Linux runs fine on Intel Macs. There are a couple peculiarities you’ll want to be aware of, though.

• Ventoy doesn’t work as an installer. The boot menu will come up, but any ISO you choose will hang
• Not all distros will recognize the wireless card and install the firmware (Be prepared to install it using a USB to Ethernet adapter)
• Same goes for the iSight web cam

Other than those initial hiccups, everything works pretty flawlessly.

Kate is really a hidden gem. It’s so light weight and just gets out of the way. I’m now installing it everywhere—Linux, Mac, or Windows.

You could likely use dd or clonezilla to create a duplicate of your boot drive and boot your laptop right from that, but that’s not quite what you’re after.

There are some distros lately that use a declarative config file to set the whole thing up that I think is much more what you have in mind. The big ones that come up a lot are nixOS and Fedora Silverblue. Maybe one of those systems would be to your liking.

That’s awesome, I’ll definitely be interested to see how it all works out.

Yeah, I started working on it once a couple years ago and getting it spun up was a chore. Life got busy and I never finished.

That imapbox looks pretty interesting. Thanks for tracking that one down.

So I think the way I would want to do this is with something like mailpiler (https://www.mailpiler.org/). It’s been on my long list of things to dive into for a while.

It’s managed service provider, which translates more or less to a company that handles IT for other companies.

My only experience with homebrew is on macOS and I’ve switched to MacPorts there. Homebrew did some weird permissions things I didn’t care for (chowned all of /usr/local to $USER, if I’m remembering right). It worked fine on a single user system, but seemed like a bad philosophy to me. This was years ago and I don’t know how it behaves on Linux.

I also prefer Firefox, but when I need a Chromium alternative for testing, I opt for the flatpak (or the snap) version personally.