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Comment by smoyer | Hacker News Reader

I agree that Ubuntu is pretty much ruined after version 10.10 or so, but I just got a MBP Retina when I started a new job last July and wish I'd gone with something that could run linux.

He describes a seamless, responsive experience but I feel neutered AND I've had numerous unexplained crashes, application incompatibility and (by far the worst) ... I can't find substitutes for all the applications I rely on.

I'm not willing to call it bad, and certainly not unusable, but it's also not the paradise he's describing.

Executive summary: If you're going to be a power user on a consumer OS, you're going to have issues that require the brains that make you a power user.

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I have been really unimpressed with the direction of Mac OS the last few releases. The desktop environment is attractive to look at, but I find it somewhat sluggish and moody (don't you show me that dreaded beachball!). 10.6 is the last release I really enjoyed. The next two have been disappointing. It's obvious that Mac OS is no longer Apple's priority.

I dual-booted Arch for a time on my Macbook and was just blown away at the difference in responsiveness. I also had the familiar ease of maintaining/installing/updating/changing my development tools instead of dealing with brew or Macports and XCode.

The thing that prevented me from running Linux on this MBP full time is the less-than-stellar Mac touchpad gesture support. I do think Mac OS nailed gestures and touchpad interaction.

If your Mac is sluggish, you frequently see the dreaded beachball and get warning dialogs about low disk space:

"The core issue seems to be that the virtual memory manager is bad at managing which pages should be freed from the inactive state and which ones should be paged out to disk (and, consequently, back from disk)."

http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-de...

The fact that you even have to do something like this to attempt to get decent performance illustrates my point. Not to mention that this may cause issues if you are RAM-constrained.

It just seems like some engineering effort could be spent to improve this, but it's sucked for the last two Mac OS releases.

"I agree that Ubuntu is pretty much ruined after version 10.10 or so..."

Try CentOS /Scientific Linux/Springdale Linux 6.3 in a VM or booting a live version off a USB. You may be surprised. Same apps/kernel family as 10.04 and support until 2017.

Yes! ... All my VMs at work are RHEL, so I'm moving towards CentOS for my personal stuff. I'm also wondering why Ubuntu never created something like Kickstart (or adopted it). Managing machines with Cobbler/Ansible is very nice!

What stops your MBP from running Linux?

Touchpad support is the big blocker for me. It does support some of the gestures, but the whole experience is sub-par compared to what we were spoiled with on Mac OS. Movement and acceleration is weird, the ignoring of "accidental" contact doesn't always work well, and some gestures take a few attempts to register.

If they could just nail this down, I'd never boot Mac OS again on my MBP.

Are you talking about the default synaptics driver or have you tried xf86-input-mtrack-git?

There's something in the wiki but I have no mac, so I don't know what I'm talking about: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook#Touchpad

I haven't tried that yet, but sounds like a good idea. I may have to give it a shot again.

The large number of pixels on the Retina display (well ... I have it attached to a Thunderbolt monitor too). Ubuntu 13.04 claims they'll support the MBP Retina, but I've already said I want to avoid Unity. I guess that means the drivers are available though. If I was choosing now, I'd probably go for the upgraded Lenovo X1 Carbon (or maybe the 230 ... my son's favorite).

But I also admitted it's usable, so I'll live with it for a couple years.

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