[arch-general] Anyone willing to share experiences running Arch on a current-gen MacBook Pro?

[Janna M.]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 01:13:31AM +0530, Ankur Sethi wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I'm in the market for a high-end development + gaming machine (dual boot).
>I've been a Mac user for the last 4 years and I'm used to their hardware, so
>I'm naturally considering a MacBook Pro as one of my options.
>

Hello. I'm dual-booting arch/OSX on a macbook pro 7.1 from mid 2010. Not
sure how much my experiences with hardware/issues apply to the newer
ones, but in the interest of putting information out there, here goes:

>  1. Does suspend/resume work?
Yep. s2ram -fpm
>  2. Does WiFi work? Does it work even after you suspend/resume?
Occasionally have random DHCP timeouts when trying to connect, but
otherwise fine with both broadcom-wl and b43.
>  3. Can I boot the Arch installer from USB? This is a big one, since the
>     optical drives in MacBooks _always_ fail after a few months of use.
I've never had problems with the optical drive. I've had issues booting
from USB; there are workarounds, but I've only tried them for ubuntu,
not arch.
>  4. Does multi-touch work? If not, is the trackpad at least usable without
>     multi-touch support?
It's fine.
>  5. Does that AMD card play well with Linux? If not, is there a way to tell the
>     machine to ignore the discrete GPU and always use Intel HD Graphics?
Mine has a NVIDIA card, which works great with the proprietary drivers.
>  6. Does the keyboard backlight work? What about the ambient light sensors?
>     Audio? Webcam?
Keyboard backlight is fine; no clue about ambient light sensors. Webcam
is fine. Audio is fine, but I had to install pulseaudio to make the mic
work properly.
>
>I know there are many guides for installing Arch on a Mac, and I've read a lot
>of them, but none of them go on to mention how pleasant (or unpleasant!) their
>long-term experience with Linux on Mac has been. Is it worth all the trouble?
I'm very happy with my setup.
>Is it usable for doing actual work?
Yes.
>Do things randomly stop working if you upgrade your firmware?
No.
>Do the Apple Store employees try to wipe your Linux partition when you
>take your machine in for repairs?
Not in my (limited) experience.