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The MacBook Pro introduction in October caused unusually negative reactions among professional users due to the realization that Apple no longer caters equally to casual and professional customers as it had in the past [YouTube video]. Instead, the company appears to be following an iOS-focused, margin-driven strategy that essentially relegates professionals to a fringe group.
This has well-known developers such as Salvatore Sanfilippo (of the Redis project) consider a move back to Linux. Perhaps that's a good moment to look at the current state of Mac hardware support in the kernel. While Macs are x86 systems, they possess various custom chips and undocumented quirks that the community needs to painstakingly reverse-engineer.
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Linux On the Mac — State of the Union
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In Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is against the law to open a soda bottle without
the supervision of a licensed engineer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14 2016, @04:19AM
Linux seems to me to have good support for everything on Macs nowadays. Wireless can still be a bit tricky if there's no ethernet port and a broadcom card (unless you're using a distro that has those drivers out of the box, ubuntu mint, and elementary all did last I checked), but otherwise everything works. Even power management has reached near-parity with OSX (I can get 10 hours out of my Macbook Air running gentoo if I'm not doing anything CPU intensive and keep screen brightness low, not quite as good as OSX but not substantially worse). The most annoying issues I've run into are ACPI stuff (had to do some hackish stuff to get keyboard backlight buttons working properly because they don't have ACPI events like the other ones, and a ton of stuff to do with wakeup sources not behaving properly), and the SD card reader randomly using tons of power for some reason (I just load and unload the modules manually I need it because I couldn't figure that shit out).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14 2016, @04:23AM
Forgot to add that I would really like to run a BSD on it, but none of the BSDs have an equivalent to the linux broadcom-sta driver which makes that a no-go (because the macbook air has BCM4360 which isn't supported by bwi or bwn).