Linux

I recall it using some different design philosophies behind managing windows than I was familiar with, I'd honestly just recommend trying it out in a live USB or a vm so you can see for yourself. It uses a desktop called Pantheon that they make specifically for elementary OS. Specifically, the X button on the window is in the top left, maximize is in the top right, and there's no minimize button.

Wifi card drivers can be an issue, that you should be able to see in the live USB before you try installing though. It's not a matter of any specific distribution and more whether or not your wifi card has working drivers.

Interesting, what do you mean by "fresh"?

x86 is the instruction set, 64 is for 64-bit extension of that instruction set. It's also known as AMD64 to make it even more confusing. All Intel Core processors starting from Core 2 are using that architecture, as far as I remember.

By "tinkering a bit" I meant sometimes digging up a package in the archives and rolling it back. I used Arch daily for around 2 years and had to do it once. You can also avoid it by keeping tabs on what the community says, broken packages cause quite a bit of fuss.

Release schedule is a trade off, if you are updating weekly, it'll usually take less than 5 minutes to download all the packages that got updated within that week. The rarer you update, the more time each update takes.

But it's all ultimately a matter of preference, just wing something up and try to use it for a couple of days. If it's not to your taste, scrap it and try something else, it's rare to end up with a setup you like right from the get go.

You can put Zorin on it and use the Mac theme it has to make it more familiar.

What I’d recommend is getting a couple USB drives, download the distros you’re thinking of trying, boot into them, and just click around a bit to see how they feel. It’ll give you a chance to try out the desktop environments, like Gnome and Cosmic and see if you like them or not.

Little harder to compare the actual distro part without using it first and trying to set them up or do something with them like installing programs and updating. Unless you can spin up a virtual machine to try them out, but that might be harder for some if you don’t have the resources for it.

Fedora will be Fedora regardless of which backend you choose so it’ll have the same familiar commands, feel, and stability. Where the atomic versions of Fedora will differ is in how they handle updates and system changes.

Pop_OS! is based on Ubuntu, so where you were hearing about the popularity and ease of use of Ubuntu, you’ll find a similar feel with Pop, but with a lot of quality of life improvements. It’s got support for Nvidia drivers built in, which is big, and a lot of the bloat you were concerned about with Ubuntu has been stripped out. Since it’s based on Ubuntu you have access to everything that’s available to that widely supported platform.

Regarding Atomic updates, and immutable distros, it’s something to consider for sure if you aren’t confident, but there are some slight downsides (depending on your point of view) you should look at as well.

Since Atomic Updates keep copies of previous configs, you might see slightly more storage use.

Immutable distros focuses on making sure you can’t break things, and it does that by restricting access to system critical folders. That can be a very good thing, but it could also mean that there could be a time you run into trouble trying to change something you don’t have access to. This is just a hypothetical as I don’t know how you use your computer tho. It’s a trade off. You know how people joke about how Windows won’t let you delete a simple file, but Linux won’t blink if you tell it to delete critical folders provided you run the right command with permissions? Yeah, that’s kind of what immutables are stopping.

Here’s a couple articles you can read that go into Atomic Updates and Immutable Distros.

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One distro you’ll hear come up a lot when talking about Atomic and Immutable is NixOS. It’s considered to be the best at what it does when it comes to those two features. But as I don’t know enough about it I can’t recommend it confidently. I will say tho that I’m probably going to take the plunge and flip over to it sometime in the near future. I’ve heard enough great things about it I’ve gotten interested in trying it out.

Last thing to note is when considering a new distro, another thing might help make you make a choice is to check out the wikis. Good documentation on how to do different things can make a world of difference to your experience with the OS. For example, I really love the CachyOS wiki because it just walks you through every step of setting it up and makes a number of solid recommendations for things you might want to change or enable. When something isn’t in their wiki, there’s the ever extensive Arch Wiki as well, tho the language in it goes up a couple steps so it wouldn’t be where I’d send a new user. For that matter I wouldn’t recommend an arch distro for a new user. While CachyOS is great, rolling releases probably isn’t what you want based on your use case.

Hope this helps!

Adding to compatibility notes, it does seem that with the 2015 A1502's there won't be anything major in poor compatibility, beside the webcam not working out of the box. Found someone who documented their experience heavily tuning their Fedora install on their 2015 A1502. The author kitted out their Mac with a new SSD and better Wi-Fi card, which is worth mentioning. Some of the information is straight up helpful for even a standard A1502. Common stuff like installing the RPMFusion libva driver, EasyEffects equalizer presets, TLP are generally good ideas.

Mbpfan is also a good idea, but it looks like the package got dropped on 44 from a missing maintainer. May be recommended to install 43 for now if going with Fedora. I pulled the package source and built it on my computer, and it seems to work. Unfortunately I don't have an actual Macbook to test it on. ~~I'll see about getting a COPR repo for it available soon, so that the package can be easily tested.~~

I have a Copr repo available (jrgd/mbpfan) for unofficial packages on Fedora 44.

Some stuff, like disabling mitigations, throttled, and installing the FacetimeHD drivers are not stuff I'd really recommend. You can still go with any of these noting the caveats listed for each tweak. The FacetimeHD drivers are required for getting the webcam to work, so going through the hassle of getting those drivers to behave or just not having a built-in webcam is a choice to make.

Looks like it has either an i5 or i7, depending on the specific A1502 version, so there's a lot more available distro's