Linux on Mac

thomas harding · June 13, 2017

I have a mac and i have ubuntu on a usb and i have a 10gb partision on my 2015 macbook air and would like to have unbuntu on that partition to duel boot

Electronics Wizardy · June 13, 2017

Shrink the partition in osx, then boot into the live disk and install, not much to it.

Wild Penquin · June 14, 2017

It can be done, and is almost quite as straight forward as what @Electronics Wizardy said.

But: All Macs have a locked bootloader (although they do support full UEFI). You need to boot in safe mode, remove the protection (called "SIP" or System Integrity Protection). This means that installing the bootloader might fail, unless you disable it. I *think* that most modern Linux installation should be able to bypass the SIP when you install them, and install their bootloader correctly. Perhaps this was @JayKay3000s problem?

Also, every now and then a larger OS X upgrade will overwrite the bootloader. Better learn sooner than later how to boot into your Linux installation and re-install it (EDIT: I mean just the bootloader, installing the whole Linux is unnecessary) when it happens.

I recommend using rEFInd or similar boot manager. See here for some information on SIP.

Wild Penquin · June 14, 2017

Also, if you are going to use a MacBook Pro/Air, some things to consider:

Not all distributions have the wireless drivers on the installation media (although they do exist)
Backlight control might be tricky
The Nouveau driver might or might not work, and NVidia can be a hassle too (on my MBP 5,5 no backlight in VCs in any Linux distribution I've used, and Nouvau just keeps crashing)
The touchpad sucks compared to OS X (or: actually the OS X touchpad gestures are so good that no one has ever achieved the same, on Windows or Linux). It can be tweaked, but nothing comes near the OS X gestures OOTB.
EDIT: Perhaps the most important point is, that some Linux bootmanagers - such as GRUB(2) - could not detect OS X (this was a few years back, things might have improved). This means you might get into a situation where the MacBook will boot into the Linux distribution without the ability to choose OS X. This is why I chose to install rEFInd (looks cool, it was simper, although I learned later how to add OS X into GRUB, and it was quite simple in the end).