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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, I run Ubuntu on a MacBook and a MacBook Air. As they are a "fixed" target, I figured that at least one developer would have made sure that they "just worked". And, indeed, they did.

The installation tutorial was comprehensive, the out of the box experience was great, and upgrades have gone smoothly.

The only thing to note was that I was able to manually update the WiFi drivers for (supposedly) better performance if I wanted. Power consumption seems marginally higher, but I don't run the same profile of programs in OSX.

Having a fixed target is really good for Linux to show how it can shine - and I hope that Dell and Ubuntu continue to make perfectly matched hardware and software.

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Exactly. If there is any hardware platform that should be a "reference" platform for Linux (or FreeBSD) it should be the mac. It's a very tightly focused hardware ecosystem with broad adoption and of higher quality - inside and out.

It's a very tightly focused hardware ecosystem with no publicly available documentation for the ways that it differs from the broader hardware ecosystem. Supporting Apple hardware well is hard, and I say that as a person who's done a lot of work on Linux support for Macs.

There are a few reasons why a mac wouldn't make a good reference platform. Besides Apple changing hardware/firmware setups between every release, it doesn't have much official documentation and support for developers making an OS for it. Many people go to great pains to make linux run well on a Mac, especially hacking around the UEFI bugs that are present (not that they don't appear on other platforms either).

You also don't really want a reference plaform for linux, because as soon as you specify one, you might start making decisions which only benefit that platform. This is bad for the current eco-system, as it could impact linux's ability to run everywhere.

PS. Not to mention that Macs ship with broadcom wireless cards these days, which don't have very good linux support.

"PS. Not to mention that Macs ship with broadcom wireless cards these days, which don't have very good linux support."

You're saying that OS X has better hardware support than Linux? :-)

> and of higher quality

That's completely your opinion. I have had much better luck with Thinkpads. Many of the Unibody Macbooks have severe wifi connectivity and overheating issues.

As far as broad adoption goes, it may be more broad than the adoption of Thinkpads, but I wouldn't call it "broad" by any stretch. Mac market share is still quite low - less than 10%.

Is the TrackPoint (eraserhead) pointer well supported by Linux? I hope the answer is yes. If so, which flavor of Linux?

It's a normal PS/2 mouse (at least it was on my R60).

There are a few pointers here: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_configure_the_TrackPoin...

Yes. As the GP answered already, it's just another input device. I use it exclusively and turned the touchpad completely off on this T520.

The 'flavor of Linux' should be irrelevant.

What about over heating?

I tried ubuntu 12.04, and 12.10 on a 2011 macbook air 4,2. I followed the information here, some of the tweaks weren't needed on 12.10:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookAir4-2

But the fans were spinning almost constantly. This was with just firefox and vim usage.

OS X seems to do a better job of running Apple hardware at a sensible temperature.

I'm using this project on my Macbook retina and it works wonderfully: https://github.com/dgraziotin/Fan-Control-Daemon The fans only spin up when I'm doing something intensive and go back down to completely silent when finished.

Thanks I will take a look.

Back in the 10.5 days, you had to install separate fan control daemons for OSX too, because it didn't do well enough. This has mostly been fixed.

Yeah, this is why I laughed at the line "No, it doesn’t have an official reference platform, not even whatever PC Linus happens to be using these days.". Linus is quite known for using MacBooks himself.

Based on his recent G+ posts, it seems he is using a Chromebook Pixel now.

Also based on his G+ he seems to be a big fan of High Res displays, something both the Pixel and new MBP's have.

Really? That's good to hear. I know support for MacBooks used to be quite poor in Ubuntu. I'm not sure when they got it up to snuff, but I know as recently as a couple of years ago (the last time I tried it), waking up from sleep was still a crapshoot on a MacBook Pro. Maybe it would wake up, maybe your trackpad would even still work after it woke up — but you were never sure.

I thought the same, but as chance should have it I finally installed Ubuntu on my mpb yesterday. It went off without a hitch, and as far as I can tell everything works out of the box (wireless, dual monitors, sound, even all of the Mac function keys!).

It was a surprisingly pleasant experience.

You wish. For years, I have been trying to run Linux on my dual GPU Macbook Pros. This generally works, but Linux always uses the "big" GPU, thus battery life is abysmal.

All the following links were found by searching since your comment was posted:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=289711

https://github.com/ah-/gmux-scripts

http://www.linuxine.com/story/how-do-i-use-integrated-intel-...

http://askubuntu.com/questions/126862/how-to-use-integrated-...

I make no warranty that the linked recipes, scripts, or suggestions work, but your "you wish" warrants refutation.

Thank you for those links. I have not yet been successful in booting any Linux in EFI mode on the MBP. EFI mode is required for using the integrated GPU. Currently, EFI mode on an MBP seems to require a custom-built kernel, which frankly is too much trouble in my book. I will try again in a few weeks.

This has probably struck you before, but any reason why you're not using a Linux VM? Free virtualization solutions are available that would certainly save you quite a bit of trouble.

Adding RAM to your MBP should be fairly straightforward (and cheap) if necessary.

I would use Linux mostly for ideological reasons.

For most of my work, I need a terminal, a text editor and a web browser. Ocassionally some light vector graphics work and a simple sound editor. I can do all this on any Unix-like system. It mostly even works on Windows.

The only technical reason I have to use Linux over OSX is performance. OSX can be a memory hog and it is very much limited by hard drive performance. I more or less solved this with more RAM and an SSD, but having more resources available would be nice.

Thus, it really defeats my purpose to use Linux in a VM. But thank you for suggesting it!

You use Linux for ideological reasons yet you buy Apple hardware? Doesn't make much sense to me.

I would like to use Linux for ideological reasons. I only realized the value of doing so in the last few years. After buying my last Macbook.

Besides, what's the ideological difference between Dell, Apple, Lenovo and Asus as hardware manufacturers? You know, not in terms of price, but freedom.

ICBW, but Lenovo doesn't tend to sue everyone in sight for using rounded corners...

System 76 are offering new configurations and frankly they seem fantastic.

I haven't ordered yet because I'm in the UK and I have to find out about VAT and tariffs (last time I ordered straight from the US I was charged them and a fine on top, and extortionate "processing charges"). Otherwise I'd be ordering straight away even with a 20% VAT on top.

Data point: I bought a System 76 Ubuntu netbook 2-3 years ago and it was garbage. Bad power management, finicky trackpad, sticky keys on the tiny keyboard. I hated using it (so I didn't).

Sad to hear. Latest models look very good, though. I will wait a bit until they have stock and there are some reviews out.

Can you list your "known working" platform (Macbook model, Linux distro and version, etc?) or a good place to find those, if you know one? I'm going to replace my laptop soon, and am considering a Mac, but I've been running only Linux since 2005, and would love to know how to pick a Mac that would allow me to continue doing that.

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 I think. Linux version 3.2.0-48-generic (buildd@komainu) (gcc version 4.6.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5) ) #74-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jun 6 19:43:26 UTC 2013

Running on a 13 inch MacBook Air.

There's a guide at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookAir4-2

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