Ask HN: How's your experience running Linux on a macbook?

3 pointscmdz0rd3 comments

I'm currently in the process of moving which means giving up my Arch Linux desktop and taking my macbook with me. So I was curious how is anyones experience running Arch on a macbook?

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In general, slightly older MacBooks are better supported.

Some UI issues: out of the box, right mouse clicks are two finger taps, which is OK, but I like the option of also using something like control-tap.

I just replaced my wife's 6 year old MacBook Air, and I put the latest Ubuntu on it this week. It is a 32 bit machine, so no Linux Google Chrome, and installing a few things like SpiderOak took some extra time to get right, but everything runs well, although slowly since the machine is ancient. Getting a one or two year old MacBook and using Linux should be fine.

Yeah, I'm currently running at 2014 Retina model so I'm hoping it won't be that bad. Thanks for your advice!

I run linux in virtual box (with vagrant) as a server on my macbook. I'm using Ubuntu, It works fine. I start it and stop it as needed.

You could boot directly into linux using bootcamp, bu not sure how well that will work. Drivers might be an issue.

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