Lexi Sneptaur

He knows progressivism will undo his life’s work.

I think most pundits have come to agree that he intends to sabotage the Republican party on his way out. Dude knows once he’s done with politics he can just burn it to the ground behind him

There are a lot of differences and a lot of similarities between the operating systems here. It will take you time to get used to no matter what you do. Start by swapping your apps on your existing Mac, trade out any apps that you know won’t work on Linux with apps that do. That way, you spend some time in your existing environment with the new apps you’re going to need going forward.

Next, make sure to test out your peripherals in a live environment. Does everything you use with your computer work correctly? If not, find out why. See if you can mitigate it, or if you’ll need to replace stuff.

Finally, be willing to experiment. I know others in this thread will recommend various desktop environments and distributions to you. Try many of them. GNOME is good and simple out of the box, feels kinda mac-like, but if you want to completely replicate the functionality of macOS, KDE Plasma has more options for that like global menus and the file management app (Dolphin) is incredibly extensible and customizable.

Try to have fun with it, and don’t give up. It takes time to learn a new way of working, and you will likely have frustrations along the way, but ultimately the goal is to learn and figure out what works best for your needs.

Yeah, and I’m not here to say Windows Server is always the wrong choice. Windows Server is the champion of directory services, because Active Directory is king. Windows Server can also do neat things like run WSUS and stuff. It has its place. In larger deployments, it’s likely typical to run a variety of servers in GUI-less mode, and then have one GUI-equipped install for management.

That being said, my experience is that almost all Windows Server deployments I’ve found in the field have had the GUI, and have therefore been rather sluggish. It’s just part of how it works.

Linux has an extremely flexible architecture. Before Linux, most servers ran on UNIX, and before that, well, networking was in a very early and rudimentary stage.

When UNIX licensing shenanigans kept happening, Linux was a more and more attractive option as it matured.

Today, Linux is an incredibly flexible, reliable and performant OS. It’s free, in most cases. Why would anyone use anything else? HPC software all runs on Linux and UNIX. You can run it on a tiny little SBC like a raspberry pi, you can run it in an embedded system like car infotainment or a smart meter, and you can run it on ultra high-performance supercomputer clusters. It doesn’t give a damn; it just works.

Why would we use anything else? Apple’s ecosystem, while great, makes no sense in the server world. They have their own unique directory service that nobody wants to support (unless they’re trying to sell something to Apple themselves), they have total control over the OS and its capabilities, and it’s technically illegal to modify. Windows has a heavy GUI, and its command-line interface is middling at best and difficult to learn. Windows excels in backwards compatibility and ease of deployment, which makes it ideal for small and medium businesses, but it quickly becomes irrelevant once you scale to a certain point. This is why they’ve got their Azure AD product, for example. It’s attempting to fix the scalability issues with Windows Server. Having spoken to some of the developers of Windows Server, it’s also plain as day that Microsoft is only really maintaining Windows Server to collect on their existing contracts. They have no desire to grow that part of their business.

With all of this in mind, Linux the most obvious choice. It takes no time at all to slap a copy of Ubuntu Server on a pizza box and have a functioning server up in an hour. Everything else is more complex, slower, and costs money.

This is a specimen of the fabled “blue maga” disease. Watch out! It’s contagious if you’re particularly dull.