Linux Is a Lemon On the Retina MacBook Pro 780
An anonymous reader writes "It turns out that Linux doesn't work too well on the Apple Retina MacBook Pro. Among the problems are needing special boot parameters to simply boot the Linux kernel, graphics drivers not working, no hybrid graphics support, WiFi requiring special firmware, Thunderbolt troubles, GNOME/Unity/KDE not being optimized for retina displays, and other snafus, including 20% greater power consumption with Linux over OS X. According to Michael Larabel, it will likely not be until early next year when most of the problems are ironed out for a clean 'out of the box' Linux experience on the Retina MacBook Pro."
Proof at last! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Proof at last! (Score:4, Insightful)
woooooooosh..
Did you hear that?
Re:Proof at last! (Score:5, Funny)
woooooooosh..
Did you hear that?
No, my sound card doesn't work under Linux.
Re:Proof at last! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Proof at last! (Score:5, Insightful)
Installing Ubuntu has been a piece of cake on every system I've done it on over the years.
When I was asked by some friends to assist with a Windows installation, I was very surprised at how much manual work it was (getting the wireless drivers to work, for instance - that used to be a problem on Linux around 2003).
It's no surprise Ubuntu is easier to install than Windows, because Microsoft would much rather you have the OEM do it for you.
Re:Proof at last! (Score:5, Interesting)
Installing Ubuntu has been a piece of cake on every system I've done it on over the years.
You haven't been trying hard enough. I love Linux, and the *BSDs, but we're always going to find ourselves chasing hardware support since the manufacturers (well, many) couldn't care less about supporting us and they love to stick us with so far unsupported (by the devs) proprietary stuff. Even if you stick to older hardware to give the devs a chance to do something with that crap, some systems will inevitably fall through the cracks. I'm mostly talking about laptops in my case. In my experience, first it was video that could only barely (if at all) do X, then Winmodems (bleah!), then network interfaces, then sound, now WiFi. It doesn't much help when curveballs like PulseAudio get tossed in at the last minute. My HP dv4 AMD 64 bit Turion machine still won't do sound (using Debian testing), while my 32 bit Gateway AMD Sempron does *everything* swimmingly (running Debian stable).
I just spent a weekend trying distro after distro trying to find one that even detected the internal wifi in an Inspiron 1525. Finally, LinuxMint did. Woohoo! Unfortunately, it refuses to connect to my parents wifi router, while it has no trouble with my sister's. Needs research, and a wired connection (which isn't easy to do these days, damnit); pain in the butt. Sucks to be us sometimes, dependent upon hardware support.
Don't get me wrong, it's a lot better now than it used to be and live CDs/DVDs make the process a lot easier than it used to be, but there'll always be rotten boxes that refuse to play nice. Still better than banging your head on Win* and Mac, though.
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I had a computer back in the day, a good Pentium 3 with a standard Intel motherboard and nothing too fancy at all.
Windows XP out of the box had no: Network, video, usb, audio, or anything except basic video, keyboard, mouse and cdrom.
To get it to work you'd have to download the drivers off the net, burn them to a CD on another computer then pop the cd in.
The computer was a couple of years older than XP too!
Re:Proof at last! (Score:4, Interesting)
You haven't installed Windows 7 have you? As surprising as it might sound Windows 7 is actually really good at installing the drivers for most hardware OOB even wireless cards then when you run windows update the first time it will almost always find and install the missing drivers. I've only had one or two weird pieces of hardware it couldn't find drivers for and one of those was because they didn't make a 64bit driver for it.
Re:Proof at last! (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is the "find drivers" button? Or right its called "Google your damned ass off" and you had BETTER know the exact make/rev/model of driver you need and pray to a statue of RMS someone has one. Even if they DO have one you better have enough skillz to be able to tweak that sucker, because it'll no doubt be written for make f, rev g, firmware h and you'll have make F, rev I, firmware j and the picky bastard just won't work.
It's not 1997 anymore...the kernel has 99% of the drivers you'll need, unless you need a proprietary one or something that's up for inclusion in the kernel that hasn't made it into the stable version yet.
Re:Proof at last! (Score:4, Insightful)
Now lets compare this to Linux: Where is the "find drivers" button? Or right its called "Google your damned ass off" ...
No, at least in LinuxMint it's the "Find Proprietary Drivers" icon.
If you haven't even tried to run a LiveCD in a decade, why would you consider yourself qualified to criticize it?
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The best part is where you spend hours installing all the updates.
Re:Proof at last! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been a while since you tried Linux, hasn't it? If not, you've chosen the wrong distro, which is what I suspect happened here (haven't RTFA yet). It's been five years since I've had any such issues.
That's the thing -- there is no Linux, there are a lot of Linuxes. For an example, in another thread a while ago someone was complaining that he couldn't play MP3s on his Linux box... of course not, he was running Red Hat.
OK, I'm back, just read the iApple ad (RTFA in this case means "read the fucking ad"). There's nothing there but pretty pictures of the macbook, descriptions of what a fine piece of equipment it is, and just says "Linux" without saying what distro, how he tried to install it, etc.
In short, TFA is bullshit. Tell me what distro you're trying to run! What drivers are lacking. If you've ever installed any OS on any computer.
Re:Proof at last! (Score:4, Funny)
If they say "linux" without specifying a distro, obviously, they must be talking about LFS [linuxfromscratch.org]. That's going to be tricky no matter what hardware you try to put it on, and it's certainly not going to "just work" right out of the box...
Re:Proof at last! (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux has shipped with more hardware support out of the box than Windows for ages now. You just don't care that you have to download Windows drivers for hardware because its normal to you.
Re:Proof at last! (Score:5, Interesting)
You just don't care that you have to download Windows drivers for hardware because its normal to you
Which kind of takes away the advantage of support out of the box.
This is one of those points where it's only the marginal cases that matter. Whether I need to download drivers to reach the full potential of my video card or they come pre installed is of minimal importance, because there are only basically 3 video card makers and I either can find them easily, or I need someone else to manage my computer for me no matter what, because I can't find www.nvidia.com, click the drivers, GPU drivers, then auto detect buttons, I'm not capable of managing my own computer, windows or linux.
On the other hand, if I have some bizarro SATA controller on my MOBO or a video card from SIS or matrox or one of the other boutique guys or some other random weird crap on my computer I'm still probably going to have to find drivers for something, and it's a pain in the arse because you may have to navigate some taiwanese website looking for some numbers in the hopes that they will point you to the right driver. And that's about equally bad for both linux and windows, assuming you can find drivers at all, and assuming they would do anything on linux if you needed them.
Which takes us to why Linux doesn't work on a retina macbook. The APIC intel mobo thing seems like that's actually a linux bug, whatever they happen, I'm not going to rail on the Linux dev guys about it. But the rest of it seems to be all the marginal case stuff, some custom apple thunderbolt part that you need to get working so you can transfer over files to support some other custom apple part (or at least very new part that is currently only supported by apple). No one ever seriously thought a 2880x 1800 display was going to exist (same ratios at 1440x900 but 4x the pixels), so it works like shit, the wifi is probably some custom part, so it doesn't work, the GPU switching thing is relatively new, so it's hard to say if that's a newness problem or a custom Apple way of GPU switching problem. For windows you're stuck waiting for Apple to release a driver kit (although the retina display thing can be solved through nvidia's website), and everything else is about as bad as linux. In both cases you're waiting on someone else to solve the problem for you as an end user. On linux you're waiting for someone to basically reverse engineer the parts, on Windows you're waiting for Apple to release a boot camp disk or money to change hands and Microsoft to write their own.
So sure, Linux has more support out of the box, but if it doesn't support the marginal case stuff that's hard for me to find fixes for then it's not getting me a whole lot over windows (at least in terms of driver support). As is well exemplified by the macbook retina display, which is basically a series of edge cases linux doesn't support yet, and neither does microsoft. That's probably Apple being assholes more than the fault of the other two, but either way, the linux setup experience isn't winning out over windows.
Re:As long as your hardware is common and old (Score:5, Informative)
I install over 20 Dell servers a year running CentOS. I've never needed a single driver update. All of them are fully supported. Dell manufactures their servers specifically to be Linux supported.
cf. http://linux.dell.com/ [dell.com]
Re: (Score:3)
So you tried one obscure Linux distribution in 1997 then?
Linux on Mac?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:4, Funny)
Look, sometimes you just want to stick a Chevy four-banger in your Ferrari. It's not rational, it's just linux.
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Oh damn it. What's the odds I posted nearly the identical example?
At least I was man enought to take the Karma hit!
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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Why in the world would you even try to do it? What is the goal of this endeavour?
It's a game .. seeing how many pieces of hardware we can run Linux on. There's always the question, is it the suitability of the OS or the hardware which is the chief difficulty. I'd say with problems prying into how the Mac is made and what tricks you have to overcome, it's not a particularly good choice (particularly as there may be small deviations during the production, which you won't know about, until you trip on them.)
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:5, Funny)
Just think how much more smug you are when you're running free software on over-priced hardware. It's a smug upgrade!
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just think how much more smug you are when you're running free software on over-priced hardware
I would be very interested to know where I can get a laptop with a 2880x1800 display panel for cheaper than Apple is charging. I am not aware of any others. It's a judgment call whether this is worth the money, as it is definitely a premium-priced product, but you are paying for actual hardware specs, not just snob appeal.
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A 15 inch screen simply doesn't need a resolution like that. My laptop has a larger screen than any MBP and it doesn't look any more jagged or rough than it did before the new Apple laptops came out. I mean, who prioritizes the number of pixels on their display over everything else, including the actual size of the display? Which jobs require a huge number of pixels for you to work efficiently, and is every MBP buyer who points out the resolution employed in one of those fields? No, they're not. They d
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What good is a 2880x1800 display with only 1GB of graphics memory?
Displaying fonts and graphics at double resolution with sub-pixel antialiasing.
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not? It's the only notebook with a display capable of 2,880×1,800, so if you want a notebook with a resolution higher than 1080p, its your only choice.
The hardware specs of a Macbook Pro "Retina" are quite unique, so there's plenty of other reasons you'd want this particular model just for hardware.
Where I live, a Macbook Air is the only choice for something similar to an "ultrabook". Everything else weighs twice as much, and includes crap I don't want, like huge HDDs or optical drives. So even if I dislike Apple's software, their hardware is really the only choice for me.
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It's not your only choice, it's just your only choice that's currently available.
Plenty of 1920x1200 options if you go back to Core 2, a few at Nehalem, and a couple at Sandy Bridge. (Some of those in the Core 2 and Nehalem days are even 15".)
Also, if you go back to Core 2, and don't mind some frankensteining, you can get an IDTech IAQX10, IAQX10N, or IAQX10S panel, a ThinkPad T60 or T60p, and a T61p 14.1" 4:3 motherboard, heatsink, Socket P CPU, and PCMCIA slot assembly, and put them all together. Need to
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:4, Insightful)
You must be too young to remember the days before the HDTV market killed hi-res displays. On laptops especially, the extra screen real-estate is awesome since going multi-head isn't an option. And I would personally much rather have a single 27" 4k monitor, than a 4x20" multi-head setup.
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Because the bastards won't let me upgrade my hardware to OS 10.8 ("too old" they claim). Well maybe Apple is into planned obsolescene of good hardware, but Microsoft and Linux aren't. I have not done it yet but could install either of these OSes since Apple no longer thinks I'm worthy of support. (And yes this is another reason Apple is a "luxury" brand like Lexus or Acura.... high initial cost, plus short OS lifespan == high cost of ownership).
Matt Garrett has Fedora running on one (Score:4, Informative)
See his blog post -
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/15948.html [dreamwidth.org]
As for "why try to do it?" - well, probably because liking Apple hardware and high-res displays does not automatically create a liking for XNU/Darwin. Some people prefer Open Source.
Well, speaking as a hipster (Score:5, Funny)
Why in the world would you even try to do it? What is the goal of this endeavour?
When I first got into Mac, it was still a rare thing. And so that made me better than everyone else. I got to look down on PC users and call everyone who came after me poseurs. Then, as Mac's became more and more popular, I started noticing that EVERYONE was carrying them. I even saw people using them in Starbuck's, for Christ's sake (as I passed by the window on my way to an indie coffee shop that you've probably never heard of).
This forced me to do something to set myself once more off from the pack, so that I might reaffirm my moral and intellectual superiority. Obviously, I couldn't go to Windows. So naturally I turned to Linux, and an obscure distro than only a few of us know about (if you have to ask which one, don't bother).
It was perfect. Now when people saw I was using a Mac and asked me about it, I could tell them "Yeah, it's a Mac, but not the kind YOU'RE using" and blow off any subsequent questions with "I could tell you more, but you wouldn't get it." Once more, I was whole!
I would talk more about it, but I've got to get to a Semertian Poetry reading. Not that I expect you to know what Semertian Poetry is.
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Why in the world would you even try to do it? What is the goal of this endeavour?
If you came here asking a question like that, you MUST be new here...
If we didn't approach most endeavors in the *NIX world with a "why not, let's see what happens" attitude, there probably wouldn't be a single *NIX box running a GUI yet.
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Well, it does sound more productive than making Linux run on your toaster...
Mistaken Claims (Score:4, Interesting)
whatever comes after (HouseCat?) will probably be more IOS-likeâ"i.e., sucky on a laptop.
People have been saying that for years, even though Apple has repeatedly said that a desktop OS is different than a mobile device OS and held to that statement through a number of OS releases.
Meanwhile Microsoft is the only company that has gone ahead and said "no, both platforms should run the same OS".
You can always install Linux later IF Apple turns that way as well.
Re:Mistaken Claims (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
eople have been saying that for years, even though Apple has repeatedly said that a desktop OS is different than a mobile device OS and held to that statement through a number of OS releases.
Meanwhile Microsoft is the only company that has gone ahead and said "no, both platforms should run the same OS".
This is an oversimplified description. In truth, there are not two platforms here, but three: desktops, tablets and smartphones. Apple lumps tablets and smartphones together under "mobile". Microsoft rather bets that tablets are (or should be) closer to desktops in capabilities, rather than to phones. Hence why Win8 is targeting desktops & tablets, and WP8 (which, while using the same kernel, is a different OS) is targeting phones - and their UI is also different in many ways, if you look beyond square
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Meanwhile Microsoft is the only company that has gone ahead and said "no, both platforms should run the same OS".
You can always install Linux later IF Apple turns that way as well.
Seems some Linux distros are going that way too. Yes, I am looking at you Ubuntu.
Thankfully we have Linux Mint, which at the end of the day is Ubuntu-but-not-stupid.
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Because Mountain Lion isn't THAT much of an upgrade over Lion, and whatever comes after (HouseCat [xkcd.com]?) will probably be more IOS-like--i.e., sucky on a laptop.
I don't see Liger anywhere on that comic.
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Name one other laptop that has a screen with that high a resolution. They don't currently exist.
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Their response is to send me emails of models with even worse resolution!
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:5, Insightful)
The interesting thing is, this is the first time Apple sets a trend that I (who is not your average consumer) actually want: high resolution screens.
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Is it? I've no love lost for Apple, but there are many little things they've done right, some of which were widely copied. Large "glass" laptop touchpads are one example
(granted, Trackpoint is still superior in general).
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:5, Informative)
Lets be clear (pun intended): higher DPI screens. Resolution is only half the battle. What good is 1680x1050 if it's on a 30' screen? Much better on a 15" I'd say.
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You didn't want to take advantage of the other trends they set? Like longer battery life and thinner, lighter computers? Like nice trackpads?
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole GUI trend, the built-in-pointing-device trend, the keyboard-set-back-next-to-the-screen trend.... Apple has introduced a lot of design features (especially on laptops) which have since become standard and are now taken for granted. You may not like them all, but the notion that you don't like any of them is a bit preposterous.
Video RAMM matters more than screen resolution (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple currently has the high resolution screens. Too bad you can only get 1GB of video RAM on the MacBook Pros though. What is the point of having such a high resolution screen if you run out of VRAM for textures etc? I'm thinking about a Retina Mac to replace my existing Mac but at the lack of video ramm is putting me off.
Why does this matter? Because I'm developing a cross-platform OpenGL flight simulator and I would like to have plenty of Video Ram to go around (many flight sim gamers have very high end Windows rigs with 2-4GB of Video RAM, and this is my target [TBH, I don't care about those who want to game on less capable hardware - profit limiting I know, but I'm writing the sim for myself first and foremost and I have great hardware that is poorly utilized by many mainstream games]).
So, my point is while Apple has a lovely display resolution that will probably soon be matched by others. Other laptop manufacturers (eg. HP) produce machines with 2 GB of Video RAM, which is unlikely to be matched by Apple (none of their latops have more than 1 GB of RAM, Apple don't seem to be interested in trely powerful users of laptops - I guess that's what they have the Mac Pro for - but it doesn't help folks like me).
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Then why are you concerned about using a Macbook?
If all they're going to offer with the super-duper Retina display is 1gb RAM, then just ignore the platform. Who's going to play flight simulator on a Macbook?
Now if you were developing an anal sex simulator, then you'd want to make sure it ran on Apple hardware.
Re:Video RAMM matters more than screen resolution (Score:5, Funny)
Now if you were developing an anal sex simulator, then you'd want to make sure it ran on Apple hardware.
You can't, at least not with iOS - remember that clause in developer license agreement that forbids products directly competing with ones offered by Apple?
Re:Video RAMM matters more than screen resolution (Score:5, Insightful)
First you say ...
And then you say ...
So, it's ok if you want to ignore people with smaller systems, but it's a bad thing that Apple isn't interested in selling niche devices to people like you?
They're not interested in chasing "trely powerful users of laptops" -- they're interested in chasing as many people as possible. You likely represent a tiny fraction of the market.
Re:Video RAMM matters more than screen resolution (Score:5, Insightful)
So, my point is while Apple has a lovely display resolution that will probably soon be matched by others. Other laptop manufacturers (eg. HP) produce machines with 2 GB of Video RAM, which is unlikely to be matched by Apple (none of their latops have more than 1 GB of RAM, Apple don't seem to be interested in trely powerful users of laptops - I guess that's what they have the Mac Pro for - but it doesn't help folks like me).
In most cases, higher quantities of VRAM tend to be a part of beefier graphic chipsets. In basically every one of *those* cases, beefier GPUs sit on the same motherboard as beefier CPUs. In every one of *those* units, you end up with extra runs of copper and beefier fan motors to keep them cool. Add all of that together, and you end up with a laptop that is powerful, but is large, heavy, and lacks battery life. There's definitely a market for this; Alienware, Origin, and Falcon Northwest all pay their bills based on catering to that market. HP has a wide enough product line that they can throw enough Jell-O at basically any wall and some of it will ultimately stick.
Apple, on the other hand, seems to have no desire to cater to people who are alright with a laptop that has only an hour of battery life and weighs 7 pounds. My best guess is that they feel that even having a monster-sized performance laptop would be impossible to make appear sexy, but I'm certain the Apple folk are aware of the Alienware/Origin market and have chosen not to attempt to cater to them. I've yet to meet a Macbook user who expressed unhappiness with their older graphics chipset, or one who was sufficiently unhappy as to express willingness to sacrifice half of their 2.5-hour battery life for the added performance. Ratcheting back the resolution and easing the antialiasing to 2X will get acceptable performance from most games Mac users are likely to play. After Effects comps of any consequence are generally rendered overnight, when the difference between 4 hour render times and 6 hour render times are effectively meaningless. Now granted, I have an Origin monster of a laptop that gets less than an hour of battery life and I'm okay with that, but getting acceptable performance by bumping down graphics detail is a lot easier to do than squeaking out extra battery life when you have a CPU/GPU that eats through it very quickly.
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> Apple, on the other hand, seems to have no desire to cater to people who are alright with a laptop that has only an hour of battery life and weighs 7 pounds
Actually I have a late 2008 17" MacBook Pro. It gets 7 hours on one chipset and about half that on another chipset. Apple ditching the power segment is very, very recent. This is why I made my post, what is the point of upping the resolution to a beautiful Retina display if the VRAM is not upped as well?
With regard to battery life. Apple has the
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh boy, you did it now.
If I don't see you in a few days, I'll send a search party out to look for your karma.
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I don't care.
OSX screws up just too much. The whole interface is dumbed way down, it is not configurable to any real degree and it is missing lots of normal features. One of the first that springs to mind is having one wallpaper across more than one monitor. Instead I have to cut the image up into two then place one on each screen.
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Jettison support? I run Linux on Macs because Linux has had better driver support for things like capture cards and 3rd party remotes and more complete support for things like video acceleration.
This MBP is one of the few exception when it comes to "support"
Apple reliability is overrated. So is Apple consistency.
"Elegance" is just subjective nonsense.
The problem with Apple is that things quickly go bad when you use it any manner remotely creative. It has an even worse group think than Windows. With Macs you will get shouted down for trying things that seem mundane on Linux or Windows.
apt-get is a killer feature and blows Apple variants out of the water when it comes to "elegance".
The main advantage of Macs is that you can "buy stuff" for it and Windows has a much bigger advantage in that regard.
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You've got the world waiting to hear about how "OSX screws up just too much" and the first thing that you choose to share is that you can't have the same wallpaper spread between two monitors.
Yeah, I'm with you on that one. It's kind of a bizarre complaint, given that there's so much else wrong with OSX compared to Linux.
Still, it's your choice to jettison the reliability, consistency, elegance, support and put Linux
The what, what, what and what? Are you talking about the same OSX and same Linux?
Thise are
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It'll take a few days to mobilize the Fanboi Trike Force, but yes, he will get downmods, and most likely will have comments he made from other articles downmodded as well.
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you like having middle click copy past, functional number pad in vim, or focus follows mouse OSX is not the right choice.
I tried to use it, I paid for software to enable focus follows mouse. I tried to find a decent terminal app, I tried to find replacements for all I needed. OSX is just really meant to be for one kind fo user and that is not me.
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Odd; I've had no problems implementing middle click copy/paste using the default install, nor have I had a problem with my number pad in vim (until I started using a keyboard with no number pad xP --Fn-NP just doesn't cut it, so I had to update my vimrc to move the functions to other keys). Decent terminal apps: other than Terminal.app (which is definitely sub-par in some areas and superior in others), there's a number found here: http://www.macupdate.com/find/mac/terminal%20emulator [macupdate.com] -- of which MacTerm i
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Actually, it does. I have a KDE desktop set up in this way:
- I'm using a menubar widget in a panel at the top of the screen. It looks just like the top toolbar in OSX, except it's Plasma themed.
- If the current window is not fullscreen, moving the mouse over another one does not change the focus, so I can reach the menubar.
- If I roll the mouse wheel while doing so, the window under the mouse scrolls, not the active one.
Basically, I get the main benefit of focus-follows-mouse (scroll
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Linux is fine as a "normal desktop OS". The problem here is redefining "normal desktop" to mean grandmas that really should just get an iPad. A GUI does not negate the possibility of power users. There are plenty of GUI power users and they tend to get annoyed but Apple's allegedly superior product.
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Why use vnc? Why not just tunnel X over SSH?
Or just use ssh the normal way.
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:4, Informative)
Over fast connections X over ssh is faster than VNC. On the other, hand VNC is (barely, and not for any practical purposes) usable on connections that are so slow, X can't work over them without minutes of redraw delays.
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Lots of software is actually not available, what is I have to compile myself.
OSX has more pay for software, far less FREE software. I mostly use FREE software.
OSX was commercial UNIX, it is not now. Not that it being commercial UNIX is something I care about.
Here are my major issues:
Lack of configurability.
Lack of Focus Follows Mouse. Zoom2 fixes that mostly.
Lack of middle click paste.
Breaks numpad for vim.
All the command line flags are BSD style instead of the GNU way I know and love.
Bad multimonitor suppo
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This is not to suggest that you *ought* to do this (time is valuable, particularly for working professionals), but it is possible to get much of the free software and even the GNU command line environment for Mac OS. I do it via MacPorts though I know there are other alternatives as well.
When I was contemplating the switch from Linux it took me about two months to become convinced that I could be satisfied with it. Most important factors were some critical free software standards, a GNU environment, a decen
Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score:4, Insightful)
MacPorts brought the GNU environment and utilities
Ick.
I tried fink and I tried Macports. I've also tried real ports on both Free and Open BSD. Somehow, the OSX ones always seemed really brittle and upgrades would fail frequently. The trouble is that you would find some package that you needed, try to install it, end up in some kind of hell, rm -r the tree and then wait overnight for everything to build again.
Basically, compared to any of tha major Linux distributions, and the ports tree on the BSDs, getting random OSS software installed on a mac is like pulling teeth.
XCode is easy enough to get ahold of, and gcc is also there with minimal fuss.
Some hideous, ancient and mangled version of GCC. I run a couple of OSS libraries, and the Mac support has been a bit painful at times. Not anything like as painful as Windows, to be sure, but by the standards of unixy systems, awkward.
Also, GCC has been improving a lot lately, so being a couple ov versions behing is a hinderance.
I spent little to no time now on system administration for my own system (compared with 20% of my work time in Linux, with unpredictable breakages
That sounds like hyperbole to me. That's one entire day per week. Unless you're doing some weird shit, once set up, a decent Linux distro will basically run for ever or until the hard disk dies, which ever comes first. Even Arch with its crazy roling upgrades amazingly just works pretty much all the time.
Linux is used heavily for things like servers, HPC, embedded stuff and so on where uptime is important and it can stay on for years. If you're having stuff randomly break to the point where it's taking up 20% of your time administering the thing, then you must be doing something very, very wrong.
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Windows is only the standard for a secretary's terminal and games.
Beyond that, you need something a little more serious than Windows.
Hardly newsworthy (Score:5, Informative)
Linux doesn't exactly have a reputation for working well on brand-new hardware. The new MacBooks only came out a couple months ago, give Linux some time!
Re:Hardly newsworthy (Score:4, Interesting)
On PC hardware, it has been running a LOT better than before. That said, it's still essentially true -- nothing works out of the box unless it is like 3+ years old.
With all that said, Apple goes out of its was to "think different" so that its hardware is more exclusive and more likely to be running Mac OS X... but only Mac OS X version 10."latest" because they are dropping support for hardware older than X years. (Where X is a number between 2 and 5) So anyone with ideas of installing anything other than pure Apple Mac OS X on it will be faced with some challenges.
No, it is enabled all the time... (Score:3)
Oh, so that's why you have to use 3rd party "hacks" to enable native 2880x1800
Wrong, the OS is running at 2880x1800 all the time.
The hacks are all about turning on use of the higher resolution for apps that have not provided graphics for the higher res, so the text will look better. By default so OS X does not mess with the look of an app, it will keep the whole app running at the older resolution and simply scale up the display.
All of the system apps (like Mail and Safari) of course support native 2880x18
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Hardly newsworthy (Score:5, Informative)
NEWS Flash!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux doesn't work completely on brand new hardware!!
This is totally shocking to me. This has only been a problem since the 90's.
Re:NEWS Flash!! (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the real news is that Linux does as well as it does on new hardware that is designed and tested for other OSes. A good sidebar is how quickly any deficiencies get fixed up.
Re:NEWS Flash!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly... I wonder how well OS X worked the first time Apple ran it on this hardware. I bet it didn't even boot.
I know you're joking, but the corollary here would actually be how good OS X would work on hardware tuned specifically for Linux. The answer to that would likely be "very poorly" as well.
And next (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And next (Score:5, Funny)
That isn't linux's fault, it's Ubuntu's. Slackware will run just fine on your sundial.
Re: (Score:3)
Pffft, Slackware. I run Gentoo on my sundial. Now it tells time 377.4% faster.
Re:And next (Score:5, Funny)
My NetBSD install CD caught fire in my toaster. Still waiting for a patch.
Tell me why... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is so shocking to think that an operating system doesn't work well on hardware for which no drivers have yet been written?
And yes, folks have been working on this. It's all up on the G+.
But seriously, until somebody is paid to write the drivers prior to hardware release, why expect it to work?
You spent $3000 on a laptop to run linux (Score:4, Interesting)
You spent $3000 on a laptop to run linux. You are a strange person.
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't buy a Mac.
Don't get me wrong fan boys... Apple does make good gear, and it isn't Apple's fault it doesn't run Linux all that well on this particular device. However despite having a good operating system for a workstation I'm just not a big fan of OSX at home. I use Linux primarily at work and I am quite happy with it. Given the choice between Windows and OSX at work it will be OSX every time. However, I DO have a better choice in workstation OS that more closely mirrors our production servers on which to develop software.
I also don't care much for Apple as a company. I find Microsoft more trustworthy, and that really does say quite a bit.
It would be nice if Apple contributed to Linux. I know that is asking a lot of them as they throughly enjoy tieing two products together by virtue of license and copyright law. It is something they are unfortunately unlikely to change and as a result I try to avoid purchasing their hardware. Much like I will try to avoid any "secure boot" BIOS gear in the future.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be nice if Apple contributed to Linux.
They do. Their most notable contribution was all the work on the PPC version of gcc which is the reason Linux runs so well on XBox.
Most of their major open source projects do run on Linux today though: http://www.macosforge.org/ [macosforge.org]
What a shame (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What a shame (Score:5, Informative)
It is if you aren't legally allowed to run it on anything other than Mac hardware. The $20 you pay is technically the upgrade price since the actual price has been rolled into the cost of the hardware.
I would have to start with "Why?" (Score:4, Informative)
I have the new Retina MBP... and it's a fantastic machine. But WHY would you buy it just to install Linux on it anyway? It's a very expensive computer for that - you can get other laptops with similar specs (other than the display, yes) for a lot less. In almost all cases I'd suspect that people want to use both OSX and Linux - and in that case, I'd highly suggest running Linux in a virtual machine anyway (Parallels/VMWare).
Sure it'd be nice to have a pure dual boot for Linux, but until drivers are written and fine tuned for that specific platform it will do just fine.
I use Parallels for that, and for running WinXP (believe it or not) for one old app I need. The new MBP is so fast that I can cold-boot WinXP in 3 seconds! - making it a breeze to get to the one app I need when I need it.
MadCow.
Instead of Linux laptop (Score:5, Funny)
Still (Score:3, Insightful)
but... (Score:3)
Why? (Score:3)
Other than proving it can be done, why would you drop that amount of money on a retina display macbook pro and then install linux on it? OS X is already *nix and has a much, much cleaner and better looking gui than anything available for linux.
Re:Not just the retina macbook pro (Score:5, Insightful)
But also all devices made by Samsung, LG, and HT....
But saying that doesn't draw any attention - mentioning Apple does. It's like when people talk about Foxconn. Nobody mentions they make stuff for HP, Dell, Lenovo, and others - they only mention the Apple connection.
Re: (Score:3)
http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/fusiontp2012 [vmware.com]
__
Re: (Score:3)
Even better just use VirtualBox, which is free as in beer, and has 3D support for Linux.
Re:Why run Linux on a MacBook (Score:4, Insightful)
The same reason you would run Windows on a MacBook. If the thing that matters most to you is the screen there are precious few other options in the market, even if you ignore the high resolution. Just finding an IPS laptop that has basic features and doesn't require a furniture dolly to move is hard to find. Also, if you work in both OSX and Linux environments, you are going to want a MacBook. The cases are not numerous, but they're out there.
Re:Why run Linux on a MacBook (Score:4, Insightful)
Could you please link to a cheap non-apple laptop with a 2880x1800 display? Thanks!
Re: (Score:3)
Re:This Just In: (Score:5, Informative)
It is flamebait because it makes blatantly false statement the Retina MBP is not in any sense "locked down." Apple does not block installation of 3rd party or open source software or operating systems on any of its desktop or laptop computers. So its merely a matter of an open source OS not yet having been tweaked to run perfectly on a new, and somewhat different, hardware design.