Hi, I have been running the various Debian based distros and Fedora on the
Macbook Pro 15 2011.
1) Battery Life
A major problem that it usually comes down to is dual graphics. The EFI
bootloader hides the integrated GPU on Macs with dual graphics. Eventually
this will cost significant battery life - no matter how you tweak it. Also,
you will most likely need proprietary drivers if your Mac is not old enough.
I'd recommend to install the TLP power optimizations to improve your batter
life a bit:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw ethtool
2) Slow boot
Macs will boot Windows or Linux distros in most cases using BIOS emulation.
That makes booting the Linux distro about 20-30s slower overall. But it's
still recommended because more hardware is supported then when you EFI boot.
3) Partitioning, shared partition
If you dual boot like me, I'd like to give you some recommendation on how and
when to partition using what tool. Because you can easily mess this up and
make Trisquel unbootable. Here's an extract of a guide that I wrote for
myself in case I have to re-install Trisquel:
Formatting
Format the disk using Disk Utility in OSX before installing Trisquel as such
that there is OSX (HFS+), Shared parition (optional)(FAT32), free space to
format with your linux distribution.
Once Linux is installed, do not format with OSX Disk Utility anymore. Even
re-formatting the shared partition only using Disk Utility can mess up the
partition table such as that Linux becomes unbootable – even with refind
– and you end up in grub rescue. You should format the disk on a working
dual boot installation only with GParted from within Trisquel.
Shared Partition
Due to a lack of drivers, the only options to format the shared partition
are: FAT32, exFat, HFS (not journaled). OSX will not mount other formats or
cannot read them (e.g. NTFS). However all of the available working formats
for a shared partition have their troubles:
FAT32...
...works best at the beginning – without any special configuration. But at
some point Linux just may just mounts as read-only.
exFat...
... gets recognized as a boot volume
HFS (journaled HFS)...
...is nice because Time Machine will automatically backup this parition, but
you have two problems:
1. Permissions between two operating systems
2. User ownership (OSX default UID is 501, Linux default UID is 1000 or 1001)
It's possibble to get such a setup working by changing UID's. But it can get
very messy.
