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Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on MacBookPro14,1

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Re: Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on MacBookPro14,1

#21

Post by steeleduncan »

pansa2 wrote: post #13
Dunedan wrote: post #6

I used MacBooks with Linux starting in 2006 till the end of last year. That's when I finally gave up. I really love the hardware Apple produces, but we're at a point where I believe it's not feasible anymore to use Linux on MacBooks. For the MacBook Pros 2016 and up I put significant effort into trying to get mainline Linux running as smoothly as possible by documenting and coordinating the efforts to have drivers fo…

Do the latest Macs still support running Windows via Boot Camp? What would you recommend if I need to run both Linux and Windows alongside MacOS? Virtualisation? Or would I be better off using more than one machine?

It depends exactly what you want linux for, but if it is command line stuff, then Windows Subsystem for Linux is ok.

WSL is just a linux syscall wrapper around the Windows kernel, so it isn't a perfect replica, but WSL2 runs a customised linux kernel alongside windows, so it should very close.

Re: Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on MacBookPro14,1

#22

Post by quantummkv »

Narann wrote: post #15
fcanesin wrote: post #7

Buy a XPS-13 developer edition.

Honest question: Having Linux on a Mac a decade ago had sense has Mac hardwares were special enough to provide value, but now you have XPS-like hardware, why would people buy a Mac to install a Linux on it? Dual boot? What does Mac hardware have that others don't?

For me, it's mostly the screen and trackpad. Non-apple screens come in two varieties -

1. Shitty 1080p TN or barely IPS panels with laughable color accuracy, horribly bad color reproduction, viewing angles that just plain suck, 300 or 250 nits brightness and no 100% coverage of even sRGB.

2. Completely overkill and expensive 4K panels with HDR, touch, OLED, all the bell and whistles that somehow forgot that they are in laptops and drain battery at ridiculous levels.

Apple, on the other hand, have displays that have the perfect pixel density for laptops so their battery drain is manageable, have excellent color space coverage (even the 999$ Air has 100% sRGB) and perfect color accuracy and viewing angles.

Then comes the trackpad and it's not even a contest. On a macbook, I really don't need a mouse unless I am doing something high precision like Illustrator or video editing. Even there the trackpad is workable.

And then something that is more on a personal level, but no one apart from Apple has their high end devices available in India quickly. The new dell XPS might come very close to the macbook, but getting it in India is not possible, even after 4 months after launch. Even if it arrives, it will be one or two base models with limited availability or the completely overkill models. Not so with Apple.

Re: Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on MacBookPro14,1

#23

Post by pjmlp »

Narann wrote: post #15
fcanesin wrote: post #7

Buy a XPS-13 developer edition.

Honest question: Having Linux on a Mac a decade ago had sense has Mac hardwares were special enough to provide value, but now you have XPS-like hardware, why would people buy a Mac to install a Linux on it? Dual boot? What does Mac hardware have that others don't?

I also never got the point.

For various reasons my main OS is Windows, however due to my past life as Linux fanboy during the university, when I decided to buy a travel netbook, Asus were the ones getting my money for a 1215B with Ubuntu pre-installed.

Sure it had a couple of issues later, more due to the way that Canonical managed the transition of the wlan and Brazos drivers, but it served the message to which vendors I wanted to support.

Don't want to use either Windows or hate Apple's behaviours? Then support the OEMs trying to ship Linux on their hardware.

Re: Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on MacBookPro14,1

#24

Post by dijit »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #17
Narann wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: Having Linux on a Mac a decade ago had sense has Mac hardwares were special enough to provide value, but now you have XPS-like hardware, why would people buy a Mac to install a Linux on it? Dual boot? What does Mac hardware have that others don't?

They used to have a shiny Apple logo on the lid, but now they have only black logo. Still, you won't find one on non-mac hardware.

This idea that anyone who buys Apple products is a sheep buying it purely for the brand needs to die. It doesn’t lend itself to a conversation about why people might choose differently to you.

Ignorance is not helping either side.

Re: Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on MacBookPro14,1

#25

Post by aruggirello »

sdrothrock wrote: post #18
cpach wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtualbox is very good IMHO. Vmware also has a similar product.

Just a warning: Virtualbox with hard drive files on an external USB hard disk has been broken for me on Catalina on my both of my Mac Minis (late 2012, 2018) and iMacs (late 2012, mid 2017). That particular functionality worked fine on Mojave. It works fine as long as I keep my VDI files on my system drive, but that can be a pain since they're so large.

This is, in my experience, a major pain point of VirtualBox that I don't see why Oracle apparently doesn't care about, despite being aware of the issue since at least 2017.

We're stuck in a situation where fixed-size disk images are too large to use if you care about your host's disk space (unless they're created with an "almost full" target usage), and dynamic sized images tend to grow to unwieldy sizes unless you regularly zero-out empty spaces from the guest (cat /dev/zero >somefile on Linux, sdelete -z C on Windows IIRC), then VBoxManage modifyhd --compact the image from the host once the VM is off.

But it shouldn't be this way. VirtualBox added support for TRIM years ago, and guest OSes could very well happily live inside dynamic images - if it worked at all.

In practice (AFAIK, for the few who ventured to use it) - it doesn't work:

https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/16795

Re: Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on MacBookPro14,1

#26

Post by aruggirello »

Narann wrote: post #15
fcanesin wrote: post #7

Buy a XPS-13 developer edition.

Honest question: Having Linux on a Mac a decade ago had sense has Mac hardwares were special enough to provide value, but now you have XPS-like hardware, why would people buy a Mac to install a Linux on it? Dual boot? What does Mac hardware have that others don't?

IIRC owning a Mac is also one of the few cases (the only one?), when you're legally entitled to run macOS in a VM.

Re: Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on MacBookPro14,1

#27

Post by jimsmart »

Narann wrote: post #15
fcanesin wrote: post #7

Buy a XPS-13 developer edition.

Honest question: Having Linux on a Mac a decade ago had sense has Mac hardwares were special enough to provide value, but now you have XPS-like hardware, why would people buy a Mac to install a Linux on it? Dual boot? What does Mac hardware have that others don't?

A lot of folk like the trackpads on the MacBooks. No idea how the XPS ones compare?

Another thing is Thunderbolt, but IDK if that’s supported under Linux? So that might be a moot point anyhow.

Re: Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on MacBookPro14,1

#29

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

dijit wrote: post #24
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to have a shiny Apple logo on the lid, but now they have only black logo. Still, you won't find one on non-mac hardware.

This idea that anyone who buys Apple products is a sheep buying it purely for the brand needs to die. It doesn’t lend itself to a conversation about why people might choose differently to you. Ignorance is not helping either side.

What really needs to die are attempts of attributing your own ideas to other people. No one but you was saying anything about sheep buying and that brand is the sole reason for buying Apple products.

Disclosure: I own a lot of Apple products, though I still prefer Ubuntu to MacOS.

Re: Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on MacBookPro14,1

#30

Post by slavik81 »

filleduchaos wrote: post #20
pansa2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the latest Macs still support running Windows via Boot Camp? What would you recommend if I need to run both Linux and Windows alongside MacOS? Virtualisation? Or would I be better off using more than one machine?

...I mean no offence with this, but I believe it's rather easy to look up the status of a literally official Apple product/project like Boot Camp? https://support.apple.com/boot-camp

That gets you Windows and OSX, but it's really easy to break the Windows partition when you install Linux.

To triple-boot, you start with OSX, then install Windows via Boot Camp, then resize the Windows partition to make some empty space after it for your Linux install. Then you install refind, and follow up with installing Linux.

You need to do it that way because Boot Camp won't let you leave any empty space on the drive, and you can't put your Linux partition in front of the Windows partition, because the Hybrid MBR partition table that Windows needs can only count to 4 (or something like that).

On the bright side, I think triple-booting is more robust than it used to be. It's been a while since the last time I borked Windows.

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