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Comment by gargarplex | Hacker News Reader

What's the best way to get an Ubuntu/Debian-compatible linux distro on my Mac laptop without destroying my data? The slowness of Yosemite seriously amps my cortisol.

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Both of them can boot from removable media (USB, CD, floppies)...

You could just boot forever from a USB, using the same USB as temporary storage until the day when you're ready to partition your drive and install the free OS to your hard drive.

That's a good idea. Unfortunately the Ubuntu USB "livecd" gives me a bizarre error code in reference to keyword firmware.

I would actually buy a new linux laptop if I knew where to get one.

System76[1] laptops come with Ubuntu out of the box. Historically Thinkpads have had pretty good hardware support, too.

[1]: https://system76.com/

You can set up dual boot with an EFI boot manager such as efibootmgr, refit or refind. First shrink your mac partition with disk utility in Mac OS X or gparted, then use the free space to install Linux. The cleanest way to share data would be to move it to a separate partition which both OSes can mount, although you can mount non-journaled HFS from Linux if you want to avoid doing that.

See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro

Edit: Corrected outdated info

I've detailed the process of putting Ubuntu on a MacBook on my blog https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/11/ubuntu-on-a-macbookpro-82-r...

It's fairly straightforward and works well.

if you have an older mac just install Ubuntu Mate http://i.imgur.com/HB2meal.jpg

https://ubuntu-mate.org/

Thanks. I'm downloading the LTS now.

Like good old Gnome 2, Mate DE is very nice if you do not want buttons that takes 10% of the screen.

Checkout Elementary OS [https://elementary.io/], ubuntu based, osx look and feel *live boot from usb will not touch your data

What specifically is slow about Yosemite? I'm sure there are plenty of Apple engineers who read HN and take note, even if they don't chime in.

As for Linux it looks like you're stuck with something that fiddles with/replaces EFI. Take a look at http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/index.html.

Biggest gripes:

N.B. "Long time" means an unpredictable value typically between 30-300 seconds

1. Terminal windows take a long time to become ready to accept input.

2. My "irb" program takes a long time to load.

3. Finder takes a long time to list files, even when there aren't many files in the directory.

4. Finder takes a long time to generate previews of files

Only perhaps related to slowness, but extremely annoying: incorrectly implemented iPhone sync leads to my conversational counterparties hearing the ringing chime well after the conversation has begun.

Thanks for the link to rEFInd.

Have you tried to troubleshoot the cause of this slowness? What you describe is not normal behavior for any OS. Some aspect of your system is broken. If it's a hardware problem, installing a linux distro won't help. If it's not, installing any OS from scratch (including Yosemite) will fix it.

Yosemite feels slower. I rarely encountered the loading spinner, after upgrade i see every day more then once. Its very frustrating to work.

Do you have a separate partition for your data? If so, then just install the distro normally. If not, then I don't see a way you can do it without losing your data since they're two completely different operating systems.

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