> Macbooks are great, and I wish I could find something as good to install Linux on.
You can install Linux on a Macbook if that's what you want. Despite the marketing a Macbook these days is just an expensive, well-designed PC with particular software.
> Most of the PC options are steel and plastic, so they're hot and heavy. They'll burn your legs, they have comparably poor battery life. The screen looks terrible if your viewing angle isn't perpendicular. The hardware I've had has tended to die faster, too.
Not my experience for machines from the last couple of years, particularly if you look at similar price points.
You'll need an older Mac Pro then. There is quite a bit of proprietary hardware in the new ones that I'm pretty sure have no open source drivers (ie: SMC controller, force touch pad, etc).
Not that the community couldn't find a way to reverse-engineer and build an open source version... but a straight up Ubuntu install on a current-generation Mac Pro is probably the fastest way to kill a battery, processor, flash drive and miss out on taking advantage of the ambient sensors.
To use an unfitting analogy -- you might as well buy a sports car to retrofit it into a classic gremlin.
On the latest Macbook Pro everything works under Linux except for the webcam and maybe the brightness sensor (it's hard to tell because it doesn't seem to do anything under OSX either).
Matter of opinion. I've seen better OpenGL performance on Linux on the same hardware, for example, and better filesystem performance too. (I'd also be much less productive without the customizability of Linux window management, but that's getting into more subjective territory).
Aside, ticks me off to no end that Ubuntu removed the reverse-scrolling option (at least with a desktop) ... On windows, I use an autohotkey script to reverse the scrolling, and for media shortcuts (non-media kb). Ubuntu is the odd one out there for me now.
If you mean "natural scrolling", you can do it at a lower level in linux by remapping the "buttons" with xmodmap. Gnome ignores the system setting for this (or used to, at least; I don't use any Gnome stuff now, so maybe they've fixed it), but pretty much everything else in X will obey those settings.
Yeah, but it was a checkbox option in settings, and not something people trip over... they didn't need to remove it, at least they shouldn't, without another way to do it relatively easily.
I've got a MBP from around 2012 and a big problem is that when running any OS besides OS X, it runs very hot with very short battery life because it can only use discrete graphics (NVidia) full time. The integrated graphics is disabled in Apple's efi (maybe by Bootcamp?), and I don't know that anyone has ever found a workaround. There's an extremely longstanding Apple support issue still open about it.
So if planning to run anything other than OS X via Bootcamp on a MBP, do beware this issue.
I'm not sure, it looks like it just disables the discrete GPU? If so, I've tried that - the problem is there's no other graphics to fall back on, Apple's proprietary EFI doesn't let non-OS X systems see that the integrated graphics are present at all (currently running only Windows 10 on it since I need Visual Studio). Maybe the patched Grub might be the start of a solution (could run Windows with a VM in Linux) but I'm not sure I'm that brave - last time I tried messing around with Apple's EFI for multi-booting it didn't end well :)
You can install Linux on a Macbook if that's what you want. Despite the marketing a Macbook these days is just an expensive, well-designed PC with particular software.
> Most of the PC options are steel and plastic, so they're hot and heavy. They'll burn your legs, they have comparably poor battery life. The screen looks terrible if your viewing angle isn't perpendicular. The hardware I've had has tended to die faster, too.
Not my experience for machines from the last couple of years, particularly if you look at similar price points.