SuSE linux 4.2 about 1994-6 ish? Fond memories of having to roll my own modelines to get crt monitors working. Used the various versions until the sell out to Novell and the controversy with Microsoft. Then a really big gap with some macs and now I’ve just started using Mint on a mini itx machine I’ve put together just for that use.
You don’t need an apple account to use a Mac. If you just want to enter a username and set a password, that’s all you need to do. If you want everything synced between another Mac or iPhone and so on, sign into iCloud. But you don’t HAVE to, just skip it.