I had been using some form of UNIX and some early GNU utilities for a few years by time Linux came out and had heard some rumblings about 386BSD (development started in 1989) via newsgroups, but it remained out of reach for me.

I heard about Linux (SLS Linux) being available late summer of 1992 and started saving for a 386, which I build later that year.

In the end, due to download limitations I started with HJ Lu’s boot/root disks for Linux (floppy disk images), starting with kernel version 0.12 and happily living in the terminal.

Virtual terminals were the killer app that kept me solely on Linux for a long while. Being able to download on one terminal and code in a 2nd (I programmed a MUD for free dial-up Internet access for a local system) was amazing and far better than Windows 3.x during this time frame.

If you want something that’s really open source, consider Joplin (AGPL-3.0, https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/) or CherryTree (GPL3, https://github.com/giuspen/cherrytree).

I know SUSE Enterprise Linux is popular in the EU, but I’ve quite frankly had enough of corporate sponsored distributions. A few bad quarters and things could get interesting for the community oriented distributions.

I’ve moved back to Debian (with Flatpak) and will use the testing kernel for hardware reasons as soon as I remember where I put my notes on it or get tired and look it up.

I was researching this option last year and after talking with the Asahi crew via IRC, their advice was at least 16GB of memory and 512GB for SSD because you do have to keep macOS around for certain tasks, like firmware updates. With smaller amounts of disk space and memory, the system will use swap which can use a lot of the write cycles on the SSD.

You should probably check to see if this is still their recommendation.