Install Ubuntu on MacBook Air or not...?

[Kdar]

Yes. After using it for a bit.. and getting to know OS X a bit.. I think I will keep it. I do love using touch pad on MacBook... it's large, doesn't get in the way of keyboard.. and gestures are amazing. I felt as well that it is the only laptop that I didn't feel the need to use mouse instead of touch touch.

I guess having a Linux Desktop and Linux NAS makes this enough for doing anything that I might need there when I am at my house.

I would love to try to change the OS X terminal a bit from the plain white that it is now. Need to figure that out a bit.

[mamamia88]

Defeats the purpose of buying a mba to begin with imo. Ubuntu is a great os but there is nothing really that can't be accomplished in osx. And there might come a time when you want to do something that isn't done easily in linux.

[Porcini M.]

I would love to try to change the OS X terminal a bit from the plain white that it is now. Need to figure that out a bit.

There are options for that up in the top menubar for the terminal application.

[asifnaz]

You can even triple-boot Ubuntu+OSX+Windows best of three worlds .

but I recommend you to install windows and ubuntu in virtual-box

[TNFrank]

I used OS X 10.1.5 for about 7 years on the iMac I bought in 2002 then finally broke down and picked up 10.3.9 but it was still out dated when I bought it but it did what I wanted it to do so I didn't worry too much about it. After 11 years with that iMac a lighting storm finally killed it(YES, it was plugged into a surge protector, best I can figure it was the EMP from the very near by strike that killed it) so not having funds for a new Mac of any kind I dropped back to punt and bought a used HP laptop and installed Ubuntu 12.04.2 and I'm just as happy running it as I was with my OS X AND the software is actually up to date so I can surf the web without that little beach ball waiting for javascript or other out dated stuff to run.
Personally, if you can I'd just dual boot, set aside 20 or so GB for Ubuntu and keep your OS X on the main partition. Then, if you like it pick up an older laptop of one kind or another and do a full install of whatever flavour of Ubuntu or other Linux you want onto it but for sure KEEP your OS X on your MacBook Air. They go together like a hand and a glove, you don't want to ditch OS X but Linux is also fun to use.

[markbl]

I bought a new MBA 13" in late 2011 intending to dual boot with Ubuntu which is my primary OS. However, I was not happy with Ubuntu/Linux support of the hardware at the time so I restored the disk back to full OS X and then ran Ubuntu in VirtualBox for much of my day on the machine. That worked quite well. However, from Ubuntu 12.04 till present, VirtualBox 3D support has been buggy such that the guest OS crashes frequently. I can turn off 3D but the guest is much slower and hammers the CPU/battery etc. So now I just leave it in 2D and log in to the Ubuntu guest via ssh from my Mac host (I mainly develop on linux at the command line anyhow). After all this time using OS X, and with all it's extra bells and whistles, I still prefer the Ubuntu Gnome Shell working environment. I guess at Ubuntu 13.10, I may try installing Ubuntu natively dual boot again.