I find every firmware update fixes something but also breaks something.
Great they’re working on it but super annoying also.
Some updates crash the mini refreshing my library, and since about 2.7 a lot of multi-CD albums don’t show the tracks in the right order anymore.
Still a fan, but definitely not the easy ride that iTunes + iPod was on that front.
Oh, and cool you can use it as a nifty HQ external DAC also.
I’m pretty happy with my FIIO Snowsky Mini.
It mimics a miniature Walkman and looks really great, and has a cassette playing interface that lets you totally ignore obtaining / managing album artwork. I really don’t care about seeing album art when I play music, but equally I hate seeing a ? or something when an interface expects you to have artwork. This solves that perfectly.
It’s only up to 256GB, and it only lets you scroll through all artists or all albums so navigation isn’t the quickest.
It sounds amazing. People go on about how good certain iPod classics sounded, but this is audibly better than any iPod ever was.
Doesn’t do gapless playback.
Can get them for £40-£50.
Your username is spinning me out. We always ask our cat if he’d like to “Eat da feesh” when we feed him any fish tins or treats, and we spell it just like that when we message each other to say he’s been fed too haha.
…Milo, is that you? 🐈⬛
For the reasons I switched to Debian see my other reply.
I use the computer for:
If you have a 15” Retina MBP, it’s been a huge pain in the ass, and multiple distros just stopped working after updates, often not long after installation. But also it’s been a good learning experience for the very same same reason. To work well in 2026 it needs the Nvidia graphics disabling - but the NVRAM defaults that Mac to Nvidia at startup for Linux, so even that bit isn’t straightforward! If you simply blacklist Nvidia it won’t boot.
I also bought a USB WiFi adapter as the Broadcom card doesn’t work initially on most distros, and can’t support WPA3 even when it does work.
Yes, at this stage. Although before now I’ve installed a few different things over the last couple of years as a learning experience also.
It’s not my main computer, but one I replaced. This freed me up to have a computer with no music or photos or anything on it, so I could test different distros and DEs and troubleshoot stuff without having any concerns about losing anything if I made a mistake or just erased and started over.
I’d never actually used Linux before 2023, much more familiar now.
Endeavour worked totally fine, no issues whatsoever… or no issue where Debian does better at least.
My 2 main reasons were:
Ignorance over the point at which hardware components become so old and deprecated that bleeding edge updates might just break something one day. Couldn’t find a definitive answer, but I knew if Debian 13 works fine now it should still be working fine in 2 years. That Mac has outdated Intel/Nvidia graphics that have always been problematic on Linux, and many distros won’t even boot the live USB on it, so it felt like if any computer was ever going to spontaneously have a post-update issue it would probably be that one.
Trying the give my ageing hardware the easiest ride in its senior years. The SSD is still original and approaching 14 years of pretty heavy use, so I thought to have it surviving as long as possible an OS that might only give 0-300MB of updates in a week would be a safer bet than an OS that would have many many more gigabytes of updates over a longer period of time.
I was using Endeavour, btw. Needed almost zero tinkering and was good to go straight away.
But I run Linux on an ancient 2012 MacBook Pro, so eventually swapped over to Debian, btw.
The Glam Metal Detectives.
Thought it was really funny but it’s completely forgotten now.
Some very good advice here already so I’ll be brief.
Here are some random things that spring to mind as being of note as someone who hasn’t switched exactly, but has used Macs since 1995 and uses Linux alongside macOS.
Gnome will be the most familiar on day 1, BUT. It’s amazing how quickly that won’t matter anymore when you’re learning what’s what. I started on Gnome and avoided KDE Plasma, which everyone said was more like Windows - and still ended up liking KDE Plasma the most. Both aesthetically and in terms of how easy it is to adjust anything that might not be quite right.
Avoid XFCE if you have a high resolution display, and you’re installing Linux on an old Mac. Customising XFCE to scale things correctly for high resolution is stuff you just don’t want to be messing with as a new Linux user.
Avoid X11 and use Wayland (which will be fine if you use KDE or Gnome). X11 was very confusing to me as a Mac user, as certain changes require a reboot. As above, this is just an extra level of complexity you don’t need if you’re used to Macs. On Wayland if you change the visual scale of the interface or cursor size, it just changes then and there. On X11 you’ll be wondering why certain things don’t seem to be changing…
On macOS you install apps generally by drag and drop. On Linux, whilst this isn’t actually true when you know what you’re doing, it’s as if you only have the App Store. It might have different names on different distros or DEs, but fundamentally you’re going to have a single repository that all your apps and updates are coming from.
Firefox has a hidden menu bar and you have to push alt to bring it up.
Apart from swapping ctrl and cmd many keyboard commands will be familiar.
It’s ultimately up to you how familiar you want to get with the terminal. Some distros you could genuinely ignore its existence. Others would expect you to use it at times and not supply certain GUI tools for certain things.
People are probably right that Linux Mint is the best place to start. You almost certainly will want to switch just to see what else is out there at some point, it’s just how things go. I use KDE Plasma on Debian now. But there’s nothing Mint is lacking or doesn’t have. Ultimately the only reason I’m not still using Mint is because of wanting to use Plasma, which is doable on Mint if anyone wanted to, but not officially supported.
A C64 is one of the only retro machines I’ve never encountered before in-person. Presume they were less popular in the UK because of the Spectrum.
But I have a default appreciation of it because of my childhood Amiga adoration.
I actually installed Virtual64 on the Mac the other day and was trying to learn some ways to mess around in BASIC. Hoping to get to know the C64 (and Spectrum) better, mainly just for the fun of it.
Voyager
I’m British and quit Facebook and Instagram after Brexit.
Once the Cambridge Analytica stuff came to light, and I realised how these platforms could be (and were being) subverted politically to spread misinformation it was the final push I needed.
Seeing the Covid anti-vax stuff that followed only reinforced how I felt.
I never really used twitter, and decided to leave it that was when Musk took over.
I 99% stopped using Reddit after the 3rd party apps stuff and it became clear what their ambitions for the platform were (although I still check certain things there occasionally).
Sounds ideal!
To be honest I’ve been half-looking at audio players for 2-3 years but never pulls the trigger as all I had to go on was Amazon and Reddit reviews of how things sounded, which is so subjective as to be almost useless.
I saw the Echo Mini in the Guardian for an article about DAPs and trusted that a little more and finally bit the bullet.
Apparently someone from FIIO in the forums said the Echo Mini wasn’t capable of gapless, which feels unlikely when iPods from about 2006 could.
Your device definitely sounds like it addresses my biggest “wants” for mine.