Good question, and one I’ve asked myself several times since I started thinking about reusing my MBA to run Linux.
As I mentioned earlier, I don’t profess to have a great understanding of Linux or even how different distros come about. I’ve played with the following (alphabetically) VMs on my FreeNAS machine running in VirtualBox:
- CentOS 6 & 7
- elementary OS 0.2, 0.3 & 0.4 (obviously)
- Debian 8
- Fedora 22
- Mint 17
- openSUSE 13
- Puppy Linux 6
- ubuntu 14 & 15
I’ve tried them with GNOME, KDE and XFCE desktops, and even tried running a few from the command line, although my Linux skills tend to run out pretty quickly and that’s not going to replicate macOS.
My WordPress server is running in a FreeBSD 9 VM with Nginx, MariaDB and PHP 7 and I’m much more comfortable using a FEMP stack at the command line, although some things transfer reasonably well. I also have a couple of VMs running Zimbra and Limesurvey, and both of these are running CentOS 6.8 so my choice of eOS might seem a little strange?
I guess the most obvious reason is the similarities in terms of look and feel to macOS. The menu bar and dock will immediately make anyone familiar with macOS feel a little at home. It’s also pretty lightweight and doesn’t come installed with lots of things I’m not going to use. I’d prefer to gradually add the stuff I do, as I miss it from macOS. The apps that are installed by default are also very consistent, both in terms of look and feel and user experience, something else I’ve grown to love about the Apple ecosystem.
I also like that it’s built around ubuntu which from a desktop user perspective seems to be one of the best-supported distros and a google search for Linux often returns lots of ubuntu answers. I’m going to need all the help I can get with this learning curve, so this was another big plus.
Anyway, that’s a good enough ‘why’ as far as I’m concerned. It could have been answered much more simply with a ‘why not?’
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