Ubuntu on mbp 2011 13

Im planning to install ubuntu 13.04 on my mbp, I was looking for any tips and tricks

I remember when I did that 2 years ago it was a nightmare, lack of drivers and so forth, aka the usual linux experience. It was fedora though for uni purposes. In the end I resorted to VMs, afterall when you are gutting things, better do it in a VM

mucho thanks

 

Early 2011, late 2011? What's the model identifier?

 

its early 2011, model identifier is 8.1, although ubuntu wiki states that the only problem is to do a EFI install (pretty easy), it has touchpad drivers, wifi, KB and some other stuff, though I think it, as usual, wont be a just install and enjoy

PS: I also saw how to activate trim. really they should just enable some stuff when the hardware is detected, the main focus is wifi drivers, people buy more notebooks than desktops, I thank the effort to make ethernet in the package as a priority, but wifi should be in the same spot

EDIT: Im impressed, I just installed 13.04 in another notebook that I have, almost everything works out of the box, just that its a power guzzler (as usual things are running at 100%) as usual on this machine and the macro buttons dont work, along with some other things

 

What I have so far

1) drivers
Im impressed almost everything works out of the box

• full KB support
• audio and video drivers
• wifi
• mediocre touchpad support. Im not expecting that all fancy gestures will work, despite those being in 13.04, but someone needs to fix the wiki page saying that palm detection works, it doesnt. its actually a pay in the **** to type something and not get bumped by the large touchpad, despite me having made some tweaks to the drivers, its still too sensitive and still palm detection doesnt work (despite what the tweaks said)
• power drivers work, since I had my laptop still open, I just actually checked to see if the fan was on, and it was!

2) Unity

• I havent used unity yet, since its not supported by the VMs that I use, nor I had used this version of ubuntu yet, I like it.
• The problems remain that it lacks a tremendous work on polish, simple put not always dash will appear on top of the screens, nor alt tabbing shows what you are alt tabbing for
• dash needs a more perfect integration between the software center and your files, it should show all the results in one page, I dont need to search multiple times to get the responses from files, softwares available and other stuff, I dont know keep it tabbed for all I care, or just enlarge dash to take all the screen and show the different categories there and separate each clearly, its a step in a very good direction
• general clunckyness on the side bar, do I really need to drag out of the bar at a considerable distance to move an icon up and down? slow response time for the up and down motion, and really why the hell every app that I install needs to be there? let me chose damn it

3) Resources and Responsiviness

• 13.04 really diminishes the resources needed to run, great job there
• very fast and responsive as usual

4) Usability

• Linux still has a long long way to go, there is no denying that, no way to brush it past anything, I can and wont let most of the people I know to use any distro. When basically everything you need to do still relies on terminal, and every response to problems are still offered that way, there is a need to change the mentality on how things are designed, not only on the solutions provided but also on the general usability of apps that gets released
• system settings doesnt really allow you to tweak the system settings, you need terminal for that
• drivers and general tweaks are still fetus, no wonder why I prefer to run linux on a VM
• one good example is this, yesterday I was trying to flash my a new firmware into my SSD, I was going to do the brave job of doing it in linux, despite the only tool provided to exclusively work in win 7, not xp, not win 8, only win 7. So far so good, lets do the charleston.
  1. got the firmware, started to do the steps on terminal
  2. failed, decided to do it in a live boot as per recommendation
  3. grabbed a external that I was saving for time machine back ups, it couldnt write
  4. given that my daily dosage of terminal was at an end (I spent 16h to devise why was my SSD not working as intended, not really much patience, stamina or ciggies was available) I decided to explore what they had to offer on GUI apps. I used thus disks.
  5. its crap. simply put its the worst app that had an average GUI that I used.
  6. I tried to for an unreasonable amount of time (20 min for something that should be just 5 clicks away tops) to create a small 8gb partition so that I could put the firmware in there, I couldnt. got fed up
  7. booted a win 7 machine, entered disk management, did it in 5 min, that app is really slow to load disks, as a remark its also a fail on usability, MS wont change that, because people will cry as usual
  8. plugged in the drive and I couldnt write to it, I was in the rage moment, stopped smoked a ciggie and came back
  9. how it couldnt write since I was using FAT as FS? that led me to get back into disks again and try to see what was what
  10. I discovered that when I send the order to format, the app doesnt auto unmount the drive, really why? seriously why?
  11. finally managed to format the HDD as I wanted
  12. failed on flashing the firmware
      
• another example on that goes to the new external that I use for videos/photos/docs and as a download location, it worked after I enabled via terminal exfat, then after I unplugged it, it stopped working, it wouldnt mount. I was looking for a GUI app that would let me understand how it suddenly it was flagged as a time machine backup drive (which I never did assign it to do, strangely enough the external that was assigned as a time machine back up mounted), unable to find a gui app that came standard with the OS and extremely fed up of terminal, I resorted to use windows to find out what was happening. It got corrupted, windows detected it and I just clicked on a single button and it was solved, I could use the drive again on windows and linux
• power users aka shell users, still got the shell, you can still load gnome or whatever UI you want, simply put it still needs a load of work for average users to not resort to terminal to get the system working properly
• its undeniable that from my first experience with linux in 99, to this day a lot of things changed and sincerely all for the better, but a LOT of work needs to be done
  

this kind of evolved into a mini review, but all in all its usable and works mostly out of the box, the touchpad makes me use an external mouse, which is for me is completely abysmal, since I dont use a mouse on a mac

thank god I know shell commands