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Comment by jheriko | Hacker News Reader

i'm not sure why anyone would expect to be able to install linux/windows/anything on a mac without problems these days.

apple go to lengths to make it painful, and my experience of this is that they have gone to increasingly further lengths in increments over the last 5 years. you end up having to install some funky efi bootloader like refit or refind, even if you want to use bootcamp to install windows (i've never seen bootcamp work correctly on its own, although i have heard that it does work sometimes) - even then you end up having to hack things to get it to work correctly, or find that things like the trackpad or keyboard mysteriously don't work properly if at all...

mounting your hdd into a vm in os x is often a necessity.

its a nightmare. apple don't want you to do these things.

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>i'm not sure why anyone would expect to be able to install linux/windows/anything on a mac without problems these days.

Until 2014 Linus Torvalds used a MacBook Air as his primary laptop. And even in 2005 or so, his desktop machine was a Mac Pro (the steel ones).

And of course, tons of developers do the same.

I don't advocate it myself, but it's nothing extremely uncommon. They like the hardware, but want to use Linux on it.

The issues you mention is not because "Apple doesn't want you to do these things" it's because Apple implements new hardware setups and features without taking into consideration whether people who want to run Linux have the drivers to use them.

PC manufactures are less adventurous and rock the boat less, so Linux works more easily on them with existing drivers.

But that's the whole idea of Apple controlling the hardware and software: that they can take both in any direction they want, without being held back by another party (e.g. change the interfaces with which the keyboard/touchpad talks to the cpu, offer graphics switching, etc.). So it wouldn't make sense to give that up to wait for Linux drivers to catch up on their new hardware.

> But that's the whole idea of Apple controlling the hardware and software: that they can take both in any direction they want, without being held back by another party

Right. Which is why an "ordinary user" probably shouldn't expect it to "just work".

(That said, in this kind of situation Arch Linux is probably your best bet since it's rolling-release with the most-up-to-date drivers -- outside of compiling your own kernel. It's not trivial to install, though, and that's probably for the best, honestly.)

Arch is actually trivial to install, provided you know the basic UNIX commands.

Also, the Arch Wiki is some of the best documentation for any distro, anywhere. So that helps.

> Arch is actually trivial to install, ...

Not for "ordinary users" which is what we're discussing here. For that you'd need an actual installer of some type.

Totally agree about the Arch Wiki -- it's incredible.

Not for "ordinary users," no. But if you're the sort of person who would want what Arch provides, than you're also the sort of person for whom the install would be trivial.

Unless you're an "ordinary" Mac user who wants a working Linux.

Well, then, you wouldn't want what arch provides.

It's not for everyone, and certainly not for the writer of the original article.

> Well, then, you wouldn't want what arch provides.

Sometimes, what Arch provides is "it works" as opposed to "it doesn't work". (This was the point I was trying to make.)

This is not a hypothetical. I turned a coworked onto Arch by this simply being the only Linux distro that would work on his Macbook Pro (ca. 2015, I think?). He tried Ubuntu recently (12.10)... still didn't work because it could not understand the disk on his machine.

This guy is a very competent developer. He's not afraid of a command line. It still took him a few hours (IIRC) to get it installed. (Including with my help + googling various things about how the Mac EFI thing works/doesn't. Incidentally he still has to press some magic key combo on every startup to avoid MacOS starting up. It's goddamn ridiculous.)

Fair 'nuff.

The EFI bits, and keypress combo, however, are true of any Mac.

You only need to press alt if you want to change the OS to boot relative to last time. It's a convenient way to bring up a built-in graphical boot menu with Internet boot and system restore capabilities. And a nice Fedora logo on my machine.

I don't have an exact idea of what my colleague is doing during boot, but it appears that he needs to press the button on every boot. I think (given his background) he'd have investigated the available options by now, but I don't know...

>Right. Which is why an "ordinary user" probably shouldn't expect it to "just work".

Yes, but there's a thing to balance this: unlike PCs which come in 200000 models, there are only a handful of Mac models, and they remain the same for a year or so before the next update.

So, it should be easier to target those with Linux drivers than to target tons of individual devices, even if Apple does change their hardware.

its more complicated than just drivers, apple have over the last few iterations changed the boot mechanism to make it difficult

>>i'm not sure why anyone would expect to be able to install linux/windows/anything on a mac without problems these days.

> Until 2014 Linus Torvalds used a MacBook Air as his primary laptop. And even in 2005 or so, his desktop machine was a Mac Pro (the steel ones).

> And of course, tons of developers do the same.

And none of us expects to do it without much pain. I curse the moment anything goes wrong, or I get a new MacBook and have to fiddle with it for hours or days to get Ubuntu running on it. It's unlikely that I'll ever buy another one.

2014 is an eon ago in apple terms... and even then it required fancy efi boot loaders (since 2010 at least iirc)

i'd also add that i doubt its about them supporting new stuff. its the sort of thing i look at and assume that its to make it difficult to install your own software (i.e. OS) on a mac. the benefits are negligble for the typical mac user, who cares more about photoshop and e-mail than terminals and compilers...

>2014 is an eon ago in apple terms...

Is it? Others accuse Apple of not moving too fast after Jobs...

FWIW, I recently jumped ship and installed Ubuntu over MacOs on my Macbook Pro (not dual booting), and it was as easy as can be reasonably expected. The worst side effect so far is that a strange red light is emitted from the headphone jack. It's been more-or-less flawless. Oh yeah, I also had to google for about ten minutes to find an askubuntu question about running web videos that depended on silverlight. I must admit I don't entirely understand what I installed (from apt), but it worked and in total maybe a half hour was lost.

I would have a much worse experience transitioning to windows, or even in all likelihood transitioning back to MacOs.

Of course, having linux interoperate with MacOs is a completely different situation. That said, for a while I dual-booted with grub, and it worked fine. In booting from usb, dual-booting, and running only linux on mac hardware, I never experienced track pad or keyboard failure, though I do think apple's keyboard layout is inferior for non-MacOs systems. I expected to have some major problems using Ubuntu exclusively, but I have had few hard-to-fix problems. It was hardly a nightmare.

> The worst side effect so far is that a strange red light is emitted from the headphone jack.

/me puts on tinfoil hat

sounds like optical audio out

The red light is from optical digital audio, as the 3.5mm audio port is actually a combined 3.5mm+mini-toslink port: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK#Mini-TOSLINK

You can easily get rid of it by deactivating the digital audio port. Still this problem shouldn't exist from the beginning.

That's interesting, thanks

I didn't have much trouble by just booting from an Ubuntu 16.04 USB stick and installing it to the entire SSD on MBP 2015. Almost all of hardware works, but require installation of some modules and changing configs.

Shameless plug: I prepared an Ansible playbook that does those manipulations automatically: https://gist.github.com/a-rodin/7930a50befbc7b07e20c5c3b5aca...

i am continually impressed by the ubuntu install... people who say linux is hard to install need to look at it. it works, imo, better than either the mac or windows installations... even taking care of annoying details like partitioning and boot loaders for you.

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