On Aug 19, 2014, at 11:40 AM, Bastien Nocera <bnocera(a)redhat.com> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
> While we can make our Mac hardware story better, we need to keep in mind that
> Apple is a pretty hostile company here in terms of running alternative
> operating
> systems. There is absolutely no information from them on their hardware, so
> we are
> often left with having to reverse engineer to fix bugs, which is slow and
> time consuming.
That's mainly wrong. The hardware from this year's MacBook Pros is 99% the same
as last year's MacBook Pros. Apart from the usual rigmarole of keyboard and touchpad
USB IDs updates, it works as well as last year's. The only thing that doesn't
work out of the box on those machines is the wireless card.
I don't agree with this based on my experience with 3 out of 3 laptop models:
b43 supports 802.11g only, proprietary driver is needed for wireless-n;
bluetooth hasn't never cooperated, various problems;
trackpad use is erratic;
overheating and MCE errors, one laptop died while overheating.
Even though I don't know the laptop died because of overheating, it seems risky to run
linux on Macs right now, but I might just be really unlucky.
The dual boot experience is sub-par, but that's mainly because we
regressed
the installer compared to when Matthew fixed all that a couple of years ago.
The resulting dual-boot experience from Fedora 17 is the same as Fedora 18+ so I'm not
sure what this refers to. In any case I'm more concerned about post-install issues.
Chris Murphy