Limerance

Make real backups. Ideally make two or more

• a full disk backup with SuperSuper
• A Time Machine Backup on an external drive

The likelihood of making your machine unusable for a while is non negligible.

Mac

If you want to dual boot with macOS, do some research. Boot loaders and EFI can be tricky.

Holding alt after pressing the power button gives you the option to choose the drive to boot from. Holding cmd + R after pressing the power button allows booting into recovery mode. It allows you to partition and format your internal drive and reinstall macOS.

You can install a newer version of macOS than is officially supported using OpenCore Legacy Patcher.

FOSS principles

Intel Macs often have Broadcom WiFi chips, that need proprietary software to work. As a noob, you should got with a distro that makes it easy to install these or does it automatically for you.

You likely also want to play some video files, so you will need nonfree stuff.

Distro hopping

Install to an external drive or Virtual Machine. You can do that on your existing macOS with VirtualBox for example.

similar to Windows, macOS, customizable

Even the desktop environments, who claim to be macOS like (Endeavour, GNOME), have at best a superficial similarity. Don’t expect a macOS replacement. All desktop environments are different from macOS.

beginner distro

Fedora and SuSE are not beginner friendly. Lots of Linux distros use the same marketing terms of easy to use, powerful, efficient, etc.

Start with Ubuntu or something based on Ubuntu like Mint.

Cinnamon, KDE, and Gnome are all good desktop environments for beginners.

Google search results have become so much worse. Tons of AI slop and other trash is in the top results for lots of searches.

Look at a terminal command and try to understand what it does. You can do this by checking out the commands it’s made of and learning about them.

Zulip integrates with Jitsi, Zoom, and Bigbluebutton for voice and video chat. Looks like a sensible solution.

Not bad is a good description. It’s not fun to use compared to other chat software.

Call them cretins all you want, Discord in a great piece of software and very powerful. The usability is better than most others.

Yes, enshittification of Discord has started a while ago, and it’s becoming worse.

That looks very intriguing and useful. Thank you.

Downvote should not be a disagreement button.

Working in Remote Desktop for an extended amount of time is no fun. It’s possible, but you need the right version of windows and office to do that.

I wouldn’t want to rely on complex solutions like that for an essential for work. Now you have to administrate your local computer and the remote server. You also rely on a bunch of things going right to be able to use it from on the go: Internet connection on the go that doesn’t filter Remote Desktop, Home Internet connection, proxmox configuration and updates being okay. If you want to add a VPN on top, you get more possible failure points

So run a windows VM directly on your Linux machine. No need to make it more complicated. At least then you don’t depend on a working internet connection.

Alternatively try to run MS Word using WINE on Linux. This might work or break randomly.

If you don’t want to buy a license for office or windows use these scripts.

You really seem to need MS Office. It’s not necessary to make your life harder by building complex solutions. Run windows if it makes your life easier.

Other alternative: buy an Apple device and run MS Office for Mac. That’s the only reliable way to use it without windows.

The slight difference in looks isn’t what’s stopping people.

Gnome 3 seems to be designed for touch screens, but it rarely is used with one.

The distro matters because some have better defaults for one DE over another.

The downside of KDE is the millions of options and features. It can get in the way and makes it a little harder to learn.

That said. KDE is pretty great and currently my favorite.

a non free alternative I can recommend is Tricount. It’s best feature is that is also works offline.

Depending on the Pi, you are limited to USB 2 speeds for the external drive. That’s enough for many things, like streaming video, but doesn’t cut it for regular transfer of large files.

I often use my nose to operate my Apple Watch when my hands are full.

HP Microserver