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 ❤ 🐧
I would say that you should check out Fedora as your first distro. Gnome is more like Mac than KDE (which is also great). Fedora is also built off Red Hat Enterprise Linux so it’ll will prepare you for server environments and your future career. You can learn bits of both at once.
I think it benefited my career to go in that direction. I (like everyone) distro-hopped and went through a phase where I customized everything and installed a new distro every few months. But if you learn the ins and outs of Fedora you’ll be well-positioned to manage RHEL and related servers. Debian is also a good choice for that, at least in the U.S.
And there’s nothing wrong with developing on a Mac while you use Linux for server stuff. Server level code will probably run on Linux but I found that using a Mac helped me when building front-end code because macOS devs tend to be design-forward. And don’t forget that you’re building something for other people. I barely use Windows but I try to revisit it every so often to see how the other half lives.
After getting used to the vanilla Gnome flow, at home and at work, even MacOS starts to feel a bit clunky.
Love the minimalism of Gnome with the stability of Debian.