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Comment by nemacol | Hacker News Reader

Can you use Apple products without an account? If not*, what version of Linux should I get setup with. Casual web development. I mostly use my personal machine for gaming.

Edit - Typo

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You can't access stuff in the App Store without an Apple account. And there is a chunk of Apple software that's only available in the App Store. On Windows, I can't think of any worthwhile software that's not available outside the Windows App Store.

It's different though, not system wide. You don't need it to login into the OS. There are alterantive to Apple Store too.

> Can you use Apple products without an account?

yes and no

ios devices must hook to internet to activate. they must phone home. That said you can navigate the dark patterns and don't need to use apple id (but you also can't install apps, etc)

for mac you can say this device doesn't connect to the internet. but as soon as you do it phones home.

> for mac you can say this device doesn't connect to the internet. but as soon as you do it phones home.

Yes, but to clarify the specific point, you still do not need an Apple account to use a Mac, even if it's phoning home.

I believe you need one to download apps though. for instance, I think the apps that come with the mac from the store don't reappear if you recover the OS unless you sign into the app store.

That might well be true. I only use the Mac App Store to download Xcode and update first-party software, so I'm not sure (and, at any rate, I'm signed in to an iCloud account, so I wouldn't know if that part doesn't work without one). I seem to recall non-logged-in ones having all the built-in software in the past, but it might not be true anymore.

A lot of the replies here are recommending Ubuntu - I'm going to recommend PopOS. It's built on top of Ubuntu, but comes with a newer kernel (better new hardware compatibility), graphics drivers, and some sensible defaults.

Some optimizations for laptops with graphics switching is great too.

Does it come with ads? Because that's my favourite part of Ubuntu

No, and Ubuntu hasn't included ads in like 5 years.

Some stink you just can’t wash off.

That's like saying that Linux was bad in 1991, so it can't possibly be good enough to use 30 years later. Evidently, stink can wash off just fine.

The famous shakiness of Linux pre-2.6 is not at all like violating traditional user expectations by shipping ads with the OS.

Come on. That's like still bringing up the Sony CD rootkit incident as a valid reason to boycott them so many years later. Ubuntu reversed course on ads pretty quickly, and if any of the past 4-6 years worth of LTS releases included ads, then they were so unobtrusive I literally didn't notice anything was there.

If you want to hurt Linux adoption by discouraging the most Just Works distribution for normal people, be my guest. But please at least figure out if it's still got any actual problems that are as bad as the ads in the past, like snap or systemd or something (which IMO aren't even such huge issues - most users won't care).

Secretly installing malware on millions of customers' computers then releasing an uninstaller that installs additional malware is such a cartoonishly evil/ridiculous thing to do that I have nothing but respect for someone still boycotting Sony 17 years later. It's not like anyone at Sony spent time behind bars because of it.

Fair enough, but Sony have been consistently evil afterwards. If they cleaned up their act since and didn't do very many questionable things, I'd count that as a win.

I'd recommend Ubuntu also. However I can't stand their default desktop environment, so I'd either recommend Ubuntu mate, or (what I did) the latest and greatest Ubuntu, and then just sudo apt-get install cinnamon-desktop-environment which will give you a desktop with a start menu more akin to windows.

Ubuntu is a must have in every masochist’s toolbox

Use pretty much any other distro and let us know which one is as useful for beginner users.

You're best starting with Ubuntu. It has the biggest userbase which makes googling for answers easier.

It'll handle casual web dev without breaking a sweat.

It's been a few years but I tried to use mac OSX without signing into an apple account and eventually I was forced to do it to get updates from the app store IIRC. So it's probably possible, but almost certainly not common or advised unfortunately.

Thus at least you can have a local account without any attempt of Apple trying to force you not to, and then login to the app store with an apple id, if you want.

Ubuntu or one of the main derivatives depending on the user interface you want: Kubuntu, Xubuntu, ...

The obvious choice is Ubuntu. Works, is easy to use, and help is everywhere for it.

Later on, you may want to branch out to More complicated Distros, but Ubuntu (or Debian) is the easy choice.

>Works, is easy to use, and help is everywhere for it.

It's so easy you can't even be smug anymore using nearly any linux distro. Damn their eyes, I worked hard in the 90's getting my linux cred. Now, grandma is using it. Time to switch to Gentoo I suppose.

I can recommend Pop!_OS for a good out-of-the-box Linux distro for development

Put Linux in a VM on your (windows?) gaming machine. It'll be much smoother than trying to run on real hardware, and if you're not gaming on it Linux anyway then you probably don't need direct hardware access (not for web dev, certainly). Use VirtualBox or whatever Windows calls their hypervisor they ship with Windows these days. If you hate it you can just delete the disk image and it's gone.

This is what I have done. Currently have Ubuntu, Mint, and DLing Pop now.

That's how I got started. Then I progressed to Wubi and dual booting, and afterwards only ever booted up Windows for games or MS Office.

Hyper-V

Depending on your hardware, you may be able to utilize Looking Glass[1]. It’s software for running games in a virtual machine that has a dedicated graphics card. I do not meet the requirements myself (and will not anytime soon with current graphics card prices), but the concept looks somewhat solid.

[1]: https://looking-glass.io/

I'm tied over this because noone can predict how future govts will go, so having a manufacturer account could be useful, but at the same time when that happens who can you trust, you dont know who is accessing your data at the manufacturers, privacy is the biggest loser eitherway.

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