I actually went with Tuxedo OS, which is based on the Ubuntu kernel but has a very noob-friendly desktop environment.

My daily driver laptop is a 12-year-old Hackintosh MBP that I’ve been repairing for years, but I’ve priced out a Tuxedo laptop for when it finally kicks the bucket. So I started dual booting Tuxedo on that as well to get my bearings.

Once I’m a little more experienced, I’m definitely interested to check out other distros! Right now it’s a lot of looking up terminal commands and learning the architecture. The firmware fan control in the MacBook is shot - fans blasting at full speed due to a failed GPU temp sensor that makes the computer assume it’s overheating - so I’ve already learned how to write to /sys/ with a custom fan control based on the working sensor in the CPU die.

It’s been really fun so far. You get the sense of just having vastly greater control over the hardware at a low level and the ability to control how it functions in a way that Windows and MacOS completely obfuscate. I still have very little idea what I’m doing in the terminal, but I’m starting to pick it up.