LeFantome

They are probably saying the shared POSIX underpinnings means greater commonality between macOS and Linux and therefore easier porting. That is likely true to some extent but real apps are written to Apple proprietary APIs and therefore that advantage is largely nullified.

In terms of effort to bring apps over, there has been far, far more effort put into porting Windows apps and so that task ( at this point ) is generally easier. It may have been less effort to port macOS at the start ( eg. GNUstep ) but that work has still largely never been done.

It is easy to move POSIX world apps to macOS. It is not as easy to go the other way.

I installed EndeavourOS on a 2013 MacBook Air a month ago for a backpack trip. It was light enough to carry around and it was cheap enough I did not worry about it being broken or stolen.

It works fantastically. LibreOffice, Outlook online, Teams, OBS Studio, Distrobox, Docker, IntellijIDEA. I have even played a little Steam on it. The only thing that was not out of the box was the iSight camera and even that was a one line command after install.

The only software that let me down was DaVinci Resolve. The integrated GPU is not supported.

All I did was hold down Option at boot so I could boot off the USB and then I let the installer do the work. Anybody could do it.

Did you install the facetimehd module?

When is this hardware from? 2010?

I have been using a 2013 MacBook Air recently that has Intel integrated graphics and have actually run a few Steam games in it. I also use a 2008 iMac but it actually has a dedicated GPU so that does not help with your hardware.

Even my old stuff has more than 4 MB of RAM though. That would be hassle these days.

I love running Linux on old kit. Way to go.

This thread is 3 MB

I assume it is because /var can be written to while the rest of the filesystem ( outside /home ) is expected to be read-only.

What is the name of the dinit system designed for containers?

As others have said, macOS does not “just work” anymore.

I am primary tech support for a few “normy” users including my mother and wife. My wife, the more technical and capable of the two, uses macOS. My mother uses Windows. My wife requires substantially more tech support. Worse, the issues are often complete mysteries to me like “why is everything so slow” and it turning out that some OS level process is consuming huge amounts of memory and / or CPU. Web searches reveal lots of people with similar issues but no real insight into what to do about it or why it is happening. I have moved OS versions just to solve this kind of crap on Mac. Another problem is software not working on older versions of the OS.

I am no Windows lover but, once I show my mother how to do something, I never hear from her. Every once in a while I stop by to marvel at how many updates need to be applied but that is about it. She is in the Windows 10 that I installed for her many years ago now. It just works.

While I understand the sentiment, we have to understand that Open Source developers work on projects that motivate them.

So, we can have a single example of each of these but they do necessarily get any more devs. In fact, if you take economic theory ( competition for example ), it is likely they attract less attention individually than they do competing as part of an ecosystem.

It would certainly help on the user acceptance and commercial software side where choice is an impediment. But, if we are just talking resources, limiting the number of projects only works if you pay people to work on them.

Why was each of these projects started ( eg. window managers )? The answer is simple. It is because the founding developer did not like any of the existing options.

That is honestly a decent analogy. So, on what rides is it ok if something goes wrong and a young family member is killed? Rust says, it is never ok so we won’t let you do it.

To use your analogy though, the issue is the driver feeling quite confident in their skills and rating the risk as low. Then a tire blows on a corner. Or somebody else runs a red light. Or, there is just that one day when an otherwise good driver makes a mistake. History tells us, the risk is higher than the overconfident “good” drivers think it is.

In particular, history shows that 70% of the real world injuries and fatalities come from passengers without seat belts. So, instead of each driver deciding if it is safe, we as a society decide that seat belt use is mandatory because it will prevent those 70% of injuries and fatalities ( without worrying about which individual drivers are responsible )

Rust is the seat belt law that demonstrably saves lives regardless of how safe each individual driver thinks they are. It is a hard transition with many critics but the generation that grows up with seat belts will never go back. Eventually, we will all realize just how crazy it was that they were not always used.

Mint would be a perfect distro to start with. Don’t listen to them—just download Mint. I don’t like Ubuntu but honestly it would be fine too. In other words, although it does matter, it does not matter as much as people say as long as you do not start with something to too hard to install.

Thank you for suggesting we not harass anyone. That is a lot better than I have seen elsewhere related to this.