I'm not sure a fork is needed - I think as ever it's a question of drivers.
The existence of this page suggests that the listed PC manufacturers are at least to some extent cooperating, or even helping, with getting Ubuntu working on their hardware. Sadly, I can't see Apple taking the same attitude :( Are there any Linux fans inside Apple with 20% time?
Yep I mean to provide a zero-problems experience. Just put a CD inside and everything will work. Possibly with a selection of pre-installed beautiful open source software. So an "apple alike" experience for Linux users.
I needed 12 years of using only Linux to finally don't trust sentences like this without any need for debates or arguments. (I'm only using osx even if I would switch for ethical issues, but there is nothing similar IMHO).
EDIT: also even after the 12 years two years ago I tried again with a macbook, with very poor results.
I've been involved with around 1,500 Ubuntu installs over the last four years at http://www.freeitathens.org. It's rare for us to image a computer and not have everything just work. We're usually working on three to ten year old computers. If we saw more new computers, perhaps I'd be more pessimistic about linux support.
Ubuntu actually works really well on MacBooks - since Natty I've not had to do anything OOTB to use it on my MacBook Pro, and only minor tweaks for Maverick.
While you'll never see Apple hardware certified for Ubuntu, I expect we'll see lots of results on our crowdsourced hardware compatibility listings at http://friendly.ubuntu.com
Obviously I know that I'm working from a sample size of one, but when I bought my MacBookPro7,1 last spring I tried to put the latest Ubuntu on it (must have been 10.4) and it wouldn't even boot to the installer. Could not get it to do anything. Admittedly, it might be fixed now, but I would have expected the installer to be pretty robust and to fall back to generic drivers if there was some new unsupported hardware, and such was apparently not the case.
Is this also the case for current-generation MacBooks? On both of the last two occasions I researched this - 2 years ago and 1 year ago - the story was that on older MacBooks it would mostly work, though you might need to tweak to get some hardware (e.g. sound) working, and that on the current or previous generation of MacBooks it would require serious surgery to even boot.
TBH, even the tweaking to get sound working is more than I can be bothered with these days. I use Linux rather than OSX because it's better for my use cases and I want the option to tweak, not because I actually enjoy tweaking.
Would be great news if the support was better now.
I got Ubuntu 11.04 on an Air -- it was more convoluted than I would have liked, but a lot of that is how Apple set it up. The Air won't boot from an external disc unless you're using the Apple-branded drive, which seems a little silly.
The steps were pretty much (a) install refit (b) make a custom USB stick (usbnetbootin doesn't work) (c) create a partition from within OSX (d) install from the usb stick to the partition (e) Do a couple of fixes, such as blessing the correct drive to stop the really slow boot times.
Typing this on a late 2010 MBP running 11.10. I started on 10.10 which needed modules and other bits from the mactel PPA for audio, backlight control, hotkeys etc to work properly. 11.04 was pretty good - just needed a wireless driver from the backports repository I think. 11.10 so far is working with the exception of 3-finger tap to middle-click in Unity. I've switched to KDE which is good enough, after some theming/tweaking.
From my sample of 1 I'd say Ubuntu Mac/Macbook support is good about 6-9 months after the first release by Apple. Before then it's hunting around forums, and PPAs.
Someone could take the software in the Mactel Support PPA and integrate it with the installation media. Unfortunately, the big problems are drivers that still need to be developed upstream (e.g. broadcom 4331 wireless).
That goddamn broadcom chip (enable powersaving on it and it degrades drastically, basically unusable, plus installing a proprietary driver is a huge pain in the ass if you're rolling your own kernels with any frequency) and the complexity of setting up EFI only boot -- you have to manually compile grub2, you need an HFS+ partition with a /EFI directory, and then you need OSX on separate media that you can boot into in order to 'bless' the partition as bootable -- are the two things keeping me from switching my MacBook to linux permanently.
The reduction in battery life when switching from OSX to linux is also annoying, but you can tweak stuff enough (via powertop, etc) that it's reasonable enough.
I've often thought this. To support the current lineup of MacBooks you'd need to test on 8 CPUs, 3 GPUs, and have basic support for Mac hardware across the line (keyboard, trackpad, webcam, etc). There might be some issues with writing drivers for devices that Apple has not provided any specs for, but once the effort is expended it'll work on a wide range of popular machines.
I've already chimed in elsewhere in this thread, telling my story (I'm an owner of a 8,1 MBP who bought my laptop just to run linux on it).
I've found that Ubuntu has the most "mature" Apple user community. They have their own PPA (which, sadly, seems to not be aging well.. still no Oneiric packages) and a pretty active sub-forum with a friendly crowd of regulars. From time to time, people (mostly Fedora users) come by to bum kernel patches and whatnot off of the locals.
That being said, a MacBook specific distro would be pretty cool, but I think that it'd be better to just get Canonical's ear and push work to their "upstream", as they seem pretty receptive; they have a mac-specific installer ISO (although I never use it.. it always gives me trouble). Also: they were really helpful, during the Natty beta cycle, responding to bugs with the Sandy Bridge integrated graphics sub-system (as the 2011 MBPs were pretty much, at that time, the only Sandy Bridge laptops in the wild). They actually turned me on to a bleeding edge kernel build that had upstream changes from the intel graphics team to get extmon and whatnot working (the quality of said bleeding edge kernel is another story, of course).
I question the number of people who own macs that don't want to run OS X. As someone who owns a lot of macs, and even does kernel hacking on them on a regular basis, I'm infinitely more likely to (and, in fact, have) bought dedicated boxes to run Linux rather than wiping out a mac.
There's an argument, certainly, for supporting a small number of SKUs really well. But I don't think that the Apple machines are the right set of SKUs for the project.
I was shopping for a new laptop twice in the last three years. Both times, I would have bought a current-generation MacBook if it had run Linux reliably, based on the merits of the hardware.
This is less about existing Mac users switching to / dual booting Linux, and more about people who already know they want to run Linux choosing what hardware to run it on.
