Linux is a lemon on the new retina Mac Book Pro | Hacker News Reader

Linux is a lemon on the new retina Mac Book Pro

phoronix.com

This article from a fedora developer seemed a bit more hacker newsish to me:

Playing with Thunderbolt under Linux on Apple hardware

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/15948.html

You're totally right, but i didn't see that article until you posted it, and I thought the content might be interesting to HN.

I didn't mean it as a criticism, just trying to add to the conversation.

Can anyone explain why ACPI would want to know what OS is running? Shouldn't it just report what it can do and let the OS decide what to do with it?

You would think so, but unfortunately ACPI is horrendously overengineered by committee and basically does have code running in it which can contain these sort of checks. I once had to recompile some part of it (possibly the DSDT - differentiated system description table - whatever that is) on an old Dell laptop of mine which literally had

if (operating_system == "Microsoft Windows NT" || operating_system == "Microsoft Windows 95" || operating_system == "Microsoft Windows") { // make stuff work }

baked into it. Linux worked fine once those checks were removed, of course.

Needless to say, my opinion of the whole mess has been pretty tainted by that. I try to assume that it is incompetence rather than actual malice on the part of Microsoft and/or the manufacturers, but it does do an awfully good impression of the latter.

Your experience with ACPI is very common.

Here's what Linus Torvalds had to say in 2003: "ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce." http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7279

This is why Linux now claims to be Windows.

The striking parallel with user agents makes a good case for a generalized design rule of "don't assume anything about the ability of the other side to handle your side's specifications. Let them make the decision."

> horrendously overengineered by committee

Yes, but it doesn't explain the rationale behind such a decision.

I wouldn't buy a macbook for linux regardless of display. Mainstream linux window managers expect two mouse buttons. If you want an ultrabook, there's a great new Thinkpad just released made out of carbon fibre. Lenovo hardware tends to work well with linux/unix. http://gizmodo.com/5935723/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon-review-...

I don't suppose there's much motivation to write Linux mouse drivers that detect the second mouse button and/or scrolling and swipe gestures on the Apple mouses the same way Apple does.

But it's too bad, Apple went from making subpar mouses to some of the best I've ever used in the last five years or so. The trackpad is pretty great too.

This. The trackpad is godly. I haven't seen a PC equivalent.

Assuming you mean desktop and not laptop PC, there's this: http://www.apple.com/magictrackpad/

Linux has been capable of driving multitouch trackpads for years (specifically the synaptic driver). Even then, it can 'fake' it on some, by detecting the width of the touch area. The main problem is all the touches must be handled in the driver, so pretty much only two finger scrolling, two finger click for right click and three finger click for middle click work. There is work going on to bring a proper multitouch api to xorg, so gestures can be used correctly.

I've played around with multitouch on Ubuntu, it does work with some hardware (but not if the driver intercepts the touches and synthesizes something like scrollwheel events, that's bad).

See eg. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Multitouch and https://lists.launchpad.net/multi-touch-dev/msg00997.html

I have full multitouch on this laptop, and use the two-finger scrolling and triple click that is provided by the synaptic driver everyday. The inability for programs to directly use gestures isn't great though.

Huh? The 90s called and they want their cliches back.

All Macs come with very capable multi touch mice or touchpads. Clicking with two fingers (or more) for secondary mouse buttons is perfectly convenient and two finger scrolling is just awesome.

Are there no drivers or what?

Thinkpads have an understated, timeless design, superior to almost all competition, Macs included. The only distinguishing quality of Macs is their built quality - but that's not exactly a good reason to buy an ugly laptop.

Of course, most people have pretty childish tastes and prefer shiny things. But I guess de gustibus non est disputandum.

[And yes, I do feel like I have a bit too much karma... ;]

There's nothing quite like reading a post with the words de gustibus non est disputandum while the poster debates matters of taste.

Right, but you may be aware that Friedrich Nietzsche would have said all discussions are about taste.

as just a reader on this thread, am I being asked to judge whether Nietzsche trumps a Latin proverb?

This is a hard one, and I would need some more evidence. Don't you have a steve jobs quote?

I think Nietzsche meant that either you are talking about objective known facts and there is no discussion, facts just are (or not); or, in the most common case, you are talking about subjective ideas, feelings, opinions, etc, and these are just other names for taste.

So both are right, we should not be discussing taste and we are deemed to only discuss about taste.

I'll let some other HNmate complement with a Steve Jobs quote, if they wish.

Do thinkpads still have those terrible trackpointy things in the middle of the keyboard?

That's not timeless design. That's a timeless pice of crap!

Now the MacBook Pro trackpad... Fingers fly on that glass.

Most have a nipple and a pad.

That "terrible track pointy thing" keeps your fingers on the home row. It might not be for you but I for one like not having to constantly move from keyboard to trackpad while using my computer.

Well, that's not for me. I have RSI and track points give me terrible cramps.

On the other hand, with a properly configured (tap to click) glass trackpad that problem goes away.

If both a trackpad and a trackpoint are available, I always use the trackpoint. I feel like I have better control with it while the trakpad makes me sloppy.

Know why that is? Because their pads are goddamn terrible. Every time I see a mac vs. pc argument it gets down to the mac user saying 'it's because of the trackpad' and the pc user saying 'I don't need no trackpad'. well.. there might be a reason for that you know.

I love the TrackPoint. The first thing I do on any ThinkPad I get is disable the trackpad in the BIOS, because it's completely unnecessary when you have a TrackPoint. It's better than every other pointing instrument I've tried, including stand-alone mice (except for gaming) and trackpads (the MacBook trackpads included).

Once you get used to the TrackPoint, you'll realize what a piece of crap the MacBook trackpad is.

This is of course an ultimate bike-shedding topic, but I'll add my .02 anyway:

With a multi-touch extension like jiTouch that lets you configure your own per-app multi-touch gestures, the large trackpad (especially external trackpads) are no-debate the most versatile "mouse" alternative.

I have many keyboard shortcuts mapped to gestures for PyCharm, Sublime and Xcode that let me do very cool things during specific workflows (think: debugging, deployment, etc). I've only been using it (and Macs in general) since November but it's the first time i don't totally loathe having to move my hand from the keyboard.

》Once you get used to the TrackPoint, you'll realize what a piece of crap the MacBook trackpad is

Ooooooh no you won't. Sorry Wintermute, but you're speaking from a very, very small niche market. In my experience a huge majority of people overwhelmingly prefer the mac trackpad for all conceivable uses. Two-finger scroll is a killer app.

> In my experience a huge majority of people overwhelmingly prefer the mac trackpad for all conceivable uses.

In my experience, a huge majority of people don't even know what a TrackPoint is, let alone give it a shot.

I won't deny that this is because Lenovo's advertising is nonexistent. Apple has done an excellent job over the last 5 years of convincing the general public that they have the best hardware on the market. And although I personally relish the unchanging ThinkPad design, I can see how many people would find it to be anachronistic in the 21st century.

> Two-finger scroll is a killer app.

I've had 2 finger scroll with the TrackPoint for years, and it's a lot better than the trackpad way - my right index finger moving the TrackPoint and my right thumb holding down the middle mouse button. My fingers stay on the home row, and I use my left thumb for the space bar and my right thumb stays on the mouse buttons at most times. I've tried the MacBook "two-finger scroll" method, and it just breaks my train of thought to have to move my hand back and forth from the trackpad to the keyboard.

In fact, I like the ThinkPad keyboard so much that I have the USB model for use with my desktop.

Not really, no.

I use a ThinkPad E520 at work. Every day. For 8 hours+.

I like the TrackPoint. I use the TrackPoint. I think I'm fairly proficient at navigating with it. But the only reason for using it, in my opinion, is because of how bad the ThinkPad's trackpad is.

I'll take my MBP's trackpad over Lenovo's trackpoint any day of the week. It's faster in most cases and much more accurate. It's just better.

You'll be happy to hear that the X1 Carbon has a new trackpad, which has been described by Notebookreview as "Oh my! Best touchpad surface ... ever!". The gizmodo reviewer: "Using the trackpad, was the first time I've ever done multitouch gestures on Windows and liked it."

As both a Linux and Mac user, I'm happy a PC manufacturer is finally getting it.

'People who have different taste to me are childish'. Downvoted.

That timeless design isn't exactly timeless since they messed with the keyboard [1] [2].

[1] http://blog.laptopmag.com/thinkpad-type-off-is-lenovos-new-i...

[2] http://blog.lenovo.com/products/why-you-should-give-in-to-th...

>Thinkpads have an understated, timeless design, superior to almost all competition, Macs included. The only distinguishing quality of Macs is their built quality - but that's not exactly a good reason to buy an ugly laptop

A Mac is an ugly laptop? Compared to a Lenovo? In what universe?

Is there a parallel universe in which Apple laptops do not win all the design awards and are generally and widely considered the best looking by plain folks and designers alike?

>But I guess de gustibus non est disputandum.

Oh, the irony.

"Of course, most people have pretty childish tastes and prefer shiny things."

Not to feed the troll, but that is a pretty childish thing to say.

That's a little unfair. Mac's have absolutely fantastic design, so do Thinkpads. Thinkspads have that no-nonsense business aesthetic down pat, no argument about it.

But they are an equal footing in the same way a Jaguar E-Type and a Jeep are both iconic designs.

I'm not disagreeing. ThinkPads are awesome machines. But Macs have a second mouse button. Had for ages, now. Their mice still suck, though – but the trackpads are great.

That was the topic of discussion, I think. I certainly didn't mean to imply that Macs are better than ThinkPads.

OS X expects two mouse buttons too, I'm not sure what your point is.

Not exactly, but yeah it expects you to be able to right click. It's up to the user how they wish to do that, tap with two fingers on trackpad, ctrl-tap etc.

You can set the right part of the track pad to be the right button, just like every other laptop. It has always been this way.

I've got a Macbook 7,1 with Ubuntu 12.04 running Xmonad, and its by far the smoothest linux experience I've ever had. I ran it under Gnome Unity for a bit and that was fine too. I've never had the mouse issues you refer to. The trackpad works just as well as it did until OS X.

I actually dual-boot Arch on my mid-2011 Macbook Pro, and two mouse buttons has been the least of my problems -- you can configure Synaptics to recognize a click on the touchpad with two fingers as a right-click, just like OS X. (You can even set it up to recognize a three-finger click as a middle click, which OS X doesn't do.)

The only real issue I have with Linux is that something keeps eating my bootloader, so I have to keep a GRUB boot CD around to boot into it.

That sounds like a pain - how are you trying to boot Linux? Have you tried refit?

Are you sure it's getting eaten? I have had issues with efi bootloader, where it'll forget to boot from the right OS but the bootloader is still there and accessible from the boot menu.

I'm typing this on a macbook pro running Linux, and it works just fine; two-finger taps are a right-click, three for middle. That's worked on any Synaptics touchpad in Linux for at least the last seven years and probably longer.

Thanks for linking this. I've been using my GF's MBP while I look for a new laptop, and while OS X is nice, I just don't grok it. I'm an Ubuntu guy, and this looks like a good fit.

>I wouldn't buy a macbook for linux regardless of display.

You wouldn't. Linus Torvalds would --and actually did. And he says that his Macbook Air is the best laptop he ever had, and that Lenovo doesn't even come close.

I've read the interview where he says he uses an Air because it's quiet and light [1]. However I don't see him say anything about how the lenovo 'doesn't even come close'. I'm sure you're not making stuff up, so could you provide your citation? I'm interested as considering a new small dev laptop, you see.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-millenium...

>I'm sure you're not making stuff up, so could you provide your citation?

Sure, happy to oblige. It was on a comment in his Google+ page (around 1/5 scroll length) he said:

"no, Lenovo doesn't [still make quite decent hardware]. I have the Lenovo X1. It's bigger, plasticky, and has worse battery life".

https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyfmNCY...

I haven't seen any claim that the X1 will have backlit keyboard or an ambient light sensor to adjust the display. Will it? Seems a huge oversight in a laptop that is gunning for "best ever".

I'm currently tri booting arch linux, os x and windows on a retina macbook pro.

I almost only use linux, support is much better than suggested here. Yes, if you expect the latest build of Ubuntu to just work you're going to be disappointed.

The trackpad works excellently, equivalent to os x (with mtrack), as does wifi. Graphics are fine with the nvidia binary, which offers better performance than nouveau anyways. On that note, there is progress with getting nouveau to work. Just a few days ago a bug was fixed in the i915 driver, and intel graphics work now. It is true though that Optimus support is bad on linux, and probably will be for a while. That said I'm at 86% battery, and I have about 3.5 hours left.

Its pretty easy in linux to change the font settings for applications, having the 2880 resolution with a sane font size is really great.

Also switching between the os's is really really fast, around 30 seconds. Probably in a month or two the majority of hardware will work without development packages or other modifications on an arch install. Until then, installation is tricky, I wouldn't suggest it unless you already know linux pretty well.

Optimus doesn't work, but there's a kernel module called VGA_Switcheroo that you can use to switch between active graphics cards.

Which begs the question: when are PC makers going to take their fingers off their a$$ and start producing decent hardware? (with a non Linux-restricting implementation of secure boot, KTHXBYE)

“Which begs the question”

That doesn’t mean what you think it means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

> That doesn’t mean what you think it means.

It does now: Usage dictates meaning.

(Unless you think 'faggot' just means 'bundle of sticks'.)

roma1n just changed hir usage.

> Many English speakers use "begs the question" to mean "raises the question," or "impels the question," and follow that phrase with the question raised,[17] for example, "this year's deficit is half a trillion dollars, which begs the question: how are we ever going to balance the budget?"

Yes it does.

Ah, I stand corrected. So that "raises the question", right?

Yes, that is a good substitute

The only time I see the old usage of begging the question referenced at all is when pedants wants to correct people for the new usage. I'm pretty confident I've never come across the original usage outside of these types of discussions.

That to me says it all bout which usage is current. And it also makes this type of pedantry all the more annoying.

In other words: Yes, it now means what he thought it means.

For that much money I got a machine from Lenovo with a nice screen (not that nice) but also 32GB of RAM.

I hope you didn't buy the RAM from Lenovo. They mark up 8GB sticks by $300 each.

i got the RAM from crucial

> The various Linux desktop environments are also less than ideal in handling high-density displays. Compared to OS X 10.7/10.8, the Unity, GNOME Shell, and KDE desktops all looked like shit at 2880 x 1800 on the Retina MacBook Pro. The text was difficult to read and even when toying around with different scaling factors, the text ended up looking awkward in relation to icons and other visuals.

I wonder how could a better resolution make the text more difficult to read. Too bad he didn't publish any screenshots.

High density means smaller text, which is hard to focus on.

You can use larger text. GNOME has had this for some time, a common setting for all programs.

Why you need to run linux in a mac book?

I have to work on an latest-gen iMac at work because that's what they bought us. I tried for over a month to get used to it, but it's just too much crap that accumulates. I waste too much time on things I shouldn't even be thinking about.

Such as alt-tabbing doesn't cycle through the windows an application has, just the application. If I have three Sublime Text 2 windows open, I have to hunt it down like a predator.

So I just installed VMWare, and setup my Linux Mint 13 machine and work there exclusively now.

Did you know about alt-` -- it tabs between windows.

I discovered this about a year ago and it vastly improved my general productivity. Definitely worth knowing. (btw, ` is the button above tab, at least on my macbook).

Exactly. Once you know that it's actually preferable to Alt-Tab doing everything. If you are like me with sometimes dozens of open windows it's nice to have one more layer of abstraction.

I don't want that though. I want to be able to alt-tab between my two most recent windows, without having to think about whether they're in the same application or not. It pisses me off that OS X (and Ubuntu now) has this two-level application switcher model, and I can't figure out how to go back.

Press the Up arrow when Alt-Tabbing.

It will show you the windows for that particular application.

You can also use (set a shortcut or gesture) for mission control applications. I think that's what it's called. Or maybe it's still exposé. Anyway, it zooms out on all open windows of the current application and - for instance in Sublime - will display the file name on mouseover.

Same situation.

I found that VMWare workstation & parallels with the i7 imac (2011 model or something? it is a brand new iMac 27") causes mass tearing when using Linux, maybe a vsync issue?

Using parallels seems to lock the vm at 60FPS so it feels natural. Back to being productive....

i had the same problem until i found Witch. http://manytricks.com/witch/

Maybe you want a Macbook to run linux on. The Macbook Air 2011 is great with linux.

To get a laptop with a 2880x1800 pixel resolution?

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