
Running Linux on My MacBook - signa11
https://djhworld.github.io/post/2020/06/07/running-linux-on-my-macbook/
======
breytex
Tried to migrate from Mac to Linux half a year ago (before the 16" with the
new keyboard was announced, because I hated the butterfly keyboard).

Tried a bunch of dell and Thinkpad devices. Configured a t480s with ubuntu.
First meeting where I had to share my screen and I recognized that Chrome is
not able to share a dedicated screen of my three monitor setup. You need a
script for that, which creates a "fake" webcam, otherwise its only possible to
share the three stitched-together screens.

Those are things, I just expect to work out of the box without a script or
pulling two monitor cables everytime I want to screen share something.

Bought the 16" Mac a week later, also not happy with that because thermals are
just bad, but its better than having to script simple things. Clients don't
expect you to "have to script something real quick" during meetings.

As long as Linux does not cover ALL trivial multi media usecases, I don't see
myself making the switch.

~~~
fsociety
I think the thermals on the 16” are the best thermals a MacBook Pro has ever
had. Is there a model that had better thermals?

~~~
breytex
Yes. The macbook 15" 2015 was just running at 55°C with zero fan noise when
"just" browsing the web.

The 16" runs at 67°C with 2500rpm when doing the same task. So its neither
quite nor cool doing basic tasks. You can turn of turbo boost to get around
it, but I was expecting something in the same ballpark in terms of coolness
and fan noise for basic tasks without tweaking stuff like this myself.

------
peteretep
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.

~~~
bitcharmer
> 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.

~~~
jki275
Linux on the desktop "works" today just like it did twenty years ago --
painfully and with a lot of work to work around the operating system's
inability to be a desktop OS.

Same thing with Java. Sure, it's not _as slow_ as it was 20 years ago, but
it's still slow and painful in comparison to compiled languages.

I've used Linux actively for 30 years or more, and I've never had a "great
experience" once with it. It's a tool that I have to beat into submission to
get it to do whatever ridiculous workflow someone dreamed up that can't be
done on a real operating system.

~~~
craigsmansion
> I've used Linux actively for 30 years or more

"The Linux kernel was conceived and created in 1991"

~~~
jki275
29, whatever. When you've been doing this as long as I have the years run
together.

------
voodootrucker
Off topic maybe, but my Razer Blade 15" has been and absolutely wonderful
replacement for my MBP. The build quality feels just as nice, and none of the
weird touchbar issues. (Running Ubuntu 19.10 presently, only issue: had to
disable the USB-C port to allow it to sleep). The arrow keys are also in a
slightly wonky location.

It's been very disruptive to have Apple quality tank, and I'm glad they
finally went back to the good keyboard, but at least there's another game in
town for developers who want a quality laptop and a real OS.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Razer Blade - which year? Heard 2020 is not nice with Linux as much as older
models.

~~~
pkulak
Razer seems to be NVidia only, so I don't think they'd be my first choice for
a Linux machine.

------
abrowne
I was nearly Mac exclusive for years before switching to Linux. Similarly to
the author I mostly use a browser, VS Code and a few small utilities, although
mine are mostly simple Qt GUI apps.

My thumbs are well trained to use the keys to the sides of the space bar as
the main modifier. My solution to the Command/Control issue is to swap the key
positions with xkd so that it's always [Win][Alt][Ctrl][Space][Ctrl][Compose].
(Since Macs and PCs swap Alt and Win/Cmd, you need different xkb options for
each type of keyboard.)

As for terminals, if you set VTE-based terminals (such as GNOME Terminal) to
use Ctrl+C for copy, it will automatically set Ctrl+Shift+C to send SIGINT.
Since I don't use many terminal apps that use modifiers, this works for me,
and I set paste to Ctrl+V as well.

I mostly use Alacritty now, so I've set it up to do the same thing for
Ctrl+Shift+C. Come to think of it, I still need to do so for VS Code's
terminal, for the few times I use it.

~~~
war1025
> if you set VTE-based terminals (such as GNOME Terminal) to use Ctrl+C for
> copy, it will automatically set Ctrl+Shift+C to send SIGINT.

I just looked in the preferences for Gnome Terminal and didn't see this
option. I think I'm used to the current setup enough that I wouldn't switch
anyway, but how do you configure this?

~~~
abrowne
I guess I installed Alacritty right away on this new computer, so I have just
found and tested the GNOME Terminal option. You just open Preferences from the
hamburger menu, choose _Shortcuts_ on the left, and find "Copy Ctrl+Shift+C".
Double-click the Ctrl+Shift+C part and press Ctrl+C.

And I should say I'm not sure if it's sending SIGINT or actually Ctrl+C (or if
that's even different). I learned just enough of this to make it work :-) But
before, if I started top, I could press Ctrl+C to quit it. Now I can press
Ctrl+Shift+C to quit it, and pressing Ctrl+Shift+C on a bash prompt prints
"^C" and I get a new line.

For Alacritty, here's what I've changed

    
    
        - { key: V,        mods: Control,        action: Paste            }
        - { key: C,        mods: Control,        action: Copy             }
        - { key: C,        mods: Control|Shift,  chars: "\x03"            }
        - { key: W,        mods: Control,        chars: "\x04"            }
        - { key: N,        mods: Control,        action: SpawnNewInstance }
    

The xkb option for PCs is altwin:ctrl_alt_win, I think it's the "Control is
mapped to Alt keys, Alt is mapped to Win keys" option if you use GNOME Tweaks,
under Alt/Win key behavior. For a Mac keyboard,
ctrl:swap_lwin_lctl,ctrl:swap_rwin_rctl, "Swap Left Win key with Left Ctrl
key" under Ctrl key position.

------
amaccuish
For Firefox rendering being slow, I forced the Ubuntu Firefox to use Wayland
the other day (my login session was already wayland but Ubuntu doesn't default
to making firefox using it), and the difference is night and day. Everything
is so much faster and super smooth.

~~~
cancerSpreads
Given all the ads for Firefox on HN I keep trying it but it's insanely slow.

I don't think it's intended to be like this, not sure where to begin
troubleshooting.

~~~
wtetzner
Are yo running Firefox on Linux? Or some other platform?

------
kuon
I switched to sway, which has very good performances, Firefox under wayland
also flies, it's been the fastest browsing experience so far. I can have
hundred of tabs open with tree style tabs with no lag whatsoever.

Sway has absolutely zero tearing, for this it is very good.

But, a few issues (mostly wayland and not sway related):

· First you need an AMD card, I don't really have a problem with that as their
cards are good now. But if your laptop has nvidia, you are screwed.

· Copy paste still fuzzy

· No global hotkey. Well you have to configure them at the WM level, things
like discord push to mute will not work.

· Hard to capture (OBS cannot capture wayland app yet without major tinkering
and testing)

· Many popup widgets are positioned on the wrong monitor (like fcitx popup for
japanese input)

· Complex X apps are slow or will just crash crash, for example qgis is
unusable in X mode and crash in wayland mode, audacity do not update properly…

· Some things require tons of tinkering to get right, like having the proper
rendering pipeline, for example using mpv, but when you get it right, you can
play 4k movies with 3% cpu usage.

· Tray/notification icons are hard to setup and won't work 100%.

Disclaimer: I use sway on a large desktop workstation, so I cannot comment on
issues like power, sleep, external monitors…

~~~
codys
I run sway too, but I've kept firefox using X11 instead of native wayland due
to the trackpad scrolling in firefox under wayland not being exact (ie: it
jumps as if I had a mouse with a clicky scroll wheel instead of exactly
following finger motion). In x11, I set `MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1` to get exact
trackpad scroll.

------
djhworld
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.

~~~
mjg59
One of the problems with replicating this with more modern Apple hardware is
that Apple have increasingly moved away from the "traditional" PC hardware
platform, and their more modern laptops have adopted various design patterns
that were traditionally associated with more embedded devices (such as using
SPI for their input devices). This is a completely reasonable set of design
choices on Apple's part, but it means there's now a pretty long lag between a
new generation of Apple devices and it being possible to run native Linux on
them in a reasonable way.

~~~
izacus
They also started to add separate controllers running separate OSes (e.g. T2
chip) which have completely undocumented protocols and are protected by DRM.

------
ledvd
Tried Linux on my MacBook Pro mid-2012, ran into some of the issues described
in the post (sleep issues, keyboard layout, ...). Though I went with Ubuntu
for a bit more simplicity. I finally had to rollback because it was simply not
usable. The laptop was getting too hot, and it seemed that I had to use
scripting or workarounds for every little thing. Now I use a virtual machine,
and it's already way better. I still want to use Linux as my main OS, just not
on the MacBook. I wanted to see if I could make the switch, and it seems that
I'm ready.Now I'll wait to buy a new one with more compatible components.

~~~
robrtsql
I run Linux on that device (the 13 inch version).

For whatever reason, fan control does not work out of the box (so it gets way
too hot), but it worked for me after installing mbpfan:
[https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan](https://github.com/linux-on-
mac/mbpfan)

------
bananamerica
Please notice that OP is trying to run the i3 tiling window manager which is
very minimal (as all TWMs) and expressly targets tinkerers and advanced users.
A beginner friendly distribution with a complete desktop environment usually
provides a much easier plug and play experience.

~~~
djhworld
Yep, it's why I said at the start I'd imagine the default setup in Fedora with
GNOME probably works fine.

------
vaccarium
At a previous job, a coworker got a new Mac but still wanted to use Linux. He
spent several days setting the system up, and eventually got it up and running
smoothly.

Except that the calendar on the lock screen somehow was in Romanian, it
resisted all attempts to change the language, and he never got around to
fixing it. :)

~~~
bananamerica
It’s never too late to learn Romanian!

------
gowld
> The main reason for the switch was one killer app; the i3 window manager.
> Keyboard shortcuts, tiled windows, lightning fast to use - it feels like a
> piece of software designed for people who tinker and use computers a lot.

If that's the main reason, how about yabai on Mac?
[https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai](https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai)

> The primary function of yabai is tiling window management; automatically
> modifying your window layout using a binary space partitioning algorithm to
> allow you to focus on the content of your windows without distractions.
> Additional features of yabai include focus-follows-mouse, disabling
> animations for switching spaces, creating spaces past the limit of 16
> spaces, and much more.

~~~
bearbin
I'm forced to use a Mac for work, and I use yabai. It's far superior to the
default mac experience, which seems to be designed to actively hide windows
and make your life more difficult, but it's still a pain to use. It's
obviously a hack and that makes itself known in daily usage - dialog boxes are
tiled just like regular windows, or alternatively hidden behind the tiled
windows where they're inaccessible; suspending and resuming randomly messes up
the position of my windows; and the stupid mac detached-titlebar is almost
unusable when you drag your mouse over another program and the focus gets
yanked away.

Customisation and configuration are also plainly inferior to i3/sway, plus
there's the complicated installation process and necessity to disable apple's
walled garden features to get full functionality.

At home I have i3/sway, which is a nice polished user experience; there's no
comparison really.

------
lloydw
You might want to try
[https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto/](https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto/) for
mapping Mac style copy paste on Linux

~~~
rbreaves
Thanks for the plug, I am the author and I have recently made a few more
updates. Speed improvements to the installer, better apple keyboard (added
another driver detection for newer keyboards), also improved support for
Ubuntu Budgie (probably the most mac like distro out there worth trying
besides a couple of others such as Enso OS).

------
xupybd
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 was a major pain. In
hindsight I should have mapped in a windows key and sacrificed one of my thumb
buttons for it.

~~~
justwalt
For me it was remembering what my bindings were for every little thing. I’m a
guy who built his own keyboard for extra macro keys. I have 12 extra off the
left side. It worked out very nicely, and it was a pretty smooth experience.
Until I was using my computer to laze about at 11pm with a slightly foggy
mind.

I just don’t want to think about how to move incredibly quickly around the
computer. Easy point and click is all the effort I want to muster, sometimes.

~~~
nickjj
> I just don’t want to think about how to move incredibly quickly around the
> computer. Easy point and click is all the effort I want to muster,
> sometimes.

Right. This is an important thing to note.

It takes a lot of mental energy to remember all of these things if they are
not already imbued into your brain as effortless muscle memory. Sometimes that
energy is better off spent solving the problem you're trying to solve. This is
why after about a year of using Vim, I still use the mouse once in a while.

I remember once reporting a bug with the Microsoft Terminal (I use WSL 2 on
Windows) on Reddit and when I mentioned mouse support didn't work inside of
programs like Vim, it was the most down voted comment I ever created on any
platform with swarms of folks saying I wasn't using the terminal as it was
supposed to and that I must be an idiot for wanting to select text in Vim with
a mouse.

Luckily they fixed the bug (it ended up being one of the highest priority bug
fixes they had).

------
mijoharas
I'm surprised about the comment on sway, because afaik the issue mentioned
about a blurry chrome was fixed a while ago[0]. Maybe it's caused by something
else...

[0]
[https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1481#issuecomment-6404...](https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1481#issuecomment-640441017)

~~~
danshick
It depends a ton on what distro you are using. Some distros that now ship with
wayland native desktops have tons of downstream patching to smooth out the
experience. If you run Arch for instance, the default Chromium package is not
ozone, and will run with XWayland (although chromium-ozone is available in the
AUR). It's possible your distro is doing something differently.

~~~
mijoharas
I run arch, and the google-chrome-stable package appears to have sorted out
it's hdpi scaling issues.

I could be wrong though, a while back I did a lot of tweaks to beat the
concept of hdpi and variable screen resolutions into my computer, so I don't
exactly have a "clean" setup, and it could be something else, but the fonts
look crisp on both the low res and high res screens.

I can't say whether this is anything to do with whether it's a build
with/without ozone, but it appears to work now (sorry don't know much more
than that!)

~~~
mijoharas
I'd just like to correct my post above, it seems that chrome was running under
XWayland, I think I'd just found an incantation of settings that made it look
alright on both my high res/low res screens.

~~~
danshick
There is an xwayland[0] patch out there to fix this properly. Could it be that
you're using something like this[1]?

[0]
[https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/111)

[1] [https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sway-hidpi-
git/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sway-hidpi-git/)

------
dayvid
I purchased a souped-up Eluktronics MAG-15 recently to try out VR and I'm
really amazed by how subpar Windows is compared to Linux and MacOS even with
top of the line hardware.

I found out that I can update a lot of components of my early 2015 MBP, so I'm
going to get a 512GB or 1TB hard drive and see if I can make a Linux
partition.

------
Qerub
I recently tried Debian 10 on a MacBook Pro from 2014 and it worked
surprisingly well. The computer fan(s) would however not start when needed
even after installing extra software like mbpfan. Something to watch out for!

------
city41
I took a stab at putting Linux on a MacBook about 4 years ago or so. I found
dealing with the Broadcom wifi and bluetooth more hassle than I bargained for,
and switched to a Thinkpad. Has the Broadcom driver situation improved? I was
surprised the author had no issues getting wifi working.

And relating to the article, i3 is the sole reason I use Linux. Such a great
window manager.

~~~
djhworld
I had zero issues with the Wifi, not tried Bluetooth so can’t comment there.

I’m not sure if the lack of WiFi issues is because Fedora tends to stay pretty
up to date kernel wise.

EDIT: to clarify - I had zero issues with having to to anything special to get
Wifi working - there are still intermittent issues with the driver that
happens maybe once or twice a week

------
seaghost
For the keyboard shortcuts I use
[https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto](https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto)

It works perfectly.

------
suchoudh
These days I feel as if machines are deliberately phased out even when they
are in perfectly working condition.

I have two macbooks (white plastic) one with Tiger installed and another with
Leopard an iPad 1 ( They all are in working condition) Its a shame to not be
able to use the machines just because it is not supported.

I would assume that they are good enough for a kid to surf websites and help
do his/her homework. Listen to songs while browsing pdfs . Lack of support
should not mean that perfectly usable hardware is junked.

After covid, there are a lot of kids in Indian villages whoes education is
dependent on online education. Maybe these laptops could be made usable for
them. ( Not everyone can afford a mobile phone)

Please do let me know if your linux installs will work for my case as well (
your case covers the Macbook Pro instead of just macbooks)

PS: I myself use i3wm on a lenovo machine. ( Not very happy with Lenovo but
its ok ok )

~~~
danans
> I have two macbooks (white plastic) one with Tiger installed and another
> with Leopard an iPad 1 ( They all are in working condition) Its a shame to
> not be able to use the machines just because it is not supported.

That hardware isn't as valuable as you might think it is. The last plastic
Macbook was made in 2010. It's value as a productivity tool is very limited
today.

That said, e-Waste is a major problem, which is why in recent years, in the
west, companies are required to collect a "recycling fee" on purchase of
computer equipment to pay for the eventual recycling of the physical devices.
Coincidentally, this was in part prompted by images of children in India and
other developing countries picking over toxic E-waste from the west.

However, it's not really feasible for a company to support a device as old as
your 2010 plastic Macbook from a software perspective, because software
evolves too rapidly to run well on hardware that old. These are not desktop
workstation towers for which you can swap out every component for newer ones.

> After covid, there are a lot of kids in Indian villages whoes education is
> dependent on online education. Maybe these laptops could be made usable for
> them.

The demands of common 2020 computer use-cases will render the
hardware/software unusable, even when running a recent Linux distro.

So they will probably not be useful for remote-education. Basic things like
watching educational videos will likely be painfully slow - if they work at
all - constrained by the hardware's ability to decode and display the video.

If you do get these common use cases working on that old a device (which would
be a fun and worthy hacking project by itself), if you give it to someone else
to use, you will also have to deal with the problem of supporting it, and then
ensuring their responsible disposal (i.e. not in the village organic waste
dump) when they do reach the end of their usable lives. None of this is
trivial to accomplish.

~~~
suchoudh
Very intresting take on the situation. Thanks for taking time to comment.

------
luord
i3 seems like it would be perfect for me but I guess I'm just far too used to
gnome to really change now. I no longer even install extensions and mostly
stick to the defaults. In fact, Linux has been "just working" for me for years
now.

Anyhow, great article.

------
coronadisaster
I thought that the point of buying an overpriced macbook was because macOS
came with it...

------
new_realist
The author should try the Yabai window manager in combination with
Hammerspoon.

~~~
djhworld
Tried it, just didn't feel the same for me.

Admirable effort by the developers, though.

------
j7ake
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.

~~~
xyzzy_plugh
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.

~~~
cpursley
How did you get the Webcam to work?

~~~
commoner
There is a reverse-engineered driver for the Facetime HD (Broadcom 1570)
webcam on recent MacBook and iMac models:

[https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie](https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie)

[https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie/wiki](https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie/wiki)

------
fmakunbound
Why is Firefox so slow on Linux then?

~~~
djhworld
Other people have reported that Firefox runs fine, so it might have just been
my setup - I might have been a little hasty to write it off.

I'll try it again at some point, but disable TreeStyleTabs, that might have
been one of the causes for the slowness.

------
tuananh
Every post like these, the TODO list is super long. This reminds me again why
I don't want Linux in the first place.

~~~
djhworld
I think the real answer is buy a laptop that just works and don't bother with
Apple devices.

However it's nice to be able to re-purpose old hardware, even if it's a bit of
a hill to climb :)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Yes, a much easier path would have been to eBay the MacBook and spend the
money on a second hand ThinkPad. You would get more bang for your buck and
less headaches.

~~~
echlebek
Well, maybe. My Thinkpad experience has been good, but not amazing.

I own two Thinkpads, a 5th generation X1 carbon and a 2nd generation X1
extreme. Both very nice machines, but not perfect.

On the newer machine in particular, the X1 extreme, I've had many annoying
issues.

Suspend did not work for over a year after purchase. If the laptop was left
with the lid shut it would run out of battery in a couple of hours. It finally
started working with Fedora 32. I don't know if it was fixed because of kernel
updates or firmware updates. The laptop still uses way too much power when
suspended, but at least I can stick it in my laptop bag for a few hours.

Until Fedora shipped with Gnome running under Wayland, the integrated graphics
were too slow to acceptably render the desktop at 4K, which is the native
resolution of the panel, and the only resolution choice I am presented with in
Gnome. I enabled the nvidia GPU with the proprietary driver, but then I'd get
less than 2 hours of battery, and the thing could cook an egg. Compared to my
2012 Macbook Pro, which also has integrated graphics, the experience is much
worse, even today, with Wayland.

Battery life is not as good as Windows by default. For some reason, every
Linux user with a laptop has to install tlp and powertop just to get decent
battery life. Kernel development seems to consistently focus on this, and I'm
confident than the situation is incrementally improving.

The synaptics touchpad is hot garbage. If you compare it to a Mac's touchpad,
it's just a tragedy how bad it is. I've used both the synaptics driver with
Xorg and libinput with Wayland. There is noticeable lag when moving the mouse
cursor from a resting position. The cursor will stay where it is, and then
jump to where it ought to have moved to. This produces a very jarring UX.
Interestingly, the nipple mouse does not have this problem. Finally, the
scrolling gestures don't always work, depending where on the touchpad you
initiate them.

The keyboard would reproducibly lose keystrokes! This was not fixed until
_last week_ by a Lenovo firmware update, and it produced a lot of irritating
typos when conversing with coworkers.

Not that I care, but the fingerprint reader doesn't work.

The sound is too quiet even at full volume, so you have to tweak the system
config to allow you to adjust it past its default max volume.

I use Linux as a workstation operating system because I write software
destined to run on Linux. Despite these problems, I would gladly take them
over having to virtualize my entire workflow on a Mac, which I find incredibly
painful to do. But these quality problems have left me wondering if Lenovo was
the right laptop brand to buy. I left a negative review with Lenovo, after
they solicited me to write one, and instead of trying to resolve the problems,
they simply refused to publish the review.

------
Normille
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!

~~~
bananamerica
It turns out that a FOSS operating system largely maintained by volunteers
does not meet your requirements, and you know what? That’s fine. No ones
forcing you to use it. Giving people options is the whole point of Linux. We
cannot compel other companies (such as NVIDIA) to support it anyway.

~~~
Normille
I wish I'd put a couple of quid bet on someone coming along and trotting out
the obligatory _" Free... Volunteers... Write your own..."_ reply. The
response that someone always comes out with whenever anyone [even someone who
likes Linux and uses it] dares to criticise.

And exactly the reason why it will NEVER be the 'Year of Linux on the
Desktop'. It's the Linux equivalent of Steve Jobs's infamous _" You're holding
it wrong"_. If someone offers a valid criticism then blame the user. It's so
much easier than actually addressing the problem, no matter how glaring.

I wasn't criticising some obscure edge case here, where someone hacks about
and messes something up. This is the official GUI installer, which will
actually recommend you install something that will, to all intents and
purposes, brick your computer. How newbie-friendly can you get!

Even Steve Jobs might have thought twice, before blaming the user for that
one!

------
ireallydontknew
Ah, some still think it's an interesting thing to run linux in mb. It's
ordinary. Soo ordinary and is a must to do

