Ubuntu 16.04 on MacBook Pro 11,1 success story

Once every blue moon I try some sort of Linux as the native operating system on my laptop. As I tend to have a recent laptop, this usually ends as a short experiment where I find out one or two devices just will not work.

As my wife moved to my previous laptop when I bought my current laptop, we had her old laptop more or less as a spare / for the kids. After about half a year I noticed the laptop had rarely been touched by said kids and I figured it was too good a machine to waste. So it was either selling it off or re-purposing it.

Re-purposing as a small / lightweight spare for myself sounded great. At first I set it up using MacOS, but soon I found myself installing Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 as multiboot to toy around with.

This is by far the Best Ubuntu experience I ever had on a macbook, or any other laptop. It worked so well in the first couple of days, that I wiped everything from the machine to install Ubuntu exclusively on it.

Sound, wifi, graphics, hot plugging monitors, VPN, all with zero or really minimal fuss. Nice, fast, reliably. Really, I am impressed.

And the machine is from late 2013 / early 2014. But the performance of this thing is still pretty amazing.

Apparently the camera does not work, but I did not check as I have a Bits of Freedom sticker covering it up. Also the media controls on my apple earbuds do not work in Ubuntu apparently blocked by some Apple patent.

Batterylife is supposed to be a lot worse compared to MacOS. But I haven’t been bothered by it yet.

Thank you Ubuntu devs 🙂 #donationtime