–) nonstandard package manager
(–) hard to find third party repos
(–) anachronisms like budgie and raven make for a better desktop experience, but prepare the user for the weirdness of linux poorly

This is an excellent desktop OS, but it gets out of your way so much that you probably won’t learn anything fast, because it doesn’t break nearly as often as other “user friendly” distros.

"Friendly" Arch/Gentoo Spinoffs:
(+) working installer, GUI out of the box
(+) excellent software support, widest range of working available packages
(+) always up to date
(+) very customizeable
(+) excellent documentation (except manjaro lol)
(–) without a foundational knowledge of linux systems you may run into problems you won’t know how to fix
(–) mainline community best effort support is hostile to these spinoffs because they’re “cheating”
(–) some of them (manjaro again lol) change things down stream without good documentation or reasoning behind the changes, making matters worse
(–) first days will be somewhat trial by fire despite the friendly face
(–) if you pick one that makes a bunch of downstream design changes you lose most of the benefits of this style of distribution (see bad examples)

Examples: Antergos, Anarchy, Sabayon, Netrunner, Redcore, CloverOS

Bad Examples: Manjaro, Chakra

These offer a lot of interesting choice and modularity without being completely impenetrable to newcomers, but you have to be careful to read documentation on the changes you do, and pick a distro as “stock” as possible to start.

Vanilla Arch/Gentoo:
(+) all the benefits discussed above
(+) community support becomes friendly
(–) varying levels of completely impenetrable for newcomers to install and get running.

Don’t jump in on these, but don’t rule them out later on either. They’re definitely the best VFIO distros.

There’s also a bunch of other weird niche ones that aren’t really worth discussing outside using linux as a hobby.

Examples: Void, Nix, Puppy, Sourcemage

Kyptnc7 · August 19, 2018, 3:53am

@tkoham Thanks for info.

So, I installed Elementary on my hard drive, but it wont boot up into it. I can only use my bootable usb. Did I mess up some how? How do I get it to boot on the hard drive. Again I’m super new to everything. right now I’m using the USB…

tkoham · August 19, 2018, 3:55am

does the install fail? is your system set up to boot in uefi or legacy mode? did you disable secure boot?

Kyptnc7 · August 19, 2018, 3:56am

I have no idea, all I did was boot to the USB and hit install. I think I might have messed up.

tkoham · August 19, 2018, 3:56am

make sure you disable secure boot in the bios/uefi, and make sure “install bootloader” is checked in the last stage of the install.

Kyptnc7 · August 19, 2018, 3:58am

So when I’m in the USB install what exactly am I looking for? I will look for the “install bootloader” this time

tkoham · August 19, 2018, 4:00am

varies from distro to distro.

Kyptnc7 · August 19, 2018, 4:05am

I’m trying to install Elementary OS. I tried the install again and it doesn’t show a install bootloader

tkoham · August 19, 2018, 4:07am

and you’ve disabled secure boot?

what error do you get on boot?

Kyptnc7 · August 19, 2018, 4:08am

I don’t know how to disable secure boot, didn’t know I needed to. All I get on boot is a Folder with a question mark in the middle and it flashes

tkoham · August 19, 2018, 4:09am

oh, you’re installing on a mac

what model?

IIRC some imacs have weird UEFI shit

Kyptnc7 · August 19, 2018, 4:10am

its the iMac late 2007ish

tkoham · August 19, 2018, 4:11am

yeah, last I checked that’s a model that has a 32 bit hybrid UEFI, definitely going to make things difficult for you.

wrote this ages ago, might help.

Kyptnc7 · August 19, 2018, 4:25am

Holy Mother of mercy… Also thank you a ton for that. That is all the kinda stuff thats made me hate apple, is part of why I want to do this so bad. WOW, that is process is nuts. Now I only need to find that OSX install disc… this will be another adventure.

tkoham · August 19, 2018, 4:26am

their newer hardware works fine, you just got an unlucky year.