📚 Apple refugee here, please Linux Wizards can you share some of your knowledge?

Hello, I’ve finally opened my eyes to Apple’s fake privacy BS and am now a refugee. Windows is a hell no. Apple is crap now. That leaves me with you guys, please accept me and help me out, I am but a poor refugee with nothing but an external drive with all my files.

 

What should I do to set up a new digital world where I may finally rest my weary shoulders from this heavy external drive.

 

Here are my current requirements which may change as I learn more:

 

-secure and private as much as possible without a huge trade off for usability. I still need a GUI. I thought Apple’s macOS was this, I was okay with the bad GUI compared to Windows 7 (never used Windows 10 for personal use and refuse to)

 

-hard drive is encrypt-able and can self erase after too many failed attempts like with Apple’s encryption with too many failed attempts. Since my device would be portable and could be lost or stolen, this is a big one

 

-“time machine” style back up that clones basically your entire drive to a set destination (external drive in my case) every so often. Cron job? In Windows I used to use a scheduled task for this, with macOS Apple had a built in Time Machine. Either way, I just want my family photos and documents safe and reliably backed up, with something I can use to restore in emergency and the backup won’t be corrupt or something

 

-a program that is as good if not better than Little Snitch (firewall). I’m okay paying, doesn’t have to be open source. I paid $50 for Little Snitch after all

 

-VLC is a must, which I think cuts me down to a few flavours unless you can use hack it in to any distro

 

-same as above, but for Firefox. Must be able to use it without issues and all add ons compatible (noscript, ublock origin, etc)

 

-can handle a huge variety of media file types: ogg, mkv, mp4, m4a, mp3. I think if I get VLC for Linux that should cover most of this

 

-powerful note taking app, preferably up there with Apple’s Notes minus the stylus. What I mean is lists, sorting, headers, tables. Kind of like a word processor but not so powerful

 

-as above, is OpenOffice any good now? I tried it ages ago and it couldn’t hold up compared to MS Office which is what I was using on my MacBook

 

-no gaming required. I use my Switch and PS4/PS5 for everything I need. Some of my Steam games are already compatible with Linux and I don’t want to go out of my way to emulate Windows just to play a couple new games. Not worth the extra attack vector.

 

-are certain distros better than others (more optimized) for a laptop/macbook? I would prefer a portable device for note taking in class, etc.

 

-doesn’t require Wizard level terminal/cmd prompt knowledge. I do have a pi-hole and openwrt router running, but besides setting those up via command line my experience is minimal. I can SSH and grep here and there. Still very novice. I’m worried this will make it so Linux isn’t for me.

 

Maybe I should try and get into the tweaking scene in macOS instead? Currently all I do is gimp macOS by blocking almost all Apple processes, but with this new on device scanning, it makes me wonder what other shady crap they do. Like was my finger print leaving the security chip?

 

Anyway, thank you for the input and I look forward to my potential new home.