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Running Linux on My MacBook

djhworld.github.io

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Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#51
post #14

Converting a machine that works well out of the box into a machine that requires custom scripts and constant tinkering to handle simple tasks seems like a waste of time.

Honestly, I run Linux on a 2015 MacBook Pro. It works much better than it did "out of the box".

I get better battery life, because I can turn off things I don't need.

I don't have to restart the audio service before every Zoom call.

I don't have to reboot to get external monitors to work again.

My Yubikey doesn't drain the battery in a few hours.

My system boots to the login screen in the time it takes for the Apple logo to finish showing.

I don't have to fight with the App store to keep software up-to-date.

I don't have to work around a shitty developer experience with homebrew or docker/virtual machines.

I never have to deal with Xcode!

In any case, I probably spent a tenth of the time setting everything up, tweaks and all, than I did unfucking the default install of OS X to be usable.

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#52

Thank you for writing this! Whenever I see people using Linux as their main laptop OS, I'm struck by remembering the amount of tinkering needed circa 1999 which was the last time I did it. Having read this -- the custom scripts, the "suspend still doesn't work properly" -- it feels like that's still the case.

> it feels like that's still the case Very much not true these days. Linux on laptops is (in overwhelming majority) a great experience today. I suggest you just try out one of the live images for Ubuntu or Fedora. On a tangential note I'm surprised that it's still relatively common on HN to see comments like "Linux on desktop doesn't work" or "Java is slow". That was 20 years ago. The world has moved on.

You wish. There's tons of edge cases that make it into a difficult experience. Recently observed a guy plugging his Linux laptop into an external screen to act as a projector during a meeting. That did not go well. I think primarily due to the external screen being HiDPI.

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#53
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list to get macOS working on other laptops is even longer - I thought it would be obvious to all of you that it would be hard to make a machine designed to run a proprietary OS. Just like you buy an Apple machine to run MacOS well, you can easily buy a machine to run Linux well (Dell, Lenovo, System76 are just a few manufacturers who build MacBoook class hardware with Linux preinstalled).

> Dell, Lenovo, System76 are just a few manufacturers who build MacBoook class hardware with Linux preinstalled Debatable. I have had an absolutely terrible experience with Linux on a new ThinkPad. System76 doesn’t have as great a build quality AFAIK. Dell is fine, but they don’t have anything with preinstalled Linux anymore.

They do: https://www.dell.com/de-de/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-13-9300-lapt...

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#54
post #44
post #14

Converting a machine that works well out of the box into a machine that requires custom scripts and constant tinkering to handle simple tasks seems like a waste of time.

"Works well". I have a 2019 mbp16. It does not "work well". For me, the graphics driver crashes me out of my login session pretty much daily, the network stack occasionally shits itself (reboot) and various internal processes (the... window server?) like to use >50% CPU for no reason at all. Looking around, I'm not the only one who has issues.

AFAIK the macOS activity manager doesn’t show task usage as you’d expect. It displays resource usage based on total current usage rather than maximum capacity.

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#55
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dell, Lenovo, System76 are just a few manufacturers who build MacBoook class hardware with Linux preinstalled Debatable. I have had an absolutely terrible experience with Linux on a new ThinkPad. System76 doesn’t have as great a build quality AFAIK. Dell is fine, but they don’t have anything with preinstalled Linux anymore.

They do: https://www.dell.com/de-de/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-13-9300-lapt...

Oh, that's nice. I thought they stopped offering developer editions. My bad

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#56
post #14

Converting a machine that works well out of the box into a machine that requires custom scripts and constant tinkering to handle simple tasks seems like a waste of time.

Honestly, I run Linux on a 2015 MacBook Pro. It works much better than it did "out of the box". I get better battery life, because I can turn off things I don't need. I don't have to restart the audio service before every Zoom call. I don't have to reboot to get external monitors to work again. My Yubikey doesn't drain the battery in a few hours. My system boots to the login screen in the time it takes for the Apple…

That sounds horrendous! My experience is fairly opposite though.

> I get better battery life, because I can turn off things I don't need.

I had horrible experiences with Linux and battery life on laptops. Fans on all the time, poor or absent support for sleep and hibernate... Proprietary systems consistently performed better for me in that area.

> I don't have to restart the audio service before every Zoom call.

That's really weird. I wouldn't even know how to restart the audio service on OsX.

> I don't have to reboot to get external monitors to work again.

I have occasional issues in that area, but typically it just takes a bit of "nagging" osx to re-detect the monitor, like bringing up the System Preferences panel related to wallpapers.

> My system boots to the login screen in the time it takes for the Apple logo to finish showing.

One shouldn't need to reboot OsX more than once weekly, or less, but yeah, boot times in OsX have gone to the dogs in the last few years. Windows absolutely smokes it, I guess some Linux distros would too.

> I don't have to fight with the App store to keep software up-to-date.

It's been alright until recently, but I agree that the last few moves to persuade us to move to "Vistalina" have been annoying.

> I probably spent a tenth of the time setting everything up, tweaks and all, than I did unfucking the default install of OS X

That's really the opposite for me. The time I always end up spending on stuff like fonts (!) on the average Linux desktop, is just ridiculous.

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#57
post #2

I used i3 for a long time. After a while it didn't feel that fast. Yes switching was very quick but often it got in the way. So many applications have little windows that pop up. They didn't play nice with i3. I also had the issue of a limited keyboard and shortcut keys. I use a Kinesis advantage. I don't have a windows key. So I used alt as a super key. This meant that I often couldn't use application shortcuts. It…

The biggest issues I've had with i3 are graphics related. The first is drawing at X's borders when having multiple panels connected leads to flickering and graphical artifacts. This means triggering any window/video to go full screen while you have output on more than one monitor. It's not a unique problem to i3, but most other WM's handle window drawing in a different manner. The other issue I find more annoying. Th…

The active fork of Compton is called Picom.

https://github.com/yshui/picom

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#58
The trouble with almost every article that I read of this kind is that the author is either a writer or a coder. So their demands on Linux are relatively minor; a terminal, an IDE, something to mangle text with.

I could probably make the full-time switch to Linux, if that was the bulk of what I did too. And I do a fair bit of writing and coding. But the majority what I do on my [OSX] computers is Art & Design related. So I need Photoshop and Illustrator and there is nothing available for Linux that even comes close. Inkscape and [especially] The Gimp aren't even in the same league. The only semi-decent graphic design app I've come across on Linux is Krita. But even that is quite limited and more a Painter replacement than a Photoshop or Illustrator one.

Ironically, there is actually better quality graphic design software available for Android [with that Linux core] than there is for Linux itself. I can almost replace Photoshop with Ibis Paint on my S-Pen enabled Samsung tablet [although the picture is a lot less rosy with regards to vector graphics].

That said, I have installed Linux on an old MacBook and Mac Mini, which has given them a new lease of life. But the former I just use for hacking about on and the latter runs Kodi as my media centre. I don't actually do any work on them.

Once setup, Linux runs fine on both those machines, for what I want it to do. But, boy, is getting to that stage in the first place a complete pain in the ballsack!

Both machines have Nvidia graphics cards and even now [probably a decade after I first encountered this problem] Ubuntu's, supposedly user friendly GUI software installer will quite happily 'recommend' you to install an Nvidia driver which will brick your Ubuntu installation with a black screen on reboot.

Now, after running into this problem several times, over the years [I fall for it every time, in the vain hope that Ubuntu might have actually fixed this], I know how to repair things. But it involves a lot of swearing and command line delving into the innards of Grub's configuration.

Imagine some non-techie person deciding to give Linux a try. They boot from the live CD... everything looks fine, so they install. They reboot after the install and either:

1: If they selected "download 3rd party drivers" during installation, boot to a black screen

or

2: If they didn't select 3rd party drivers at install time, they boot to a seemingly working installation, which then recommends they install a 3rd party driver, which will subsequently cause booting to a black screen.

And, as I say, this has been going on for over a decade. And this is with Ubuntu which is the most newbie-approachable distro. In all that time, no-one thought it worthwhile adding a simple sanity check so the installer would NOT recommend installing an Nvidia driver which would break Ubuntu if the OS itself had been installed in UEFI mode!

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#59
post #4

Author here. Post is a bit rambling but I just wanted to document somewhere the things I encountered along the way with links to resources, to save someone having to trawl the web for it next time.

How is your Macbook handling VMs running for like 8 hours a day? I use docker (which runs inside a hyperkit VM on OSX) and it absolutely toasts my Macbook. To the point where my screen has started showing black lines on top and bottom due to overheating.

It's been fine, I've noticed a significant different in performance between Virtualbox and VMWare Fusion - I'm not sure what VMWare are doing but their hypervisor makes VMs feel almost native in performance levels it's quite extraordinary.

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#60
post #44
post #14

Converting a machine that works well out of the box into a machine that requires custom scripts and constant tinkering to handle simple tasks seems like a waste of time.

"Works well". I have a 2019 mbp16. It does not "work well". For me, the graphics driver crashes me out of my login session pretty much daily, the network stack occasionally shits itself (reboot) and various internal processes (the... window server?) like to use >50% CPU for no reason at all. Looking around, I'm not the only one who has issues.

I have the same machine and none of those issues.

Probably yours is broken somehow. Would recommend bringing it in for service while it's in warranty.

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