Comment by halo37253 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by halo37253 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Bootcamp on a MAC is real hit or miss when it comes to Linux. Honestly never seen a modern Macbook Pro run linux natively without major compromise. Hell the window's drivers are bad enough, Apple doesn't really want users doing anything other than OSX.

I will say they have no problem booting up a VM, and everything he is doing can be done in a VM with hardware accelerated graphics. So Full screened feels just like the real thing, as long as you are not playing modern games. Boot into windows for that.

That being said there are Windows Laptops that will give a Macbook Pro a run for the money, but when it comes to the $1k price range the Macbook Air is hard to beat. I like the ARM chips for basic users, but for a Power user the ARM chips are a step backwards. Unless you want to run ARM based Linux. With my many years of raspberry pi use, ARM has gone a long way on the Linux front. But not sure if i'd want to rock that as my main.

At the same time you can do all these things on Windows as well.... Really more of a personal preference. I have limited experience with Linux for Windows Subsystem 2, but it worked damn well when I used it.

I hope things have gotten better with Linux and drivers. I'll admit I've been out of the game for about 5 years now.

> Honestly never seen a modern Macbook Pro run linux natively without major compromise.

When I was using Linux as my main OS, I was having this problem with all laptops. Desktops usually had many less issues, but were occasionally less than perfect.

For example, Lenovo, at the time, was hailed to be great for Linux compatibility. Well, for some reason, regardless of the distro I was using, I was more or less given an ultimatum -- I could have a screen with adjustable brightness or a consistent network card driver, but not both. Editing whatever file I found on various forms to "fix" the backlight issue (was permanently stuck at 100% brightness) would inevitably cause some sort issue with where my Internet connection speed would drop from around 1gbps to mbps eventually to kbps the longer laptop was awake.

It was an issue I never found a solution to, and the oddest part was that this was never an issue if I booted the OS of a live USB. Only when the OS was installed would the issue arise.

Various laptops I owned / used for work had their own issues with Linux too. I eventually just settled on using Linux in virtual machines / servers and never looked back. So, I definitely agree with your point about VMs.

I'd consider going back, but I really cannot/do not want want to sacrifice too much time getting distracted with making the OS bend to my will when I could use that time to be actually getting things done.

> Bootcamp on a MAC is real hit or miss when it comes to Linux.

Dual booting on any hardware is nuts if you ask me, pick an OS and use VMs. If you really have to have a native OS but hate it so much you wont use it the rest of the time stick it on a different machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com