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>>i'm not sure why anyone would expect to be able to install linux/windows/anything on a mac without problems these days.

> Until 2014 Linus Torvalds used a MacBook Air as his primary laptop. And even in 2005 or so, his desktop machine was a Mac Pro (the steel ones).

> And of course, tons of developers do the same.

And none of us expects to do it without much pain. I curse the moment anything goes wrong, or I get a new MacBook and have to fiddle with it for hours or days to get Ubuntu running on it. It's unlikely that I'll ever buy another one.

> But that's the whole idea of Apple controlling the hardware and software: that they can take both in any direction they want, without being held back by another party

Right. Which is why an "ordinary user" probably shouldn't expect it to "just work".

(That said, in this kind of situation Arch Linux is probably your best bet since it's rolling-release with the most-up-to-date drivers -- outside of compiling your own kernel. It's not trivial to install, though, and that's probably for the best, honestly.)

Arch is actually trivial to install, provided you know the basic UNIX commands.

Also, the Arch Wiki is some of the best documentation for any distro, anywhere. So that helps.

> Arch is actually trivial to install, ...

Not for "ordinary users" which is what we're discussing here. For that you'd need an actual installer of some type.

Totally agree about the Arch Wiki -- it's incredible.

Not for "ordinary users," no. But if you're the sort of person who would want what Arch provides, than you're also the sort of person for whom the install would be trivial.

Unless you're an "ordinary" Mac user who wants a working Linux.

Well, then, you wouldn't want what arch provides.

It's not for everyone, and certainly not for the writer of the original article.

> Well, then, you wouldn't want what arch provides.

Sometimes, what Arch provides is "it works" as opposed to "it doesn't work". (This was the point I was trying to make.)

This is not a hypothetical. I turned a coworked onto Arch by this simply being the only Linux distro that would work on his Macbook Pro (ca. 2015, I think?). He tried Ubuntu recently (12.10)... still didn't work because it could not understand the disk on his machine.

This guy is a very competent developer. He's not afraid of a command line. It still took him a few hours (IIRC) to get it installed. (Including with my help + googling various things about how the Mac EFI thing works/doesn't. Incidentally he still has to press some magic key combo on every startup to avoid MacOS starting up. It's goddamn ridiculous.)

Fair 'nuff.

The EFI bits, and keypress combo, however, are true of any Mac.

You only need to press alt if you want to change the OS to boot relative to last time. It's a convenient way to bring up a built-in graphical boot menu with Internet boot and system restore capabilities. And a nice Fedora logo on my machine.

I don't have an exact idea of what my colleague is doing during boot, but it appears that he needs to press the button on every boot. I think (given his background) he'd have investigated the available options by now, but I don't know...

>Right. Which is why an "ordinary user" probably shouldn't expect it to "just work".

Yes, but there's a thing to balance this: unlike PCs which come in 200000 models, there are only a handful of Mac models, and they remain the same for a year or so before the next update.

So, it should be easier to target those with Linux drivers than to target tons of individual devices, even if Apple does change their hardware.

its more complicated than just drivers, apple have over the last few iterations changed the boot mechanism to make it difficult

2014 is an eon ago in apple terms... and even then it required fancy efi boot loaders (since 2010 at least iirc)

i'd also add that i doubt its about them supporting new stuff. its the sort of thing i look at and assume that its to make it difficult to install your own software (i.e. OS) on a mac. the benefits are negligble for the typical mac user, who cares more about photoshop and e-mail than terminals and compilers...

>2014 is an eon ago in apple terms...

Is it? Others accuse Apple of not moving too fast after Jobs...