Linux

Idk, just install it? Since you're a Mac person, it'll probably be easier to install on a non-Mac device, so from what you listed, I'd recommend either the micro PC (not sure what that is? AMD mini PC or something?) or the old PC.

For distro, I recommend Linux Mint or Fedora. They're both easy to install, have large communities, and largely do what you want out of the box. You'll need a USB drive, and then just follow instructions to "burn" an ISO (that you'll get from the Linux distro website) to the USB drive, boot from it (probably mash F11 or Delete to get to the boot menu as the PC boots), and follow the instructions to install. Make sure you're okay losing all data on the PC before installing, because it will replace everything.

After that, learn whatever strikes your fancy.

Good luck! Feel free to post back if you get stuck.

Mint is very easy for Windows users and everything I've tried on Steam has worked just fine.

There's so much out there because there's no one (or even just a few) right way(s) to proceed. Everyone is unique, and so there's are just as many paths to enlightenment. Just take a stab at whichever intro looks good to you, and if it doesn't work for you then move on to another - they'll all contribute to your knowledge even if they don't fully work for you.

Coming from the Mac world transitioning might be a bit easier as you already have some experience with how the filesystem is setup. Root and users home folder.

I know its a bit intimidating at first glance but installing is really not that hard. The first step is choosing your distro. I think mint is a great starter distro. One thing that you might not like is the default windows close, maximize, minimize buttons are on the right. Not sure how easy it is to change it back to the left anymore. Below is a link that should get you started with mint.

https://www.linuxmint.com/documentation.php

Or you like your close, maximize, minimize buttons on the left I'd recommend using KDE as everything is very customizable. You could use kubuntu which is KDE + Ubuntu, just like mint is based on Ubuntu but with the cinnamon desktop enviroment.

However I defiantly recommend using KDE fedora spin.

https://fedoraproject.org/spins/

All three of these choices have great documentation and communities, relatively easy to install. They should have almost all the software you will need from their repositories as well.

The basic steps are

1. Download your distro of choice.

2. Create your installation medium. There are programs that can help you do this but I don't know the best one for Mac. I did do a quick search and grabbed this link: https://superuser.com/questions/63654/how-do-i-burn-an-iso-on-a-usb-drive-on-mac-os-x#226148

If you are familiar with the terminal the dd command can easily write the image to USB. Be careful with the dd command and make sure you are writing to the USB drive and not any other drive as it is not very forgiving if you make a mistake. There is an example in the link above.

This is the hardest part, burning the iso to USB.

3: now you have to boot from USB. here you will have to get into your bios. Most computers use an F-key, you can probably search boot from bios + your computer model to get the right key.

Then look for a setting in there to boot from external drive and boot from your USB.

4: here you will be greeted by either the installer itself or a live desktop environment depending on what you picked. If you choose a live iso you can test drive the distro before you install it to your computer.

5: follow the install steps, you can refer to the disteo you have chosen documentation if you have any questions. Or post back on lemmy and someone will come along and help you out I'm sure.

That's about it. Pretty easy. Sounds worse than it is!

A big mistake many ppl make is assuming Linux should run on any hardware, unlike all other OSes. You get Win11 compatible PCs, OSX compatible PCs, etc. and somehow that's normal, but when ppl run the exclusively Windows certified wifi dongle on Linux and it doesn't work, somehow that's Linux' fault. I disagree. One should check if it's compatible before buying stuff.

Well, if you actually want to invest some time in learning, Arch is great for that, while also being awesome distro. Some say that you should NEVER use it for your first time with Linux, but I disagree. You should never use it if you have short attention span and unable to read, but if that’s not the case, you’re good to go.

My recommendation is to not try to learn everything at once. Burn archiso on USB stick, boot into it, use archinstall to get in set up easily, and then search ArchWiki for topics of your interest, for instance the installer won’t install printing support, but if you google “archwiki printing” the very first result you get is CUPS page with basically all that you need to get printing up and running.

During the installation there might be some choices that aren’t entirely clear. For example which graphics drivers to use - it depends on your hardware, if you’re on Intel or AMD graphics, simply select “all open-source” and for nvidia there different choices. If you get to choose option for audio, Pipewire is the best choice. For profile choose desktop and select the one you want. If you don’t know, I highly recommend KDE Plasma, but you might also like GNOME if MacOS is your thing. For networking use NetworkManager for easy integration with your desktop.

I also recommend installing Flatpak and use it as primary source for installing apps, rather than defaulting to system packages.

It might take more effort with Arch to get something functional, but it is more rewarding as you can get exactly the setup you want and can learn a lot.