Linux is a lemon on the new retina Mac Book Pro

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple_mbpr_linux&num=1

64 81 14 years ago

cturner• 14 years ago

I wouldn't buy a macbook for linux regardless of display. Mainstream linux window managers expect two mouse buttons. If you want an ultrabook, there's a great new Thinkpad just released made out of carbon fibre. Lenovo hardware tends to work well with linux/unix. http://gizmodo.com/5935723/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon-review-...

quesera• 14 years ago

I don't suppose there's much motivation to write Linux mouse drivers that detect the second mouse button and/or scrolling and swipe gestures on the Apple mouses the same way Apple does.

But it's too bad, Apple went from making subpar mouses to some of the best I've ever used in the last five years or so. The trackpad is pretty great too.

trueneverland• 14 years ago

This. The trackpad is godly. I haven't seen a PC equivalent.

keeperofdakeys2• 14 years ago

Linux has been capable of driving multitouch trackpads for years (specifically the synaptic driver). Even then, it can 'fake' it on some, by detecting the width of the touch area. The main problem is all the touches must be handled in the driver, so pretty much only two finger scrolling, two finger click for right click and three finger click for middle click work. There is work going on to bring a proper multitouch api to xorg, so gestures can be used correctly.

arrrg2• 14 years ago

Huh? The 90s called and they want their cliches back.

All Macs come with very capable multi touch mice or touchpads. Clicking with two fingers (or more) for secondary mouse buttons is perfectly convenient and two finger scrolling is just awesome.

Are there no drivers or what?

hastur• 14 years ago

Thinkpads have an understated, timeless design, superior to almost all competition, Macs included. The only distinguishing quality of Macs is their built quality - but that's not exactly a good reason to buy an ugly laptop.

Of course, most people have pretty childish tastes and prefer shiny things. But I guess de gustibus non est disputandum.

[And yes, I do feel like I have a bit too much karma... ;]

cmelbye• 14 years ago

OS X expects two mouse buttons too, I'm not sure what your point is.

rane• 14 years ago

Not exactly, but yeah it expects you to be able to right click. It's up to the user how they wish to do that, tap with two fingers on trackpad, ctrl-tap etc.

chilie• 14 years ago

I've got a Macbook 7,1 with Ubuntu 12.04 running Xmonad, and its by far the smoothest linux experience I've ever had. I ran it under Gnome Unity for a bit and that was fine too. I've never had the mouse issues you refer to. The trackpad works just as well as it did until OS X.

LeafStorm• 14 years ago

I actually dual-boot Arch on my mid-2011 Macbook Pro, and two mouse buttons has been the least of my problems -- you can configure Synaptics to recognize a click on the touchpad with two fingers as a right-click, just like OS X. (You can even set it up to recognize a three-finger click as a middle click, which OS X doesn't do.)

The only real issue I have with Linux is that something keeps eating my bootloader, so I have to keep a GRUB boot CD around to boot into it.

archangel_one3• 14 years ago

That sounds like a pain - how are you trying to boot Linux? Have you tried refit?

acomar• 14 years ago

Are you sure it's getting eaten? I have had issues with efi bootloader, where it'll forget to boot from the right OS but the bootloader is still there and accessible from the boot menu.

archangel_one3• 14 years ago

I'm typing this on a macbook pro running Linux, and it works just fine; two-finger taps are a right-click, three for middle. That's worked on any Synaptics touchpad in Linux for at least the last seven years and probably longer.

HorizonXP• 14 years ago

Thanks for linking this. I've been using my GF's MBP while I look for a new laptop, and while OS X is nice, I just don't grok it. I'm an Ubuntu guy, and this looks like a good fit.

batista3• 14 years ago

>I wouldn't buy a macbook for linux regardless of display.

You wouldn't. Linus Torvalds would --and actually did. And he says that his Macbook Air is the best laptop he ever had, and that Lenovo doesn't even come close.

ballooney• 14 years ago

I've read the interview where he says he uses an Air because it's quiet and light [1]. However I don't see him say anything about how the lenovo 'doesn't even come close'. I'm sure you're not making stuff up, so could you provide your citation? I'm interested as considering a new small dev laptop, you see.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-millenium...

Evbn4• 14 years ago

I haven't seen any claim that the X1 will have backlit keyboard or an ambient light sensor to adjust the display. Will it? Seems a huge oversight in a laptop that is gunning for "best ever".

roma1n2• 14 years ago

Which begs the question: when are PC makers going to take their fingers off their a$$ and start producing decent hardware? (with a non Linux-restricting implementation of secure boot, KTHXBYE)

Samuel_Michon• 14 years ago

“Which begs the question”

That doesn’t mean what you think it means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

derleth• 14 years ago

> That doesn’t mean what you think it means.

It does now: Usage dictates meaning.

(Unless you think 'faggot' just means 'bundle of sticks'.)

Cushman• 14 years ago

> Many English speakers use "begs the question" to mean "raises the question," or "impels the question," and follow that phrase with the question raised,[17] for example, "this year's deficit is half a trillion dollars, which begs the question: how are we ever going to balance the budget?"

Yes it does.

roma1n2• 14 years ago

Ah, I stand corrected. So that "raises the question", right?

vidarh• 14 years ago

The only time I see the old usage of begging the question referenced at all is when pedants wants to correct people for the new usage. I'm pretty confident I've never come across the original usage outside of these types of discussions.

That to me says it all bout which usage is current. And it also makes this type of pedantry all the more annoying.

In other words: Yes, it now means what he thought it means.

trotsky2• 14 years ago

This article from a fedora developer seemed a bit more hacker newsish to me:

Playing with Thunderbolt under Linux on Apple hardware

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/15948.html

disgruntledphd2• 14 years ago

You're totally right, but i didn't see that article until you posted it, and I thought the content might be interesting to HN.

trotsky2• 14 years ago

I didn't mean it as a criticism, just trying to add to the conversation.

rbanffy2• 14 years ago

Can anyone explain why ACPI would want to know what OS is running? Shouldn't it just report what it can do and let the OS decide what to do with it?

archangel_one3• 14 years ago

You would think so, but unfortunately ACPI is horrendously overengineered by committee and basically does have code running in it which can contain these sort of checks. I once had to recompile some part of it (possibly the DSDT - differentiated system description table - whatever that is) on an old Dell laptop of mine which literally had

if (operating_system == "Microsoft Windows NT" || operating_system == "Microsoft Windows 95" || operating_system == "Microsoft Windows") { // make stuff work }

baked into it. Linux worked fine once those checks were removed, of course.

Needless to say, my opinion of the whole mess has been pretty tainted by that. I try to assume that it is incompetence rather than actual malice on the part of Microsoft and/or the manufacturers, but it does do an awfully good impression of the latter.

arunoda• 14 years ago

Why you need to run linux in a mac book?

sergiotapia• 14 years ago

I have to work on an latest-gen iMac at work because that's what they bought us. I tried for over a month to get used to it, but it's just too much crap that accumulates. I waste too much time on things I shouldn't even be thinking about.

Such as alt-tabbing doesn't cycle through the windows an application has, just the application. If I have three Sublime Text 2 windows open, I have to hunt it down like a predator.

So I just installed VMWare, and setup my Linux Mint 13 machine and work there exclusively now.

jmelloy• 14 years ago

Did you know about alt-` -- it tabs between windows.

taligent• 14 years ago

Press the Up arrow when Alt-Tabbing.

It will show you the windows for that particular application.

obituary_latte• 14 years ago

You can also use (set a shortcut or gesture) for mission control applications. I think that's what it's called. Or maybe it's still exposé. Anyway, it zooms out on all open windows of the current application and - for instance in Sublime - will display the file name on mouseover.

thejosh• 14 years ago

Same situation.

I found that VMWare workstation & parallels with the i7 imac (2011 model or something? it is a brand new iMac 27") causes mass tearing when using Linux, maybe a vsync issue?

Using parallels seems to lock the vm at 60FPS so it feels natural. Back to being productive....

bosie• 14 years ago

i had the same problem until i found Witch. http://manytricks.com/witch/

kzrdude• 14 years ago

Maybe you want a Macbook to run linux on. The Macbook Air 2011 is great with linux.

asjo• 14 years ago

To get a laptop with a 2880x1800 pixel resolution?

PaulHoule2• 14 years ago

For that much money I got a machine from Lenovo with a nice screen (not that nice) but also 32GB of RAM.

Evbn4• 14 years ago

I hope you didn't buy the RAM from Lenovo. They mark up 8GB sticks by $300 each.

PaulHoule2• 14 years ago

i got the RAM from crucial

ciupicri4• 14 years ago

> The various Linux desktop environments are also less than ideal in handling high-density displays. Compared to OS X 10.7/10.8, the Unity, GNOME Shell, and KDE desktops all looked like shit at 2880 x 1800 on the Retina MacBook Pro. The text was difficult to read and even when toying around with different scaling factors, the text ended up looking awkward in relation to icons and other visuals.

I wonder how could a better resolution make the text more difficult to read. Too bad he didn't publish any screenshots.

Evbn4• 14 years ago

High density means smaller text, which is hard to focus on.

ciupicri4• 14 years ago

You can use larger text. GNOME has had this for some time, a common setting for all programs.

es92• 14 years ago

I'm currently tri booting arch linux, os x and windows on a retina macbook pro.

I almost only use linux, support is much better than suggested here. Yes, if you expect the latest build of Ubuntu to just work you're going to be disappointed.

The trackpad works excellently, equivalent to os x (with mtrack), as does wifi. Graphics are fine with the nvidia binary, which offers better performance than nouveau anyways. On that note, there is progress with getting nouveau to work. Just a few days ago a bug was fixed in the i915 driver, and intel graphics work now. It is true though that Optimus support is bad on linux, and probably will be for a while. That said I'm at 86% battery, and I have about 3.5 hours left.

Its pretty easy in linux to change the font settings for applications, having the 2880 resolution with a sane font size is really great.

Also switching between the os's is really really fast, around 30 seconds. Probably in a month or two the majority of hardware will work without development packages or other modifications on an arch install. Until then, installation is tricky, I wouldn't suggest it unless you already know linux pretty well.

AngrySkillzz• 14 years ago

Optimus doesn't work, but there's a kernel module called VGA_Switcheroo that you can use to switch between active graphics cards.

Linux is a lemon on the new retina Mac Book Pro

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