Caveat for anyone being influenced by the long political intro trying to convince folks to install Debian based Mint over Ubuntu based Mint:
"There’s a few final things to note about Linux LMDE 6 that may be of interest. Firstly, if you’re looking explicitly for a DE that supports Wayland instead of X11 then Linux Mint of any flavor isn’t going to meet your needs. Linux Mint LMDE 6 (and Mint main) with Cinnamon uses X11 exclusively, and Cinnamon support for Wayland isn’t there yet. If you’re looking for Wayland support, you’re pretty much limited to GNOME 3 and KDE at this time and distros other than Mint will serve you better in this regard.
Another thing of note is that the LMDE version of Mint specifically, including Faye, does not have the same third party driver helper tool that is present in the main version of Mint based on Ubuntu. While the 6.1 branch of the Linux kernel brings even more hardware support to LMDE 6, there are still times when you may require or prefer to use third party proprietary drivers for certain hardware. If that’s the case, you’re on your own to install those manually in LMDE."
Up vote for Hetzner. Your data, on your own instance, fully compatible with Linux. In a privacy friendly jurisdiction.
You can SFTP or Rsync data across or just add a WebDAV mount to your file manager to use it seamlessly.
If you want a fancy pants gui with automation there is Duplicacy.
Many options. Begin with Hetzner hosting.
Disk caching only benefits spinning rust.
Operating from solid state storage such as SSD or NVME pointlessly wastes CPU/RAM resources juggling memory.
I turn all this archaic nonsense off (as far as I can) when running solid state media.
Don't do this. Stick with Ubuntu or Ubuntu based Mint. They're fan boi'ing you into disaster
tl:dr use Ubuntu/Mint
We have a 2009 iMac here, not identical to you but very similar vintage. After running through a battery of Linux distros on it (I'm a bit of an operating system nerd) I found that Ubuntu/Mint have the best hardware support for old Mac's.
Being told to try Debian on Mac's of this vintage is not helpful in my experience. No disrespect to Debian.
Your spinning rust will run Linux better than MacOS in terms of performance and resource use.
Installing an SSD running Linux will do wonders with old Mac hardware with the caveat that Apple's firmware will maliciously set the system fans to full blast for the sin of using a non Apple SSD.
The fan issue is easily fixed with a small bit of software which over rides Apple's firmware to set the fans back to normal speeds.
As a bonus, if you'd like to get rid of the loud Apple 'bong' at startup there is a way to do it in Linux.
Reply for links. Cheers 🎄
3gb of ram is always going to deliver a sub par experience. Set your limit at phones with 4gb ram as a minimum.
Having said that, Motorola has traditionally done a lot with the available ram on their devices, its just that Android is becoming more ram hungry with each successive iteration.
The RAM usage though ... I boot Bodhi Linux 6.0 in 230mb of RAM to a fully featured graphical desktop...
I have a 2009 iMac (Intel Core 2 Duo, 4mb RAM) sitting here that needed even lighter. I found Bodhi 6.0 booted its full graphical desktop (Moksha, a fork of Enlightenment) in 250Mb of RAM. Not a typo. I was so impressed at how zippy it was I installed it on an old HP Pavilion G6 laptop (Core i3, 4mb RAM, SSD) and it positively flies.