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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.

Yeah, I'll definitely want the security patches on whatever timeline. I just don't want other kinds of updates frequently.

Zorin looks nice too! Thanks.

re using a VM - I like the idea of trying out different distros and desktop environments with less risk. It does seem like a large part of the greatness of Linux is having so many options, and it would be a shame not to experiment. Thanks for the tip!

My understanding is that Asahi Linux is designed for newer Macs with a different kind of chip from the one I plan on experimenting with. I might try it in the future if I decide I like Linux and want it on my current computer, though.

If it's just rolling back a package once in two years, that doesn't sound so bad. I don't see myself downloading updates once a week, though. I'd rather have fewer updates, especially if they're well-tested and I can set things up so they happen overnight while I'm sleeping.

I really like knowing that I won't be stuck with whatever setup I start with. Thank you!