As per title, have you experienced any distro on this device? Currently torn between mint/Debian or just vanilla Debian
Concerning the compatibility, there shouldn’t be a difference between LMDE and Debian. The choice of the Desktop environment depends on your personal favour. As Mac user, you probably tend towards Gnome which can be installed during the setup of Debian, not LMDE. However, as I don’t know about the performance of the 2013 iMac, maybe Cinnamon or Mate are a better choice.
Yeah I tend to Gnome but was thinking to give this to the wife that is a windows gal ಥ_ಥ she might be better off with cinnamon
If she’s used to Windows, KDE might be a better choice. It runs well on my 2012 Intel i3 dual core, 8GB RAM laptop.
Last time I tried KDE was like 2013… it has been a long time. How does it play with flatpacks designed for gnome?
I just installed the Flatpak version of Inkscape (the first GTK application, that came into my mind, where it makes sense to have the latest version installed) and the Breeze dark theme works for me.
I’m using Debian Bookworm btw ;-)
I’m not really sure (I’ve never tried to run linux on a mac except once on a 2013 (or 2012 or 2011) 13" macbook pro (I tried ubuntu and debian stable) but the keyboard was playing up and the trackpad didn’t work while it was charging (all hardware problems, they happened in macos as well)(this was in 2021 or 2022)), but given the age of your device any modern distros should be fine.
I can’t speak for your exact model, but I’m running kubuntu on my old 2012 MacBook Pro (with an upgraded SSD and maxed-out 16 GB RAM). My daily driver is a desktop, but I spend almost as much time on the laptop. It’s a wonderful experience for my use case, and all the hardware is supported “out of the box”.
Maybe try distro hopping a bit to see which experience is best for your usage. Have fun with it!
Yes, I also had a positive experience with Ubuntu on a 2012 MacBook Air :)
