Why would you want GNU/Linux on a Mac?

[msrinath80]

Thank you all for your input. Can someone also comment on battery life in Ubuntu vs battery life in OSX?

[Bachstelze]

My only issue is that to get Ubuntu running, one has to jump through a few hoops to get wireless working.

Depends on the model. My MBP 5,5 has a Broadcom wifi card, which is also found on a lot of PCs. It's not any more trouble to get working than on any PC with the same card.

For giggles, after I posted my earlier message, I booted an Ubuntu 10.04 live CD. It did not even recognize my Broadcom 802.11 b/g/n card. Without a wired connection, I was dead in the water. Now I know that with a bit of fiddling and working with third party repos one can get everything to work, but it can be very frustrating for someone who just wants to dabble in Linux. By the way, I booted a PCLinux OS c.iso and got full functionality, even the wireless. So it is obviously distro dependent.

That's because until very recently, the Broadcom driver was proprietary, and PCLOS is much more tolerant of proprietary software than Ubuntu. The driver is free now, though, so it should be included by default in future versions of Ubuntu (not sure about Maverick, but it should be at least in Natty).

[entangled]

In my case I have bought a new iMac i3 because it has the best screen I've seen and bluetooth mouse and keyboard - no wires - in a sleek all-in-one package.
I like running Linux in a VM (and maybe on the bare metal when Maverick is released) because I feel more comfortable with KDE desktop than I do with OSX and because I enjoy seeing the development of linux.
However, at the moment I still think of OSX as my reliable base system.

[ryanczak]

I run Linux on a 13 inch macbook pro 7,1. Why? My job and personal interests have me working with a lot of open source software and Linux tends to have more recent versions and better support for that software. I don't have to worry about macports being up to date do or hacking source code to get something to compile on OS/X.

I also prefer using a lot of Linux only desktop apps (terminator for example) and have a vast collection of scripts and other home grown utilities that are Linux centric and do not work on OS/X.

In addition to that I do not like that apple tends to have a very "my way or the highway" approach to doing things in their OS. OS/X lacks many many customization options (from desktop to shell) which are available in Linux.

In my opinion OS/X is an itunes delivery platform and not so much a innovative OS. It used to be but apple has moved on to embedded devices like the iphone and ipad. Linux is where the innovation is these days.

It is worth pointing out that the company I work for purchased my mac. If I had to pay for my laptop I would not have purchased it, but something that was known to run Linux very well. With that said, I am running Ubuntu 10.04 on my mac. I have full hardware support (suspend works just fine too) and I get a good 5 hours of battery life which is not as good as when I run OS/X but it is good enough for my needs.

[msrinath80]

Once again thank you all for your detailed responses (esp. ryanczak)...

[renkinjutsu]

My Macbook 1,1 has an Atheros card, so for that, I am very grateful. It was a breeze to set up with iwconfig.. So I was able to script it to connect to specific AP's at different locations. I suspect it even supports "Master mode" but I haven't tried it yet. I don't have another laptop to test it with.

As for battery life, I can get around 2 hours out of the old thing. But when I really need to, I'll take the screen brightness all the way down and spin down the drive a bit, and I get around 5 hours of battery life.