butWhatIfiCan

I really don't understand why we got rid of it! Why move toward using two letters in place of a single one? Þat's just feaÞerbrained.

Oh, wonderful. Thank you so much for your help!

Thank you so much for explaining all of this!

Yeah, I think I will try out at least a couple distros on USBs or maybe a virtual machine. I think I still have at least one USB lying around somewhere in my closet... don't remember if it has enough space, but maybe.

Based on those articles and your explanations, I'm certainly going to want to explore immutable and atomic at some point, although maybe not right away since it sounds like there's more I'd need to learn. Both of those qualities sound fantastic to me. I think I'll be fine with a little more storage use, and I highly doubt I'll want to change anything about critical folders anytime soon. I'd like to avoid broken installations and myself accidentally doing really stupid things.

Yeah, I'll look at the documentation available before I install any OS. Thank you!

Oh, OK. It seems very weird to not have a minimize button in elementary OS, unless the maximize button is also a minimize button. I wouldn't want to have to close a window and reopen it every time I wanted to downsize it. I'd probably end up resizing windows manually instead of maximizing them.

Thank you so much! That makes a lot more sense.

Awesome, thanks! Do you think I'll have to mess with the wifi card or drivers to get things like the wifi, audio, and/or webcam to work?

Thanks! What kinds of workflow differences? And do you think I'll have to mess with the wifi card and drivers to get it to work? I'm seeing some people talking about that with other operating systems.

Yeah, I'm realizing that might be unavoidable. I'm still hoping I can get Linux Mint or Zorin working without messing around with that (one person said they didn't have to do any of that when installing those on similar Macs, but others did - maybe this changed at some point when Mint/Zorin was updated?), but we'll see. Not looking forward to figuring that out, but it might be worth it. Thanks!

Wonderful! Thank you so much. I will probably try one of those two first then.

Thanks! Did you have to do anything to get wifi, fans, or the webcam working on the 2015 Macbook Pros running Zorin or Mint? Some other people have mentioned having to work around that on various distros.

Oh, good! So you didn't have to jump through a bunch of extra hoops to get things like wifi, the fan, and the webcam to work?

Another commenter showed me this documentation of what someone with a similar-to-mine Macbook Pro did to set up Linux Fedora, and I don't really understand anything they did (yet). I'll try to learn if needed, but it would be great if that wasn't necessary.

Oh, OK. Very different use case!

If you're at the level of knowing all this stuff and also running your own server, and you're finding PopOS Cosmic to be still in its beta days, then it's probably not for someone like me. I don't really know what dnf vs. apt means yet (still just trying to wrap my head around what a package manager does). A lot of people keep recommending Gnome, though, so I'll probably still try that and maybe Fedora.

Thanks for looking into this and finding that Github documentation! All of this stuff still sounds complicated to me, but I'm probably going to have to do some learning and kitting up anyway. It turns out that this computer's battery is toast because it sat in a closet for years, and my relative never recharged it in all that time. I might as well look into a new Wi-Fi card and maybe a new SSD as well, if I'm going to be fixing this thing up with new parts anyway. Might have to wait a bit longer than I thought to get started, though. I don't know what anything else you mentioned in this post is, but I can learn. I'll probably try to figure out the Facetime HD drivers eventually.