Despite the fundamental contribution of general relativity (GR) to the understanding of gravity and
cosmology, a number of problems remain unresolved. The most significant of these are related to
the effects of dark matter and dark energy. In this regard, alternative theories are being actively
studied, which, while maintaining the success of general relativity in explaining confirmed phenomena, could eliminate the need for “dark”components. Such modified theories should not only
reproduce the predictive accuracy of Einstein’s theory in proven areas, but also expand its applicability to more complex physical processes. One of the promising areas of research is symmetric
teleparallel gravity. This approach uses a different geometric structure of space-time in terms of
nonmetricity and a greater number of dynamic degrees of freedom. As a first step, it is necessary to
analyze the limit of weak gravity, i.e. small perturbations around a trivial background. Therefore,
the properties of vacuum equations of motion in the linear order of perturbation theory over a flat
Minkowski space is studied in this paper. The result of the work is the analysis of field motion
equations linearized by perturbations in scalar, vector and tensor sectors, as well as the selection
and classification of realistic models.